Last night we saw the film “Control Room”, a behind-the scenes documentary of Al Jazeera covering the initial invasion of Iraq.
I watched some coverage of the war from the Arab side on the Mosaic news program so there was nothing really new factually in this film for me. It was still well worth seeing however as it, for example, demonstrated the complicated realities of how journalists, whether from Fox News or Al Jazeera, unavoidably bring a point of view to their coverage, however committed they are to reporting the “truth”.
One of the compelling characters in the film was a press officer at Central Command whom Salon reports is being muzzled by the Pentagon.
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).
“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.”
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.
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.
