One of those books was “Astronomy”, published some time in the early 1970s. Towards the center were some really fuzzy pictures of Mars and Saturn. And it occurred to me. This was prior to the Viking missions, and the Voyager missions. In 1970 our understanding of even our own solar system was incredible elementary.

As I now look at beautiful images taken by Hubble over the last decade, it’s hard to believe how recent all this knowledge really is, and how much more we are sure to discover.

Dynamic Periodic Table
Just because it’s awesome.

Dutchess Wine Trail - Discover the Premium Wineries of the Hudson Valley
Our local wine trail

Storm King Art Center
Giant Art on 1000 acres of beautiful land

Viscount Wines & Liquor
Wine tastings every saturday. It’s like an amusement park for adults.

Dutchess County Tourism
dutchess county tourism page

Stanford CS Ed Library
If you or a friend are trying to cut or re-cut your teeth on basic C stuff, I found this site years ago that’s actually quite good. Especially as they don’t seem to teach pointers in college any more.

Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool: Table of Contents
For whatever reason the GNU.org docs here suck, and this has always been my reference page for this.

Quick Reference Cards
A bunch of great quick reference cards for various technical tasks.

Advanced Search—The Tree Guide at Arborday.org
In case you are looking to plant a tree, and want to find the right one for your area

Giles Bowkett: Lightbulb Joke: Bad Ruby Programmers
If you follow things in the community, it’s pretty funny. It doesn’t change that I love ruby and ruby on rails, but it’s still funny.

Improbable Research
ignoble winners for this year, really great list of awards

Little Big Computer - an adding machine built in little big planet.

Previously I spent some time finding Nebula, double stars, and galaxies.  Last night I decided to check out something different, stellar clusters.  It turns out there are 1/2 dozen different stellar clusters in and around the constellation of Cassiopeia, and I found most of them last night.  While the most famous is M103, as that’s in the messier catalog, the double cluster was the most spectacular.

There is something about a stellar cluster and it’s dense packing of starts that gives you the sense that the stars are just spilling out of a rift in space.  The pictures don’t do them justice, they are just breath taking in the scope.  The detail and depth of the clusters is amazing, even in slightly too bright sky last night (the moon was 1/2 full and setting at the time).  I can’t wait to check them out once the moon cycle passes and we get back to really dark skies.

M103 - open cluster in cassiopeia


NGC 869 & 884 - double cluster in perseus

apt-cache search color picker

which returned 3 results, including gcolor2.

First off, this is exactly the application I needed.  It launches fast, and just gives me a color wheel to pick colors.  But, it turns out it has something else that’s great.

You see that little eye dropper?  You can click it and then click any pixel on your computer, and it will give you the RGB color of that pixel.  It doesn’t need to be anything special, as it’s pulling directly from the xbuffer.  So handy.  I can’t believe I didn’t know this existed until now.

Manual/Edge and Face Tools - BlenderWiki
Really useful in shaping by point removal

Extension:Lucene-search - MediaWiki
I really need to get this installed on the opensimulator.org site. Built in searching in mediawiki isn’t very good, and there is a lot of content there that would be good to have indexed.

Over the past year I’ve fallen into running 3 media wiki instances… and I’m impressed.  So, I made converting mhvlug.org from MoinMoin to Mediawiki as my Linux Fest project yesterday.  2 hours to port our theme, an hour to figure out how to export / import all our content, a couple of hours tracking down how to get short urls to work right, then an hour or two of deleting pages that probably shouldn’t have transfered in the first place, and we’re done!

I’m very happy with the new site, especially after adding plugins that do callendar and maps.  I’m hoping that over the next month we can migrate everything else and get rid of the old site entirely.

It’s also amazing how much more you use software you really love.  I’m definitely a fan of mediawiki at this point, and being able to use things I learn in one instance on other instances is really handy.

freshmeat.net: Project details for ProcessMaker OSS
ProcessMaker is workflow and business process management software that allows small to medium-sized organizations to automate document intensive, approval-based processes across various systems including finance, HR, and operations. An entirely Web-based, AJAX-enabled application built on the popular open source WAMP/LAMP stacks, it includes tools to design forms, create documents, assign roles and users, create routing rules, and send alerts. A full service-orientated architecture (SOA) and Web Services interface allows the software to directly connect with popular business intelligence, content management, and enterprise resource planning systems.

Overturning Copernicus, eliminating dark energy
A new model that eliminates dark energy from the universe equations. Plus, I like how the article ends…

“In addition to the concepts put forth, this paper illustrates nicely how science works. Pseudoscience often argues that controversial or contrarian papers and ideas never get published, suggesting that the “establishment” won’t listen to new ideas. But this paper puts forth a completely novel idea, and in the process overturns a long held philosophical pillar of astronomy, and yet it is set to be published in one of the top-tier physics journals.

The main idea put forth here is vastly different from the generally-held consensus of how the universe works; however, as in all of science, every idea is tentative. Future surveys of supernovae may tell us whether or not we are special in relation to the rest of the universe.”

It’s also interesting that the dramatic challenge in getting everyone excited by mobile wasn’t really a bump up in technology.  90% of what the iPhone can do today would be doable on your random flip phone from verizon, except the carriers block you from doing it.  Carriers:

• block your access to the gps on the phone.  Every phone has had a gps for the last few years due to e911 requirements.
• make it difficult to deploy apps to the phone, as they want a cut of every one.
• make it impossible to really provide free apps on phones (by the previous point)

A good instance of this is the fact that I’ve got google maps on my Sprint flip phone.  Google wrote the app, and it does all the close searching for things like the iPhone does.  It can’t tell me where I am, because sprint blocked the gps.  But, when it comes to finding a restraunt in a strange city, it works quite well.

What Apple and Google have really been working on is getting the carriers out of the way so that mobile devices can really become a more primary platform for consumers.  They basically forced AT&T, T-Mobile, and hopefully soon Sprint, to break down their walls against letting consumers really do things on the mobile networks.  This is exciting.  I’m eagerly hoping that Sprint (who is part of the Android alliance) puts an Android phone out by the end of the year, because I’m going to snap it up immediately.  I’ve already got the Android SDK installed, and am going to start puttering around with applications that I’d love to be on my phone.

openmeetings - Google Code
This looks seriously interesting. I’m going to have to see what it takes to get something like this set up.