Category: Technology
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Scientists Drop Absolutely Stunning New View of the Milky Way Galaxy
Saw this article during my morning reading. Scientists drop absolutely stunning new view of the Milky Way galaxy The above article references the main one. Billions of Celestial Objects Revealed in Gargantuan Survey of the Milky Way Space is so humbling. Here we are in what is generally considered a below averaged sized galaxy, but…
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The Amazing Men That Salvage Large Ships (video) « Sea-Fever blog
The Amazing Men That Salvage Large Ships (video) « Sea-Fever blog.Long ago, I posted about a company that handles high stakes salvage. I was browsing around some boating news, and I happened on this video of the operation I described. There isn’t much new info, but I thought I would share. Enjoy.
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More Bletchley Park
Saw another new post about Bletchley park getting a grant to fund restoration efforts and new exhibits. As a techie and a student of history, Bletchley park and Building 26 have always been fascinating to me. This is where Turing (of Turing Machine fame) got his start. This is where the modern computer was born. This…
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An Amateur Astronomer’s View of the Space Shuttle Discovery Cozying Up to the ISS
An Amateur Astronomer’s View of the Space Shuttle Discovery Cozying Up to the ISS.This is pretty amazing. This guy, Rob Bullen, guided his 8.5″ telescope with a Cannon 40D BY HAND to get this photo of the shuttle about to dock with the ISS. The level of precision to guide a telescope at a moving target…
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John Harrison and the Longitude Problem
It’s been a while since I read Longitude by Dava Sobel, but I happened to catch another documentary on the story recently. It reminded me again about this amazing story of science and perseverance. As an engineer, I can’t help but admire John Harrison for his scientific method. It’s also a description of an iterative…
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Software: Utility vs. Joy
How many software packages do you use that give you joy? How about simple utility? How about both? My guess is there are far fewer that provide joy and even fewer that provide both. I have dozens of applications that provide utility only. For example, I use OmniFocus and EverNote constantly. Both apps have become…
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YAGNI and the Crystal Ball of Software Architecture
YAGNI and the Crystal Ball How often have you been involved in a project, and someone starts a statement with “It would be really cool if … ?” The second I hear that, I find myself evaluating what comes next with high degree of skepticism. First of all, it usually would be “really cool,” but…
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Using Thinking Sphinx
I recently had an instance where I wanted to add full-text search to an application. I’ve used Lucene, Solr, and a few others in past lives, but this time I wanted something just as functional but a little more lightweight. After looking around I settled on Sphinx, and so far it’s worked great. By itself,…
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Apollo 11 – Could we do it again?
July 16, 2009 marks the 40 year anniversary of the Apollo 11 launch. Four days later, July 20, the Eagle landed on surface of the moon. It all started with the famous speech by President Kennedy. It’s still one of my favorite presidential quotes. “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and…
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Checkout Hoptoad by thoughtbot, inc.
I’ve been using Hoptoad for about two months now, and I’m sold. Hoptoad is a product by thoughbot, inc. Previously, I’ve always used the excellent exception_notification plugin. The exception_notification plugin is easy to use, and it works great. However, there are a couple of problems with it. You could flood your inbox if there is…