This was August 2008 | « July 2008 | Main | September 2008 »
ESA runs a webcam...around Mars
Posted on Sunday, August 31, 2008
And they invite the public to participate in processing the images. See for more @ ESA's VMC website. Nice job by VMC team coordinator Thomas Ormston, Mars Express Spacecraft Operations Engineer.
Wow!
Posted on Thursday, August 28, 2008
Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo. More at Mozilla Labs (via).
Its the Valley alright
Posted on Thursday, August 28, 2008
Notice the little feet ;-). On the 101 on my way to work today.
Trading Routes 2.0
Posted on Thursday, August 28, 2008
Haven't been very active with blogging recently. Partially this is due to my other backchannel recently opened on twitter where I every now and then post URLs I would otherwise probably post here (even more are at my del.icio.us or my FriendFeed). Anyway, life at NASA Ames continues at an ever speeding pace, moving ahead with our mission to properly weave space into the fabric of our digital "global brain". One link that stayed with me over the weekend is this GigaOM article talking about how new cables carrying internet traffic are indicators of future economic activity (how is that for a comparison to the stale 'Columbus' metaphor to space exploration):
This leads me to my conclusion: Building new cables is the equivalent to adding new roads, new shipping lanes, or flights. The undersea fibers of today are what sea trading routes were in the past—an indicator of future economic activity and a subsequent boom.
Welcome, Interplanetary Internet. Oh, and the image above? Well, there is a planet-finding mission called Kepler of which the Science Operations Center will be based here at Ames. This was on the door of their Deputy Principal Investigator David Koch.
The Economist on Space
Posted on Thursday, August 21, 2008
Since reading the excellent 'Nasa at 50' in the Economist earlier this summer, I am considering them a valuable voice in the (online) space debate, so I am glad to see 3 new space articles in the 21st August edition (via):
On Rocks and Clouds
Posted on Thursday, August 21, 2008
Auw! Everything that can go wrong, will go wrong...
Posted on Wednesday, August 20, 2008
But hey, that's what tests are for. Glad to see NASA releases this stuff, although it does take some convincing from certain individuals.
War on Terror The Sequel
Posted on Tuesday, August 19, 2008
My brother works in the advertisement business back in Amsterdam. Yesterday he send me below "movie trailer" he recently made for the H20 film festival. Lip sync isn't brilliant, but the storyline soon takes over. Which reminds me that I've been watching a lot of 'Der Untergang' spoofs lately, like this TechCrunch one. As an aside, yesterday I saw this 'hot-of-the-Siggraph-press' video of Microsoft Research into new video editing techniques.
FriendFeed: the Network of Social Networks
Posted on Saturday, August 16, 2008
I am late to the game, but having signed up just 5 minutes ago, I already like FriendFeed a lot. My feed brings together this blog, my delicious tags, my twitters, my facebook account, (not my Hyves account...ah, who cares about Hyves), my Flickr account, my Linkedin account and my Youtube account. See below for an interview with co-founder Bret Taylor.
MIT on the web
Posted on Friday, August 15, 2008
Doing some Friday afternoon web-wondering, i stumble across the MIT web, reading about a mission called TESS that is being developed between MIT, NASA Ames and some other partners. Diving a little deeper into the MIT web, I come across a feature I've been wanting to implement on the NASA homepage, i.e. a changing background image. In the case of MIT, its a background image that can even be proposed by the entire MIT community.They also have something called MIT TechTV, reminiscent of Google's invaluable TechTalks. Overall, MIT's web presence is pretty elegant, lightweight (wow, how nice and oldschool html-isch), transparent and inviting. Good reference material while thinking about revamping NASA Ames website.
A shuttle Delta-2 launch from 30000 feet
Posted on Thursday, August 14, 2008
(via)
Correction:
"This is the launch of a Delta 2, most likely GPS 2R-18 on December 20th. The YouTube original was posted "seven months ago" according to the tag. You can see the first set of SRBs burn out and the other ignite at 55 seconds into the video." from nasawatch(thanks Jur)
Chris Kemp kicked of Code I (IT Directorate) here at Ames. This is going to be good!
Posted on Wednesday, August 13, 2008
In other news:
- A good interview with Jeff Stibel on the 'perceived' parallels between the Internet and the brain
- Cyber attacks preceeded bombs in Georgia. Which makes me want to go back to a commercial I saw one of the first weeks I arrived in the US: Airforce: Air : Space : Cyberspace. This completely brings home the topic of this blog. Moving up from Air into Space and beyond, you enter...Cyberspace. If you want a challenge: be a cyber warrior.
- Google Maps didn't have any info on Georgia (I noticed that myself as well, and wondered what was up). Now Google is saying they just didn't have data there.
- Is Google a media company? Many seem to think so, including Tom Foremski:
For the past four years I've been saying that Google, Yahoo and many other large Internet companies such as AOL, and eBay are media companies. They publish pages of content with advertising around it.The fact of owning or not owning the content is a red herring. Either way, Google publishes pages of content with advertising around it. How is that not a media company?
GOOG is not a technology company. What technology can you buy from Google? I can buy a database from Oracle--that's a technology company. I can buy microprocessors from Intel--that's a technology company. What technology can you buy from Google?
Google is a technology-enabled media company. It won't create its own content. It mostly scrapes its content from the Internet, or collects it from users of Youtube, etc, and sells advertising around it. How it gets its content is not important, it is still a media company.
What's up at Ames
Posted on Tuesday, August 12, 2008
2 quick snippets from my work life:
- an inspired radio interview with Chris Kemp, the NASA Ames CIO (and my boss) where he talks amongst other things about some of the projects I'm involved in like establishing a new collaborative platform on the web for sharing NASA's vast data resources (think: Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Force.com etc etc.). I hope to share some more information in the future as we move ahead.
- The new Code I has been announced here at Ames
How to syndicate SOHO's realtime images?
Posted on Monday, August 11, 2008
Redesigning my blog's look & feel, I wonder why I can't embed this realtime stream of SOHO images into my blog? Why is there no readily available embed option like the one below for the Colbert Report? Serious, how difficult would that be to implement? Btw, if you wonder what the CCD bakeout overlay means, this is from their website:
And what about EIT's CCD bakeout?
Over time, many types of CCDs (Charge-Coupled Devices) used to detect EUV radiation are degraded by contamination of heavy ions from cosmic/solar particle radiation (interfering with the doping of the chip), deposits and polymerisation of deposits on the surface and, finally, trapped charges (again interfering with the doping of the substrate). These forms of degradation reduce the sensitivity of the detector. Fortunately, by heating the CCD over an extended time period, some of these effects can be reduced. Heating the CCD to improve its performance is called "baking out" the CCD. Since EIT would be unable to do "business as usual" during keyholes, they schedule their bakeouts during periods when data loss is inevitable.
Buzz Aldrin at the Colbert Report (US Only)
Posted on Monday, August 11, 2008
Sailing the seas of the Internet
Posted on Sunday, August 10, 2008
This blog is currently going through a re-org (not even noticable for rss readers). Bare with me while I tweak the MovableType templates and stylesheets.
Summer 2008
Posted on Friday, August 1, 2008
Back from a week of Internetless holiday on the island of Korcula (above photo was at Koln airport just before we were told we could board the plane ;-). Catching up here are a few relevant tidbits:
- The Economist's commentary on NASA's 50th anniversary provides a sharp dissection of NASA's past, present and future. Its the most sensible story on space and NASA I've read in a long while. As always, the comments are worth reading too, if only to see how space proponents bring their arguments into gear to downplay the article's 'hammer on the nail' analysis
- Sanfran article of the week about twitter, relationships, and the bay area working spirit
- Missed OSCON, but here's a 37min intro and Tim Oreilly's comments
- A great discovery: this TED video by kevin kelly. I especially like his McLuhan Reversal analogy. Have to watch it again.
The future is process, not a destination
Bruce Sterling
Everything is ultimately becoming information technology
Ray Kurzweil
Data is the Intel inside
Tim O'Reilly
There is only one machine and the web is its OS
Kevin Kelly
The medium is the message
Marshall McLuhan