From JPL:
Shown here is a mosaic of seven of the sharpest, highest resolution images taken of Phoebe during Cassini's close flyby of the tiny moon. The image scales range from 27 to 13 meters (90 to 43 feet) per pixel.
Open up this full-res image, turn off the browser image shrinking and pan around in the image, imagining yourself flying just a few kilometres above the surface. It's quite exhilarating.
Well, the upgrade of my obrain.com home server from an ancient version of Redhat Linux to the latest stable version of Debian Linux had mixed result. After struggling with a somewhat confusing installations process I eventually succeeded in getting things up and running, but in the process I lost my old entries for the Movable Type blog I was hosting. So here I am re-starting the blog again, but this time hosted on blogger’s own servers. Hopefully I can trust Google with my data more that I can trust myself.
All the previous entries in the blog were hand-entered by copying from the Google cache or the wayback machine copies of my pages. It is not complete but hopefully it should include the more popular pages (otherwise the Google and wayback machine spiders would not have saved them).
date: '2004-05-09 03:18:54' layout: post slug: citizens-keep-an-eye-on-government status: publish ref: http://www.flickr.com/photos/eob/47609285/ title: Citizens keep an eye on government. wordpressid: '109' categories: Society image: http://static.flickr.com/32/47609285e5a4e4a8e9_m.jpg image-text: Reichstag
Citizens keep an eye on government., originally uploaded by Tolka Rover.
In the Reichstag dome you can see down into the parliament chamber with the help of the mirrored central column. [Explored] [IMG_2434-reichstag]
date: '2004-01-24 12:11:04' layout: post slug: fossil-sites-in-california status: publish ref: http://www.iwaynet.net/~mperona/fossil1.htm#california title: Fossil Sites in California wordpress_id: '18' categories: Science
Some sites near me:
“Capitola, near Santa Cruz — The beach is a good site for Pliocene fossil collecting. Clams, snails and sand dollars. They are in the sandstone of the sea cliffs and in the talus that falls on to the beach. Go at low tide, walk a few hundred yards south of the Esplanade at Capitola past the sewage outfall. “
“Jack's Peak near Monterey — there are fossils of little leaves and shells in shale a hundred yards down the trail from the west parking lot. Also, there's lots of jasper at Point Lobos, 5 miles south of Monterey. “
“Pleasanton, Alameda Co. — upper Miocene brines sandstone — Go south on Highway 680 from Pleasant, turn right on to Castled Rd., then left on Pleasanton Sunol Rd. Go approx. 1.2 miles, pass under railroad passover, stop at large hill cut for railroad on left side (east) of road and rail tracks. The whole cut, plus the road banks and down slope to right of road is brines sandstone with huge assemblage of miocene marine fauna. Watch out for trains — Stay away from the railroad tracks! This is one of the best exposures in area.”
Copied from old blog.
date: '2003-11-12 11:28:32' layout: post status: publish ref: https://web.archive.org/web/20031218102935/http://developers.sun.com/techtopics/mobility/personal/articles/pbp_pp/ title: 'J2ME Profiles' wordpress_id: '16' categories: Programming
Personal Basis Profile vs. Personal Profile: What's the Difference?
Recently, however, two new CDC-based profiles were finalized. These profiles, the Personal Basis Profile (PBP) and the Personal Profile (PP), replace the PersonalJava platform, which is no longer under active development. Like PersonalJava, they provide the classes necessary for building interactive applications. This article describes the two profiles, and compares them to each other and to the PersonalJava platform.
{Recovered from old blog.)
date: '2003-08-25 12:51:02' layout: post slug: quantitative-data-on-distributed-computing-economics status: publish ref: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/tr-2003-24.pdf title: Quantitative data on distributed computing economics. wordpress_id: '15' categories: Programming
Some interesting quantitative data from Jim Gray's Distributed Computing Economics:
$1
= 1GB over WAN
= 10 Tops (1012 CPU instructions)
= 9 hours of CPU time
= 1 GB disk space
= 10 M database access
= 10 TB disk bandwidth
Computation/network break-even point is
= 10k instructions per byte of network traffic
= 1 minute CPU time per MB of network traffic
Copied from old blog
date: '2003-08-22 13:53:24' layout: post slug: satellite-image-of-the-big-blackout status: publish ref: https://web.archive.org/web/20070715161926/http://epod.usra.edu/archive/epodviewer.php3?oid=152768 title: Satellite Image of the Big Blackout wordpress_id: '14' categories: Science
From Earth Science Picture of the Day:
Sometimes the emergent behavior from a distributed system is not what you want.
Copied from old blog.
date: '2003-08-16 13:28:09' layout: post slug: space-based-programming-blackboard-communication-on-top-of-jms status: publish title: Space-based programming (blackboard communication) on top of JMS wordpress_id: '13' categories: Programming
Using Space-Based Programming For Loosely Coupled Distributed Systems”
(Copied from old blog)
date: '2003-03-21 09:18:34' layout: post slug: space-based-programming status: publish ref: https://web.archive.org/web/20030321113917/http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2003/03/19/java_spaces.html title: Space-Based Programming wordpress_id: '12' categories: Programming
ONJava.com: Space-Based Programming [Mar. 19, 2003]
This is a nice overview of the distributed programming paradigm in which applications simply read and write from a shared “tuple-space”. Invisibly to the application programmer, a distributed middlerware layer takes care of the replication and consistancy of the data between the processors. The article demonstrates how much simpler this model is than the RPC paradigm that is used for most distributed programming.
Copied from old blog.
date: '2003-02-09 15:33:17' layout: post slug: mit-initiative-on-technology-and-self status: publish title: MIT initiative on technology and self wordpress_id: '11' categories: Product
I am currently listening to a Cambridge Forum speech by Sherry Turkle on our local public radio station. She is the director of the MIT initiative on technology and self.
Interesting stuff. She is talking about the reality and implications of people forming emotional attachments to computation devices (“relational artifacts”) like robot pets and dolls. I wonder how much this extends to the ubiquitous computation world that we are exploring in our research?
Copied from old blog.