In the process of building a Monte Carlo simulation engine, I stumbled across Eastwood, and the Google Chart API.

Diving in, I’ve discovered that the Google Chart API is pretty solid for simple charts - easy to get started, and fairly simple to experiment with by manipulating the URL.

And, if you’re using Grails, Eastwood is a plugin that converts JFreeChart to use the Google Charts API. Very nice.

• Dealing with Negative numbers

My site was “partially” down for a week or two, because someone hacked a malware iframe into one of my posts, and Google flagged it.  This cascaded into Firefox 3 refusing to let me visit my site (bleh).  I was able to find the post, remove the offending iframe (and upgrade to the latest version of WordPress).

Still, more than a little frustrating to discover accidentally that my website was blocked.

Most people, myself included, can be deluded into thinking that all the great discoveries happened long ago.   That, for the most part, we have everything figured out.

I suggest you read this article about memresistors.

Fact: This technology was theorized 30+ years ago, but not demonstrated until April 30th of this year.

Fact: One of the fundamental principles of electronic circuit theory was wrong.  As  wrong as claiming that Force == Mass * Velocity, instead of Force == Mass * Acceleration.

Fact: The evidence that this principle was incorrect was here all along, but buried and shoved aside as ‘hysteresis’

What, in your lives, is being ignored because it doesn’t fit theory?   Maybe you should be focusing on what theory doesn’t explain, instead of what it does.

Oh, and as an aside - this new technology is yet another recent innovation that will make computers faster, smaller and better.  I have friends who claimed 10 years ago that we were already at the theoretical limits of computing and solar conversion efficiency and so forth.      But the world didn’t listen to them, kept innovating, and now-a-days it seems like we can’t go a month without some exciting new advancement in technology.

Regarding this story - Is there anybody out there?

1. First, the Drake Equation called, they want their calculations back.
2. Second, 1979 called, they want their song lyrics back
3. Third, the journalistic standards on this article are mind-numbingly bad…. A 0.01% chance that life develops????
   1. That’s per-planet. Think about that for a moment. How many stars are there in the Milky Way galaxy alone?
      1. Between 200 and 400 billion.
         1. How many of these are similar to our Sun?
            1. Unclear, but not higher than 15%
   2. So (and this goes back to the Drake Equation) - how many of those stars have planets?
      1. Estimates are that 10% of sun-like stars have planets
   3. How many of those stars have planets in the habitable range
      1. Unknown, but at least a few we’ve found so far appear to be in the potentially habitable range - Let’s say 1%, based on the fact that 3 out of the 287 we’ve found seem to be close to livable.

Given all of these facts and estimates. How many Sun-like stars in the Milky Way?… Assuming 300 billion stars total, that’s 45 billion Sun-like stars. How many of these have planets?… About 10%, or 4.5 Billion. How many of those have planets in the habitable range? 1%, or 45 Million.

Yes folks, based on our latest understanding of the Milky Way galaxy, there are 45 million planets out there capable of supporting life.

Now, according to the initial article, only 0.01% of those will have intelligent life and civilization… That would mean there are “only” 4500 civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy.

From April, 2006 - Cedric Beust explains “Why Ruby on Rails won’t become mainstream”

Personally, I think he turned out dead wrong on this.  If the AARP is building a large-scale software project in Ruby-on-Rails with the ongoing back-and-forth between Django and Rails, and the various efforts to “port” rails to other languages, I think it is hands-down a mainstream contender.

Hudson

Good Continuous Integration tool. Nice charts, easy to use, fairly flexible out of the box.   A _lot_ less setup work than CruiseControl.  And the plugin system is well done, and pretty nifty.

Struts2

An incoherent mess.  Documentation is spotty, uses a lot of contrived toy examples that blow up on anything more complex than hello world.  Documentation is also simply wrong in some cases (for example, the ‘var’ attribute on the iterator tag is not valid according to the TLD).  Namespaces are nice in theory, but frustrating in practice.   I can’t get the wildcard action management to work reliably, although this may just be pilot error.

Good things: 

The integration with Spring is nice, and I haven’t seen a web framework yet that is more friendly to unit testing.  When it works properly, the wildcarding is very nice.   The Action.execute() model is useful, and easy in concept.

Visit this page: http://css-tricks.com/examples/StarryNight/

and once you get there, resize your browser. What a trippy effect.

The only way to truly manage global warming is if we establish a global government with the power to control every human’s carbon emissions.    Anything less than this, and it falls apart, because any individual nation-state’s ability to self-manage will be taken advantage of by other nation-states.   See: The Mote in God’s Eye.

Discuss!

Having gotten the Sunlight Foundation over the hump technologically with their Sunlight Media Services platform/product, it’s time to start looking for my next great success.

If anyone out there is looking for some project help, or some support/ideas on improving infrastructure, leveraging new technologies or development environments, I’m happy to start a conversation.

There is a one in 75 chance that an asteroid will hit Mars in January 2008.   That probability may go down after more observations.

It wasn’t discovered until November of this year.

I recognize and acknowledge that global warming is a problem.  But if you found out that an asteroid had a 1 in 75 chance of hitting the Earth, would your top concern be your carbon footprint?

Scientists do believe that they have ways to deflect asteroids w/missile strikes, if we have 15 years notice.  I observe with some dismay that 2 months is slightly less than 15 years.

In the span of 13 years, we’ve already seen a comet hit Jupiter, and now a “fly by” (most likely) on Mars.   NASA has a theoretical program to track 90% of asteroids, but, of course, that program isn’t being funded.

So here’s the current situation - we don’t know (and will probably never know) what all is out there, and, even if we did, we’d have few options to prevent a strike unless we have 15 years advance notice.

I recognize that most people concerned by global warming have nothing but the best of intentions when they advocate that we throttle down our growth and  industry in order to live in harmony with nature.   But as I’ve said before, the asteroid that hits the Earth won’t care how pastoral our countryside is.

I’ve read arguments that the Earth and her creatures would be “better off” if humanity never existed.  Really?  It is a certainty that, absent advanced technological intervention, an asteroid will eventually hit the Earth, and extinguish most of the species on the planet.  It is a certainty that at some time in the future that the Yellowstone supervolcano will erupt, and kill most of the life on the North American continent.  It is a certainty that various large slabs of islands in the  Atlantic and Pacific oceans will collapse, and send massive tidal waves to obliterate much of the coast.   It is also a certainty that eventually, absent human efforts at preservation, every species on Earth will go extinct.  How exactly would this be better for the Earth?
If we are obligated to be the stewards of the Earth and her creatures, we are also the defenders of the Earth and her creatures.   We can defend the Earth most readily by increasing our technological advances, instead of throttling them back.  And we can defend the Earth’s creatures most readily by building an effective and sustainable space colonization program and taking the animals (or at least their DNA) with us.

One in Seventy-Five…  The clock is ticking.

A commenter on a blog I read said the old chestnut:  “for the 1,257th time, someone name something new and revolutionary that’s come out of open source. Th incentive that drives creativity isn’t there. Real artists see no virtue in being starving artists.”

So I thought I would compile a list of great software projects that were built in an open-source way - i.e. not for profit, and with source that was freely shared with others.

This is just a tentative list - I’m sure there are mistakes, and please feel free to correct in the comments.  Also, if you can think of other revolutionary software, please add it.

1. Rails - combining the various aspects of web development into a seamless package was certainly revolutionary (to me).  And it was open source from the beginning.  Don’t like Rails?  Django was built the same way.
2. emacs - certainly open source, and was the first text editor that I know of that incorporated a programming language as part of its core functionality.
3. Internet News - the servers and readers were all oen source - this was the first “Internet-scale” forum
4. DNS - created by a scientist, specced via RFC and deployed freely.
5. Wiki - the original WikiWikiWeb from Ward Cunningham wasn’t open source, but it was shared and available, and he (as far as I can tell) took no compensation for it
6. IRC - was it open source?
7. Sendmail - was it revolutionary?
8. Jabber?

I look forward to your suggestions.

I’m sitting in my car, using my wireless broadband on my wife’s computer, which has been flawlessly connected for the last 3 hours, while listening to my iPod Nano through the car stereo.

Fricken Sweet

Coding Sanity reviews Microsoft’s latest OS, and gives is a great report - a welcome improvement over Windows Vista.

I haven’t upraded my game machine to Vista. I think I’ll leapfrog it and install this great new OS. I suspect it will go very, very smoothly, like I wasn’t upgrading at all!

*Edit* - must have forgotten the link earlier.

So after providing technology to make storage simple, and make setting up computers trivial, Amazon adds a database system on top.

I wonder what happens when they run out of things to virtualize?

http://steampunkworkshop.com/lcd.shtml

You know how sometimes you forget to do something, and then you forget that you forgot, and then you feel bad that you forgot and it just seems awkward…

Well, I wrote this just before Thanksgiving. Since it’s still the holiday season, it’s still worth saying:

• I want to thank Pamela Slim, and J Timothy King for helping inspire me to try something new
• I want to thank Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok from Marginal Revolution for providing the economic justification to try something new
• I want to thank all the good people at the Sunlight Foundation for helping introduce me to non-profits, the inner workings of democracy and most of all, their interesting points of view.
• I want to thank my wife and kids for putting up with selling the house and moving and all the strange new things that come along with it.
• I want to thank all my wife’s friends for being incredibly helpful and supportive when she was trying to get the house ready.

Best webpage ad of the year, or of all time?  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRAUlK8_2VE

This should be a Facebook app, but until then, it’s a pretty nifty website - a social networking system for book readers.

http://www.goodreads.com/friend/i?i=LTM2MDY0NzM1NTM6MzIz%0A

The Traveling Salesman problem. The backpack problem. Public Key encryption. All examples of the NP-Complete family of algorithms - are they non-polynomial? Are they polynomial w/a really brilliant algorithm that we haven’t yet found? Nobody knows.

It turns out that humble Minesweeper is of the same family. The proof of this is absolutely brilliant.

Thus, every time you’ve solved a game of Minesweeper, you’ve solved an NP-Complete problem. Yay, wetware.

Having said this, since Quantum Computers can solve Public Key Encryption in Polynomial time, assume that they can solve Minesweeper in polynomial time too.

Next up: Sudoku is solved using the Riemann Hypothesis (heh)

Do they have the HVAC on backup power as well?