Microsoft is now saying that a flaw in the NT4.0 RPC system is too difficult to fix. Their solution: put your NT4.0 boxes behind a firewall and pray... I mean, block port 135 [The Register]. Of course the same flaw was found in Windows 2000 and XP and they were both fixed. Somehow, I think Microsoft is using this as a lever to try and get administrators to upgrade. 10:45:45 AM    comment []  

Ants are able to solve some difficult problems of finding and transporting food. No single ant in an ant community is responsible for orchestrating the communal behavior, but the complex interaction of the ants forms a system that is surprisingly effective. Douglas Hofstadter, in his famous book, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, used the analogy of an intelligent ant community to illustrate how other autonomous systems, like the brain, are able produce consciousness. I think it is a worthwhile analogy to follow since it allows us to visualize the interaction of autonomous agents (ants) interacting to form a system with important emergent characteristics.

There are a growing number of researchers who are working on applying ant or swarm learning techniques to the computer world. In particular, a paper was recently published showing how self-assembling networks could be created using these techniques [Slashdot]. 10:35:21 AM    comment []  

It looks like the problem I was having trying to access Al-Jazeera's english language website was partially due to the large number of people trying to access the site, but also to do with possible DDOS attacks on the site [New Scientist][via ArsTechnica]. 11:16:16 AM    comment []  

I read that Al-Jazeera had an English language site up, but when I followed the link, it was broken [boingboing]. With a little bit of searching I found a Saudi Arabia based news site in English [Arab News]. CNN is really way too one-sided. Arab News may offer a little more balance. In fact, there is an article on their site comparing Al-Jazeera and CNN [Study in Contrast: CNN Vs. Al-Jazeera]. 4:57:47 PM    comment []  

As some of my colleagues and I were discussing today: why not spend $74.7 billion on developing hydrogen based energy, thus making Saddam Hussein a non-issue? That's so much money that I can't even comprehend it. 4:32:05 PM    comment []  

Following up on research that showed that there is a "mysticism center" of the brain and that it can be externally stimulated, a researcher in Canada has made a helmet that can invoke halucinations like those experienced by mystics [boingboing].

Since I first heard about this research, I have wondered what evolutionary purpose such experiences could possibly fulfill. I'm still at a loss for that however it has helped me to understand the source of beliefs about the Holy Spirit. Christians in general, and Mormons specifically, believe that the Holy Spirit can touch you through your feelings. It is believed by the Mormons that if you pray about Joseph Smith or the Book of Mormon, that the Holy Sprit will testify of their veracity through feelings.

It is unquestionable that many people can self induce these feelings of the "Holy Sprit." The desire to believe is enough for many. However, if you are one of those individuals with overactive temporal lobes, then it would be hard, indeed, not to believe. 4:25:08 PM    comment []  

About a year ago, I thought about building a commercial P2P network with the focus on lowering distribution bandwidth costs. The motivation would be to allow the content owner to maintain control over its own content even though the content is being distributed from the P2P cloud. Its a good idea, but like most ideas and nearly all of my ideas, something like it is already in the works [BitTorrent][Open Content Network][via boingboing].

In theory, if a piece of content is distributed on multiple P2P nodes, it should be possible to get download speeds that exceed those that would be typical of a unicast distribution model (i.e. downloading from a website). The key is to make the primary interface to the P2P network be the web browser and not some custom application. The network should be accessible via the standard URI scheme, but require that the user install the client software in order for them to participate in the network. It appears that both BitTorrent and the Open Content Network have adopted this approach.

Eventually, I would like to see the web switch to a completely P2P architecture, where any piece of content would be distributed through a global P2P cloud. This would provide levels of performance and efficiencies that are unimaginable today. 9:52:42 AM    comment []  

The war coverage in Iraq has featured some very nice 3-D maps showing surface features as well as political boundries and cities. It turns out that those maps are being produced by a Silicon Valley startup called Keyhole [via Slashdot]. 9:32:02 AM    comment []  

I have done a lot of work with audio capture and compression in a professional capacity, but very little in the way of video. I have often heard that video is significantly more difficult to deal with. Recently, my wife bought a digital camcorder and we have been planning on installing a firewire card into our PC and doing some digital video editing. This process is made fairly easy by the software and by the fact that the video is already in a digital format. But, what do you do if you have video in an analog format and you want to bring it into the digital domain? Today, I found a nice little introductory article on the topic of analog video capture [ArsTechnica]. It's the first in a three part series that will deal with video capture, clean-up and compression. A very good read for anyone who wants to put their old home videos on their PC, CD or DVD. 11:58:48 AM    comment []  

As I was reading some comments about creationism [Corpse Divine] made by my friend, Chris, on his weblog, I had a few thoughts to add:

Charles Darwin at no time made any claims regarding the origins of life. His theory assumes that life exists without trying to explain why. His theory then attempts to define the driving forces behind the "origin of species". The origins of life fall outside the theory of evolution as formulated by Darwin.

Of course, few people actually understand evolution and many people will invoke evolution to support or disprove claims that they make regarding the origins of life. Others will make assertions trying to disprove evolution by demonstrating how evolution does not adequately explain the origins of life. In either case, the false assumption is that evolution even tries to explain the origins of life; it does not.

I personally believe that some formal theory will eventually be developed that will tie together such seemingly disparate concepts as species formation, cognition, development of social organization and the origins of life. All of these phenomena, and others, share certain common themes relating to the emergence of higher levels of order within systems comprised of discrete entities. Darwin’s theory of evolution contains some of the building blocks for such a universal theory of organizational genesis, but is probably too specialized to properly deal with such diverse systems.

I think it is because of these similarities that people tend to incorrectly view Darwin’s theory of evolution as an attempt to explain the origins of life. People intuitively perceive the similarity between the origins of higher levels of organization whether that process is operating upon individuals within a species or individual molecules in the primordial soup. This perception is not without merit, but any conclusions made based on such analogies must be treated very carefully. 10:46:41 AM    comment []  

Many people blame oil as the root cause of turmoil in the Middle East, but current estimates suggest that water will soon eclipse oil as a primary source of contention around the world.

By 2050, water shortages brought on by booming populations, pollution and global warming, will affect between two billion and seven billion people around the world out of a projected population then of about 9.3 billion [AlertNet].

These are some big problems that we are facing that cannot be solved by war. Unfortunately, as long as world governments are run by reactionary individuals like George W. Bush, it is unlikely that these problems can be solved without huge losses of life and a great deal of pain and anguish for those who survive. 9:34:41 AM    comment []  

Comments on the impending conflict with Iraq from Salon managing editor, Scott Rosenberg [Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment][via DaveNet]. 9:12:00 AM    comment []  

It's been a few years since XML burst onto the development world with the promise of making it simple to exchange data. Unfortunately, given all of the time and hype, exchanging data is still hard. There are even some sites popping up with the express purpose of bashing XML [XML Suck][via Slashdot]. Now that I have started to use XML, I am finding that it isn't so great afterall. My biggest gripe is that it is almost impossible to write readable XML code. The formatting makes it very hard to visually distinguish between language elements and data. I can't even imagine writing complex code in XSLT. Code written in that language is almost completely illegible. 5:41:57 PM    comment []  

"MySQL 4 Declared Production-Ready" [Slashdot]. 5:26:08 PM    comment []  

More on Linux inroads, this time from a non-technical, business oriented source that, none the less, makes some pretty strong statements in favor of OSS (Open Source Software) [CIO Magazine].

[CIO's who don't start using open source] will be paying for support that others will be getting gratis. They will be paying for hardware that's overpriced because it uses an arcane proprietary operating system. They will be paying for bows and ribbon—for packaging—when what's inside the competing packages is essentially the same.

It seems 2004 is going to be the year of OSS. War, economy, dotbomb, anti-trust and more are all combining to lift OSS up and make it successful. 1:39:22 PM    comment []  

Linux has been slowly chipping away at Microsoft's server market share for a while and, more recently, it has started to make inroads in the desktop arena as well. A recent Evans Data Corporation survey suggests that Linux may be on the verge of overtaking Windows within the developer community [LinuxWorld].

This year, Windows commands attention of 50 percent of the developers. Roughly 40 percent focus primarily on Linux. These priorities will switch places almost number-for-number next year. Actually, more than 50 percent plan to focus primarily on Linux and less than 40 percent on Windows, so the switch favors Linux. But because the differences are within the margin of error, it is essentially a symmetrical reversal of fortune where Linux will take priority over Windows starting next year.

This is great news, but not entirely unexpected. The real question in my mind is how well Linux will be able to penetrate the non-developer market segment. However, as the number of developers developing for Linux increases, I think we can expect a proportional increase in the quality of Linux desktop software. If that trend continues, it will only be a matter of time before Linux not only catches up to Windows on the desktop, but far surpases it in not only functionality but quality and market share as well. 11:58:57 AM    comment []  

The Linux desktop keeps improving, but there's a new group working on the Linux desktop that is probably heading in for trouble. The XPde Desktop Environment is an effort to make Linux look exactly like Windows [XPde]. Somehow, if this begins to be popular, I think Microsoft will be very unhappy about this project. It's one thing to copy the essential functionality of Windows, afterall, Windows did the same to Macintosh; it is another to copy Windows pixel for pixel [via Slashdot]. 4:38:54 PM    comment []  

Evidence of present day water flowing on Mars [BBC][via Slashdot]. 9:26:20 AM    comment []  

Practical machine learning techniques are finding their way into more and more places. The Mozilla project has started using machine learning for spam filtering and now for address completion [mozilla.org]. I am definitely looking forward to this feature. Sorting the address history in alphabetical order is simplistic and often times completely useless. I expect these types of features are going to start popping up in more and more places. 2:42:28 PM    comment []  

This interview with Martin Schulze, from the Debian press team, is a couple of months old, but it gives a very nice overview of what differentiates Debian from other Linux distributions [The Age]. 2:34:29 PM    comment []  

Snowflakes are one of those everyday, almost mundane natural phenomenon that can fill us with awe, yet be completely overlooked. The precise workings of snowflakes is something that scientists have yet to crack, yet there is a simplicity to them that seems very tractable. If that were not enough, they are simply beautiful to look at [Snow Crystal Photo Gallery][via boingboing]. 11:04:52 AM    comment []  

My wife is an English as a Second Language (ESL) instructor for the University of Washington. Currently, however, she is teaching some ESL classes on the Microsoft campus. She works helping the non-native English speaking population at Microsoft to improve their pronunciation and general speaking skills.

Last night, I joined in on an end-of-the-quarter dinner that she had with one of her classes. During the course of the meal, I had a thought. How many Microsoft developers are Slashdot readers?

I posed this question to the class (nearly all of whom were developers) and not a single one of them had ever even heard of Slashdot! Now, I find that almost impossible to believe, but there it was right in front of me; a table full of developers who had never heard of Slashdot.

The first thing that comes to mind is that these Microsoft employees, by virtue of the fact that they are non-native English speakers, are probably not typical of the overall Microsoft developer population. But, it was a very surprising result, none the less. Now I am very curious to interview more Microsoft developers to see how pervasive this lack of familiarity with Slashdot is. 10:19:38 AM    comment []  

As I was rereading my last post, something hit me. When we say things like "hydrogen, a virtually unlimited source of power," we are missing a very important point. When viewed on geological timescales, neither hydrogen nor fossil fuels represent a source of energy. Instead, they are means by which solar energy is stored.

In the case of fossil fuels, photosynthetic organisms, over the course of millions of years, have sequestered carbon-dioxide from the atmosphere into more complex carbon molecules with oxygen as a byproduct. This reaction is endothermic with the sun providing the necessary energy to power it.

Hydrogen, in its gaseous or elemental form is not very stable. There are many natural processes that will gladly grab up free hydrogen atoms and, in the process, release energy. By using nuclear or solar power to split water into oxygen and hydrogen, we are able to "store" that energy for later use.

When it comes down to it, there are only a small number of energy sources that are available to us; solar power, nuclear fission, nuclear fusion and geothermal. Wind and wave power are really just indirect sources of solar energy. Most other things that we might think of as sources of energy are more appropriately thought of as means of energy storage. Ultimately, none of these energy sources is infinite, but for the purposes of human beings for thousands of generations to come, solar power is the natural, long term energy source of choice.

The real problem with fossil fuels is that they represent solar energy that was trapped over millions of years and is not renewable. Of course, we could wait a few million years for the process to repeat itself, but Wall Street isn't really prepared to wait that long for a return on their investments.

So, the problems that need to be addressed are how solar power can be captured, stored, transported and used. Energy can be stored using hydrogen more efficiently than almost any other means known to science. Couple that with the ubiquity of hydrogen and you have a sustainable means of storing energy. But, before hydrogen can be used, the means of capturing solar energy, transporting and using hydrogen based energy all need to be standardized and put into mass production. 5:13:24 PM    comment []  

It would be ignorant the think that part of the motivation for moving against Saddam Hussein isn't based on oil. America is a drug addict and our cars and SUV's are the drug. That habit requires oil and lots of it. As I've mentioned before [Aug 19], shortage of fossil fuels is a problem that is looming in our near future. You can interpret our previous conflict as well as our current one with Iraq as a harbinger of the oil motivated conflicts to come.

Increasing efficiencies in our use of fuel combined with developing domestic sources for energy may offset our reliance on the Middle East's oil supplies, but that is a short term solution that only partially delays the inevitable crunch. The only real solution is to break our dependence on oil altogether. There are a number of potential replacements for oil out there to meet our energy needs, but the one that makes the most sense is hydrogen.

The cost of oil dependence has never been so clear. What had long been largely an environmental issue has suddenly become a deadly serious strategic concern. Oil is an indulgence we can no longer afford, not just because it will run out or turn the planet into a sauna, but because it inexorably leads to global conflict. Enough. What we need is a massive, Apollo-scale effort to unlock the potential of hydrogen, a virtually unlimited source of power. The technology is at a tipping point. Terrorism provides political urgency. Consumers are ready for an alternative. From Detroit to Dallas, even the oil establishment is primed for change. We put a man on the moon in a decade; we can achieve energy independence just as fast [Wired].

A lot of money is going to be thrown at the Iraq "problem" when the real problem is the oil money that created this problem in the first place. In the 1920's, Prohibition created an economic environment that catapulted people like Al Capone and Lucky Luciano from petty street thugs to wealthy underworld powerhouses. The nation's love of alcohol, combined with its scarcity created a climate that shot these men to the top. Our nation's love of oil, combined with its scarcity has shot Saddam Hussein to the top. 4:10:56 PM    comment []  

It is a common misperception, partially caused by poor coverage in the media, that 64-bit computing results in a 2x performance improvement over 32-bit. If you really want to know what 64-bit has in store for you, check out this introdution to 64-bit computing [ArsTechnica]. 3:50:14 PM    comment []  

By stimulating a rat's hippocampus over and over with every possible input and recording the results, a group in California has been able to exactly duplicate its behavior on a computer chip [ArsTechnica]. Apparently, the hippocampus is the simplest of brain structures and provides the ideal vehicle to test whether or not a prosthetic hippocampus is feasible. 12:17:28 PM    comment []  

War with Iraq is a decision that, in my opinion, is being made for the wrong reasons. The rhetoric coming from the White House is that allowing Saddam Hussein to possess weapons of mass destruction is an immediate threat to the security of the United States. However, Bush and his supporters have been unable to show any conclusive evidence to back their claims.

I don't argue that Saddam should or should not have weapons of mass destruction. Iraq agreed to dismantle these happens at the conclusion of the first Gulf War. I don't argue that Iraq is or isn't a security threat to the U.S., though I think the evidence presented by the Bush administration supporting this claim, so far, has been extremely weak. What I find unacceptable is the hasty and arrogant manner in which the Bush administration is approaching the issue. If it can be persuasively demonstrated that Saddam's power represents an immediate threat, then I would back immediate regime change. Until that time, I feel it is in our best interest to support the U.N.

In the end, it may be necessary to go to war with Iraq. However, if that day comes, it should be as a member of a U.N. sponsored military force. To pursue any other course will likely have a huge destabilizing effect that will be far more detrimental to our national security interests than the current policy of containment.

If you are opposed to the Bush administration's stated intention to act with or without the U.N., show your support by participating in a petition opposing immediate war that will be sent to the U.N. Security Council [Move On]. Then, talk to your friends and get them to join in the petition. 3:16:03 PM    comment []  

The Internet, by allowing like-minded people to find and communicate with each other almost instantaneously, has made it possible for anti-war advocates to assemble in three months numbers that took three years to assemble during the Vietnam era [New York Times]. 2:52:31 PM    comment []  

A friend of mine, having read my color blindness post [Mar 6], decided to doctor up one of the tests to show how a completely color blind person and a red-green color deficient person might see the image [Corpse Divine]. That's very cool! I've always tried to explain to people how the whole thing works, but have found it very difficult. Using Chris' method, you can show to a completely color sighted person how the same image might appear to a color blind or color deficient person. 1:41:14 PM    comment []  

A couple of years ago, I started encoding my CD's into MP3 format. At first, I only encoded the CD's that I listened to most and I stored them on a PC that I kept at work. I listen to music at work more than anyplace else, so it was an obvious place to keep them. Since I also had a web server and Samba on that computer, I could stream the files to my desktop computer over the LAN.

About a year ago, I found myself unemployed. This turned out to be a great opportunity to mess around with some things that I hadn't had time to mess with. So, I bought an 80GB hard drive and began systematically ripping and encoding my entire CD collection. I now have over 60GB of MP3's encoded at 128kbps.

Just as I did a couple of years ago, I keep these MP3 files on a Debian Linux box. This offers a number of advantages over simply storing them on a Windows workstation.

First, the Linux box is always available on my home network. If I choose the play a game or do some other resource intensive task on my PC, I don't have to worry that I might be inadvertently affecting the availability of the MP3 files. Plus, since Linux is so reliable, I never really have to worry about my little Linux fileserver. It is setup in a bedroom closet in my house, connected to the LAN and has no monitor. When I want to connect to it, I simply ssh in with no problems.

Second, I have Apache and andromeda installed to make it easy to navigate the files over my LAN through a web interface. Andromeda provides a very simple interface for navigating MP3's on a filesystem. With it, you can create simple playlists by selecting entire albums, artists or individual clips. Plus you can easily navigate the files regardless of how you have them organized. For instance Andrea and I organize our files first by a high level categorization (e.g. Brazil, Latin, Pop, Eighties), them by artist name, then by album.

Third, by using Samba, Linux allows me to make the files available to standard Windows computers through the Windows Explorer utility. This is how I actually manage the files themselves. Organizing my files and directories is as simple as copy and paste. When I am ripping and encoding, I am able to employ both of the workstations in my house at the same time. Since they both have the MP3 Samba share mounted, I was able to configure them to rip and encode locally and save the encoded files directly onto the network share. This doubles the number of CD's that I am able to rip and encode in a given time period.

To round out my use of MP3 files, there are several ways that I can listen to them.

First, I took an old Sony Vaio sporting a Pentium MMX processor, installed Linux, X Windows, xmms and Mozilla on it. I connected its headphone jack to my home stereo RCA inputs and set it up on my LAN. This setup might not appeal to the audio purist, but then the audio purist wouldn't be using 128kbps MP3's, however, it works just fine for me. I am able to browse my collection using the web browser and andromeda and stream the files for playback. The result is that I have been able to breathe new life into on otherwise useless laptop. Since the files are not stored locally, there are no concerns about disk space on the laptop and as I add new files to my collection, they are immediately available for playback.

Next, I now own a portable CD player with MP3 support [Panasonic]. A single data CD can store about 10 hours worth of MP3's encoded at 128kbps. So, instead of using audio CD's in my car, I am now able to create 10 hour long "mixes". This has the side benefit that if anyone steals the CD's from my car, they aren't getting the originals.

My conversion to MP3 is now complete. Though I don't yet own an iPod or any of the other MP3 only devices, I find that I don't need them. Not that I wouldn't mind having one. So, CD's have become simply the means of acquiring and distributing music. As soon as I get a CD home, I immediately rip and encode it. I rarely listen to a CD in CD form anymore, I now use MP3's almost exclusively. 11:39:29 AM    comment []  

"Half of the most infectious bacteria strain in the United States -- a cause of everything from ear infections to fatal pneumonia and meningitis -- will be resistant to antibiotics just over a year from now, creating an urgent need to cut our use of antibiotics, doctors say" [Canada.com].

This is a scary situation that is bound to get worse. The article goes on to say that flu shots and frequent hand washing are the most important first steps to slowing the resistance of these bacteria to antibiotics. Why? Because by preventing infections from taking hold the need to use antibiotics is greatly decreased. 10:27:48 AM    comment []  

We've all experienced the annoyance caused when the shower curtain gets sucked into the shower. I've often wondered about what forces cause this to happen. I had always thought it had something to do with the hot air in the shower rising and creating a low pressure area within the shower. The high pressure cold air outside the shower would then force the curtain inward. Now, a researcher at MIT has performed a computer simulation of the problem and has come up with a solution [Unversity of Massachusettes][via Corpse Divine].

"What makes the shower curtain suck in is that you have low pressure on the inside and high pressure on the outside," he said. Schmidt discovered that there is a strong vortex circulating in the shower. Though the drops are being accelerated by gravity, they are actually slowing down due to aerodynamic drag, Schmidt said. "And for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, and the opposite reaction is the air has to start moving. That is what makes this whole flow go."

I'm glad that's all cleared up. 10:07:15 AM    comment []  

Well, what we all suspected has been confirmed... 8march2003.com was a hoax, or at least fictitious. The photos that were "discovered" where obviously photoshoped. According to the website, the photos show a craft with the name of "Ark II" that will be used to save members of the human race during an emminent planetwide flood. 6:59:22 PM    comment []  

I thought this was just too good to pass up... Tomorrow, March 8th, an unkown individual that has been, presumably, running from some unnamed "faction" will be posting photos on the Internet that will be of "Biblical proportions" [8march2003].

I used key words in the search engine - words that exactly described the images. That's when all hell broke loose.

From that moment on, he has been on the run and it will all be explained tomorrow when the photos are made available.

After reading a number of his posts, I don't think it is a hoax, per se, as much as it is a poorly fabricated story. It's not good enough to count as a hoax in my book. There is all kinds of speculation running around about what it might be about [Metafilter]. Some are saying its a promotion for a video game or a movie. Maybe, but I'm going to stick with the idea that it's just someone having some fun. Tomorrow we will either discover that it was a joke, or the individual will try to stretch to whole thing out longer. But then again, maybe it is real... 10:52:53 AM    comment []  

When I was about six or seven years old, I took a color blindness test at school. At that time, they told me that I had a red-green color vision deficiency. Since then I have learned, through trial and error, that my color vision really sucks. Today, I took a test that only confirmed that my color vision really sucks [Colour Blindness Test]. 6:16:29 PM    comment []  

The music industry has been extremely slow to catch on, but they are finally offering downloadable music services that are at least somewhat usable and worthwhile. I haven't been keeping up with the specifics of the various services, but this article caught me up pretty quickly [New York Times]. Of course, I'm not going to go out and join up with any of these services until they make it easy for me to download whole albums in the codec I like (MP3).

I really don't like KaZaA and its ilk that much. I find that they are more work than they're worth. Sure, if you're young or unemployed and your time is cheap, then KaZaA is great. But if your time is valuable to you, then in all likelihood, the cost of purchasing a CD will be less valuable to you than the time it will take to track down and download all the tracks on that CD from KaZaA. I have personally found that borrowing friend's CD collections, ripping and encoding them myself, is far more cost and time effective than using the P2P services.

All hope is not lost, though. Sooner or later the labels will figure out that there is money to be made in downloadable services, and when they do it right, I'll be one of the first to subscribe. But, until that time, I'll stick downloading CD's over the sneakernet. 5:55:16 PM    comment []  

Even though I do most of my development in Java now, I developed exclusively in Perl for quite a few years. Recently a collegue of mine sent me a link to the development page for the Perl Shell [psh]. I think I'll wait a while for them to get it to a more mature state before I jump in, but this really sounds like something that I would really like to use.

Bash syntax is too arcane and I have never gotten up the energy to learn it very well. I use the most basic features and I'll sometimes copy and modify wrapper or init scripts developed by others, but I have never been able to convince myself that it was worth learning in earnest. On the other hand, I love Perl. Although Perl's syntax is also arcane, it is so much more powerful than Bourne Shell scripting. 12:23:28 PM    comment []  

Space travel has fallen far behind the hopes that were inspired by the 1960's moon missions. Yet, there is hope on the horizon. In particular, the "space elevator" concept seems to be one of the options with the biggest near term potential.

In their new book The Space Elevator, Bradley C. Edwards and Eric A. Westling present a compelling argument, backed up with a great deal of quantitative analysis on both scientific and economic grounds, that a space elevator is near-term-feasible. The authors argue that carbon nanotube fibers are both strong and light enough that a 100,000 km elevator, constructed of a 2m wide carbon nanotube "ribbon," could be constructed in 10 years for a cost of US $6 billion, and be capable of lifting a 13-ton payload to geosynchronous orbit once every few days. If feasible, it would present a stunning breakthrough in space accessibility, and likely usher in a new age of space development and exploration [Slashdot].

The biggest hurdle seems to be in mass producing the carbon nanotube ribbons that will be needed to make space elevators feasible. Carbon nanotubes are a recent discovery, but with so much potential, there is sure to be a lot of R&D dollars thrown at making them usable. Even if everything goes smoothly, it is likely to be many years before space elevators (literally) get off the ground. But, when they do, it will completely revolutionize they way we use space. 11:53:28 AM    comment []  

Today it was announced that Microsoft Office 2003 is being released as a public beta [ArsTechnica]. Why should anyone care? They shouldn't. The pitch that the XML support is going to make this a must-have product is overblown. Sure, XML is great and everything, but it isn't going to be used correctly by the average user and will therefore fall far short of its potential. With many users and organizations still happy with Office 97 and 2000 it is not obvious that Microsoft is going to convince them to switch. OpenOffice, AbiWord and other open-source alternatives do everything that the majority of users care about, making the bloated and expensive MS suite less and less appealing. 11:47:16 AM    comment []  

This doesn't seem like anything that will ever be useful for me in my line of work, but it just looks so cool, I had to post it.

Sandia Labs have patented a MEMS-based nanoscale padlock as a new anti-hacker measure. The security benefits sound pretty dubious, but boy, the tech is awfully cool! [boingboing]

I'm sure there is some kind of technical reason why it is designed they way it is, but to me it is almost as if they purposely tried to make it look like an mechanical device built in the 19th century. If this is, in fact, a case of mixing form and function, then I will have to applaud those guys over at Sandia, because I am a big proponent of making things look nice while at the same time making them functional. Maybe Apple could include this in their next line of Macs <wink/>. 10:14:00 AM    comment []  

Some screenshots of the recently leaked development version of Longhorn, Micrsoft's replacement for Windows XP [neowin]. 11:03:23 AM    comment []  

Yesterday, I wrote about the main reason that, despite my love of Linux and open-source, I still use Windows on the desktop [Mar 3]. Today, I learned about Win4Lin [Desktop Linux].

There are three approaches to running Windows in Linux; emulation, integration and virtualization, or in other words; WINE, Win4Lin and VMware, respectively. Win4Lin offers the best of all worlds in that it gives pure compatibility, broad application coverage and no loss of performance. It also accomplishes this with a minimal resource footprint.

Back when I used Linux as my primary desktop environment, I also used VMware to run Windows applications as I needed them. It worked great except for the fact that it was really too slow for any compute intensive task. I have always found WINE to be too cumbersome to work with and so I have yet to consider it a viable solution. Though I haven't had a chance to use Win4Lin, it sounds like they may have hit on the right formula for using Windows apps on Linux.

Of course, if all goes well Win4Lin will simply be a stop-gap solution. As Linux continues to mature, the need to use Windows apps continues to diminish. Eventually, we can hope that Linux will have matured to the point to where Windows apps will no longer be needed. 10:41:39 AM    comment []  

I'm currently working on a library for persistent storage of bean-like objects in Java. It is a solution to the problem of dealing with relational databases which have the unwanted effect of destroying any hope of building business applications in an object oriented fashion (yes, I know this is an overstatement, so leave me alone to rant). Local EJB CMP (Container Managed Persistence) is a great step, but just not quite far enough. Anyway, a group called Prevayler has come up with another approach to this problem which they have ported to quite a number of programming languages, including Java [Slashdot]. It seems that their solution is to store serialized objects in memory that periodically get dumped to disk. 7:05:35 PM    comment []  

I have straddled the fence between Microsoft and open-source products for years. As a software developer, I generally choose open-source tools and libraries. I currently favor Java, Resin, Linux and MySQL for the projects that I work on. On the other hand, despite a couple of years of using FreeBSD and then Linux on my desktop, I currently use Win2k and XP as a primary desktop environment. This is because all of the tools I use can be run on Windows and many of them cannot be run on Linux (e.g. Quicken, Paint Shop Pro, Homesite). Of course, there are Linux alternatives to these tools, but they are not, generally, as featureful and easy to use.

All of this may be in the process of changing. The Microsoft anti-trust verdict hasn't modified the way Microsoft does business, but the continued progress of open-source projects combined with a general distrust of Microsoft is creating the potential for a large reversal in their fortunes. Today I read one of the most thorough editorials on this topic that I have ever read [Automation Access][via Slashdot]. This is a must read for anyone interested in how things are shaping up in the open-source vs. Microsoft battle. 6:52:31 PM    comment []  

Almost a year ago, a Peruvian congressman, Dr. David Villanueva Nuñez, introduced a bill that would limit the software used by public agencies to only software that is available as open-source. Obviously this was extremely disturbing to Microsoft who wrote the congressman about the many reasons the bill should not be passed. Dr. Nuñez' rebuttal is one of the best written papers in support of open-source that I have read [here]. His case is especially strong as a choice for government institutions [via Automation Access]. 4:26:38 PM    comment []