Big Dave’s Blog

Big Dave’s Blog

  • Reflecting on a New Generation of Mirrors

    Gallery – Reflecting on a new generation of mirrors – Image 1 – New Scientist Continuing on the theme of interesting optics, Andrew Hicks, a mathematician, has created mirrors that accomplish some amazing feats. Imagine looking at text in a mirror, and the text is not backwards. Imagine 360-degree panoramas without distortion. It’s all pretty cool stuff. All…

  • Navy Says Combat Robots Multiplying Fast, Need “Battlefield Ethics” Pronto

    Machine Takeover: Navy Says Combat Robots Multiplying Fast, Need “Battlefield Ethics” Pronto Things like this make me nervous. I love the idea of technology and robots (building one would be a blast), but my concern is that war and combat will stop being dangerous. When that happens, it will be too easy to resort to…

  • iPhone Wishlist

    I’ve been an iPhone user since the first weekend the 3G came out, and so far I love it. Prior to the iPhone, I was a Blackberry user for a while. My reasons for waiting to change were: My contract with Verizon conveniently ended the same month the 3G came out. AT&T had lousy coverage…

  • The Secret in Building 26

    I just finished reading The Secret in Building 26: The Untold Story of How America Broke the Final U-boat Enigma Code. What a fascinating read! I’ve written before about the UK’s contribution to code breaking during WWII (Neglect of Bletchley condemned and Bletchley Park Update), but this is the first time I learned about some of…

  • Jury Duty – Epic Fail

    Today, I was scheduled for Jury Duty. Actually, I was an alternate with instructions to call a number after 3:00 PM the day before. The instructions said there would be a recording to let us know whether we would be needed or not. Like a good citizen, I called the number at 3:15 PM, but…

  • Smallest Exoplanet Is Most Earth-like Yet

    Smallest Exoplanet Is Most Earth-like Yet | Wired Science from Wired.com This is really interesting. It’s a planet that is twice the size of earth, and it orbits a star similar to our sun. The main similarity is that it is rocky instead of a gas giant like all the other planets found so far.…

  • How great is named_scope?

    If you haven’t used named_scope in Rails 2.1+ yet, I suggest you learn about it ASAP. Prior versions of Rails had a plugin that could perform similar functions, but it’s nice to have it part of the core system. What does it do? It does just what it says. It gives you a way to…

  • First Direct Image of Multiple Exoplanets Orbiting a Star

    First Direct Image of Multiple Exoplanets Orbiting a Star | Wired Science from Wired.comGEMINI RELEASES HISTORIC DISCOVERY IMAGE OF PLANETARY “FIRST FAMILY” Wow! This is an amazing and a serious blast from the past. It’s amazing because it’s the first time we have an image of an entire solar system. It’s a blast from the…

  • Bletchley Park Update

    It looks like Bletchley Park may be saved for a while. Several grants are in the works to keep what I consider the birthplace of serious computing alive for future generations to learn about. In July, about 100 UK academics signed a letter to The Times condemning the neglect of Bletchley. That seemed to have…

  • More Asynchronous Processing

    In a previous series on using workling and starling for asychronous processing, I described how to setup background tasks. Here is a quick way to use this for emails without a lot of changes to your application. First, create lib/asynch_mail.rb: # Makes an actionmailer class queue its emails into a workling queue # instead of…