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 []