Friday, April 20, 2012

Instant Web Server on Amazon (AWS) S3

Well, I just tried it and it worked!  If you needed a quick and easy web server set up, you could grab a micro instance of a virtual machine on Amazon Web Services (AWS)  EC2 service, set up Apache or similar, etc.

However, it's much easier than that.  S3 (Simple Storage Service) lets you serve files, including static web pages, directly.  You create a bucket, upload files, set permissions, set up logging, and you have a web site.  It's free unless your web site has a huge amount of content.

Of course this is static, i.e., there's no PHP or programming, or dynamically generated pages here.  This is just a simple site, but it works quite well.

Thursday, April 19, 2012

The Beatles on American Bandstand

When I think of American Bandstand, I always think of watching this very show in 1967 when films (like  videos!) were premiered for Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields.  (From Video Cabinet in Limbo.  It looks like the actual music videos have been removed).

Here are color versions of the videos.  The ones on AB were in black and white.

Penny Lane

Strawberry Fields  (Another B&W version)

So Long Dick Clark

Man Flies a Boeing 737 in His Garage

From Mercury News. “James Price of Pleasanton has built a flight simulator out of the nose of a former Lufthansa fleet Boeing 737…”

Friday, April 13, 2012

Your Next Boat

The Adastra super yacht.  From Mail Online.


  • The Adastra is so hi-tech that you can even control it with your iPad 
  • Its range is 4,000 miles, enough to go from the UK to New York in a single trip without refueling 
  • The 42m yacht has a maximum speed of 22.5 knots 


Saturday, April 07, 2012

Why Have I Disappeared from Facebook?

Or at least, why am I not responding?

I have a few FB accounts and it seems that FB has decided I need to provide a phone number to keep them active.  Right now I can't log into most of them without providing a cell phone number.  I'm generally put off by this whole development and mostly inclined not to provide any information like that and just leave FB, at least on those accounts, behind.

For anyone who wants to read what I have to say, the good news is that I usually only post on FB an echo of what I post here.  You can always see what I have to say by reading this blog.  You always could.

Similarly, I've provided easy and effective ways to contact me.  You can, for example, use those to comment on or follow up on my postings here.

What I am missing out on are some postings and pictures by folks on the locked FB accounts, and even occasional messages.  Right now I can't reply to any of them and can't see many of them.

For most of the time I've not been a fan of FB and I'm less a fan than ever right now.  Who knows, though, they may yet emerge as the preferred way to communicate and stay in touch.  I expect the future holds some interesting surprise that I haven't imagined.

In the mean time, if you're looking for me, I'm still here where I've been the whole time.  That's the nice thing about centering communication, at least the outbound kind, on one's own blog.  You always have control of it and it can persist beyond the limits and misdirections of other services.

New Look

Well, now I've gone and done it.  For the first time in some six years (I think) I've changed the look of the site here.  I may make more changes over the coming days as I sort this out.

The site was looking a little old and, frankly, I didn't really like the current version of the look.   I did like the fonts, colors and general layout.

However, I'm clearly a fan of the lighter and more open looks and this one is an example of that.   I like the days being grouped this way.

I spent some time poking around with the text font.  This is currently Open Sans (I think).

Ting

The new mobile phone service, Ting, looks interesting.

The Twelve Greatest Defunct Tech Magazines

... from Technologizer.   Memories.

Mac OS X Dtrace Scripts

I'm cleaning up my email notes and found this excellent article on Mac OS X Dtrace scripts from Brendan's blog.

Friday, April 06, 2012

Nice Balloon Flight Report

This is a nice balloon flight report and I like the 1/4-wave and yagi antennas.

Monday, March 26, 2012

Andy Ihnatko's Ipad Review

At the Chicago Sun-Times, here's Andy Ihnatko's full review of the iPad.

My favorite line has nothing to do with the iPad:  “Well, look, if you want your mind blown, go and watch the original Star Wars trilogy again while pondering the question ‘Is Artoo Detoo using The Force?’”

Thursday, March 08, 2012

Coronal Mas Ejection, Geomagnetic Storm Update

From spaceweather.com:

 A coronal mass ejection (CME) hit Earth's magnetic field on March 8th around 1100 UT. The impact was weaker than expected, sparking only a mild (Kp=5) geomagnetic storm. However, the storm could intensify in the hours ahead depending on electromagnetic conditions in the wake of the CME. High-latitude sky watchers should be alert for auroras

Wednesday, March 07, 2012

Electric Charges in a Molecule

via the BBC.

Nifty HDTV Antenna

for UHF.

The Bitcoin Story

I wondered where things are now with Bitcoin and went looking for a report.  This story at Wired is pretty good.

Remarkable Employees

I hate integer headlines, but this article at Inc was fascinating.

Smalltalk, Haskell, LISP

by Daniel Lyons.

Raspberry Pi

$35 and $25 mini computers.  The Verge.

Uh, that's “mini” in a new, modern sense, not in the PDP-11 sense.  I used to say that, soon, we'd have computers that you could actually lose. “Did you notice were I put the email server? I can't find it!”

Roku Interview

Jolie O'Dell from Venture Beat interviews Anthony Wood, CEO of Roku.

MIT Launches Android App Inventor

Android and me.

Wallit

Write on walls via augmented reality.  From Venture Beat.

Radar images from the March 2012 tornado outbreak



from United States Tornados. “a collection of a handful of the most gripping radar images of the March 2, 2012 storms as they were occurring.”

Solar Flare



Watch for aurorae!

From Space Weather: “ Big sunspot AR1429 has unleashed another major flare. This one is the strongest yet, an X5-class eruption on March 7th at 00:28 UT. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded the extreme UV flash”

And: “A coronal mass ejection (CME) hit Earth's magnetic field on March 7th at approximately 0400 UT. The impact was not a strong one, but it could stir up polar geomagnetic storms anyway. High-latitude sky watchers should be alert for auroras.”

From 11-Alive News.

Friday, February 17, 2012

Strings in Scheme Lisp

I was recently trying to find what string functions were built into Scheme.  Yes, it actually is in the manual but my web search brought up this site:   Python vs. Scheme: strings.

Simplified Sign-up and Log-in

from designer Sacha Grief.

Spray-on Antennas

Using nano-particle capacitors.  [Article at Discovery News].  I still don't know what to make of this—it feels somewhat like a hoax.

R-Like Statistics in Clojure

“Incanter is a Clojure-based, R-like platform for statistical computing and graphics. Incanter can be used as a standalone, interactive data analysis environment or embedded within other analytics systems as a modular suite of libraries.” From incanter.org..

Monday, January 30, 2012

RT @ihnatko

I'm not saying that getting in a United economy seat is _exactly_ like squeezing into a Mercury spacecraft. But there are similarities. (From @ihnatko)

The 10 Best Android Arcade Games

From @mashable, in spite of the fact I despise these integer headlines.

Why are software development task estimations regularly off by a factor of 2-3?

Michael Wolf's answer.

ISS Flyover Video

More time lapse [VIDEO] from the International Space Station—flying over the earth.

Cockpit Video

This is a fantastic cockpit [VIDEO] sent by Hal.

Friday, January 27, 2012

NASA’s New Satellite Captures Amazing Hi-Res Image of Earth

via @Mashable.

Google’s Python Lessons are Awesome

via Hartley Brody


The lovably geeky Nick Parlante — a Google employee and CS lecturer at Stanford — has written some awesomely succinct tutorials that not only tell you how you can use Python, but also how you should use Python. This makes them a fantastic resource, regardless of whether you’re just starting, or you’ve been working with Python for awhile.

Google's Python class 

Earth at night seen from space

ISS (HD 1080p) ORIGINAL [VIDEO]

Thirty Books Everyone in the Software Business Should Read

Micro ISV Blog.

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Don't Return Null

Use a Tail Call.   This is a fascinating read, particularly if you follow the links.

Drone Data

I found this interesting from the article Counting on a Rush to the Cloud from Bits.

(One interesting side note: The cameras on drone aircraft in Afghanistan take such precise pictures that not all the data can quickly travel over the local Internet connections to analysts in the United States. The usual method is to store everything in a local cargo container full of receiving gear, computers and storage, then airlift it home when it’s full, swapping out another container to absorb more info from the drones.)

It reminds me of astronomers returning from a run at an observatory.

iPad Survives Fall from Space

[VIDEO] http://youtu.be/X4xNcF6T7Is

Thursday, January 05, 2012

Large Scale Design with Haskell

I'm revisiting the question, why and how is Haskell well-suited for large-scale projects?  Here's one set of answers at Stack Overflow.

Monday, January 02, 2012

Saturday, December 31, 2011

The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face

Peter, Paul and Mary.  Wow!

In the Early Morning Rain (1966)



Peter, Paul and Mary.  I don't approve of all the lyrics, but this is one of my favorites.

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Haskell Authors

Simon Peyton-Jones and John Hughes interviewed at Channel 9.

The interview looks amateur but it gets more and more interesting as it progresses.  Try to ignore the picture taking extravaganza that goes on in the background at one point.

Thursday, December 22, 2011

Top 10 Data Center Stories

for 2011 from Datacenter Knowledge.

Earth's Rotation Measured!

Actually it's easier to think of this in terms of the wandering of the poles being measured.  Story at Physorg.com.

Happy Winter Solstice!

At 0:30 EST last night  (5:30 UTC).

Thu 2011-12-22 00:30:00 -0500
Thu 2011-12-22 05:30:00 +0000

These times are rounded to the minute, the seconds aren't really zeroes.

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Android vs. iPhone

Which looks better?  This article in Business Insider says these 11 screen shots prove that “Android apps are uglier Than iOS apps.”  I looked at them and I just don't see it.  The Android apps don't look worse to me and I generally don't see what the captions of the various images assert.

I do see that the iOS apps look more consistent in some ways.

To me, many of the Android apps look cleaner.  In one example the iOS app has a search box at top (taking up a lot of space) but I know Android has a search button  that works in all apps (that I've experienced and that have search), so you don't need a search box always on screen.

In another case, the iOS app has letter-of-alphabet dividers for a list but I know on Android if you grab such a list and scroll a little tab appears.  That tab has the current letter of the alphabet and you can quickly move it to the letter you're interested in, the list will scroll quickly as you move through the alphabet.

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Dawn Approaches Vesta

“Unveiling [a] spectacular alien world.” by Ken Kremer at Universe Today.

Building the Universe Inside a Supercomputer

by Ian O'Neill at Discovery News.

In an arXiv preprint publication submitted on Dec. 8, Juhan Kim and colleagues from the Korea Institute for Advanced Study in Seoul have completed the largest simulation of the universe ever attempted.

The simulation calculates the evolution of 374 billion cold dark matter particles in a box some 10 gigaparsecs across—this represents approximately two thirds the size of the observable Universe. This virtual universe is 8,800 times larger than the previous record holder.

Images of Jupiter and Moons

Here are 10 sets of remarkable images of Jupiter's moons, provided by observers in recent months. Many of them resolve surface details. (South is up in all images. Click on the thumbnail images below for full size versions.) From britastro.org.

Higgs vs. Hype

A mini guide from MSNBC.

Higgs Boson

Five one-page explanations.  Well done!


“In 1993, the UK Science Minister, William Waldegrave, challenged physicists to produce an answer that would fit on one page to the question ‘What is the Higgs boson, and why do we want to find it?’”

Tweetdeck

Well, there goes the destruction of Tweetdeck by Twitter.  Thanks.

WW2 Tweets from 1939

This is Outstanding! @RealTimeWWII - Livetweeting the Second World War, as it happens on this date and time in 1939, and for 6 years to come.

Meet the Internet's Newest Boy Genius

by @gigaom.

Third Rock Radio

from NASA?

BrowserID

An interesting authentication scheme.  This looks pretty good.  It's based simply on your email address.

At Mozilla

Browserid.org.

On Security Now.  (YouTube)

Nano-Optic Technology for Enhanced Security

“Nanotech Security [has] created an atoms-thick display that can be read by humans or machines and that shines with the brightness of a typical LED despite using nothing but reflected light.” via @FastCompany.


NOtES exploits an obscure area of physics to accomplish its bright and sharp display, known as plasmonics. Light waves interact with the array of nano-scale holes on a NOtES display—which are typically 100–200 nanometers in diameter—in a way that creates what are called “surface plasmons.” In the words of the company, this means light “[collects] on the films surface and creates higher than expected optical outputs by creating an electromagnetic field, called surface plasmonic resonance.”

Friday, December 09, 2011

Caught Up

Okay, I think that catches me up on some reading I'd saved up to repost.

Game On!

The beta episode of a new show on gaming at Twit.tv.

Will Cultural Pushback Kill Private Clouds

at GigaOM.

Video Editing in Youtube

from GigaOM.

Car, Table, Counter or TakHomaSak



by Roger Ebert.  A must-read tribute to Steak 'n Shake.

Graphics Rendering on Android

True facts from Diane Hackborn.

Zero Email

Finally, a company implements a no email policy!  For a long time, I've thought email should go!

Observations on Ten Years of Blogging

by @GigaOM.

Engulfed Cathedral

by Claude Debussy is one of my favorite pieces of music.

This electronic version performed by Isao Tomita on Snowflakes Are Dancing (1974) was used in the first planetarium show I ever did.  The show was a live lecture for some 50 minutes (too long, but these were the old days of longer attention spans) and the show (created by Mike Hood) ended in a beautiful sun rise with this music.   We only used the piece up to the 3m35s mark or so, fading it out there.

Piano

Wind ensemble arrangement

CarrierIQ

Interview in The @Verge by Sean Hollister is a good attempt to begin sorting out what's going on here.  This story is still developing.

It was discussed on This Week in Tech 330.

Lance Ulanoff at Mashable.

Sunday, November 20, 2011

BSD VM

I'm reasonably familiar with the virtual memory systems on classic UNIX, Solaris and current Linux.  However, now that I'm even more a Mac user and (back) in the BSD world, I find myself trying to recall the specific details of memory states, active, inactive, free, wired.

Here's a good reference.  It's not the most lucid discussion but it's accurate.

Chapter 7.  Virtual Memory System, from the FreeBSD Architecture Handbook, The FreeBSD Documentation Project at freebsd.org.

Monday, November 14, 2011

Astroid 2005 YU55 Fly By



from Sky and Telescope.

Faster Than Light Neutrinos?



Nope.  From @Endgadget.

Gemini 12



was launched on 1966-11-11.  Story from Universe Today.

Amazon Kindle Fire

reviewed at The @Verge by Joshua Topolsky.


Knocks aside, I do like the general aesthetic and feel of the Fire. After using this device and then going back to the iPad 2, I was struck at how big and bulky Apple's tablet feels. This size and shape might very well be the sweet spot for many users, and since most people have never seen or used a PlayBook, the Fire should be a relatively new experience for them from a design standpoint too.
Minor complaints aside, my main takeaway from the Fire on the process of finding and purchasing content is this: Amazon has done it better and more elegantly than anyone else in the space right now, and I hope the competition follows suit.
There are some bright spots, like the use of tabs, but overall I was underwhelmed with browser performance.
Furthermore, because the Fire is on Android 2.3, many of the applications offered feel like glorified phone apps. That works sometimes, but often it feels clunky and cheap.

Thursday, November 10, 2011

Scenes from Autumn

Standing in the checkout line at Burt's Pumkin Farm hoping the price of the pumpkin I have is $8 and not infinity.

Thursday, November 03, 2011

The Reengineering of Facebook Messages

From IEEE Spectrum.

Robot Riding Bicycle

In @TechCrunch.  [VIDEO]

Oh great, not only do we have to worry about these things chasing us through the woods on foot, but now they have bicycles!

The Mac App Sand Box

This posting on Naming Things bemoans the new required sandbox for App Store apps on Mac OS.  They may be right but I think this is a move in the right direction.

I don't know about you, but it's become clear to me that putting user data into files on systems and putting system data into the same types of files on systems has led to many of the troubles we have with system security today.  User data should never have been allowed to mix with system data.

In general, sand boxing in various forms works to prevent this problem.

In the article, the author complains about not being able to grab screen shots or not being allowed to communicate with another process.  In fact, a better model than shared files is for the system to provide a service which apps can access.  The system could provide a screenshot service that can take a screen grab from the display system and offer it to a client app.  Interprocess communication services have been there all along.

There's a long rant in the article about plugins.  I'm not sure how important plugins are, but I can see a service that registers and stores plugins if a plugin needs to be shared by multiple apps.  If it doesn't, if a plugin is app-specific, then there should be a service that allows each app to register and store it's own plugins.  They don't need to go into files.  No data does.  Files just contain data and the data can just as easily be stored other ways.

An architecture like this is actually better all around and doesn't preclude functional software.   In fact, a service-based architecture like this provides for more easily moving parts of the architecture to other machines, if the communication can occur over a network.

I, for one, welcome our new service-oriented architectures.  If there's a down side, it isn't clear to me yet.


Friday, October 28, 2011

Apple Television

Here’s why Apple’s TV needs to be an actual television, and not just a cheap add-on box from Dan Frommer, @SplatF.

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Citrix claims it will make virtual desktops cheaper than real ones

by Jon Brodkin at Ars Technica.

I think a lot about cloud computing and I'm ready to go (pretty much) all in.  Actually, I'm already there to a large degree.  However, when I think of possibly needing to run Windows (I don't expect to), I usually think of needing to get some VM software, a Windows license, and software to boot up at least a virtual Windows machine.

It hadn't occurred to me, really, that a service could provide Windows machines on demand.  You could have a fully running, personal, persistent desktop, or an ephemeral Windows machine on-demand, or even just a virtual app that runs, popping up a virtual Windows VM underneath it, again on-demand.

Confessions of an iPhone User Who Recently Switched to Android

by Cullen Roche at Business Insider.

Yes! HAL from ThinkGeek (for iPhone 4S)



From Mike Elgan.



Does Anyone Use Twitter Any More?

Brian asks.

I use Twitter a lot, mainly for reading.  I essentially abandoned RSS for Twitter some time ago (> 1 yr but I forget how long), so essentially all news I read is  via Twitter.

Because tweets act like they're ephemeral and seem to act even more so over time (they aren't really but it can be hard to dig up your old  tweets), I've backed off to blogging for any message I really care about, and even some that I don't.  All of my blog posts go to Twitter via Feedburner.

In the past, I thought Twitter was extremely powerful since it provided an instant communication infrastructure for almost anything you wanted to do on the Internet.  The buzz over that seems to have died down.  I don't know if it's really old news but I'm sure there are so many examples on either side of that question, it's probably not worth debating.

So, I use blogs and Twitter for almost anything I want to say to groups of people or in public.  If you read those two sources, you can see almost anything I've said.  For other places like Facebook, Google Plus, I forward the blog and Twitter posts on to them.

On rare occasions, I do post or reply in other places.

Thursday, October 20, 2011

Ice Cream Sandwich on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus



Announced yesterday.  Google.com/nexus.

Ice Cream Sandwich is the name of version 4.0 of the Android operating system.

Movie Being Shot on Marietta Square Today

The stars are reported to be Vince Vaughn and Ben Stiller but they won't be there today. See the AJC.com.

Siri Security Flaw

from Business Insider, SAI: Tools by Dylan Love.


Even if you have a passcode set to keep your phone inaccessible to other people, Siri's default setting is to ignore this. By holding the home button to activate Siri, anyone can bypass whatever preventative measures you have in place.
Don't despair—it's a simple fix. Start up Settings and navigate to General/Passcode Lock. Make sure that the “Siri” option is set to “Off.” That's all it takes to disable Siri while a passcode is in place.

Your Next Camper

Via @GuyKawasaki from The Designer Pad:  A Suite on Wheels for all of the campers in our family.

These other posts there are also interesting.

Size Does Not Matter

Living in 500 sq ft. The Bedroom

Friday, October 14, 2011

Thursday, October 13, 2011

dmr::7:3::/usr/dmr


wget http://simh.trailing-edge.com/sources/simhv38-1.zip

unzip *
mkdir BIN
make pdp11
cd BIN

wget http://simh.trailing-edge.com/kits/uv7swre.zip
unzip uv7swre.zip

./pdp11

PDP-11 simulator V3.8-1
sim> set cpu u18
Disabling XQ
sim> set rl0 RL02
sim> att rl0 unix_v7_rl.dsk
sim> boot rl0
@boot
New Boot, known devices are hp ht rk rl rp tm vt
: rl(0,0)rl2unix
mem = 177856

# cat /etc/passwd
root:VwL97VCAx1Qhs:0:1::/:
daemon:x:1:1::/:
sys::2:2::/usr/sys:
bin::3:3::/bin:
uucp::4:4::/usr/lib/uucp:/usr/lib/uucico
dmr::7:3::/usr/dmr:

# ^E
Simulation stopped, PC: 002306 (MOV (SP)+,177776)
sim> exit
Goodbye

So Long, Dennis Ritchie

Inventor of UNIX.

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

NGINX

How is it that I've never heard of, or noticed, NGINX until now?

The Mythical Man Month

by Dhanji R. Prasanna at Rethrick Construction.


I vividly recall my first week at Google. It was in Google's old office in Sydney, high up on the 18th floor of a triangular skyscraper. The views from virtually everywhere in the office were breathtaking. And inside, the walls beamed the warm glow of those wonderful colors so familiar from a childhood playing with Lego--Yellow, Red, Blue and Green.
Fast-forward six months and Google was in a lavish, new office with Walkabout fully underway and around 35 strong. The trouble, I am sure, began a lot earlier but this is when I started to really feel it. First, there was the dreaded endless meeting--they lasted for hours with very little being decided. Then, you started having to push people to provide APIs or code changes that you desperately needed for your feature but that they had little to no interest in beyond the academic.
Of course I enjoyed my time on Wave like no other time in my career. It was equal parts frustration, joy, defeat and passion. I don't regret a single moment of being associated with it. It remains a wonderful attempt at creating something unique, exciting and incomparably bold. Nor do I want to ascribe blame to anyone on the team or Google at large. I just want to point that even the smartest, most motivated and talented people in the world--with a track record of delivering success--are alone not sufficient to overcome complexity that creeps up on you. Maybe we should have known better, but we didn't.

In the end, the man-month as a scalable unit of work is hubris worthy of a Greek tragedy.

The iPhone 4S

by John Gruber, Daring Fireball.

No, Facebook Is Not Ruining Your Grades [STUDY]

by Sarah Kessler at Mashable.

All Facebook activities do not have the same relationship with grades. Posting status updates and using Facebook chat generally mean a lower GPA, while checking to see what friends are up to and sharing links suggest a higher GPA. In other words, social Facebook activities were correlated with lower grades and information-related Facebook activities were correlated with higher grades.

This doesn’t necessarily mean forgoing Facebook status updates and chat is likely to improve a student’s grades. Nothing in the study implies cause and effect. Instead, it seems that what’s important about Facebook in an educational context has very little to do with how much time you spend on it.