Sean’s Mental Walkabout

So very awesome.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Just because it’s that awesome.  You should definitely look at signing up to the APOD RSS feed.

Popularity: 10% [?]

• The Associated Press: Endorsements: Anchorage paper picks Obama
  I wonder if this means that Alaska is not longer part of "real america"
• Prototype - If No One Sees It, Is It an Invention? - NYTimes.com
• Slacker Astronomy
  A good blog, and a good podcast
• Great World Wide Star Count
  You should participate. It's an easy way to help figure out how much light polution is out there.
• Sean’s Blog » Blog Archive » Getting Suspend Working with nVidia in Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron)
  Works on Intrepid with my home desktop. Finally, suspend working on this machine.

Popularity: 15% [?]

• India to the Moon! | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine
  The space race just got more fun to watch with another world power (India) getting into the mix. Congrats to them on a successful launch.
• jwz - “There are many copies.”

Popularity: 11% [?]

While I love the snow part of winter (which we don’t get nearly enough of down here in in Poughkeepsie), I used to hate the dark part of winter.  The Sun setting at 4:45 in December is sort of depressing.

I say I used to, because now I’m eager for sundown, as it means I can grab the binoculars or the telescope and wander outside.  Now, a 6 pm sunset in October is great.

Popularity: 9% [?]

• Learn The Airdates Of The Final 10 BATTLESTAR GALACTICAs!! — Ain’t It Cool News: The best in movie, TV, DVD, and comic book news.
  Battle Star returns Jan 16th, and pushes straight through to the end. Can't wait.
• James Governor’s Monkchips » On Timeless Software: Pace Layering and the SAP Software Architecture
  I love this idea that layers in software need to age at different rates. I'd never thought of it that way before, but it makes perfect sense.
• ESA - ATV - ATV re-entry: First pictures (updated)
  Some great pictures of reentry of a satelite taken from the DC-8 observing plane. Very cool.
• Star Trek Side By Side Photo Comparisons
  Comparison of new trek casting with old. I'm quite impressed by Spock, Kirk, and Bones casting, and really can't wait for this to come out.

Popularity: 13% [?]

Main Page - Stellarium
This is the ideal software for getting familiar with the night skies. I love that I can actually go back and look up stars that I was staring at here and figure out what they are.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Open source gets pragmatic | The Pervasive Datacenter - CNET News
Open source has, in a sense, won. By which I mean that it’s entered the mainstream and has, to no small degree, heavily influenced how companies do development, engage with user and developer communities, and provide access to their products. Furthermore, the well-established success of many open-source projects (Linux, Apache, Samba… the list is long) makes many of the long-ago barbs thrown at open source (insecure, risky, unsupported, etc.) risible in today’s world. Open-source advocates no longer need to jumpstart a software revolution. They can afford to be pragmatic.

Install Ubuntu Hardy Heron on a T61p - ThinkWiki
Should have bookmarked this a long time ago, as hal updates force you to redo this

Hubble Legacy Archive
A search engine for the existing hubble data that’s out there

Popularity: 12% [?]

Tonight we were at the library, as I needed to pick up an inter library loan book. As per usual they had a table of old books for sale, which I was flipping through.

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.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Astronomy Picture of the Day RSS Feed
The Astronomy Picture of the Day is a wonderful web site that puts up a different astronomy-related picture every day. However, the site does not have an RSS feed. This page fixes that deficiency.

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

Popularity: 13% [?]