A Shadow of Phobos
I saw this very cool animation of the shadow of Mars' moon Phobos passing over a dust storm. Apparently an enterprising enthusiast combed through online archives of photos taken by the Viking 1 probe back in '76 and found this sequence. It's kind of cool to see that people are still finding new information this much later. If you're an astronomy nerd like I am you'll probably find it worth checking out!
CRTC Matching Line Speed Ruling
I came across this article on Slashdot this morning, apparently the CRTC has ruled that ISPs such as Bell must provide the same network service to resellers as they currently do to their own customers. This means that ISPs such as Teksavvy that currently provide service over Bell's DSL infrastructure and copper should soon be able to provide much higher capacity uplinks via Bell's newly deployed fibre network.
I haven't had a chance to read the actual ruling yet but from what I gather the only small print is that the big ISPs will be allowed to charge a 10% markup. If you're interested Teksavvy has posted this press release (PDF).
Diaspora
I just pledged $25 to the Diaspora project on Kickstarter. I won't repeat all the details here, but it's in many ways an answer to my complaints about Facebook. I'm still a bit leery of some aspects of social networking regardless of the tools but the idea that I manage my own data directly is incredibly appealing. I urge you to check it out and if you feel strongly about it go ahead and sponsor the project. Anyway, off to Montreal... have a great weekend!
Flickr is Cool
I'm a pretty slow adopter of new "fad" Internet tools, particularly when it comes to so-called social media applications. Though I don't have any illusions regarding the level on anonymity anybody can have on the Internet these days (read none), I am not very comfortable with ease with which sites like Facebook merge one's "private" and public lives by default. As a result I tend to avoid anything that even smells like Facebook, thus I was very surprised when I started playing around with Flickr last week. I'm so far behind the curve on Flickr that I think I can safely assume that nobody's going to accuse me of being a trailblazer but I still thought it might be worthwhile to share.
I used to run a lot more software on my personal website but I just don't have the time to maintain tools like Gallery with my current day job if I ever want to take some time off from being a sysadmin. (Which I do!) So I started looking at alternatives to Gallery in the WordPress plugin database and didn't find anything I really liked but it gave me the idea that I should investigate using Flickr to host my images. At any rate, after playing around with Dan Coulter's phpFlickr class and fumbling my way through the Flickr API I've managed to cobble together a passable little photo gallery with all the backend content and meta data being stored on Yahoo! servers. This also has the side benefit of reducing my bandwidth usage and hopefully speeding things up for remote users. I'll probably rework things someday once I actually read the Flickr API documentation and figure out a slightly more elegant way of doing things.
I'd post the code I wrote to create my galleries but I'm so rusty with PHP it would probably be a crime. Once I clean things up a bit and standardize how I'm doing things I'll try to make it available for anybody who might be interested, the only serious limitation of my approach is that it is not a full-fledged WordPress plugin so it requires the ability to execute inline PHP on WordPress pages to call my gallery function but it's still fairly simple to do and doesn't require much overhead compared to building and managing a local photo gallery.
I also integrated Lightbox into the photo galleries to make things look a little sharper. I'm not completely sold on it yet but it's not that hard to replace so I'm going to wait and see.
In any case, I just wanted to draw attention to the Flickr API and phpFlickr for anybody who might be trying to solve a similar problem. They're incredibly powerful and so far I'm quite happy.
You can see my Flickr photostream here.
Flash is Not a Right
I just finished reading this post on Slashdot as well as the linked blog post. I've been hesitant to weigh in publicly on what I think about the whole Adobe/Apple war that's going on right now since I'm not really a iPhone OS developer and and I don't pretend to be a technology maven (or pundit). However, I do have some opinions on the matter and Bogost has presented a more articulate explanation of some of my thoughts than I ever could.
I'm not overly keen on the idea that Apple chose to close their platform to Flash developers (or even to Adobe and other third party tools providers) but at the same time Steve Jobs' public argument isn't entirely without merit. Adobe's response has been pretty flaccid, in my view premised more or less on the idea that because lots of people use Flash, Apple should therefore support it.
Flash, in my experience, is actually not that well optimized for any platform and Adobe gives the impression that non-Windows platforms second class citizens. Being a MacOS X/Linux user I probably see the whole argument through a slightly more jaded lens than your average Internet/iPhone user but I have experienced Flash crashing web browsers and my netbook (running Windows 7) only heats up and burns its battery off at a rapid rate when I hit heavy flash sites.
It's too bad that Adobe hasn't done a better job of integrating Flash, when the first apps and media players first hit the web I was pretty impressed. But times have changed and the world of proprietary (and in particular) Windows/PC/x86 based tools on the web seems to finally be behind us thanks to mobile devices and Apple (as well as RIM) have been key players in this space. The whole debate appears to me to boil down to a major clash in philosophies and interpretations of what the concept of "open platform" means.
I don't know if there's a "right" answer to this, but I'm sort of hoping that both sides stick to their guns and we get to see where the rest of the industry/public do. My impression is that neither side will come out unscathed and I hope that this isn't a massive miscalculation on Apple's part because I'm quite concerned that this may be an ideological or profit driven move rather than a genuine effort to move mobile computing and HTML5 forward. It's hard to tell the difference when Apple is no flock of angels and could very plausibly be basing their moves on either motive (or both).
US Piracy List, A Canadian Reponse
There's a good summary over on Ars Technica of some of the problems involved with the continued American insistence of categorizing Canada as a country that doesn't enforce intellectual properly law. I'm personally content with the middle ground that we seem to be standing here. Although ideally I'd prefer to see a more open regime here, the reality is that so long as we live next to the United States we're not very likely to have completely reasonable laws. Anyway, the article I linked is pretty brief and has some interesting facts regarding piracy and IP violations in Canada.
Migrating to pobox.com
I've been using Pobox's mail forwarding service for a couple of days in an attempt to wrestle my e-mail situation to the ground. The basic idea is that I'm going to eventually only publish my pobox.com address as a primary mail address and other than personal contacts I will deprecate my other e-mail accounts.
The reasons are twofold. First I am subscribed to a large number of fairly active mailing lists which I find beneficial in both my private and professional life, rather than maintain multiple accounts on each mailing list service I find it easier to simply send this mail to one address and then filter and munge it there as appropriate. The second reason is that I don't need to expose my "real" identity anywhere and if I ultimately need to move to a new final delivery address this simplifies the situation. I know I can deal with this 10 ways from Sunday using procmail or crazy MTA-fu (which are still in place) but for various reasons I find that less than optimal.
In any event I am posting this simply to let people know about pobox.com which is a reasonably high quality service at a reasonably good price.
Salon.com Writeup of Microsoft’s Move on Yahoo!
There's an interesting read on MS's hostile takeover attempt on Y! over on Salon.com. I'd characterize what Microsoft is up to as more of a race not to be last rather than a move against Google of any real import, but it is to some degree based on my own views of the various technologies. I was once upon a time a Yahoo! regular, but completely replaced it with the early iterations of Google in my own life.
Despite the fact that I have very serious ideological and technical reservations about Google's collection of information and ad-driven revenue model, I continue to be a very heavy Google user because the service is just that good. The idea that Microsoft who has missed web technology several times and really only has a market share due to non-technical users, bundling and vendor lock-in can somehow salvage itself just by buying Yahoo! runs in the face of my personal impressions of their corporate culture and strategy. It's too bad really, Google needs competition not somebody to dismantle their only real competitor.
Here's a Slashdot article on the topic just for good measure.
MIT World
Thought I'd point out that I just added a link to MIT World. It's an excellent site with quite a bit of video content and excellent lectures from various MIT courses and campus events.
The Comedy Network Online
In case you don't know about it, you can watch a number of The Comedy Network's top programmes online by visiting: broadband.thecomedynetwork.ca. I don't watch TV much these days but it's nice to know I can find stuff like The A Daily Show and The Colbert Report without having to subscribe to cable.
I especially recommend January 22nd's Daily Show sketch on Iceland pulling out of the Iraq War.