Monolith149 Daily

Saturday, September 26, 2009

Stats for Nerds

Wow, while using the Chrome Browser (which I now use nearly 100% of the time on all platforms, Windows, Mac and Linux, at home and work) and while looking at the Task manager, I just discovered Stats for Nerds. It shows memory statistics similar to what you can see on a running Linux system. Excellent!

You can get the same information by putting about:memory in the search bar.

Computing Luminaries

Someone put together a nice set of pictures of some computing luminaries. This is translated from Portugese to English by Google Translate. Here's the original site.

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Mt. Wilson Fire Updates

After a couple of web site relocations while power and servers were down on the mountain, the main reporting website has moved back to http://www.mtwilson.edu/fire.php. Hal McAlister and his wife spent several days on the mountain top with other observatory staff and the fire crews.

The accounts are riveting and the photographs amazing. Recommended reading!

(Note that links to many of the photo albums appear in the second posting near the top of their blog page).

Tuesday, September 01, 2009

Station Fire Threatens Mt. Wilson

The Station Fire in the LA area has been on Mt. Wilson for many hours now. Most media are reporting the threat to the cluster of TV and radio transmitters there but Mt. Wilson is also home of the Mt. Wilson Observatory which includes the 2.5-meter/ 100-inch telescope.

This was the telescope used by Edwin Hubble and Milton Humason in the 1920s to observe the redshift in galaxies.

Today, Mt. Wilson is also the site of Georgia State University's CHARA array, an optical interferometer. CHARA is the Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy at GSU. Hal McAlister is the director of CHARA and, according to the LA Times, also director of the Mt. Wilson Institute.

From the LA Times:

The top of the 5,712-foot mountain, which sits above Altadena, is home to multimillion-dollar astronomy projects for UCLA, USC and UC Berkeley. Georgia State University also operates a $20-million facility and a powerful telescope array at the Mt. Wilson Solar Observatory.

“A lot of people think of an observatory as one dome, but Mt. Wilson Observatory is actually a 40-acre tract of land with 50 to 60 buildings on it,” said Dr. Harold McAlister, director of the nonprofit Mt. Wilson Institute, which runs the observatory. “None of that stuff is portable, and to move telescopes out of there takes many weeks. We’re strictly at the mercy of nature and the great competence of the firefighters.”

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is also nearby. Here's video of firefighters battling flames from the air just behind JPL.

Sunday, August 30, 2009

Lifehacker Desk

This Lifehacker desk looks pretty interesting.

How to Design A Social Sight for Sign-Ups

This is a brief article by Guy Kawasaki that highlights a presentation by Joshua Porter that

designer Joshua Porter explains how to solve the three big problems of social software:

1. Getting people to sign-up for a service.

2. Making their first-time use a positive and engaging experience.

3. Keeping them engaged on an ongoing basis.

NFS on Mac OS X

These look like helpful tips from James Gosling regarding NFS on Mac OS X, and changes in Snow Leopard (sigh).

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Natural Logs

Also the topic of natural logs came up. I was looking for a way to explain clearly why natural logs are “natural.” Here's a pretty neat explanation of the natural logarithm and the base e.

http://betterexplained.com/articles/demystifying-the-natural-logarithm-ln/

N-Body Simulations and Big-O

I did a little class session on Big-O notation at work today and we looked at a galaxy N-body problem just briefly. After the fact, I found this really nice web site.

http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/N-body_simulations

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Eight-bit

Okay, this is really neat.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qsWFFuYZYI

My favorite part is Press Play on Tape.

Ogg Theora

Ogg Theora looks interesting.

The free, patent-unencumbered video codec now works in over 24% of the world's web browsers with no plugins required. The latest 1.1 release of the Theora encoder is coming out any day now. And when it does, the huge improvements in quality and functionality made over the past year with support from Wikimedia and others will percolate out into the major GNU/Linux distributions, arriving at the fingertips of those who build and maintain the world's biggest video sites.

Sunday, August 23, 2009

Chrome

I switched over to using Chrome almost exclusively on MS Windows a few months ago with great satisfaction. For the past week or two, I've also been using Chrome on Linux and the Mac version. They are all working pretty well now. I'm now using Chrome nearly all of the time on all platforms.

It's important to note that neither the Mac or Linux versions have actually been released, so they are not in their final form and don't have that level of usability.

However, the Mac version seems to be extremely stable. It supports Flash (Youtube videos) and I haven't experienced any problems with it at all.

The Linux version is a little less stable and doesn't have Flash support yet. Still, using it through most of every day, I only load Firefox for the occasional video.

Saturday, August 22, 2009

Eclipse of Jupiter's Moons

Eclipses among Jupiter's four large Galilean satellites aren't that rare, but I've never seen images like this. Scroll down to about the middle of the page to see the animation of Io's shadow transiting Ganymede. Recall that Io is roughly the size of the Earth's Moon, and Ganymede is roughly the size of the planet Mercury.

Thursday, August 20, 2009

PubSubHubBub on Blogger

Blogger is publishing PubSubHubbub automatically.

S&T Report on the Perseids

Here's a nice Sky and Telescope report on the Perseid meteor shower.

UPDATE: The Perseids still hold surprises! According to IMO observers' data collected worldwide, the shower showed not just one peak, not just two, but three! The third, a day after the show was supposed to be mostly over, is unexplained. Meteor scientists are trying to reverse-engineer their prediction models to see where it came from.