Returning to ISS

Image to left: Space Shuttle Discovery executes a backflip, exposing its underside for visual inspection by the Station crew. Image credit: NASA TV Space Shuttle Discovery reached its orbital destination this morning. Discovery docked with the International Space Station at 7:18 a.m. EDT to begin an eight-day stay at the Station. During the approach to the ISS, the Shuttle crew performed a maneuver to allow the Station crewmembers to take more imagery of the Station's heat shield. The seven-member Shuttle crew will enter the ISS later this morning and begin work with the Expedition 11 crew.

A Visit to Adobe

A visit with the Photoshop engineers at 345 Park Avenue, San Jose, CA. June 16 & 17, 2005. More

Everyone Is Watching NASA TV

The Discovery launch went off with a cleanest countdown. What a beautiful shot of the external fuel tank separating. Everyone is watching, fabulous.

Discovery Is GO!

All Systems Go! Solid Rocket Booster separation was triggered 2-minutes and 5-seconds into the flight after burnout of the putty-like fuel packed inside each rocket. The firing of explosive bolts freed the twin boosters from the side of the External Tank, allowing them to peel away from the Space Shuttle. Parachutes were then automatically deployed from the boosters, allowing them to slowly descend into the Atlantic Ocean where they will be towed back to shore. Discovery initiated the command for Main Engine Cutoff, or MECO, at the 8-minute, 23-second mark. MECO shuts down the orbiter's three powerful engines in the rear of Discovery after completing the "uphill" climb into space. With the ascent into space complete and fuel onboard the External Tank exhausted, Discovery jettisoned the orange canister. Following jettison, Discovery used it's new belly-mounted digital camera to take pictures of the tank as it fell back into Earth's atmosphere. Watch Space Shuttle Discovery's countdown to liftoff with the Virtual Launch Control Center. Photo Galleries: Discovery Launch Day

Return to Flight: STS-114 GO GO GO!

image left: Specialist Charlie Camarda offers some last minute words. Image credit: NASA/KSC The astronauts are being seated inside Discovery's crew cabin. Commander Eileen Collins was the first crew member to enter the orbiter, taking her seat on the left side of the cockpit. Commander Collins is now busy powering-up Discovery's General Purpose Computer for flight. Mission Specialist Charlie Camarda followed a short time after Collins. Discovery will launch in 3 hours. Check the mission site and watch the event live on NASA TV: Live with RealPlayer (Captioned, Akamai) Live with Windows Media (Yahoo!) Now I'm out for food and dog running. Keep tuned.

Google Adds RSS Reader to Personalized Home Page

Google has turned its Google Fusion customized home page into a full-fledged RSS reader. You can add any feed by clicking on "create a section." Let the RSS wars between Yahoo and Google begin! Google Blog

Yahoo Buys Konfabulator

SAN FRANCISCO - Hoping to pave a new path to its popular Web site, Yahoo Inc. has acquired Konfabulator, a tiny software maker that provides a computer platform for monitoring the weather, stock prices and a wealth of other customized information without opening a Web browser. Expect a LOT of RSS widgets pulling Yahoo content. Link

HOW TO make a "Windows Vista" AUX Display, NOW

Earlier this year Microsoft and ASUS showed a new technology that might be baked in to future laptops, an auxiliary display, a small LCD on the outside of a laptop that can display email, battery, CPU, Wi-Fi signal and all sorts of things. It's much like the Flipstart (that hasn't shipped). I like the idea, but don't wait to wait until Windows Vista/Longhorn so here's how to make your own that's almost as good...It's also a great and cheap way to add a LCD to a PC case, this HOW TO uses the now free Konfabulator! Here's how... More

YOUR DNA Map As Home Deco

DNA 11 commissioned by ABSOLUT VODKA to create custom art piece. Andy Warhol would be proud. DNA11 creates unique DNA portraits through an extraordinary combination of science and art. The end result is a group of different sized pieces of DNA (unique per individual), which we "run" on a gel, such that each strand of different sized DNA is separate. The DNA is then stained with a fluorescent dye and illuminated by UV light, which then glows, giving off a fluorescent signal. A special camera captures the image which is then digitally enhanced, cropped, color adjusted, adding colors and filter effects. Each piece is carefully processed and is then printed as a Giclee fine art piece. Each piece is then visually inspected and signed in the back by the artists at DNA 11, ensuring authenticity. The result is a high-end piece of art that can never be replicated, and is as unique as you are - When asked “who is the artist?” the answer is simple: you are.

Transformers, The MOVIE!

We're getting Transformers on the BIG SCREEN, 07-04-07! http://www.transformerslive.com/ | http://transformerslive.blogspot.com/

Sunglasses and suncream for dogs

Yes, for dogs! The £4.99 ($8) goggles are sold in England, the dog loving nation, and allegedly offer 100 per cent UV protection while the £2.99 ($5) sunblock protects delicate areas such as the nose and ears. This summer manufacturer Pets At Home is also selling beef-flavoured ice lollies at £1.99 and a £5.99 water-cooling bowl. From The Sun and Ananova. [via]

Media Embargoes Obsoleted?

Steve Rubel: However, by soft launching it over the weekend, Microsoft put Virtual Earth (which rocks by the way) out there for all of us to blog about, basically jeopardizing any embargo that may exist. Scobleizer: So, why do we have embargoes? I think it's one of those last things that survive from old-school PR. They are trying to give everyone in the media an equal shot at being out at the gate. I personally think we need to reevaluate our rules here. The word-of-mouth network is just getting too efficient to try to live by these rules anymore. Rick Segal: Seems to me that’s the new way the messages are getting out and having PR departments control things with media embargoes, etc, is the surest way to lose control. James Robertson: There are still plenty of PR people who think you can hold back information until a critical point, and then open the flood gates. That may have been true once, but it isn't true any longer. - especially for the large outfits like MS, IBM, Oracle (et. al.). There are simply too many people watching their every move, ready to pounce out with information. A decade ago, that didn't matter too much - an early leak meant that information hit the printed page a day (or a week) later. Now, early information leaks immediately. Also on /.

Alt-n to update MDaemon with DKIM

On July 26th, MDaemon 8.1 be the first Windows-based email server to deploy an emerging industry initiative to protect sender identities and message content. Initially designed by Yahoo!, Cisco, SendMail, IBM, Alt-N Technologies and others, and recently submitted to the IETF for public review and further development, DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) uses cryptographic techniques to authenticate the identity of the signer and protect the content of signed messages from alteration. More about DKIM in a recent Alt-N press release. MDaemon 8.1 will also include support for "Greylisting" (Opt-In) and groupware functions (free). What a beast. I've been using it since 3.x days. It's a life changer for me.

Kite Aerial Photography

Scott Haefner: I’ve been interested in photography for as long as I can remember, and kite aerial photography (KAP) seemed like a natural progression. At least it did after my friend, Thomas Dewez, convinced me that it isn’t completely ridiculous to suspend an $800 camera from a kite. After seeing the potential in online galleries, I knew that I had to do this! I spent a few months researching equipment, technique, etc. before diving in. I had not flown a kite since I was a kid, so I’m learning as I go… These web pages will serve as a photo gallery of select images, as well as a general information source on equipment, technique, and other related info. Be sure to see my 360° virtual reality (VR) panoramas taken from a kite’s eye view. They might take a while to load (depending on your connection speed), but it should be worth the wait. Link

MoFo, two years after

MS-AOL settlement, the collapse of Netscape, the creation of MoFo, Firefox, IE7, the blogsphere... It's two years.

MSN Desktop Search is a Seven Day Winner

Jeff Sandquist, Microsoft Evangelist, compared MSN Desktop Search vs. GDS. And integration of MSN Search in MSN Screen Saver as well.

MSN Virtual Earth Is Out

Microsoft planned on announcing this on Monday, but it looks like that Microsoft's Virtual Earth (MS version of Google maps) is out already now. It has a feature called "locate me" You can install Location Finder to display your current location on a Virtual Earth map by using Wi-Fi technology. If you do not install Location Finder, or if your computer does not support Wi-Fi, Virtual Earth can attempt to find your location by using the Internet Protocol (IP) address of your computer. This method is less accurate though. Link Also: Google Maps have added a new ‘Hybrid’ button on the maps interface that gives you the satellite imagery with the roads and place names overlaid, similar to labeled aerial photos in MSN Virtual Earth. Update: MS PR

Web 2.0 checklist 2.0

Arnaud Leene listed a Web 2.0 checklist.

Rubik Solver Sources

Wow, this program solves the Rubik's Cube.

MakeZine.com: Volume 03: Cars and Halloween

New! Volume 03 is out. Mod Your Rod: turn your car into a tech-enhanced, grease-eating monster machine. In Primer, Mr. Jalopy teaches welding. Make the Night Lighter 36, a stunning spud gun. How to build a controller for a geeked-out haunted house.

Microsoft Patents Custom Emoticons (Pat/No 760975)

Back in January 2004 Microsoft filed a patent in the US for the procedure for creating and transferring Custom Emoticons. It was published by the US patent office on Thursday. Comments from ZDNet UK:

- Mark Taylor, executive director of the Open Source Consortium, said the patent could be particularly problematic as it covers basic human communication. "Emoticons are a form of language, and a precedent allowing patenting of language constructs is very dangerous indeed." - Jonas Maebe, a spokesman for the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII), said that "it is unfortunately quite clear such patents have nothing to do with protecting investments nor R&D, and only with obtaining exclusion rights which can help them [Microsoft] maintain their dominant position in the market." - Such patents are in contradiction to the original purpose of the patent system, according to Maebe's colleague at the FFII, Felipe Wersen: "Patents were ultimately designed to benefit society — to have companies disclose things that benefit society which they wouldn't otherwise disclose. Who does this patent benefit?"

I hope this patent is just not so serious. Patent Application Text

Running Vista on Flash

Korean vendors are releasing large and fast flash chips and prospect to introduce units up to 100GB in the foreseeable future. Speculations float around on notebooks running on these flash devices in place of hard disks. Many are concerned about the performance and writing cycles of these units once used in full-fledged Windows Vista instead of Windows CE. I'm thinking it's well time to revise NTFS for this trend. An FS running on solid state should be designed with these in mind:

• Caching
• Shuffling
• Striping
• No defragging at all

Caching is nothing new as all modern systems have been designed with it. We may just balance the depth of caching and data integrity in case of crash/power failure. I especially like the mechanism in RAID controllers. They have tons of memory on board with a little battery. During a crash or power failure, the battery holds the cache in place and the onboard firmware flushes the cache during next initialization. We may do something like this, either software based for the whole FS, or hardware based for at lease the most write-intensive portion (MFT, etc., maybe). Shuffling is critical to prevent flash to be worn out unevenly too fast. A simple implementation I can think of is making all the free space blocks a sequential queue. When even any block is being over-written, instead of just over-writing it, first release it into the free blocks queue, and request another block from the queue. This could shuffle the writing efficiently. And, the queue itself along with other fundamental FS structures need shuffling too. Maybe we might just use the same approach when updating the FS structure itself. We might end up in a roaming and crawling MFT as well. Speaking of striping across multiple chip banks, I doubt flash unit manufactures are doing that already in high-speed cards. Anyway, it’s very easy to implement either in hardware or driver level. Defragging is no longer needed. Flash devices are true random access memory compared to disks as sequential-random hybrid. Anything in FS design to reduce fragments in the trade off of complexity, (computational) intensity, and most importantly unevenly worn out can be disable. The resulting FS maybe an NTFS variation, or a driver/filter beneath it. And it may write blocks in a fashion that resemble a transactional database.

Fly Your Own UFO

At first glance, you might mistake this as two-thirds of a six-pack ring. Then you'll see it take off flying, and wonder if you've had too much to drink. This four-ring contraption is really the X-UFO, a remote control hovercraft/UFO by Silverlit. It's made of lightweight carbon fiber and and EPP foam, and uses electric motors with a couple of rotating propellers and a gyroscope for stability. The X-UFO can fly up to 100m, and has one red and three blue LEDs (the lights are supposedly for orientation, but we know they're really to freak out your neighbors and have them running for cover). Too bad little green men aren't included. Silverlit X-UFO | Firebox | Gizmodo

The Great Wall on Google Maps

It’s a very common misconception that the great wall of china is the only man made object visible from space (sometimes others say from the moon, or from a satellite). Apparently the rumour started long before anyone had even been to space to check. You can scroll east or west to follow the wall’s path, it goes on for 3,946 miles so you’ll probably get bored before it runs out. Link

Longhorn Christened 'Windows Vista'

Sources say Microsoft is set to unveil the official name of Longhorn on Friday. And the word on the street is that name will be "Windows Vista." Microsoft has registered the WindowsVista.US domain name. And This will be announced officially friday morning 6:00 AM pacific time here:

REDMOND, Wash., July 22, 2005 — Today Microsoft Corp. announced the official name of its next-generation Windows® client operating system, formerly code-named “Longhorn.” Windows Vista Beta Beta 1, targeted at developers and IT professionals, will be available by August 3, 2005. Watch Video "So there's no more Longhorn, We're now officially Windows Vista. All right!" Windows Vista Web site

Microsoft-Watch | ActiveWin | Bink.nu Update: Key Dates (More likely to slip over time) Beta 1: 7/27/058/3/05 Beta 2: 11/16/05 RC0: 3/17/06 RTM: 6/28/06

RFID in Japan: Miragraphy - RFID enabled mirror

Hitachi announced yesterday a new mirror that functions as a computer display. It will be available for purchase in Japan on Septermber 30. It combines a half mirror and a diffusion film to directly display digital information (text, photos, video, tv shows, websites, flash movies etc.) on a mirror surface using an LCD projector. This technology, called Miragraphy, also integrates sensors, RFID readers, barcode readers, cameras, etc. So, the mirror can automatically respond when people are aruond and personalize digital contents based on their sensed identities. [via] Link

Upcoming firefox release to be 1.5

Asa Dotzler: "For the last several months, we've been discussing the versioning of the upcoming Firefox release. One major consideration in this decision was that the sheer volume of changes in the Firefox core (Gecko) made a minor .1 increment seem misleading. While it may not be obvious by looking simply at release dates, today's Gecko core of Firefox has seen nearly 16 months worth of changes compared to what shipped in Firefox 1.0. This is because we created our Gecko 1.7 branch (the branch from which Firefox 1.0 shipped) back in April of 2004. At that time, Gecko development on the trunk continued and very little of that work was carried over to the 1.7 branch to be included in Firefox 1.0. Another consideration was that we've made some major improvements to the Firefox application, especially in the update and extension systems that warrant more than a minor version bump. Calling it 1.1 would suggest to most users that this was a minor update when in fact it is quite major and all 1.0 users really should move forward for a much improved product..." More | MozillaZine

MSN Screen Saver (Beta)

• Personalize with background photos and news and weather information from MSN® or any RSS feeds from websites you choose.
• Search the Web and click news headlines directly from the Screen Saver.
• Stay connected with MSN Hotmail®, MSN Messenger, and MSN Spaces. Track how many unread Hotmail messages and current Messenger conversations you have, and display blogs and photos from your friends’ MSN Spaces.

Download Note: The MSN Screen Saver (Beta) requires installation of the MSN Search Toolbar with Windows Desktop Search on the same computer.

MSN Messenger 7.5 BETA started

Redesigned sign-in screen, new Voice Clips, Dynamic Backgrounds, and other minor changes. It's sleek! Link | Mess.be | Bugs | Don't ask for download links Update: Mess Patch

Fully-Autonomous Vehicle Driven by Mac OS X

No human driver. No remote control. More Team Banzai wins coveted invitation to the 2005 Grand Challenge National Qualifying Event. "Dora", is the world's first fully autonomous vehicle driven by Mac OS X. The entire development and race management efforts at Team Banzai is being done using Apple Mac OS X technology. Link | PR

Google Moon Beta

"That's a small step for man, a giant leap for mankind." Neil Armstrong - 36 years ago. Google launched Google Moon today to commemorate the first lunar landing, which occurred on July 20, 1969. Google also disclosed the progress of Copernicus initiative. It confirms that on July 20th, 2069, in honor of the 100th anniversary of mankind’s first manned lunar landing, Google will fully integrate Google Local search capabilities into Google Moon, which will allow our users to quickly find lunar business addresses, numbers and hours of operation, among other valuable forms of Moon-oriented local information.

Why you never saw a 256M WM 2003 device

Interesting explanation on battery life concerning "the 72 hour rule" and how Persistent Storage in WM5 addresses this.

"when we shut you down because your batteries were "critically low," they were still 1/4 to 1/2 full. Why? Because, if the batteries ever fully died, it would be catastrophic. You'd lose your data, and that's, in our opinion, one of the worst things that can happen. So we made a requirement and held our OEMs to it. The requirement was that, at the point where we decided the batteries were "critically low," they had to still have enough power to keep the RAM charged for 72 hours. The idea there was that you could discover that you were out of power on Friday on the way home and you'd still have your data on Monday when you got back to your charger. A typical battery holds 1000mAh of charge. 128M of RAM takes about 500mAh to stay resident for 72 hours. 64M takes about 250. This is why you never saw a 256M WM 2003 device. It would have run for a minute then decided its batteries were critically low."

Read More | Follow Up Part1 | Part2

Kai-Fu Lee Quit Microsoft to Head Google's China R&D, Microsoft Suing Both for NDA Violation

According to Microsoft-Watch. - Link | Google PR | Forbes | Scobleizer

Breaking News: Konica Minolta and Sony Agree to Jointly Develop DSLR

Konica Minolta and Sony have today announced an agreement to jointly develop digital SLR cameras. This agreement appears to mean that both Konica Minolta and Sony will develop D-SLR cameras with Konica Minolta lens mounts. It also covers technology sharing between the two, including Sony's CMOS sensors and Info-Lithium batteries and Konica Minolta's AF, metering and Anti-Shake system. The release doesn't state whether each company will be able to use any of these techologies in products other than DSLRs. I suppose this means Sony aren't going the Four Thirds route... KM PR | Sony PR And more on DPReview | Image Resource | PhotographyBlog | PC World | Macworld | Softpedia | CNN | Forbes | Bloomberg

Tintin Beats Beckham

What a feat. More

It Had to Happen: Flickr Spam

Over the weekend, a blatant case of Flickr spam appeared. This Flickr member has uploaded exactly one "photo," added it to several Flickr photo pools. And it's a lame advertisement for Web design services. This discussion thread points out that the photo's imagery is ripped off from Corbis: you can see the Corbis watermark across the illustration. Ah, but let us revel in the Flickr community: Other Flickrites have added some pretty funny tags and comments to the photo. You can't do that with email-based spam. The spammer is 27, female, and single, and based in Dubai, UAE. "And our slogan is High quality, challenging projects, so challenge us we love challenging projects as well as we keep our promises and time keeping."

Dog Powered Scooter

Particularly appropriate for urban use on bike paths & sidewalks. The human is in total control of the speed and direction of the scooter because the dog is harnessed inside of the frame and subject to its steering (90 deg. turns easy) and braking force. This also simplifies the animal's "choices" and reduces the level of "training" required of the animal. Simply harness the dog and clip them into the frame and off you go. With just a few outings pulling the scooter the dog quickly learns when to slow (by feeling the braking) and which direction to turn by again "feeling" the side pull on the harness. Dogs love it because it takes little "effort" to pull the scooter and they get excercise next to their owner. The owners love it because they are excercising their pets with little effort on their part and getting a fun free ride!

People really getting into the Google Maps act!

Here is a person from Argentina who is taking a picture of his confluence point in Buenos Aires, Argentina (Lat -30.61086 Long -58.41862). His blog shows the zoom in to show where the picture is taken. I think it's great that he's actually holding a pushpin with the latitude and longitude to illustrate! [via]

I love this company

I met them last Friday night at Riffles City, whom apparently were into each other per the Engineer-CSR office-affair traditions derived from MS China.