Category: Technology

When I read recently that they were decommissioning the ISS around 2015, I was really perplexed. We’ve been building it since something like 1998. So it takes us 11 years to complete and you’re going to get scarcely four years out of it? And even that time won’t be terrifically useful, because upon completion, the shuttle goes out of commission, making it a little more difficult to get people up there. Compound that with the fact that the follow-up ship won’t fly until 2014, and that’s best case scenario…

It just kindof sounds like a mess.

Luckily, Sally Ride thinks we should hang on to it for a little while longer. Which I’m down for. It’s a little weird to look around at the financial crisis, there all being no money anywhere, and to think that in the next few years we’ll be setting the stage to head back to the moon, and then even someday Mars! I’ve heard a few people get a little uppity and say something to the effect of, “We shouldn’t be wasting all that money on stupid ol’ space when regular Earth People could use it better.”

::sigh::
This world, how it taxes me so. The easy retort to that is to ask them if they know how many people are employed by Lockeed Martin, MacDonald Douglas, and Boeing, combined. A hefty chunk of each of those companies is devoted to space contracts. Those people all just lost their jobs because aerospace is a bit of a niche market, especially if your job is to build a spaceship. NASA employs around 300,000 people, and contracts out about 18,000 additional people in industry, which is a good chunk of people. They have an operating budget this year of 17 billion, which might sound like a lot, but lets recall that the War in Iraq costs ballpark 150 billion a year.

I read an article that said NASA costs the American household about 150$ per year. The author went on to ask if that would pass if put to a vote, and felt it wouldn’t. I saw that number and thought it was a steal! I guess it just depends on how you look at it. For example, friend of mine used to ask the question, “NASA, what have you done for me lately?” I was in the JFK Memorial Museum/Library a few weeks ago, and I found the answer to that on a small plaque. It read as follows:

“The following innovations, products, and inventions are just a few of the by-products or spin-offs of the space program:

• GPS Navigation Systems

• Kidney Dialysis
• Satellite TV
• Interactive Computer Training
• Virtual Reality Technology
• Cordless Power Tools
• Bar Coding
• Medical Imaging
• Invisible Dental Braces

”

So, if you were ever wondering, the estate of John Fitzgerald Kennedy asserts that you owe all of the above to the United States’ space program. No one thing on the list is indispensable, but a handful have saved a good many lives, and the rest have made our lives considerably easier.

It’s exciting to me then that we’re gonna keep the space station up there a while yet. Or at least we’re thinking about it. I know not everybody feels the same way about it as I do, and I can respect that. But we spend a lot of money on a bunch of stupid crap in this nation, and when those people start to bitch about an agency that has some of the most global and altrusitic goals of any in America, I guess I get peeved.

Anyways, rant over.
Yay space station!

I found this little tool somewhere online the other day, and thought it was worth looking into. AddThis is a little button/gizmo that allows a browser of the the site to instantly push content they want to share to any one of some 50-odd social networking sites. Now, if you know me, you know that I really do not care for the ol’ social networking thing. Something about it still strikes me as… oh I don’t even know.

I don’t like it and, largely, I don’t us it.
But other people do! If you are one such person, and you feel so inclined, we now have a “Share this Observation” feature located after the meta info for each entry. Mouse-over for the main options, click it for the whole song and dance. [the notion that I've opened the doors to people aggregating my site to bebo is sickening... to say the least.]

That aside, I have a small gripe. Apparently, it is beyond the powers of the great and magnificent AddThis monolith to enable a relatively simple request. If you decide to install the AddThis feature using the WordPress Plugin from AddThis, you can’t pick where you put the damn thing. They let you customize a whole manner of things, colors, features, images, but not WHERE. This struck me as kindof silly. All the AddThis code appears to be is a link to a small javascript hosted at their server; the object itself is about handful of lines of code:

<a href="http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=250&pub=xa-4a6396e4416cf507"
onmouseover="return addthis_open(this, '', '[URL]', '[TITLE]')"
onmouseout="addthis_close()" onclick="return addthis_sendto()">
<img src="http://s7.addthis.com/static/btn/lg-share-en.gif" width="125" height="16" alt="Bookmark and Share" style="border:0"/></a>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://s7.addthis.com/js/250/addthis_widget.js?pub=xa-4a6396e4416cf507"></script>

I’d just installed the plugin, and was rather irritated to see it sitting, smugly, to the left, at the end of the entry. As you can see (at the time of writing) all the meta data is clearly on the right-hand side of the page. Such a displeasing destruction of symmetry is inexcusable, even here at the blog-hack-capital of the internet, Schrödinger’s Blog. The above is the code they provide for you to just install it on any ol’ website. I looked at that, and thought, “it really can’t be that hard to get that thing working the way I’d like.”

Turns out, a manual install of AddThis to a WordPress blog is easier than I thought. I don’t know a ton about how this hunk-a-junk works, but I knew that AddThis essentially just calls for a URL and a title for it to pass on to all those other services. I know from programming the template for this site that two such tags exist:

<?php the_permalink() ?> - For the link to the entry
<?php the_title(); ?> - For the entry's name

So… you grab those, stick them in where AddThis supplies [URL] and [TITLE], and game over. It functions just the way it would if you installed the plugin, but now you’re free to stick that little chunk of code wherever you’d like in your template! I slung mine over to the right, and used one of the AddThis images available for download, just to slim down the entire affair. My final code appeared as follows:

<a href="http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=20"
onmouseover="return addthis_open(this, '', '<?php the_permalink() ?>', '<?php the_title(); ?>')"
onmouseout="addthis_close();"
onclick="return addthis_sendto();">Share the Observation <img src="http://schrodingersblog.com/images/plus.gif" alt="Share This" style="border:0"/></a>

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://s7.addthis.com/js/250/addthis_widget.js"></script>

So. That was a fun little project. It was something I’d been meaning to play with. I get irritated when projects like that pop up, but it’s a good opportunity for a little spot of problem solving and I always feel pretty badass when I can code my way out of an annoying problem. [Also: Big thanks to Damnit Jim! for the WP_CodeShield plugin]

Finally: My quest continues for a good plugin for “buy” or “purchase” links. I don’t want to scare anyone into thinking I’m trying to mine money off of this godforsaken little blog. I’m just trying to gear it up as a music-blog that I might one day submit to Hype Machine or elbo.ws, and they’re pretty particular about making sure you give readers the opportunity to purchase the artist’s music. I really like what billy’s done over at TWF, but either he did that by hand, or the plugin has a name I can’t think of.

Man, on the long list of Things Tom Saw Coming, this is most certainly near the top. Today, Google announced that they’re going to release an operating system modeled after their Chrome Browser. I don’t think I’ve launched into it here on Schrödinger’s, but I have a Thing about Google. They make so many useful products (Search Engine, Reader, GMail, Calendar, Picasa, and Product Search to just name the ones I use myself), and that’s great! Far be it from me to discourage such a practice. Even further, they seem content to share these developments with everyone, for free; also admirable.

Not to take too Orwellian of a spin on this, but what happens on the day that Google ceases to be a benevolent dictator, and turns into an authoritarian one? Would the internet come crashing down in a day? Maybe not, but imagine the impact if one day Google packed up and left town? It’s scary. I just can’t get on board, fundamentally, with the idea that one company should have such a controlling share of my online activity. Once again, not that it’s their fault, but I feel like there should be some type of “internet anti-trust” to prevent such a scenario as outlined above from occurring.

So with that theory, I’ll say that I’ve long expected Google’s foray into the Operating System field. ChromeOS will, of course, be free, due to Google’s decision to embrace Open Source for this project, and try and mine out some of the work to the community. I’m unsure how well this is going to work. Google’s allure and success have largely been because they can maintain control. Everything Google (and even their Labs Branch, for the most part) is near-perfect for the end-user, and that’s because they seldom, if ever, release a work in progress. They polish and polish until the only thing you can see is the sparkling reflection of your own stupid grin in their fantastic product.

Introduce the open source community into the equation, and suddenly there’s conflicting directions, incompatibilities, and worst of all, loss of homogeneity with other Google products. Unless they maintain unflinching and total control over the core, ChromeOS won’t gel with the rest of the Google line, and that’s going to be a problem is the OS isn’t the sleek, elegant, refined user-experience people have come to expect from the company that revolutionized internet searches.

By no means am I prognosticating failure; I have total faith that Google will pull it out in the end. I’m just curious to see how the community responds.

It’s gunning for speed, which is fantastic, and reportedly Chrome has in spades (I don’t use it myself. You’ll have to pry my Firefox from my cold, dead hands). This goes along with their goal to address the issue of providing a well-tailored OS to the burgeoning product field that is ‘The Netbook’. Vista is just too hard on those little guys, and XP is finally starting to show its age. Certainly there’s around 1.4 million Linux distros that would work fantastically on those machines, but can you imagine the complexity differential between Ubuntu and a Google product? Also consider the type of user that purchases a netbook. Finally, recall then that Chrome OS is still built upon a Linux kernel, so they net all the benefits, along with the renowned sleekness that’s come to define their products.

Google knows how to choose its battles, and I will go so far as predicting a knockout. It’s free, so I can almost promise I’m going to look further into this when it gets closer to becoming a reality.

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So I learned today that there are exactly two reasons to play the theremin.

The first is that theremin’s are pretty sweet. It’s an instrument that you play by manipulating the oscillating electric fields surrounding the two antennae simply by moving your hands around it. In this way you can vary not only the volume, but also the pitch, using a physical principle called heterodyning.

The instrument was created in Russia following the Bolshevik revolution, and Lenin thought that they were so awesome that he had several hundred made, and Leon Theremin was made something of a national hero, as successful innovators/scientists commonly were Leninist Soviet Russia.

Theremins can be found in the music of some of my favorite artists such as Radiohead and Neutral Milk Hotel.

The second reason is Carolina Eyck:

Which I do not think requires an explanation, except that the thing she’s leaning on is a theremin.

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So today was a pretty good day. Things are starting to sort themselves out and pandemonium of the close of Fall Semester has FINALLY started to die down.

Doing my best to get ready for the Spring Semester; hitting the ground running and all that. I need to figure out of Tower will be requiring my services again (I feel like Rambo: they keep bringing me out of retirement to send me to Vietnam… Where Vietnam is Johnson County, and the Viet Cong are easily annoyed New Money Types.). I’ve got to get working on applications for summer internships. I’m looking at one in Germany, even! Plus some in Boston. I really, REALLY want to get a good one, so I’m going to work really hard on these.

I also need to log some serious time working on some analysis of astronomy data; the idea being that Cody and I may be working on a paper of sorts in the early weeks of Spring Semester.

So that’s the work end of things. For fun, I’ve been playing with getting my computers to talk to each other with VNC. That basically means you can open up a window on Computer 1, and in that window you see the desktop of Computer 2, and can use it as if you were sitting in front of it, which I think is cool. I’ve yet to get it to work on my Server-To-Be machine though.

In a previous entry, I mentioned wanting to get a server up and running. Well, the machine is here, and I even loaded it with my old install of Ubuntu, so that much is done. Getting it to play nice with VNC has been trying, and I haven’t even broached the actual “server” aspect of the project. That’s essentially a work in progress, but I do love a project, and this one is keeping me pretty occupied.

Trying to think if anything else happened…
Got back from Arizona. The house was SO DAMN COLD. It was a little unpleasant, and I slept only about three hours before driving home through the snowstorm on an all-Radiohead playlist (a la 2007 Break Drive Home), which was always an experience.

Got some stuff worth looking forward to, mainly the write-up edition of Tom & Ian’s Top Albums of 2008. We did the radio-edition, which isn’t posted yet, but will be soon. I might work on that later this evening, but we’ll see. FTP-ing 2-hour-long MP3 files… is painful. For you guys though, it’s worth it.

Oh! And I’ve been pouring a ton of time and effort into the planning phase of my RPG I’m working on! I really like the storyline I’ve come up with so far, and I’m finally getting it to where I like the flow… it’s just now I need to actually execute that all into a game that is perhaps maybe a tiny bit fun, and people will want to play. (Where ‘people’ is Ian and Joey, and Ethan if I ask nicely.)

But really, the point is that things are looking up.
For once.