Sunday, July 31, 2005

Vancouver

Next stop, OSCON. I've arrived into Vancouver on time, negotiated US customs and immigration and am now sitting in the holding area waiting for my puddle hopper to PDX...

This post is brought to you curtsey of the free wireless network here in the US-bound departure area at YVR, it looks like civilisation has arrived to Vancouver airport since last time I came through.

Update: Another day, and yet another in a long line of Dash 8's...


Yet another commuter flight...

Update: Looks like someone else noticed the free wireless network in Vancouver...

Heathrow

I'm on Air Canada 831 out of Heathrow into Vancouver, where I'll transfer to a puddle jumper for the short hop down into Portland and hence to OSCON. I'm feel very lucky that I get to attend for a third year in a row, it's a great conference...


Air Canada's computer system was down, and that meant a long queue at check-in, not the best start to the trip.

Saturday, July 30, 2005

Déjà Vu...

I'm suffering from severe déjà vu. I've just realised that I started writing this blog just over a year ago to cover OSCON, and here I am, holed up in the same hotel, on my way to the same conference. I'm not sure what this says about my life...

Feed splicing...

For those of you taking the alternate Feedburner RSS feed rather than the native Blogger Atom feed, I've decided to splice a Flickr feed into my normal blog feed as part of my coverage of OSCON 2005.

So if you're still subscribed via the native Atom feed I'd encourage you to switch to using the Feedburner RSS feed for a richer semantic experience during OSCON. This was a public service announcement...

In Transit...

I'm currently holed up in the Heathrow Marriott waiting to fly out to OSCON 2005 first thing tomorrow morning. I'm being sneaky this trip and flying Air Canada via Vancouver into Portland in an attempt to shorten my queuing time through US customs and immigration as you can "enter" the US when you transfer between flights in Vancouver, and the queues for non-US citizens are usually fairly minimal...

Friday, July 29, 2005

Water found on Mars

The BBC is reporting that water ice has been found in High Resolution Stereo Camera (HSRC) images taken by Mars Express earlier this year. This is a big boost, both to the possibilities that life might have existed at one point on Mars, or might still exist, but also to the chance that a manned mission could one day be sent to our most interesting neighbour...

CREDIT: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum)
The HRSC on ESA's Mars Express obtained this perspective view on 2 February 2005 during orbit 1343 with a ground resolution of approximately 15 metres per pixel. It shows an unnamed impact crater located on Vastitas Borealis, a broad plain that covers much of Mars's far northern latitudes, at approximately 70.5° North and 103° East. The crater is 35 kilometres wide and has a maximum depth of approximately 2 kilometres beneath the crater rim. The circular patch of bright material located at the centre of the crater is residual water ice. The colours are very close to natural, but the vertical relief is exaggerated three times. The view is looking east.

Update: Slashdot has more...

Debris strike confirmed?

The BBC is reporting that NASA now believes that at least one of the several pieces of debris observed during the launch may have struck Discovery. Three spacewalks have been planned during the mission, and it now seems likely that one planned to test repair kits may now be given over for assessing and repairing real damage to the orbiter...

Update: The spacewalk to test the repair kits went ahead as planned, but the BBC is now reporting that NASA is considering another spacewalk to repair damage to Discovery.

Thursday, July 28, 2005

iPod Video?

More on the new iPod video (12th Oct 2005)

The first look (via Gizmodo) at Apple's long awaited, and eagerly anticipated, iPod Video? Or a good fake done with Adobe Photoshop?


Real, or not?

Update: More from the Unofficial Apple Weblog...

Update: Three months on, and we have our video iPod at last...

Rolled and Docked...

At 11:00am BST this morning during its approach to the International Space Station, Discovery performed a 360° back flip at a distance of around 600 feet from the station so that the orbiter's belly could be checked for debris damage.

CREDIT: NASA
Top: The International Space Station crew snapped this image of Discovery at a distance of 337 feet. Bottom: The International Space Station is viewed through Discovery's docking ring during approach.

Discovery then went on to successfully dock with the ISS at 12:18 BST this afternoon above the South Pacific just west of Chile.

Update: NASA has released soon amazing video taken from the International Space Station of Discovery's full pitch maneurver...

CREDIT: NASA
QuickTime | Windows Media | Real Video

Shuttle "fleet" grounded...

The BBC is reporting that NASA has grounded the shuttle fleet, all two of them. With the loss of both Challenger and Columbia, and with Discovery in orbit, only Atlantis and Endeavour remain to be grounded as Enterprise has never been refitted with either a heat shield or main engines and is not currently capable of reaching orbit.

CREDIT: NASA
Handheld still image taken by Discovery's crew of the external fuel tank as it was jettisoned after launch on July 26.

In-orbit examination of Discovery by the crew didn't initially suggest cause for concern, but with more evidence emerging that the orbiter may have suffered damage to it's heat shield in a similar manner to Columbia, and the subsequent grounding of the remaining shuttles, you have to start to wonder. It can't be reassuring to the Discovery's crew to hear that NASA management now consider it unsafe to launch a second shuttle to retrieve them.

Update: For once, Slashdot injeccts some sanity. I'm sure it won't last...

Wednesday, July 27, 2005

Is the PSP an iPod killer?

Is the Sony PSP the iPod killer that everyone has been looking for? That's a question that's been sitting in my edit queue for a good part of this month...

Last Saturday Russell Beattie posted about the Firmware 2.0 upgrade which includes a web browser, and as soon as it was released in Japan he snagged a copy and upgraded. Looks like it works fine on US PSP's. Although if you're interested in running home brewed software you shouldn't upgrade, as most of the PSP hacks only work on PSP's running version 1.5 of the firmware or older...

I mentioned the PSP web server a couple of weeks, well for those people still running verison 1.5 or below, someone has written both an FTP server and a VNC client. There seems to be quite a community growing up around the Sony PSP and it's a shame Sony refuse to recognise that and open the platform up for "unofficial" development. Despite being a fairly closed shop Apple in recent years have benefited a great deal from opening up their platform.

Interestingly MAKE magazine has a link to a mass storage hack for the PSP and a video showing you how to go about hacking your PSP.

With the introduction of the firmware upgrade, which includes a web browser amongst its improvements, Sony have probably killed the Nokia 770 dead in the water. The PSP does everything the new Nokia 770 does, and more, but the iPod, time will tell...

Update: C.K. Sample has a good summary of the changes Sony have made in the new firmware revision...

Debris problems?

NASA is reporting that,
A camera mounted on the external tank caught what appeared to be a small fragment of tile coming from Discovery's underside on or near the nose gear doors. A later image about the time of Solid Rocket Booster separation showed an unidentified piece departing from the tank and exiting away, apparently not striking the orbiter.
Although Astronauts will now will inspect the shuttle for damage in-orbit, the deluge of data now available from the new monitoring cameras and other systems will pose their own risk to the mission. How much damage is too much? Faced with another Colmbia disaster when would NASA choose to pull the plug?

CREDIT: NASA
The falling chunk of debris (shown above), which may have damaged heat resistant tiles on or near the shuttle's nose landing-gear. Video footage reveals that a patch of tile around 4cm across is missing. Damage to hatch enclosing the landing gear would be especially worrying post-Colmbia.

Tuesday, July 26, 2005

Go for launch...

Despite ongoing problems with the fuel sensor, it looks like Discovery is still scheduled for launch today in just over an hours time, at 15:39 BST. Despite feel good sounds coming out of NASA it's worrying that the launch today may be more driven by political pressures to get off the pad than valid engineering concerns. We've been there before, and the pressure on NASA to go before the launch window closes must be fairly severe...


Holding at T - 9 minutes till launch

Update: A successful launch for Discovery...


The launch of STS-114

Update: Predictably the launch has generated lots of coverage, amongst others, New Scientist, BBC News and Slashdot have more...

Update: Looks like there may be a debris problem with Discovery...

Friday, July 22, 2005

HTN Workshop, redux...

Now that was a long, stressful, but in the end very successful week. I'm behind with virtually everything, I have way too many emails sitting unanswered in my inbox, my paper mail is stacked to the ceiling, I haven't done half a dozen things that are critical and should have been done yesterday, and people are chasing me around the building to sign things I should have signed already. But we do have a standard, we've decided how all these proprietary telescope networks are going to talk to each other, and I'm a happy man.


The usual suspects...

Of course not to sit still, Robert White from the Los Alamos RAPTOR project is staying on for another week to write the interoperability software with me that will let TALON and eSTAR talk to each other. Standards aren't much good if they aren't implemented in software...

Thursday, July 14, 2005

HTN Workshop

As you may already know, next week I'm running a conference, but as anyone who has run a conference before can tell you, it's a lot more work that you initially figured. I really have to sit down and write my talk(s), wonder when I'm going to have the time to do that?


The conference badges, fresh from the printers

Update: We've now had the conference...

Wednesday, July 13, 2005

perlVNC

You sometimes see an open source project and you have to ask yourself why they did that, but sometimes you see something and you realise that its just solved a problem that you didn't know you had yet. I've just stumbled across perlVNC (via Tao of Mac), it's a pure Perl implementation of the VNC protocol. Funnily enough, it's exactly what I didn't know I was looking for...

BBC Radio via OS X widgets

This has been sitting in my edit queue for a couple of days now, so it may be old news to some of you, but the BBC have released a Mac OS X Dashboard widget that lets you listen live to BBC Radio...


The prototype listen live Dashboard widget

No return to flight

As I mentioned before NASA isn't having much luck lately, and despite problems it looked to be go for launch for Discovery today...

CREDIT: NASA/KSC
Space Shuttle managers inside the Kennedy Space Center's Launch Control Center

However, a last minute fault with a fuel tank sensor meant that the launch has now been called off, and with the launch window quickly closing it now seems likely that NASA's much troubled return to flight may now have to be postponed until September.

Slashdot has more, and for once some of the the discussion is actually fairly informative...

Update: New Scientist has more details...

Update: it's looking more and more likely that NASA may have to postpone the launch until September.

Monday, July 11, 2005

Yet more Python for Series 60

Erik Smart has just announced the next release of Python for Series 60, which includes some much needed documentation for the new framework hooks...

Friday, July 08, 2005

No luck for NASA

The Register is reporting that Hurricane Dennis may be the next obstacle in the way of NASA's return to flight. It looks like NASA just isn't having much luck at the moment. Slashdot also has the story...

Update: The shuttle is go for launch, despite Hurricane Dennis...

The London bombings

Yesterday four explosions ripped through London, killing 50 and injuring about 700 others...

The reaction to the London bombings in Britain was calm, with the foreign press seemingly more alarmist than our own. We're used to terrorism in Britain, although it has abated in recent years the IRA conducted a decades long terrorist campaign on mainland Britain which included the Brighton hotel bombing in 1984 which almost succeeded killing the then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

So despite the nature of the attacks, there was little panic reported and bus services at least soon restarted allowing some people to make their way home yesterday, and with the Underground being returned to partial operation today, London is begining to return to normal.

I'd flown into London only the day before the bombings, and it's sobering to think that I could have been caught up in it. I know that many of my friends and colleagues have been caught in the aftermath, and the heightened security in the capital, although thankfully I don't know of anyone that was directly involved. That said, I've not yet managed to get in contact with everyone that might have been in London at the time.

I remember the September 11th attacks in 2001 very well, where most of our news was gleaned from Slashdot as many of the major mainstream news sites went down under the increased load, and work stopped as people crowded around a small portable television.

The changes in the way the way news propagates since 2001 is marked, camera phones captured the aftermath of the blasts and blogs covered the blasts real time. A lot of people got their news directly from people on the ground with Wikinews having better coverage during the day than most of the main stream news sites.

The mobile phone networks were, unsuprisingly, heavily loaded all day. With the mobile operators reportedly increasing the available bandwidth to deal with the load, although reports that the government used it's emergency powers to shut the networks down seem now to be unfounded.

The aftermath of the September 11th attacks lead to a curtailment of civil liberties, both in the United States and here in Britain, on a scale never previously seen. I'm more scared of the political reaction to the bombings here in the United Kingdom than I am of the terrorists. The terrorists we can fight by simply ignoring them and their "message", the government is another matter...

Famously after the Brighton hotel bombing Margaret Thatcher stood up in the Conservative Party conference the next day and said,
The attack failed. All attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail.
I agreed with her then and I agree with her now, however attempts by a country's own government have had a good record succeeding.

In these difficult times we must remember that giving up our freedoms in exchange for security is a bargain we should not make. I'm willing to give my life in return for keeping my freedom of movement, of association and of anonymity in public, and so should you. If you are not, if you want security more than you want democracy, then I'm ashamed of you.

I want my iPhone...

So despite rumours, there wasn't a big Apple press event yesterday. No new product announcements, and especially no iPhone. Oh well...

Biometric boarding passes?

According to Forbes (via Engadget) Lufthansa has started testing biometric boarding passes.
When checking in at the terminal, Lufthansa passengers' fingers are scanned and their fingerprints printed in encrypted form as a barcode on the boarding pass. During boarding, the code on the pass is then checked against the actual fingerprint to identify the passenger...
I don't understand the move towards biometrics, and I strenuously object to the use of RFID chips, especially when linked with biometrics. However, Lufthansa's approach here seems sound, if only we could be guaranteed that our encrypted fingerprints wouldn't be stored, cross-referenced and checked against any number of other databases. Which, of course, is exactly what will happen...

The new dark age?

Jonathan Huebner is predicting an upcoming dark age. He claims that the rate of technological progress, rather than exponentially increasing, is actually slowing, and has been since the late 19th century.

I don't believe I've ever seen an article I disagree with more, his choice of metrics is dubious, and his conclusions are questionable...

Huebner bases his conclusions on his analysis of major innovations and scientific advances over time compared to world population, this seems to me to be a odd metric to choose. The world population has been steadily growing but as anyone that has ever managed a project can tell you, throwing more people at a problem will not necessarily mean that it gets solved faster. So why does he normalise against world population? Doing this is so obviously the wrong thing to do...

Huebner says,
We are approaching the 'dark ages point', when the rate of innovation is the same as it was during the Dark Ages, we'll reach that in 2024.
however does at least seem to realised that something is wrong with his conclusions, and contradicts himself a bit further down the article,
I'm certainly not predicting that the dark ages will reoccur in 2024, if at all...
Extrapolation of Huebner's innovation curve it appears that we have already made 85 per cent of the technologies that are economically feasible. This seems like a far fetched conclusion to reach, even based on his analysis.

While it is certainly true that in general you shouldn't necessarily extrapolate exponential growth curves towards a technological singularity, as many people have done in the past, I think such a singularity is more likely that a new dark age. Every year it is harder and harder to keep up with the bleeding edge of technology, even for those of us deeply involved with it. Anyone working in the high technology will tell you that Huebner's conclusions are bogus...

Tuesday, July 05, 2005

In transit

I took the red eye out of Kailua-Kona last night and arrived into SFO at some stupidly early hour in the morning...


United 36 out of KOA bound for SFO

I must admit at this point to committing one of the cardinal sins of the frequent traveller, not reading the return itinerary particularly carefully. You tend to get a bit blasé about travelling after a while, and just figure things will work out...

In the past this has left me on La Palma scheduled for an inter-island flight which would get me into Tenerife North with only 40 minutes between landing and take off of my connecting flight at Tenerife South. For those of you who haven't been out to the Canary Islands, Tenerife South is about 40 minutes drive from Tenerife North and not, as the secretary booking the flights assumed, another terminal in the same airport.

Well this time when I finally got round to reading my inbound itinerary properly, which was about 20 minutes before landing in SFO in an attempt to figure out what flight to get on next, I discovered that I was stuck in San Francisco for 7 hours. I'm currently sitting at my departure gate, which was about 50 meters walk from my arrival gate, debating whether to try and get into the city for a few hours rather than camp out in the airport.

However I'm fairly comfortable here, unlike LAX there is actually a fairly decent food court air side, and of course the terminal is more or less fully covered by the T-Mobile wireless network. It also looks to be raining outside, so I might just stay put...

Update: They seem to have moved all the international flights to a brand new terminal building since last time I had an international connection at SFO, which really only goes to prove that I'm flying through LAX too much. Apparently I'm not 50 meters way from my departure gate, I'm in entirely the wrong terminal. Perhaps it also proves you can become a bit too blasé, time to go hunting for this new building. I knew I should have flown via Vancouver.

Update: So they have a shiny new terminal building, can anyone tell me why it appears to be almost entirely empty? It feels like a ghost town here...


The empty halls of SFO's International Terminal

Monday, July 04, 2005

Deep Impact

At 05:52 UT Jul 4 (22:52 PDT Jul 3rd at JPL), the 372 kg impactor released from Deep Impact probe successfully smashed into Comet 9P/Tempel 1...

CREDIT: NASA TV
A view from JPL of the Deep Impact's flyby showing the impactor colliding with comet 9P/Tempel 1. (22:52 PDT, July 3)

Update: Post-impact images are starting to come in from the ground based observatories, and from the spacecraft itself...

NASA/JPL-Caltech/UMD
This image shows the initial ejecta that resulted when Deep Impact probe collided with comet 9P/Tempel 1 at 22:52 PDT, July 3. It was taken by the spacecraft's high-resolution camera 13 seconds after impact.

A. Fitzimmons and the Maui Deep Impact Workshop students and educators
The Faulkes Telescope North can clearly see the expanding ejecta in the coma. Above is an image obtained by dividing an R-band image obtained at 08:35 UT by an earlier one taken at 06:24 UT. Positive (bright) pixels show the enhancement in R-band brightness in the inner coma at 08:35 UT. Image size is 85×62 arcsec, the apparent enhancement has a maximum brightness 2.5 arcsec from the center of the comet.

Update: The International Herald Tribune has some local colour from out here in Hawaii, while the New Scientist takes a more in-depth look at the impact.

This is not the iPhone, redux...

The new Motorola E790 is not the long wished for, eagerly anticipated, Apple iPhone. It looks as clunky and badly designed as most Motorola phones. This is not the iPhone, this is just a phone with iTunes support. Move along at the back, nothing to see here...

Saturday, July 02, 2005

PSP httpd server

Since Frossie bought a PSP at the tail end of last week I've been keeping an eye on the developer community that's forming around this device. Not because I want one myself of course, err, but just for interest...

Despite this I was still surprised to stumble across a PSP httpd server, that's right, a web server for your PSP. While still in the early stages it lets you access the memory stick and the two internal flash devices over the web, and although of course even the author admits that he can't think of a good use for it, it has to count as one of the coolest toys I've seen in a while! But then I've got a web server running on my phone, so I wouldn't take my opinion if I were you...

Friday, July 01, 2005

Astronomy Dashboard widgets

For the astronomers out there running Mac OS X, there is now a Dashboard widget that hooks into the ADS...


The widget in question...

Does anyone know of any more astronomy related widgets?

Update: Someone almost immediately mailed me to tell me about the Sunspot widget for you Solar-Terrestrial Physics guys...


A widget for the STP community

Update: I've now gone off and written some of my own widgets...

Death by a thousand cuts

Apple Matters seems to think that Longhorn and Microsoft are dying a death by a thousand cuts. You can see their point, barely a month goes by where you don't hear another announcement from Microsoft saying that Longhorn has been delayed yet again, or that it'll ship with even less features...

Annotating CPAN

Even the language's fiercest critics will usually acknowledge that CPAN is Perl's biggest advantage over the other high level languages like Python and Ruby. However, as for most open source projects, at times the documentation for some modules can be fairly thin on the ground.

However I've just stumbled across an article by Ivan Tubert-Brohman, published today, where he talks about his latest project AnnoCPAN which allows anyone to post public annotations in the margins of the module documentation.

I'm really excited about this, as it could be an amazingly useful tool if used correctly. I know there has been many occasions where I've struggled with a module interface, only to finally figure out that the code and the POD only bear a passing resemblance to each other. In these cases the module author is sometimes pretty unresponsive about fixing things, so it would be nice to be able to tell people about the problems with the relevant modules. Hopefully AnnoCPAN can solve this problem...

Shuttle launch date

Despite continued worries over safety, NASA has announced a new launch date for return to flight of July 13th...

CREDIT: NASA/KSC
NASA Adminstrator Mike Griffin and senior managers announce the revised launch date for Discovery

Slashdot has the story, and no doubt lots of commentary...