Publish a Google Spreadsheet Chart

Okay, after reading the previous links, here's a very cool tool that lets you publish a chart (that automatically updates) on a web page from a Google spreadsheet! It's very cool. The app downloads the data, allows customizing the columns used, colors, etc., and generates the code that you can paste into a web page!

Here's a sample I just made!

Google Speaks Emacs!

Amanda reports on this fascinating set of modules in the Google Web API that provides access to Google services from Emacs! Cool!

Related:

Google Apps APIs

Jim W. Backus, Inventor of FORTRAN, Dies

At the New York Times, Jim W. Backus, 82, FORTRAN Developer, Dies.

Here are some excerpts.

Fortran, released in 1957, was “the turning point” in computer software, much as the microprocessor was a giant step forward in hardware, according to J.A.N. Lee, a leading computer historian.

In an interview several years ago, Ken Thompson, who developed the Unix operating system at Bell Labs in 1969, observed that “95 percent of the people who programmed in the early years would never have done it without Fortran.”

After the war, Mr. Backus found his footing as a student at Columbia University and pursued an interest in mathematics, receiving his master’s degree in 1950. Shortly before he graduated, Mr. Backus wandered by the I.B.M. headquarters on Madison Avenue in New York, where one of its room-size electronic calculators was on display.

When a tour guide inquired, Mr. Backus mentioned that he was a graduate student in math; he was whisked upstairs and asked a series of questions Mr. Backus described as math “brain teasers.” It was an informal oral exam, with no recorded score.

He was hired on the spot. As what? “As a programmer,” Mr. Backus replied, shrugging. “That was the way it was done in those days.”

In 1953, frustrated by his experience of “hand-to-hand combat with the machine,” Mr. Backus was eager to somehow simplify programming. He wrote a brief note to his superior, asking to be allowed to head a research project with that goal. “I figured there had to be a better way,” he said.

Mr. Backus got approval and began hiring, one by one, until the team reached 10. It was an eclectic bunch that included a crystallographer, a cryptographer, a chess wizard, an employee on loan from United Aircraft, a researcher from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a young woman who joined the project straight out of Vassar College.

Mr. Backus, colleagues said, managed the research team with a light hand. The hours were long but informal. Snowball fights relieved lengthy days of work in winter. I.B.M. had a system of rigid yearly performance reviews, which Mr. Backus deemed ill-suited for his programmers, so he ignored it. “We were the hackers of those days,” Richard Goldberg, a member of the Fortran team, recalled in an interview in 2000.

After Fortran, Mr. Backus developed, with Peter Naur, a Danish computer scientist, a notation for describing the structure of programming languages, much like grammar for natural languages. It became known as Backus-Naur form.

UCAC

So what is the UCAC? I wasn't even familiar with this catalog. It's the USNO CCD Astrograph Catalog. From their web site (and I've added some brief, explanatory comments [in italics]):

This is an astrometric, observational program, which started in February 1998 at CTIO [Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory]. All sky observations were completed in May 2004. The final catalog is expected not before mid 2007. The second data release (UCAC2) became public in 2003. Positions accurate to 20 mas [milli-arcseconds] for stars in the 10 to 14 magnitude range are obtained. At the limiting magnitude of R=16 [red magnitude = 16] the catalog positions have a standard error of 70 mas. Proper motions [apparent motion of a star across the sky] are provided using various earlier epoch data. Photometry is poor, with errors on the order 0.1 to 0.3 magnitudes in a single, non-standard color.

Occultation by Pluto!

There will be in occultation of Pluto of UCAC 25823784 on Sunday morning 18 Mar 10:56 UT (6:56 EDT). It will be astronomical twilight for us, so I don't know if it will be possible to see Pluto in the Southeast. In the Southwest US, it should be visible.

IOTA Page
Space.com

Sky and Telescope doesn't even mention it in this weeks pages!! What's that about??

The picture is from IOTA. Go to their site to see the full image.

UFO Sightings

Hah! This Ask Yahoo question (Why do most UFO sightings happen in the United States?) popped up on my Gmail Clips this morning which I found completely fascinating! Particularly this paragraph:

The National UFO Reporting Center lists thousands of "close encounters" submitted by users. According to its database, the United States has far and away the most reported UFO sightings. In fact, California alone has reported more than China, England, India, and Brazil combined.

Girl Scout Cookies

The thing I like best about Girl Scout cookies is that each serving is individually wrapped!

How Does DST Work in Linux

I've been working on answering this question since yesterday afternoon. I'm close to an answer but don't have a complete one yet.

Here's a Slashdot posting on the subject.

http://linux.slashdot.org/linux/07/03/06/0229232.shtml

Optimus Keyboard

What's this I hear about an “Optimus keyboard?” Ohhhh, after looking at their site, now I see. It's something I imagined at one time—a keyboard where the key symbols change! Very cool.

“ Every key of the Optimus keyboard is a stand-alone display showing exactly what it is controlling at this very moment.”

(key image from http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/optimus/)

Linux Time Notes

Here's a nice tip sheet on Linux time (note that it's pretty RedHat-centric).

Quote of the Day

From today's AWAD…

Lots of times you have to pretend to join a parade in which you're not really interested in order to get where you're going.

—Christopher Morley,
writer (1890-1957)

Lunar Eclipse

I looked at the lunar eclipse last night for a few minutes between 19:00 and 20:00 EST. By the time the moon was above the trees it was well past totality and was into the partial phases. It was in the clouds the whole time I looked at it. The view was not very ideal.

I was using my 7x50 binoculars on the camera tripod (an ideal arrangement!).

Here's an AP posting via Space.com.

Binocular Image Stabilizer --- Brilliant!

Sky and Telescope has an article by Alan M. McRobert on his new binocular image stabilizer made from some simple wood pieces. Brilliant!

Total Lunar Eclipse This Weekend

There will be a total lunar eclipse this Saturday night. Binoculars are best for observing!

Amazing Ubuntu Conversion!

Okay, we have these cool new workstations. They are Sun Ultra 20s with

• Two dual-core AMD Opteron 1218 (four cores total) at 2.6 GHz (Santa Ana 90nm)
  
• 2 GB RAM
• Two 250-GB SATA drives (Hitachi HDS7225S)
  
• RW DVD, etc.

Of course I quickly installed Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft and I'm now turning it into my workstation.

Here's the cool part. I copied all of my files over from the old system.

cd
scp -r oldhost: .

Since this copied all files including window manager and Gnome configs, this brought over my complete environment! I'm done! The whole conversion consisted of that!

Of course I had to log out and log back in.

Perl, Minimal and as a Beginning

So here's a post regarding a new book, Minimal Perl by Tim Maher (and a Slashdot review).

This is a cool idea, a way to look at a usable and easy to learn subset of Perl if you already know tools like sed, awk, etc. This is, in fact, a large part of how I learned Perl.

The thoughts that this leads to, and which really interest me, regard using Perl as a First Programming Language. Teaching and learning to program is a topic that interests me and I've watched the parade of programming languages used for this purpose with amusement, joy, and more recently, horror.

We used to have BASIC and Pascal (Blissful Sigh), but then moved to C (Incredulous Gasp!), then to Java (Hesitant, Lesser Gasp). Some schools seem to be using Scheme, an offshoot of LISP (Faint to Unconsciousness).

I believe that I understand the reasons for all of these choices at the time they were made. I get it. But, I'm not convinced that some of them are the best First Programming Language. Java is probably okay and, thank goodness, gets out out of using C. C++ was an improvement over C as well. I believe Java is an improvement over C++.

I'm not sure how I feel about teaching beginning programmers about object oriented programming or LISP-based functional, non-procedural programming.

What I've wondered about is trying to use Perl as a First Programming Language. It could only excel in that role if you leave a lot of parts out and focus on a simple, BASIC-like subset of Perl. But is there still too much inevitable wierdness (the weirdness that I love!) in Perl to make this a bad idea? I've thought about a book, Perl as a First Programming Language, along these lines, but I'm not sure I'm convinced yet.

Here's an important example.

Life with Perl used in simple mode is good up to the point you need to write a counting loop. Here's how to do it in BASIC (sort of) and it's typically one of the first things you learn in BASIC.

FOR I = 1 TO 10
PRINT I
NEXT I

or something like that.

Now, think of what we need to do in Perl.

for ($i = 1; $i <= 10; $i++) {
print "$i\n";
}

Hm. Well, a Perl aficionado might point out you can do this:

foreach $i (1 .. 10) {
print "$i\n";
}

I'll keep thinking about it.

The Gyroball

Here's an article on what is said to be the first new baseball pitch in 30 years, the gyroball.

Google Apps Premier

Hmm, Google Apps Premier.

But possibly the most compelling aspect of Google Apps -- at least from the standpoint of potential customers considering a switch from Microsoft products -- is the price. Google is offering the whole package for just $50 per user, per year. Microsoft does not publish volume licensing prices for the Enterprise Edition of Office 2007, its latest entry in the office productivity market. The price of a standalone copy of the Professional Edition is $499.

Some analysts believe Google Apps could save businesses hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in IT support and personnel costs alone. "You could buy 1,600 Google Apps licenses for the cost of one IT worker," says Nucleus Research analyst Rebecca Wettemann, who notes that because Google Apps is Web-based it greatly reduces the need for deskside support.

LED Light Bulb

I've heard predictions that they are coming. Well, one is here! An LED-based “light bulb” that is said to output the light equivalent to a typical 70 watt bulb using only nine watts of input power. The cost is between $60 and $70. That's a bit expensive but I expect that they will have a very long lifetime—much longer than a compact flourescent lamp, for example.

The IT Crowd

Mike told me about this series the other day. This British sitcom is one of the funniest things I've seen in a long time (as he said)!

The IT Crowd (on YouTube).

There are six episodes and most are uploaded to YouTube in three parts. Be sure to watch the first episode and don't miss the first part of the second episode (the commercial is my favorite scene of the series).

To find some parts I had to search on “The IT Crowd Ep3” or “The IT Crowd episode5”, for example. There seem to be six episodes overall.

Enjoy!