Centauri's Thoughts

40 years ago today, man set foot on another world. Even though it was only a quarter million miles away (compared to say, the asteroid belt or Mars) it was the furthest we had gone and under the most severe conditions at the time.

I was in grade school at that time, and the way things were going, I thought sure we'd ALL have the opportunity to live and work in space if we chose to. Well, that certainly didn't happen. Those who get to work in space these days are few indeed.

I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do out there, but I know I wanted to be involved. I studied as many things about the sciences as I could, and especially anything that could be useful for space. This started with chemistry, physics, electronics, and progressed later into the math involved for calculating orbits and masses, and finally the jump into astronomy. about that time the web took off and I was in heaven (In my own way). I could study ALL of these subjects as much as I wanted (and I did).

Sadly, we are still no closer for the “the common man” to go live and work in space, and by the time it DOES happen, I'll be too old!

We are exploring some robotically, and through space telescopes we are seeing even more, but our human presence in space is a mere 250 miles away.

I'd love to know that we have colonies in space and on other worlds, and have even had a hand (mentally) at designing such structures, although I haven't yet posted that.

I can only hope we do better in the NEXT 40 years!

I spent another long day learning some graphics tricks for web design. The biggest lesson I learned is that graphics are really fluff, and that content matters more. Not only does content matter, but HOW it is constructed and how concise it is matters too!

I found some awesome sites today, that show examples of good design without being complicated graphically.

Its comforting to know that we have moved beyond the flash and glitz, and that the content and wording itself is what matters.

I have so many links, that it is not practical to list them ALL here, but I will list a few:

for colors

tutorials and good info

web design, CSS, graphics, tutorials

GIMP tutorials

I can barely believe its been only 10 days since I create a twitter account and jumped right in! In this span of time, I have found people, conversed, learned of special web sites and analytical tools all made specifically for twitter and to track tweets.

I now see all the various uses that can be applied, and how groups of people can interact. A very interesting thing indeed.

Its everything from the most practical: family members to track a caretaker, to random thoughts, to special interest area updates, and anything else one can imagine a broadcasting platform could carry, in addition to total interactivity in that group.

There are those people out there following and being followed by nearly 40,000 people. Managing this would take (in my mind) software other than the twitter interface, which shows all people you are following is strict chronological order.

Some special tools are being developed to watch for keywords, which might be better suited than following 1,000s of people who speak specifically to things of interest to you on occasion (along with everything else). I just cant imagine reading the tweets of 20,000 – 30,000 people and getting use of that. There are tweet aggregators which can make this process easier.

That being said, twitter is still a new and interesting new social app, and as such, you just never know where the social crowd will take it.

Apparently, there is a special kind of twitter hiccup that happens on occasion (as it did today) and people lose 1,000s of followings (friends) (it acts like a person just stopped following other people).

This happened today to at least 2 people that I know, and I dont follow very many (yet).

Due to the nice API set out there, it looks like someone has already thought about this, and there is a way to back up your followers and those you follow.

You can also back up your favorites, direct messages, etc., but I imagine the biggest thing is the followers and friends (as it is called on tweetake)

Here is an excerpt from the about page:

Why bother to do this? Many reasons:

• Twitter may lose followers again like it did in June / July
• You may change your Twitter name and want to re-follow the people you were following, and contact the people who were following you
• You may want to refer to an older Tweet - currently Twitter does not keep all of your older Tweets
• You may just like backing things up, ‘just in case’, like us

It creates a CSV file suitable for saving in many types of spreadsheets (or text software if you have the patience to read comma separated values that way

When the information technology guys discover how painful it can be to upgrade their current PC hardware to Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows 7 — the successor to the much-maligned Windows Vista — they may be tempted to switch to Linux or Apple’s (AAPL) Mac OS X.

Part of the problem is that you can’t install Windows 7 beta directly from Windows XP. Instead, you have to upgrade to Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) or later before attempting an install — a process the Channel Web team found to be non-trivial.
Among the scariest quotes in their report:

• “While Microsoft has assured the world that if the hardware works with Windows Vista it will work with Windows 7, the reality is that is misleading at best.”
• “We’ve almost lost count of the number of blue screens we’ve seen in the CRN Test Center during the Windows 7 evaluation process.”
• “We tried to do the upgrade on an Acer TravelMate, but were stopped in our tracks by Bluetooth driver incompatibilities.”
• “On a series of 3-and-a-half year old ThinkPad T43s, an IBM security processor refused to let the notebooks boot up with Windows 7. We needed to crack open a couple of four-year old desktops … to add memory just to try to get a system image.”
• “Across the XP-Vista-Windows 7 landscape, Microsoft has fostered an ecosystem that now holds out the prospect of a mind-numbing number of incompatible drivers, unsupported devices, unsupported applications, unsupported data, patches, updates, upgrades, “known issues” and unknown issues.”

Bring it on! It cant happen soon enough for me to see legions leaving the crippling M$ world and come to their senses.

The entire article can be read at http://apple20.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/02/25/windows-7-trouble-on-the-upgrade-path/

We started eons ago as separate beings with separate thoughts, completely isolated.

Through the advent of language, we got better at communicating with each other, but this was still a long ways from truly understanding anothers thoughts. We are a sea of of islands, each completely distinct in thoughts.

As time went on, we got better at communicating with each other. Not only in spoken word, but with the written word as well. Writing also allowed people to speak across time, for once something was written, it could be read at any time, whether that was ten minutes later, or ten years, or ten centuries!

In the past ten years, our level of communications has gone up yet another level. Our written word is not just a daily newspaper or a letter. We went from e-mail, to web pages, to blogs, to chat, twitter and IM.

Communication now is almost instantaneous amongst so many of us, and the connectedness of us is starting to resemble the kind of connection in a large brain. Each of us has many contacts, and each of those contacts has many more, and not all of them overlap. the concept of a “meme” spreading over the global community is somewhat like a “thought” becoming known to the whole.

The concept of the Borg in StarTrek: The Next Generation was a bunch of beings tied together at the thought level. We are working our way towards this, although we have a long ways to go. for one thing, we dont (as of yet) have a chip implant to be always connected to the centralized system (thats coming!). There is also the question of being able to turn it off (the Borg didnt have this choice).

The way we can currently get legions of computers to work together on a problem (via the SETI distributed method, or parallel processors) could prove very interesting when this is applied to human minds. Imagine if solving a problem suitable for human could be sent to 100 or a 1,000 minds to each ponder and resolve all or a part of it, together.

IF we dont blow ourselves up, I feel this last point will not be a question of if – but when

Its been brought to my attention that even unix users can launch attachments from e-mail if they are using a graphical environment (which, I suspect, is most, these days). This is because if something is on the desktop in KDE or Gnome, clicking it can invoke a program called a “launcher”.

Of course, all the standard rules SHOULD apply: you dont execute programs when you dont know what they are. Even if you receive something from a friend, what if they were somehow infected, and it was sent from their system, without their knowledge? you shouldnt run programs you get without expecting to receive THAT program, end of story.

Its also been brought up that while you cannot easily obtain root on a unix system, enough damage can be caused by the primary user of a system, that this doesnt matter too much. The average unix user has the ability to e-mail and do other functions, and this is not something you want a rogue program doing from your name.

reference

While working within the FluxWorld power grid, and enhancing the system, I have come to understand some interesting things while simulating a live power grid with loads.

Even though my system knows all of the loads and all of the sources (which a real-time power grid may not), there is always room for management. I can see why the implementation of a “smart-grid” is so important.

I spend my time managing turning sources on and off as needed, for maximum efficiency.

Even though my loads dont change from day to night, they very well could, and because of solar and wind power, my sources change as well.

The effective management of energy resources on the grid by not putting more power than is needed on the wires, and yet, not having insufficient power (causing brown-outs or black-outs) is indeed an interesting ad tricky balance. Of course, the “brute-force” method of ensuring there is never a black out is to over-power the grid all the time. Unused power sits on the wires as “potential”, but it was still generated and used resources to put it there.

None of this, of course, speaks of storage. TheGrid is TheGrid, and has never utilized storage (like a battery). There are a few methods I have heard of, like pumping water up into a reservoir at night, to generate power during the day, but thats about it. There is just no good (efficient) way to save off terawatts or petawatts of energy at this time.

As we use more and more energy, all of this will become more critical, if we are to survive.

This just boils my blood!

NY governor proposes Internet tax on downloads

New York Governor David Paterson has proposed a tax on Internet downloads, a spokesman said Monday, in a move that has raised eyebrows because it could apply to everything from software to pornography.

The four percent tax would apply to downloads of music, software, books, videos and other Internet content, a spokesman for Paterson said.
"It is a general proposal, not focused on the content, so it would apply to any download, regardless of the content," said Errol Cockfield.
The governor has floated the idea as a way of closing the state's 15 billion dollar budget deficit, but critics say the proposal would likely apply to the hugely lucrative Internet pornography industry and could even drive business away from the state.

Reference

I have been reading Dilbert for a number of years (even have the stress ball personifications of the crew), but reading the comics, and reading the blog of Scott Adams adds a whole new dimension into the person behind the comics.

Even though I have been reading dilbert comics since the 1990s, I only discovered the blog around 2002 (more or less). He comments on all sorts of things, and his perspectives on various topics are thought provoking. Its been an interesting journey, to say the least

Since I am a programmer, I can totally relate to the cubie lifestyle, and what goes with it in corporate life. Although I dont have any co-workers exactly like Wally, Alice or the others, bits of many types of personalities are indeed captured in his characters.