08.04.08 - 12:57pm
From the Washington Post:
The “small world theory,” embodied in the old saw that there are just “six degrees of separation” between any two strangers on Earth, has been largely corroborated by a massive study of electronic communication.
With records of 30 billion electronic conversations among 180 million people from around the world, researchers have concluded that [...]
05.26.08 - 01:43pm
NASA’s Mars Phoenix spacecraft has landed, without disaster, and the first pics are in. Huzzah!
But what I found most stunning was this picture:
That’s a shot of Phoenix dangling under it’s parachute (mid-air, during landing), taken by another spacecraft (Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter) from orbit. Wow.
Trivia: Something similar was done in 2005, when MGS took pictures of [...]
05.16.08 - 11:17pm
Today we launched the first Release Candidate of Firefox 3 (yay!). 7 days from now, NASA will be landing a spacecraft on Mars. I thought it might be interesting to compare the two…
The browser
The spacecraft
Original name:
Phoenix
Mars Surveyor 2001 Lander
Current name:
Firefox
Phoenix
Mission:
Make kick-ass software, promote the open web
Study water, soil, weather at northern polar region of Mars
Cost:
Free!
$420 [...]
05.13.08 - 02:50pm
Dear Sprint…
I hear you’ve had a rough time of it lately. Losing 1.1 million customers and $505 million last quarter? Ouch. I’d really love to help you out. Drop me a line when you have a billing system that will actually take my money! (I believe you already have my number.)
04.27.08 - 06:37pm
I finally got around to upgrading to new cell phone and plan. Sprint, Samsung M520, SERO plan — nothing fancy. The phone isn’t even quite as awful as I had been expecting.
But, as suspected, adding on a Phone-As-Modem (PAM) data plan (to enable internet access from my laptop and N810) was a nightmare. In [...]
04.25.08 - 12:40am
Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy Heron” came out today (*checks clock* err, yesterday) — congrads to the Ubuntu community on the release! I just finished installing it under VMWare Fusion on my MacBook, and will upgrade my home and work Ubuntu desktops this weekend.
Installation was painless. I didn’t even need to edit xorg.conf and specify my monitor’s [...]
03.22.08 - 10:02pm
I’ve been shopping around for a new cell phone and plan. My first attempt was about a year ago, after moving to the Bay area, but I gave up in despair. I had been hoping that the success of the iPhone would help improve things, but after looking around again I remain throughly disgusted at [...]
03.15.08 - 08:37pm
The space shuttle is in orbit right now, delivering some more equipment to the International Space Station. One of the payload items is Dextre, a large robotic hand that will be attached to the end of the station’s robotic arm.
Mission Control’s daily upload of instructions to the shuttle crew included this note:
Good Morning Endeavour!
Optimus [...]
02.29.08 - 05:57pm
One aspect of software piracy that’s always interested me is the way protection schemes always seem to end up causing nothing but trouble for legitimate users — while pirates happily release 0-day cracks to use the software trouble-tree (albeit illegally). The issue’s been around since at least the early 1980s, and continues to spread into [...]
