Blue Sky On Mars

This didn’t seem like the kind of thing that people would make up, but the photos are pretty incredible. Snopes reports that these sandstorm photos are likely genuine, and I’m sure it would be unnerving to be the one standing there taking those shots! Particularly if you’re from a non-sandstorm place like Michigan.

Cobb County, Georgia is getting set to start distributing Apple iBook laptops to their teachers and students, possibly going to 63,000 computers. To me, it seems a little ironic that a school board that doesn’t understand science would approve $70 million in funding for computers.

Over the next couple of weeks, I’m going to write an article or two about design choices that I’ve made in Zesty News. The ideas for Zesty News started forming in late-2002, and were fairly concrete by mid-2003. I remember talking to Nigel, my boss at the time, about some of the ideas. At that point, with a baby coming in July, I was not in a good position to make a run for it.

Late last year, I surveyed the scene and decided that I’d give it a go. None of the feed readers out there did what I wanted. Despite new RSS readers popping up all the time, they nearly all seemed to be clones of one another.

In short, and I’m sure that everyone will agree with me on this, there is plenty of room in the RSS reader space for new development and new ideas. Feed readers haven’t entered the mainstream yet, but the increasing number of mainstream articles about blogs and RSS is changing that. Millions of people are using Firefox now, which raises the awareness of RSS through its little orange icon in the lower right hand corner. Safari 2.0, shipping today as part of Mac OS X Tiger, adds a blue RSS emblem. And IE7, going into beta this summer, will also reportedly have RSS support.

2005 is probably the year that news aggregation crosses the chasm. While I’m sure that there will be a small handful of dominant players, as with any business, the size of the ecosystem will be so much larger that even small players like Blazing Things can have a role.

People everywhere are discovering new ways to gather and use the information available on the internet. Zesty News will provide a new new way to gather up and read the information on the net.

The focus of Zesty News is simple: keep you informed about everything that matters to you, and use up as little of your time in the process as possible.

Zesty News runs on Windows PCs or Macs and works within the browser you’re already familiar with: Internet Explorer on the PC, Firefox on the PC or Mac and Safari on the Mac. More details, screenshots and the like will be coming a little later on.

As of this writing, Zesty News has one minor feature and some cleanup and documentation to go before the initial alpha test release. That first release will not be a general public release. Only people with accounts on the blazingthings.com website will have access. Feel free to send me an email message if you’re interested in being a tester for Zesty News.

The beta release of Zesty News will be open to the public, and this first release of Zesty News will be completely free. My plan is that there will always be a free version of Zesty News.

“Official” Zesty News information and tips will be posted at Blazing Things. As always, more technical discussion, and my general talk, will be here on my personal blog.

Tiger Direct appears to be shameless. One day before the slated release of Mac OS X Tiger, they have decided that Apple is infringing on their trademark. The claim does indeed have merit, but the timing certainly doesn’t. The Mac OS X Tiger name was announced a long time ago, and I’m sure that Tiger Direct had heard of it before this week.

They’re just hoping for a cushy settlement, given Apple’s billions in cash.

Charles Miller and other Atlassian folks were digging into a memory issue and found out that memory allocation and garbage collection for Strings and StringBuffers may not be what you’re expecting. The main thrust of it is that there are some optimizations to speed the common cases that can result in considerable memory waste if you’re not aware of the implementation. (For example, if you have a StringBuffer with a 32K capacity and do a toString on it, that new String will take up 32K of memory even if you only had 1 byte in the StringBuffer.)

To me, that actually sounds like a bug. It’s probably worth a couple microseconds (or less) to see if the data is significantly smaller than the allocated space and then do a copy if that’s the case.

Furl has always been a neat idea: if you see something you on the web that you like, toss it into your own personal filing cabinet for later retrieval. Yahoo has launched My Web which lets you do much the same thing, but it’s integrated directly with Yahoo! search and Yahoo’s toolbar. It also allows you to pick things up via RSS and they’re experimenting with attention.xml. Very cool stuff going on there.

I should’ve blogged this the other day. I did a yum update, and BAM! mysql disappeared. So, I guess these instructions for upgrading MySQL on FC3 are not entirely flawless. However, they did do the job of getting MySQL 4.1 running. It just didn’t survive an update. If you’re looking to get it running for yourself, these steps will do the trick.

The JavaScript Shell lets you interactively run JavaScript commands, even against a particular window. This allows you to easily test out DOM manipulations you’re considering or, as the authors suggest, GreaseMonkey scripts.

Very nice, but it does not appear to be Safari compatible at all. Just goes to show that Firefox is far and away the best browser for development. I have found that Firefox’s tools are the easiest for getting things working, and then I deal with making things cross-browser.

Someone on the mailing list of former ANS employees points out that ten years ago this week, the NSFNETt was turned off. I was working in the ANS network operations center at the time, so I saw the decomissioning firsthand, though I wasn’t personally flipping any switches.

During the days of the NSFNET, commercial exploitation of the Internet was frowned upon, and AOL connecting to the Internet promised to dumb things down. By 1995, AOL owned ANS, which operated the NSFNET. When the NSFNET was turned off, it was clear that the Internet had moved out of research circles and was now a fully-commercial institution.