Happy Summer Solstice

on Monday 21 June 2010 7:28 EDT (11:28 UT).

USNO
Wikipedia

In the Shadow of the Moon

Whether or not it was one of the defining motifs of your teenage years, but especially if it was “before your time,” everyone should watch this amazing and beautiful film, In the Shadow of the Moon.

Main web site:   http://intheshadowofthemoon.com/ with trailer.

What is a ton of AC?

This explanation by coldfuse on the web site onlineconversion.com looks quite good.

Re: Ton of air conditioning
by coldfuse on 02/06/02 at 20:53:16

Just wanted to provide background on the derivation for tons of refrigeration, and provide information on the similar SI standard.

The latent heat of fusion for ice is 144 BTU/lb. For one ton, that is 2000 lb x 144 BTU/lb, or 288,000 BTU. Refrigeration's roots are in the ice making industry, and the ice guys wanted to convert this into ice production. If 288,000 BTU are required to make one ton of ice, divide this by 24 hours to get 12,000 BTU/Hr required to make one ton of ice in one day.

This is simply the requirement for the phase change from liquid to solid -- to convert +32 deg F water into +32 deg F ice. As a practical matter, additional refrigeration is required to take city water and turn it into ice.

One BTU is the heat removal required to lower the temperature of one pound of water by one degree F. In SI units, kilocaries are used. One kilocalorie is the heat removal required to lower the temperature of one kilogram of water by one degree C. One ton of refrigeration is equal to 3024 kilocaries per hour. It is basically the 12,000 BTU/Hr divided by pounds per kilogram divided by 1.8 (to get from degrees F to degrees C).

I hope this explanation hasn't been too cumbersome and will be helpful for someone out there! I'll :-X now!

About Cousins

In case you find cousin relationships confusing, here are the basics.

All grand children are first cousins.  All first cousins have the same grand parents.  (Except some are sibllings).

All great-grand children are second cousins.  All second cousins have the same great-grand parents.  (Except some are first cousins and siblings).

If your grand parents are someone's great-grand parents, then they are your first cousin once-removed.  They are your kids' second cousin.

If your grandparents are someone's great-great-grand parents, then they are your first cousin twice-removed.

It keeps going but that's probably enough to get the idea.

Vuvuzela

I thought the vuvuzela were insects and that they were just really bad at the soccer games.  There's no question about the fact that they are equally annoying.

Android (particularly Froyo) Advantage Explained

And the resulting threat to the iPhone. Sam Pullara on his Java Rants blog discusses how Android's Java implementation is much improved with Froyo (Android 2.2) and the advantages it has over iPhone's Objective-C.

I'm also coming to understand more how much the garbage collector (GC in the quote below) and over-allocating data from the heap or failing to de-allocate (memory leaks) affects Android performance.  Chances are, if your Android phone seems slow or choppy, you're waiting for garbage collection.

Up until Android 2.2 (Froyo) the JVM (really a Dalvik JVM for licensing reasons) on the Android platform was playing with one hand tied behind its back. Different from desktop/server Java, the JVM was still an interpreter, like the original JVM back in the Java 1.0 days. It was very efficient interpreter but an interpreter none-the-less and was not creating native code from the Dalvik bytecodes that it uses. As of Android 2.2 they have added a JIT, a just-in-time compiler, to the stack that translates the Dalvik bytecode into much more efficient machine code much like a C/C++ compiler. You can see the results of this in the benchmarks of Froyo which show a 2-5x improvement. As they add more and more JIT and GC features that have appeared in HotSpot, JRockit, etc, you will likely see even more improvements over time — without having to change or recompile the 3rd party developed software.

Sky and Telescope article on CHARA

Tony Flanders writes about Georgia State's observatory on historic Mt. Wilson in Sky and Telescope.

Almost 80 years after Michelson's experiment, Georgia State University's Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy (CHARA) arrray became operational atop Mount Wilson. It consists of six one-meter telescopes scattered across the mountaintop. The light from the separate telescopes is brought to an optical laboratory where it is mixed together with exceeding precision and care.

The CHARA array claims a resolution of 200 microarcseconds, 250 times better than the Hubble's theoretical limit of 50 milliarcseconds.

Andy Ihnatko on the iPad One Month Later

As usual, his review is well-balanced and well-said.  I finally got around to reading Andy Ihnatko's column in the Chicago Sun-Times on the iPad after one month of use.  It's quite good.

Bruce Artwick, Creator of Flight Simulator

Robert Scoble interviews Bruce Artwick, the creator of Flight Simulator which we mostly know as the MS Flight Simulator.

I own and enjoyed the first version on the Amiga 1000, before MS bought it.  I've always been a huge fan of FS.

Watch for Comet C/2009 R1 (McNaught)

It should be visible in the pre-dawn sky.  Details are here at Sky and Telescope in their Observing Highlights section.

Note that this comet should not be confused with “Comet McNaughts is C/2006 P1, also known as the Great Comet of 2007” or any of McNaught's 52 other comet discoveries!

tgc6pook

Facebook flipped upside down.

Search Twitter with Snapbird.org

A nifty new tool for finding old tweets.  Snapbird.org

The Allman Brothers Big House Museum

I knew this was a project being worked on, but I didn't know the Big House Museum was open!

Ribbon Cutting Video

Quadrotor Helicopters, Drones

Coworker Brian first told me about these a few days ago.  I find them amazing, fascinating, and a little disturbing.

http://goo.gl/V8uU
http://goo.gl/QvpQ
http://goo.gl/aiaW

@Brizzly Picnics

Sounds like what I'm looking for!  Could it be?  http://goo.gl/Hn9O

Using Google Wave In Your Work Group

http://goo.gl/22C4  This is a nice, concise video (2m13s) on how Google Wave can help a work group interact! Excellent!

Lost?

I never became a fan of Lost.  It looked interesting and I watched a handful of episodes, but as soon as I saw a dark cloud flying around and doing things, I became much less interested.  It seemed that the writers were creating a world with no rules, where they could make anything happen whenever they wanted, and that's just not interesting to me.

I guess this is why I like science fiction.  A little magic is always okay.  You know, faster-than-light travel, space travelers that aren't weightless, time travel.  Even creating a new universe is okay if the new rules are explained.  But, please, not like The Matrix where the explaining seems to go on for hours!  In my favorite review of The Matrix, the author said it was like someone sitting down to explain a new card game and an hour later they are still going over the new rules.

Sometimes, when watching media today, it reminds me of when we were kids, playing.  Someone would say, ``Wait!  I know what we can do.  You can be this and you can be that, then we'll....''  I get the feeling the film makers are out on location literally making up the story as they go along.  I'm not saying that kind of spontaneous creativity is necessarily bad, just that it shouldn't show.

When those two things are combined (or seem to be), then that's not a show that will hold my attention.  To be fair, though, even a good show may not hold my attention for long.  I tend not to watch any TV show for more than a season and a fraction.  There are notable exceptions to this, of course!

I like the tweet by @Ihnatko:

So long as Bob Newhart remains alive, ending any series with him saying "Emily...I just had another weird dream!" is an option.

Martin Gardner 1914--2010

Martin Gardner, the author of Mathematical Games in Scientific American died yesterday at age 95.

When I was in high school, during my senior year I ended up with an hour to spend in the library every day.  Among other things I loved reading Scientific American and I particularly looked forward to Gardner's Mathematical Games column each month.

There are some games he featured there that I still remember to this day.  There were some variants of Nim including one called Chomp.  He also introduced me to Robert Abbott's New Eleusis (a few years later) which I still enjoy teaching people and playing from time to time.

Number Trick

Take the a number x and multiply that by 2; add 5; multiply by 50. If you've already had your birthday this year, add 1760; if not, add 1759. Subtract your four-digit birth year. You should end up with a three-digit number -- the first of which is the number you started out with and the next two are your age.

How it works

Start with the number x.  Multipy by 2, add 5 and multiply by 50.

(2x + 5) * 50
100x + 250

Now we've already multipled the first number by 100, shifting it over by two digits.

Now we just need to get your age into the last two digits.

If y is your birth year, then your age a is

a = 2010 - y

What we want for the final answer is:

100x + (2010 - y)

but we need to get rid of the 250 we already have:

[100x + 250] + [(2010 - y)  - 250]

The first square brackets is what we have so far and the second square brackets are what we want to add.

2010 - y - 250 = 1760 - y

So, finally,

[100x + 250] + 1760 - y

The last part puts your age into the last two digits.

Putting that all together.

(2x + 5) * 50 + 1760 - y

Light at the end of the tunnel [picture]

A friend sent this picture.  http://goo.gl/kGpc

Now Facebook Has Stopped Posting My Blog Entries

The subscription/gateway seems to be gone.  And I can't even find where I set it up in the first place.  I probably lost it when I refused one of the force-you-to-go-public settings.  I'll just cross-post via Twitter then.

Bah!!

Update 2010-05-24:   This seems to be working again and no posts were apparently lost.  I'm not sure why.  Maybe a long delay.  It seemed like it was more than a day.  Maybe Facebook misconfigured their own privacy settings.

My Solution to the Gulf Oil Leak:

Whoever first contains the leak owns the well and can pump and sell the oil.  This should work to strongly motivate later accident prevention along with preparedness (by multiple, competing entities) for rapid response to fix a problem.

Facebook: My finger is poised over the deactivate button

The only thing that stops me is the fact that I barely use it in the first place.  Knock on wood, there's not that much at stake for me.  Maybe.  Still, Facebook has become the intense, flaming nucleus of the social-network-crazed cluelessness that's running rampant on the Internet.

It will be interesting to see if they can pull out of this steepening dive in time, or if they will crash in fiery self-destruction.  If Facebook does recover, I'm not sure I'll ever trust them.  But will I trust them enough to keep the accounts open and continue to (carefully) use the service?  That's the question.

Facebook Privacy:

Check your settings early and often!

GTD Project Planning

Recently, I've found the GTD approach (as I've understood it so far) to project planning to be extremely useful.  I probably do this around two times a week and it only takes 15 or 20 minutes.  After that time I have a much more clarified idea about what to do about something.

Note that the first time I read the GTD book, I barely even noticed the project planning component though it's a key part of the book.  On the second reading, three months later, the project planning part was crystal clear and practically leaped from the book.  That's mainly to say that it does seem to be very important to re-read this book at least once.

Some of you will recognize this as essentially the same approach we used for planning in our facilitation processes from years ago so, yeah, there's nothing strikingly new here.  This is fundamental planning.

Also, you can and should apply this to any planning effort, including for large group projects.  But lately this is useful for taking some things that need to be done and organizing them into a project.  For example, yesterday  I took a magazine out of my in box, an old one, and realized I really don't have a system for dealing with old magazines.   I've haven't received any magazines for years, but read everything on the Internet, so there are only old ones.  So in 10 minutes or so I sketched out a project plan for dealing with all of  the magazines.

To start, I open up a new Google document for the project plan.  I usually write out the bullet list of the steps at the top so I can remember what it is I'm doing.

• Principles
• Vision
• Brainstorm
• Organize
• Next steps

Principles

Then the document should have a section created for each part.   Under the first section (obviously with the Level 2 title, Principles) I write a bullet list of principles that I (and maybe others involved) hold, that are important to the project.  For magazines, I want all unneeded ones gone: either thrown out, sold or given away.  For those that are kept, if they are worth keeping for some reason, they should be organized, labeled, and reasonably preserved.

Vision

Next comes the vision.  This is a short paragraph (for me) of what the final state will look like.  I sat there for a few seconds an tried to imagine what this project would look like when done.  What would I see?   What are the characteristics?  A few magazines stored in containers, out of the way, the stack well with clear labels.  Something like that.

Brainstorming

Then brainstorming.  For this, I re-use an approach from Lakein, that is still very much a part of me.  I set a timer on my phone for two minutes and write down ideas as quickly as I can.  I don't even use bullets, but just write lines of text, each idea on a new line.

When the two minutes are up, I set the timer for two more minutes and either clean up the existing ideas some, maybe clarify something that came out as gibberish, or add any more ideas I can think of.

Organization

Many of you will also recognize this step.  I either copy the whole brainstorm section down into this section, or just rewrite the ideas from the brainstorm.  The point here, though, is to take the useful idea from the brainstorm and organize them some how.  The quick and natural way for me is to organize them under headings.  Each heading groups a set of ideas together.  Here the ideas are bullet lists.  One section might be about magazine storage.

For example,

Storage

• Search the internet for storage solutions
• Go to Lowes or Office Max and see what they have
• Check into using old file boxes
• Label with Brother label maker

Next Actions

Finally, the last section, and last step is to look at the organized set of ideas above and choose a handful of next actions that need to be done.  This is a short bullet list of what those are.  Then at least one or more of those should go onto your next actions lists.

Conclusion

So, at the start I was holding an old copy of Sky and Telescope, wondering what to do with it.  After 15 minutes or so I had a fairly solid plan and a couple of next actions.

This approach is useful for solving a simple problem like that which has more than a few next actions, and it's also useful for some effort that will take a quarter to complete.  It should probably be the structure of a major planning session, which might span an hour and a half to two hours.

Allen has much more useful information on this topic in his book, and there's much more in the web sites and other resources that orbit the GTD solar system.

Facebook Privacy and the Holy Grail

It's like trying to give instructions to the two guards in The Holy Grail, Facebook Privacy that is.

Facebook:  “Okay, we'll reveal all of your private information to all web sites you visit!”

Me:  “No, please only reveal my info to my friends.”

Facebook:  “Ah, okay, we'll only reveal your personal info to your friends, and to our advertisers and all web sites you visit!”

Me:  “No, no!  Only to friends I specify!”

Facebook: “Okay, only to our advertisers and your friends.  And we'll reveal your Events to everyone!”

..., etc.

Social Graph

I'm tired and more than a little annoyed at everyone wanting to build out my social graph for me.  It's like having spiders in the house building webs.  Where's the bug spray?

Fixing Facebook Privacy Settings

I just went to Facebook and did the following:

Accounts > Privacy Settings > Applications and Web Sites > Instant Personalization Pilot Program


At the bottom was a box to uncheck to disable this (otherwise automatically enabled for you) “feature.”


Then you may want to check:


ccounts > Privacy Settings > Applications and Web Sites > What You Share


From there click on Learn More.  Nearly hidden down at the very bottom is the link This page.


Go to that page and under each applicationi will be Edit Settings.  If you haven't changed them, they are probably set to share with Everyone.  


The most restrictive setting in the list is Only Friends which is probably okay.  If you want them to be more restricted, then you have to choose Customize where you can finally set them to Only Me if you wish.

Peace is Our Profession

“if you rely on deterrence as a strategy, your threat has to be believed. No one doubted that LaMay, given the order, would have carried out whatever SIOP the President chose, and do so without hesitation; and that SAC, the organization he had created, would do as ordered.”   Jerry Pournelle discusses LeMay and a recent WSJ article.

Eric Whitacre's Virtual Choir - Lux Aurumque

In case you've yet to watch Eric Whitacre's Virtual Choir on Youtube, I'm passing it on again.  I still find it amazing.

Simple Web Server in Python

I just recently learned about the simple web server capability of Python's SimpleHTTPServer module.  To instantly create a web server and serve a directory tree of files, cd to the tree root and run the following command.

python -m SimpleHTTPServer

This will start a web server on the indicated port which should be 8000.

Of course, do this cautiously!  It's great if you know what you are doing.  It could be risky if you don't.

Earthquake Happens Live on TWiT

The Baja earthquake happens live on This Week in Tech (TWIT), seen here on Youtube.  This link takes you directly to the 19m00s mark, which is just a few seconds before.  Note how quickly over 8000 results appear on Twitter.

Also, in the next handful of minutes Leo Laporte shows his sushi made from Peeps.

Regarding the iPad

I still say that, between the Nexus One and the Macbook, there isn't an iPad-shaped hole.  In fact, I'm not aware of any sort of hole at all.

However, based on what they say, holding one in your hands is like having children—it changes your life forever.  We'll see.

RFC 3331 and Bash

I've mentioned ISO 8601 here.  As of yesterday, I've started aliasing the shell date(1) command to issue an ISO 8601, RFC 3339 format with the day of the week prepended.

Here's how date(1) normally looks.

Tue Mar 30 06:09:20 EDT 2010

With the bash alias

alias date="date '+%a %Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %z'"

The output looks like this…

Tue 2010-03-30 06:06:37 -0400

As you can probably tell, date and time stamps are a big deal with me.

Actually this mostly comes into play inside Emacs where I constantly use macros that insert date and time stamps.

Sadly, the latter format is one character longer than the other style.  The two-digit month is one byte shorter than the three-character abbreviation.  However, the time zone indicator -0400 is two longer than the three-character time zone abbreviation.  Ah well, the cost or progress.

Happy Vernal Equinox!

20 Mar 2010 at 13:32 EDT.

When to Dip and When to Scroll

The proper way to read Twitter is to “dip into the stream” to read and view whatever is currently flowing by.  It's considered to be adding unnecessary stress to your life to try to read back and catch up on  your stream.

I agree.  However, if you are using Twitter as I am, i.e., as your main source of pointers to news and anything interesting, you may want to scroll back and read previous tweets from some of the accounts that you're most interested in.  A good example might be @Slashdot.

The reason is simple.  Due to the real-time nature of Twitter, if you read posts at a particular time of day, you may miss most of the items by a user who tweets at a different hour.  @GuyKawasaki tries to fix this for you by repeating his tweets several times throughout the day.  I supposed that's okay, though it makes him sort of noisy.

Currently I just wait until I come across a tweet by one of those accounts I find interesting.  Then I just click on the id and read back through the tweets until I become bored, tired of them, or see repeats.  Of course you can just scan down the list to see what's interesting.

That's working for me now.  Another approach would be to create Twitter lists with these accounts, or even one big list.  In fact, that's probably the recommended solution.  My approach has the advantage of being  dynamic and doesn't tie me to a fixed list, so the sites I consider interesting can vary as rapidly or be as constant as I wish.

Adding a Hash Tag

Okay, I'm adding a hash tag to make my blog posts easier to locate.

My Own Library Card Catalog

Since my Nexus One phone is pretty handy at scanning all sorts of bar codes, I wondered if someone had written an app so I could just can in the bar codes from books that I have to make a catalog.

An app I found that does this handily is Book Mobile.

In the process of installing and trying it out, I found that Google Books (http://books.google.com/) has a bookshelf feature so that you can add books to your bookshelf.  You can categorize them (at least by “shelves”) and easily add books.

The BookMobile app also adds books to your Google Favorites book shelf.

Social Tool Plumbing

Forget my social graph, I'm still trying to figure out my social tool graph!

By tool graph I mean how the various tools like Twitter, Facebook, Buzz, you know, are all connected together.  For now, my goal seems to be to keep my tool graph a sort of DAG, a directed acyclic graph.  All of the connections are one-way and, hopefully, there are no loops!  (I'm not sure exactly what would happen if there were.  I (and you) probably hope that we don't find out.)

I generally don't want any of the arrows to be two-directional.  That means I don't want people communicating back along the channels I publish on.  I want a different kind of control, and a lot of control, over the return channels.  So far I haven't found a general arrangement that fits that need, though the various things I've cobbled together (e.g., using Facebook) work pretty well.

Buzz seems to break my plan in a grand way, at least initially, so I'm not quite sure what to do with Buzz yet.  I've set up a gmail account just for Buzz while I try to figure it out.

For now, I'm sticking to Twitter and Blogs for publishing.  For the replies, I have lots of channels out there and availble that one can use.

View of the Future?

This is a fascinating visualization of what a future with augmented reality could look like.  I'm not sure what I think about it.

Trying Out Feedburner

I'm trying out Feed Burner.  If it's working, this should appear on my twitter account @stargate149.

Web IDE Part 3: Ephemeral Shells and Immutable Files

Thinking about this continues and there are some on-going conversations.  My recently former boss is quite interested in these ideas, too.  Here are some thoughts about replacing the UNIX shell.

Some shell operations are ephemeral.  You run some command, look at output on the screen, sometimes maybe cut and paste it, then you're done.  A trivial example is the date(1) command.  You look at or grab the date string and that whole shell instance could go away.  It's essentially stateless.

Other shell operations create or modify files.  These are cases where you want to save the state for some later use, or just as some kind of permanent record.  My first thought here is to give such a shell access to your files but to treat them as immutable.  That means you couldn't modify an existing file but could create an entirely new one.  Then, when you close that shell-like browser tab (or something), it will ask you if you want to save any of the files that were created.  Only then would they be saved into the file storage system with some type of versioning, either with a modfied name like browsers do for downloads (Myfile, Myfile(1), Myfile(2)), or built-in versioning as in Google Documents.  Documents' built-in versioning allows you to access the previous versions of the files, see the dates and times when they were modified, revert changes, etc.

Finally, for file storage, I think the Google Documents approach works pretty well.  It has a sufficient level of organization, search, folders and organization, metadata, ACLs, etc.

See also Part 1 and Part 2.

Ignorance of Typesetting on the Web

I'm rapidly becoming more than simply frustrated and annoyed.   Apparently web pages are now being designed by people that know nothing about typsetting and reading.

• Columns of text are better narrow than wide.  Hasn't anyone ever read a newspaper!  There's a maximum width beyond which text should never go!  Check a typical novel in original book form, or nearly any book,  if this is confusing.
  
• Serif fonts are better than sans serif.
  
• Fonts shouldn't be too small.

I've been worried about the effects of stupid wide screens.  Wide screens are only good for two things.  (1)   Watching movies and (2)  if the screen is really, really big, you can work on things side by side.

Okay, I could compromise if web designers did the reasonable and correct thing:   Allow the web page to reformat if it's made narrower!!!!   Web pages have worked this way for ages but some people seem to want to force some minimum width.

The monitor I'm using right now is a 17-in CRT at 1024x768 resolution.  Everything is the perfect size for reading but more and more I encounter pages that won't narrow properly.  There's a scroll bar at the bottom and I have to scroll right and left to see all of it.

Honestly, I don't see how people that stretch a window of text out to the limits of their monitor with tiny text can find the beginning of the next line.  How do they do it?

Some sites with half a clue do format their text into columns within the page.  Some even supply a wonderful, refreshing bit of white space, which is like finding water in the desert.  But there still may be that annoying scroll bar at the bottom.

I do offer a huge Thanks!  to the page designers that do get all of this right.  To the rest, please fix your pages!

Postscript

Yes, if you are reading this on my blog page, you've already probably pointed out that the fonts *are* sans serif.  It's a good point.  It's a default theme that I othewise like.  Maybe I'll take my own advice and change the face.

Post Postscript

I did.

The New Facebook Interface

Poll Question:  How do you like the new Facebook interface?   (Love, hate, etc…)

The truth is, I'm fairly neutral.  I've never liked using Facebook, though I'm completely at a loss to explain why.  Trying to look at it objectively, it seems like a reasonable design and I can't think of a single suggestion to improve it*.  Maybe I haven't really given any though to the latter, but just try to log off as soon as possible.

Finding things in the old interface was like going on a hunting expedition and that's true in the new one, so not much has changed for me.

But, interface and usage aside, there are some things where I think Facebook (or something similar) is perfect!

• People can only talk to you if you let them and you, presumably, know who they are.

Okay, I could only think of the one, but it's critical.   This is how Facebook is better than email.

__________

*  Okay, I just thought of two suggestions.  I'll put them in the next blog post.

Why Don't You Ever Respond on Facebook?

Why am I so slow and neglectful in replying to Facebook comments and such?  Because I rarely log on.  I really only use two things for outgoing information:  Twitter and blogger.

I do get email for Facebook comments and messages from folks.  My biggest problem is that I often see them on my phone at at time when I can't easily reply.  Then I forget about them.  I have the same problem with email, too.

Maybe I'll try to log on more often and catch up.

Digital Photography

I have to say, I'm not convinced that unloading, editing, cropping, fooling around with color corrections, uploading, organizing, adding captions, publishing on-line, putting them in the blog, etc., is less time-consuming than mixing D-76, stop bath, fixer, loading the tank, printing contact sheets, etc., etc.

Or at least dropping rolls of Kodachrome in the mailers and sending them to the Kodachrome lab was pretty easy.

But, yeah, the finished product is different.  I guess it's apples and oranges.  Still, there's no push button convenience to be found here.  Where are the Jetsons when you need them!

Truth be told, there's something I really miss about the equipment, chemicals, working with light of an enlarger, etc., though I don't think I could ever go back.

Web IDE Part 2: Where's my UNIX?

The other thing I'd miss is the UNIX (Linux) command line.  If everything is on the web, where can I type

| sort | uniq -c | sort -nr

…?

I bet you could run a virtual shell environment in a browser tab.

Finally (or at least what I can think of so far):  I'd want to be able to write little tools, in Python or something, to do useful things.  Actually, I think that could be done.  The Bespin editor has a command line interface to the editor.  You could just as easily put a shell-like command line interface there.

I think it can be done.  It just requires some tools and carefully removing our work space from the desk top and re-gluing it onto the cloud.  I will admit, though, I've seen clouds.  They aren't hard and solid, but they're white and fluffy.  Truth be told, they're actually quite damp and foggy, not something easy to glue to…

See also  Part 1 and Part 3.

Bespin: Web IDE

I'm interested in the concept of web-based integrated development environments, IDEs.  Basically, that means writing and testing code via a web browser, without a computer in the traditional sense.  That's because I'm thinking more and more about a browser-only, workstation-less world.  The only thing I still need a traditional computer for is programming.  If that can be moved into the cloud, then I'm free!

Bespin looks like an excellent attempt to this end.  The video is quite compelling.  The main thing I would care about in such environment is the performance of typing and editing.  The demonstrated zipping around, effortlessly, in a 33-k line file is impressive in the Bespin video.

I think I can't write and edit code without Emacs, but the truth is I spend a lot of my time typing into browser windows and text fields just like I am right now.  A lot.

Google Documents' word processor is also a pretty good model for browser text editing.  The text entry is interactive and fast.  Document saves are automatic and there's version control.  With line-number recognition, a monospaced font, keyword highlighting (which I've now sadly come to depend on), and even typing help such as auto-complete may not be too bad.

With a button to run tests, etc., the edit and test cycle could be pretty nice.

See also Part 2 and Part 3.

Trendistic Apple and Google

It's interesting to look at Apple and Google trends on Twitter via on Trendistic.  You can clearly see China, the iPad and Buzz.

It looks like Apple's announcement on 18 Jan of their upcoming press conference completely killed the China buzz.  You can also see the little blip from Google's superbowl add before the Buzz announcement yesterday.

Seesmic on Android Now Supports Multiple Accounts

RT @stargate149 Hooray! @Seesmic 's new upgrade on Android lets me RT to multiple accounts.

Quantum Mechanics Double-Slit Experiment

Bobby sends along this excellent animated explanation of the quantum mechanics double-slit experiment.  (Except I find the talking head to be extremely irritating…)

Google Buzz

@stargate149 RT official @google Introducing Google Buzz: a new way to start conversations about the things... http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/introducing-google-buzz.html

Pharo Smalltalk

This weekend I discovered Pharo Open Source Smalltalk.  It's a fork off of Squeak Smalltalk.

They claim that they'll service the bug queue faster and fix more bugs, the claim being that the Squeak queue is pretty large with slow turn around.  It also has slicker graphics (they look like the Mac) meaning a “more modern” look and feel.  They also claim to have pared down the bundled software and that part I'm not sure about yet.

I haven't used Squeak enough yet to bump into any of it's bugs.  Since it has elements of Smalltalk dating back to Smalltalk-80, I thought it was quite well debugged but there is newer code in it, so the references must be to that.  Probably network and, I bet, newer Internet- and Web- related stuff.  That's only a speculation.

The graphics do have a visual appeal.  I am actually partial to serif fonts, they are easier to read and I don't really understand why sans-serif fonts are in vogue.

A full virtual machine doesn't seem to be that big in any event, so I'm not sensitive to the smaller size either.

I'm giving Pharo a try and adding to a little exercise that I wrote some time ago.  I still sort of prefer Squeak, though.

Smalltalk is the original object-oriented language (or at least nearly so) and it's the most wonderful and pure environment one can code in, in my opinion.  I take it off the shelf every now and then to play with, but I've yet to find a practical application to do in Smalltalk.  That's it's curse, I think.  However, as it turns out, I've never found a practical use for Java either, always finding Perl or now Python to be at least sufficient and sometimes necessary.

Banjo Music

Wow, I just stumbled onto this by accident.  Steve Martin, Tony Trischka and Bela Fleck playing together.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jn3KCZEqxc

The iPad

Some folks have asked me what I think about the iPad.  I'm still thinking about it but here's a brief snapshot of what I've thought so far.

Is it the pad device, dare I say tablet?, that I've thought about for decades?  I'm not sure.  My Nexus One fills that niche really well:

• It's portable
• I can watch movies and TV.
• I read nearly everything I read on it.  That can include books, news.  Twitter, email.  Even the dreaded Facebook.
• I can play an occasional game.  I could even play chess if I was playing much at the moment.
• My task list and all of my organizational information is on it.
• It's a fairly decent still image and video camera.
• I can use it to find the answer to just about any question I can think of and do this many times during the day.
• It also does a pretty decent job of understanding what I'm saying.  I can type into any input field in any application (a property of the Android OS) by talking to it.

So with all of that, what do I need a pad for?  I think that's a critical question many folks are asking.

About the only thing my phone doesn't do is allow me to type quickly and see more than the small screen of information at one time.  My favorite device for that is the laptop, which has a keyboard, and my favorite laptop is the 13-in Macbook.  (So, Apple hasn't lost my business).

Here's one advantage of a laptop that I haven't heard anyone mention yet:  It holds the larger screen up for you at the most ideal viewing angle.  With this big (compared to a phone) iPad, you have to hold the thing up yourself.  That seems like it would be annoying to me.  I wonder if anyone will eventually complain about that.

It's shocking to me, but I do think the need for any more than caching storage on these devices is on the verge of evaporating.  By that I mean no disk drive and not even a CD or DVD slot.

So, with all of that, I supposed I should prefer something like the Macbook Air  or one of the netbooks.

There's no question about one thing:  Apple is clearly targeting the netbook market.

Here's another thing that I'm sure of.  The nature of using what we call computers has shifted in a major way.  Basically, if you have a working browser, you're pretty much done.  I think this will become more true and, in this sense, the iPad is more than you need.  

Netbooks do fill a niche.  

I think Chrome OS is going to be quite interesting to watch.

Finally, I've read an account or two where people say, yeah all of that seems true until you hold the thing in your hands.  Then, the experience is so amazing and so compelling, you realize that this is something completely new.  I'm not in a position to argue against that and I won't be surprised if its true.  If it is, then like the iPhone, the trail will have been blazed for a new class of device to be built and sold, and less expensive but functional versions will follow.  Even if they aren't quite as amazing.

One more thing:  Convergence.  That is the notion that everything we use, our phone, TV, computer, music player, etc., is evolving toward a single something that is one thing we all carry around.  I've often thought that was true and I haven't dismissed the idea.  It could be, though, that we end up with multiple devices, like we have now but different ones, that serve different purposes.

Regardless of where things are going, it's certainly interesting.  

There's one other aspect of the world that I live in.  The 21st century.  The current world has just about caught up with my imagination.  Granted, robots aren't too common, no one goes to the relatively small space station but astronauts, and there are no off-world colonies where people shuttle off to, work and live.  There aren't any flying cars to speak of.  But, the rest of it is pretty much there.  I'm just about out of expectations now.  I guess whatever happens next will be a surprise.

Tethys and Titan

This is an amazing picture of Titan and Tethys!

The Original Newspad

Much to my dismay, I didn't get to see 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968.  However, I read the book in 1970 and  finally got to see the movie when it came back to the theatre in 1971 (and again in 1972).  This is one of my all-time favorite movies.

The newspad, shown here, set part of my view for what such a device would be like since that time.

Is the iPad it?  Possibly.  I'll comment more, soon.

Talk by Wozniak

While perusing iPad stuff on-line over the past couple of days, I came upon this nice talk by Steve Wozniak (co-inventor of Apple with Steve Jobs).

Mona Lisa mystery: Da Vinci to be exhumed

What?!  Are you kidding me?  I agree that it's an interesting speculation, but is it this important to try to find an answer?  Good grief.

Mona Lisa mystery: Da Vinci to be exhumed

Or, is it just April Fool's day in Australia?

My favorite line: “They hope to find his skull….”    Yeah, it has been a while…

Small World

Bobby sent me this really neat video that compares the sizes of worlds in our solar system and some stars beyond.

http://www.wimp.com/smallworld/

Deep Fields

Today I was reminded of the Hubble deep field images.

• Hubble Deep Field
• Ultra Deep Field

The Setup

The Setup says it's &ldqup;a bunch of nerdy interviews.&rdqup;

New in the Solar System: The IBEX Ribbon

Okay, at least new to us.  As reported in Discovery News:

Last year, NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) made a discovery so profound that scientists had a hard time describing what they were seeing. A vast ribbon located in the outermost reaches of the solar system had been spotted, a structure that had never been seen before. Now scientists believe the shape might be created by a huge reflection caused by particles bouncing off a galactic magnetic field.

Facebook, Twitter and Email

A blog post about Facebook, Twitter and email.

Python for Astronomy

Astropython.org “is a community-driven knowledge base for research in astronomy using Python.”

Christmas Tree Launch

Well, it hardly gets better than this.

Greatest Program

David Horne is not an urban myth. David Horne achieved what many would even now consider impossible. He wrote a chess game, with AI, that ran on a poorly documented, buggy machine that contained only 1k of memory.

The Amiga

The Amiga just lives on!

The Known Universe

This video, The Known Universe by the American Museum of Natural History, was shown to me by Hal and it's just beautiful.  It reminds me of the short film from the 70s, Powers of Ten.

Okay, I do have to mention a point or two that bother me.  The main one is that the presentation jumps almost immediately and too quickly from the Milky Way to All galaxies we've mapped.  It doesn't really represent our Local Group which includes, along with our Milky Way, two other grand spirals, the Andromeda Galaxy and M33, and then the other dwarf galaxies.  Similarly, it doesn't call attention to our local super cluster or the other nearby super clusters.

For one of the most distant surveys, the data are limited to the wedges shown here (mostly because of the dust in the plane of the Milky Way itself.  But there are more deep surveys that go farther than the edge of the Milky way, i.e., the picture is filled in much better than that.

But, with those points aside, the film is still extremely well done and a nice planetarium show in a video.

How Much Antifreeze?

Someone asked me the other day how much antifreeze you need to prevent engine damage in freezing temperatures.  Okay, that wasn't really the question, it was much more complex, but the basic idea revolved around how much you need to add.

The simple answer, that everyone already knows, is to mix antifreeze and water 50/50.  Actually, as shown here, ethylene glycol in water reaches it's minimum freezing temperature when the concentration is 70% by weight.

However, the boiling point of the ethylene glycol and water solution actually continues to increase, so more is better for (but not necessary) for the prevention of overheating.  In the end the 50/50 mixture should work fine.

But, if you wanted to know the minimum amount of antifreeze to add, it's not simple.

At this page of the excellent site Water Structure and Science by Martin Chaplin, the second plot has the type of information we really want, i.e., how does the pressure in a confined system (e.g. a pipe or engine) increase with freezing.  The text states that pressure can increase to 25 MPa (megapascals) in a pipe of freezing water.  25 MPa = 3625 PSI and = about 246 atmospheres.

What you'd really need to know, to answer the minimum antifreeze question precisely, is (1) what is the pressure at which the container fails (breaks) and (2) what does the pressure vs. temperature plot look like for various concentrations of the antifreeze, in a contained volume.  Then you can choose the concentration where the pressure at the anticipated temperature doesn't exceed the pressure in (1).

The plot is from Water Structure and Science by Marton Chaplin (link cited above).

Age of the Solar System Needs Recalculating

From Wired.

The currently accepted calculation of the solar system’s age is derived from comparing lead-206, a daughter isotope of uranium-238, to lead-207, a daughter isotope of uranium-235.

That comparison relies on knowing the ratio of uranium-238 to uranium-235. Earlier calculations of the ratio all came up with the same number, 137.88. The assumption that the ratio was constant simplified calculations greatly — it allowed scientists to combine both uranium values into a single number, eliminating one variable from the equation. Lead isotopes are easier to measure with high precision than uranium isotopes, so an age-estimation system based only on lead values was thought to be extremely precise.

“Everybody was sitting on this two-legged stool claiming it was very stable,” comments Gerald Wasserburg, emeritus professor of geology at Caltech who was involved in much of the early work in measuring uranium ratios. “But it turns out it’s not.”

Casper Live Aircraft Tracking

Though it's limited to Amsterdam, Casper live aircraft tracking is just really neat.  I've known of similar sites for Atlanta and San Francisco, but not one that's this smooth and well-done.

KISS Programming

This article on keeping it simple in programming expresses something I've thought.  Actually, one might call it a pet peeve.

Herschel Telescope HIFI

From Spaceflight Now.

The Herschel telescope's highest resolution instrument will begin observing the infrared universe this month after operations were suspended in August due to faulty electronics, according to the mission's project scientist.

The Heterodyne Instrument for the Far Infrared was built to obtain revolutionary new information on dynamic star-forming regions, galactic nuclei and interstellar gas. HIFI will study the motion and composition of material throughout the universe, specifically hunting for water and carbon by observing a single pixel in the sky at a time.

HD Voice in the UK

This story by Gary Kim in TMCnet.com is about high definition voice coming from Orange in the UK.

My question is:  Do we really need HD voice?  Usually, most of my cell phone conversations are quite adequate.  I think we may want to reserve that bandwidth for something else, other data, rather than clearer voice transmissions.  We aren't doing radio shows over our phones.

Star Wars in Strange Places

This is an interesting assortment of pictures.  Some are “found” I'm sure, but some also are no doubt contrived and obviously photoshopped.

These are my favorites.

Civil War At At.

Sleeping Bag.

Catching Up

I like Seesmic on Android, but it doesn't lend itself well to retweeting (the way I do it, which is non-conventional) so I end up just emailing URLs to myself.  Now, that has resulted in a back log of items to share, so I'll try to unload some of those now.

Eclipsed Blue Moon

This image of the eclipsed blue moon at APOD is beautiful!  The gradient of the penumbral shadow makes the moon look three-dimensional.  Not in the true sense of the curved terminator on the moon, but in a “fake” sense of being illuminated by a large surface.  It looks like someone is holding a big white reflector behind the sun, say several million miles across.

Oh, and if you're wondering what the “blue” business is about, a blue moon is just a second full moon in a given month.  Usually there's only one.

Why Twitter Will Endure

From the New York Times this brief essay by David Carr describes what Twitter is, why it's important, and how it works.

Mashable Twitter Guide

The Mashable Twitter Guide.

If you find Twitter elusive or weird, this might be worthwhile reading.

And the Answer Is...Thorium!

This article by Richard Martin in Wired describes how Kirk Sorenson discovered in the works of Alvin Weinberg how Thorium could be the nuclear fission power generating fuel of choice.  Sorenson…

…became convinced that thorium could solve the nuclear power industry’s most intractable problems. After it has been used as fuel for power plants, the element leaves behind minuscule amounts of waste. And that waste needs to be stored for only a few hundred years, not a few hundred thousand like other nuclear byproducts. Because it’s so plentiful in nature, it’s virtually inexhaustible. It’s also one of only a few substances that acts as a thermal breeder, in theory creating enough new fuel as it breaks down to sustain a high-temperature chain reaction indefinitely. And it would be virtually impossible for the byproducts of a thorium reactor to be used by terrorists or anyone else to make nuclear weapons.

When he took over as head of Oak Ridge in 1955, Alvin Weinberg realized that thorium by itself could start to solve these problems. It’s abundant — the US has at least 175,000 tons of the stuff — and doesn’t require costly processing. It is also extraordinarily efficient as a nuclear fuel. As it decays in a reactor core, its byproducts produce more neutrons per collision than conventional fuel. The more neutrons per collision, the more energy generated, the less total fuel consumed, and the less radioactive nastiness left behind.

Even better, Weinberg realized that you could use thorium in an entirely new kind of reactor, one that would have zero risk of meltdown. The design is based on the lab’s finding that thorium dissolves in hot liquid fluoride salts. This fission soup is poured into tubes in the core of the reactor, where the nuclear chain reaction — the billiard balls colliding — happens. The system makes the reactor self-regulating: When the soup gets too hot it expands and flows out of the tubes — slowing fission and eliminating the possibility of another Chernobyl. Any actinide can work in this method, but thorium is particularly well suited because it is so efficient at the high temperatures at which fission occurs in the soup.

In 1965, Weinberg and his team built a working reactor, one that suspended the byproducts of thorium in a molten salt bath, and he spent the rest of his 18-year tenure trying to make thorium the heart of the nation’s atomic power effort. He failed. Uranium reactors had already been established, and Hyman Rickover, de facto head of the US nuclear program, wanted the plutonium from uranium-powered nuclear plants to make bombs. Increasingly shunted aside, Weinberg was finally forced out in 1973.

SF Sea Lions Found!

The San Francisco sea lions have been found.  Apparently they decided to go to Oregon.

Israeli Security

What Israel can teach us about security.

Palindrome Day

Whether you follow the proper ISO 8601 format  20100102 or the improper format 01022010, today's date is a palindrome.  Enjoy!

I'm Feeling Lukcy

Go to Google and click I'm Feeling Lucky.

The Infinitely Profitable Program

This is a great story about the CP/M days, programming and a program!  The infinitely profitable part is true.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year 2010!

Monkees Daily Nightly

I just found this song, Daily Nightly by the Monkees.  It's probably not that great but it really made an impression on me because it used a Moog synthesizer.  On-line articles say this was the first pop song to use a Moog and that Dolenz was the third artist to own a Moog.

World Clock

This is an excellent GUI World Clock.

Best Space Probe Photographers of the Decade

The images in this Discovery Space article, Best Space Probe Photographers of the Decade, are amazing and fresh!  They are different from the images we see the most.

Web Sockets and Tornado

Maybe you've never heard of web sockets.  Here's a brief introduction to web sockets which are implemented in Tornado.

Web 3.0

This is an interesting and somewhat useful article about Web 3.0.  It describes what many would agree the elusive Web 2.0 term means.  (If you feel like you've never been completely sure exactly what Web 2.0 means, you're not alone.  It's an ill-defined term).

This article probably falls short, though, on it's predictions.  I'd say almost the majority of what it predicts is already here in some form, not something out in the future.

Google Maps Navigation Works Without Signal

Over Christmas weekend I had the opportunity to use Google Maps Navigation on Android 2.x.  I confirmed that Navigation works when you don't have signal.  I'd heard that it caches enough of maps that it can idle without Internet access for a while.  Of course GPS is still working during that time.

More than 10 miles of the last leg of my trip were without any cell phone access at all, no phone network, no Internet data access.  Navigation worked flawlessly right up to the last turn into the destination driveway including the maps, turn by turn voice navigation, etc., etc.

Russia Plans to Save Earth

Russia Plans to Save Earth From Rogue Asteroid. My favorite line is “everything would be done ‘on the basis of the laws of physics.’”

I'm fascinated by the possibility of violating the laws of physics.  If they can do that then I say, Don't apologize! Carry on!  There are probably much more interesting solutions in that arena!

Also interesting is the “no nuclear explosions” policy.  I understand a concern about a nuclear power building large bombs and mounting them on rocket boosters and putting them in spacecraft.  Still, it's the most efficient case of energy per mass.  It's the best way to get the energy needed to change the momentum of an asteroid to the target.  If you are really saving the earth (an important requirement) then I think it's definitely time to drop the pretense of political correctness.

Facebook Privacy

Summary

On Facebook, check Settings, Privacy Settings, Applications and Websites, What friends can share about you.  Then click on Edit Settings.  You probably want them all set to friends only.

Run applications with care.  The popular ones are probably okay, but beware of new and unfamiliar applications

Details

The news articles about Facebook privacy finally got my attention so I decided to finally check out what's going on there.

The most important thing is to go to the Privacy Page and check out the settings there.  Even after you check the little “simplified” page that the special announcement on Facebook shows you, it's still important to go the Privacy Page and check all of the settings.

Follow the menus (starting at the top right of the screen):   Settings > Privacy Settings.

There's no immediate danger involved in any of these.  It's all about how much you want to share.  I generally restrict just about everything to just Friends.

The one I'd pay careful attention to is Settings > Privacy Settings > Applications and Websites > What friends can share about you.  Then click on Edit Settings.

Just to be clear about what this means, when you use something like Something-ville, or My Family, etc., those are applications.  They are written by, well by anyone (you could write youself), and when you join/use them, you basically give them access to your Facebook account.

I believe that up to now, such applications had access to all of your information and they could do with it what they wanted to.  I don't think anyone has a reason not to trust some of the more popular apps that are on Facebook.  LOTS of people are using them and I've not heard of any problems.  Still, it's a good idea to be cautious and not just grab onto any application that pops up.

A major part of this recent change is to let you limit how much of your information such applications can  share with anyone.

Some folks may have noticed that I don't use (knock on wood) any applications at all on Facebook.  I'm not at all saying that everyone should avoid them.  In my case I'm not ready to put time into them.  Still, though, I also don't know who they are from, how trustworthy they are, and haven't taken the time to figure all of those details out.

With these new settings (that I've restricted to all friends access, only) I'd feel safer in actually using one of the apps.

As a final thought, I'd be careful about the Friends of friends setting.  As I understand it, that means not just your immediate friends can see something, but their friends as well can see it.  Most of the time, that's probably okay, but if I learned anything from MySpace, it's that only two hops away from someone you know are some pretty seedy people.  It's sad I know.   On the other hand, most people you've ever heard of are probably only two hops away, maybe three, at least as far as acquaintance goes.  If you believe, Kevin Bacon, six hops cover everyone in the world.*

__________
* Via Google, I find the population of the world for 2008 is 6,692,030,277.  We want to know what x is for x⁶ = 6,692,030,277.

log x⁶ = log (6692030277.00) = 22.62


6 log x = 22.62
log x = 22.62 / 6 = 3.77
x = exp(3.77) = 43.41

I think this means that, if everyone knew 43.41 different people, with no overlap, then Kevin's six degrees would work.

Cosmological Distance and Grains of Salt

Why do I always say to take large distances in space, say to galaxies in a Hubble deep field image, with a grain of salt?  The main reason is that, in an expanding cosmology, the meaning of distance is not a simple concept.

In the diagram we represent space with the horizontal s-axis and time with the vertical t-axis.  There are two galaxies and both are stationary in the space around them.  However, because space (s) is expanding, B is getting farther from A, not because B or A is moving, but because the space is expanding.

At the point in space and time, B, a photon of light leaves that galaxy and travels to our galaxy where it arrives at A', later in time.  The red path represents the path the photon takes through spacetime.

The red path of the photon is curved which is a consequence of the expansion of space as it travels.

How far away?

Now, everyone wants to ask the question (when we at A' look at our picture of B), how far away is B?  Well, there are at least three distances here.  There's the distance AB, there's the distance A'B' and there's the path the light actually took BA'.  When someone says the distance is 13 billion light years, which one of these are they talking about?  If your answer is that you don't know, well, I don't know either.

The problem is actually worse than this.  In my diagram, I've represented space as expanding at a uniform rate.  That rate would be represented by the slope of the BB' line.  However, space doesn't really expand at a uniform rate but at a changing rate.  Worse, it's lately come to light that the rate is increasing, i.e., the expansion seems to be accelerating.  So, the BB' line wouldn't even be  a straight line in this diagram.  The BA' photon path would be different.

A tale of two numbers

In fact, how you draw this diagram in detail depends on the cosmological model of how space expands with time.  You can write it down as a simple function of scale and time, R(t).  However, we don't really know well what the current rate  d R(t) / dt  is, or even the acceleration d² R(t) / dt² is.  By the way, the rate is called the Hubble constant.  (Of course, if there's acceleration, then that speed isn't a constant).

What do we know?

There is really only one thing we know with high accuracy from these observations.  The wavelength of light when emitted at B was proportional to the length AB.  The wavelength of light received at A' is proportional to the length A'B'.  So the ratio of A'B' / AB is equal to the ratio of the wavelengths.

The redshift is expressed as a value called z.  If the new wavelength is three times the original length (i.e., the ratio is 3), astronomers say the redshift z = 2.  That's because you add two more of those wavelengths to the one you started with to get 3, or you shifted it by the amount 2.

So the one thing we know is that scale of the universe (the distance between distant galaxies that are sitting still) is z + 1 times bigger than when the light was emitted.

That's why I'd rather just hear the redshift for these observations and leave the other details to be figured out some day.

How far have we seen?

Some recent record observations of redshift are around z = 7, so we've seen some objects as they were when the scale of the universe was 1/8 it's current scale.

Of course this is also model-dependent, based on the concepts of cosmological redshift and general relativity!

__________
I think the phrase “a tale of two numbers” should be attributed to Edward R. Harrison, probably from his book Cosmology:  The Science of the Universe.

Digital Archives and File Corruption

From Slashdot.

“…massive digital archives are threatened by simple bit errors that can render whole files useless. The article notes that analog pictures and film can degrade and still be usable; why can't the same be true of digital files?”

TWIG

I've become completely addicted to This Week in Google (Twig) on Twit.tv.  The show is hosted by Leo Laporte and usually features regulars Gina Trapani and Jeff Jarvis.  Recommended!  I actually learn new things from this show every week.

You can listen to the podcast and/or download the MP3 and even burn it to CDs like I do, to play in my car.

The show is recorded on Saturday evening at 17:15 ET, roughly, so you can watch the live video stream on the web page.

Pournelle on TWIT

I may not even have posted here how I've gotten addicted to Twit.tv.  This week, one of my favorite authors, Jerry Pournelle, appears on TWIT. (This Week in Technology, a web-based radio program hosted by Leo Laporte).   I've only listened to the first bit of it, but I recommend listening to the podcast (which is also a downloadable MP3).

Safe Computing!

This is an excellent blog post by Sarah Perez regarding malware getting on your computer when you click on short URLs on Twitter and Facebook pages.  The advice in the article is good so I won't repeat it here.

I'll just add these bits.

• Use Chrome as your browser.  If you don't use Chrome, use Firefox.
• Use Ubuntu or Mac OS X if you can.
• If you have to use Windows, it's imperative to keep it up to date and use virus software.  AVG and Avast are good choices.