Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.
– Philip Greenspun, MIT professor, entrepreneur, photographer, pilot
I have dabbled in Common Lisp and Scheme (a related programming language), but don’t know nearly as much about them as I’d like to.
Yesterday, NASA launched the New Horizons spacecraft onboard an Atlas V rocket. (NASA, BBC, Wired, CNN) The purpose of the spacecraft is to observe Pluto and its moons and hopefully a Kuiper belt object or two. At the moment, Pluto is the only planet that’s never been visited by a spacecraft.
It will take it about a year for the spacecraft to get to Jupiter, at which point it will use a gravity assist to get its speed up to around 47,000 mph, a little more than thirteen times faster than a rifle bullet. After passing Jupiter it will take New Horizons about nine more years to make it to Pluto. Pluto is about 3 billion miles from Earth.
New Horizons is powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator. The RTG uses the heat from twenty-four pounds of radioactive Plutonium to produce electricity. Fitting don’t you think?
The BBC has an interesting article about the woman who came up with the name Pluto back in 1930 when she was 11 years-old.
“Tea, Earl Grey, hot.”
– Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the Starship Enterprise, ordering his favorite tea from a replicator
This is the first quote I’ve posted from a fictional character. :) I actually tried Earl Grey tea because of Picard. Now I have a cup pretty much every day. I also like English and Irish breakfast teas.
Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
– Edsger Dijkstra, Computer scientist, Turing Award winner
If you’ve never SSHed into a UNIX or Linux system, you can safely ignore this post…
This week I was remotely installing Gentoo Linux on my system at the University. Gentoo is notorius for taking forever to install. The first emerge -auDN world can take several hours. I didn’t want to have to worry about my SSH connection dying (the Internet connection to our apartment isn’t very reliable) and I wanted to be able to check its status from work and home. I had heard of screen and I thought it might be able to handle something like this.
Here’s how it works. I SSHed into the machine and started screen. It just gives you another shell, running inside the screen process. I then started the emerge and made sure it got started okay. Then I detached from screen by typing Control-a d. After that, any time I wanted to check on the progress of the emerge I could SSH into the machine and run screen -r, which reattached to the screen instance I had started earlier. Very cool. screen has a lot of other capabilities, but I haven’t taken the time to check them out.
My new iPod arrived yesterday. I’m very impressed with Apple and FedEx. I ordered it last Wednesday afternoon and Apple shipped it the next day after engraving it with my Alan Kay quote. Shipping was “free.” FedEx got it from Shanghai, China to Oxford, Mississippi in three business days, five days total. Not bad at all.
I’m really glad to have an iPod again. I missed having one. I’ve got a lot of podcasts to catch up on, and I’ve already listened to four Daily Source Codes. My music is still on my old computer (which doesn’t have USB 2.0), so it took around six hours to move about 15GB of music and podcasts over to the iPod.
Chance favors the prepared mind.
– Louis Pasteur, French scientist
This afternoon I ordered myself a new 30GB iPod. I sold my iPod mini on eBay back before Christmas, and I was waiting until after Macworld just to make sure Apple didn’t announce a new model. I got the white model, and I got the Alan Kay quote in my previous post engraved on the back. I also got an ezGear ezArmor aluminium case to put it in. They should both arrive about the middle of next week. I’m really looking forward to getting my new iPod. I’ve missed having one.
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
– Alan Kay
Last night I watched King Kong at the new Oxford theater. It was easily one of the best movies of 2005. It’s directed by Peter Jackson and is a remake of the 1933 original.
I have to admit, I’m a little biased. Peter Jackson directed Lord of the Rings a few years back, and I thought he did an excellent job. Until he disappoints me, I think I’ll see anything he puts out.
In a movie, it’s important to convince your audience that what’s happening on screen can happen or could have happened in some world at some point in time. The idea of a giant ape seems unbelievable in any world, at any point in time, but Jackson does a very good job of making King Kong and his world believable. The scene where Kong fights the three T-Rex was amazing and the giant insects made my skin crawl.