Tuesday, August 19, 2008

RAISING GOLDFISH

So I've been an avid keeper of ornamental goldfish for about eight years now and I've learned a lot about keeping the little critters alive and happy. To boil it down to two simple rules that should get you past the "they died after 1 week" stage of ownership:

  1. Get as much filtration as you can afford
  2. Pre-soak any dry food that can expand.

That's it! There's lots more, but those two pearls of wisdom should get you past  the weekly funerals at sea phase of fish ownership into the rewarding world of watching these beautiful creatures grow and respond to your presence.

Friday, August 08, 2008

SNOWL

Mozilla labs, those wild and crazy guys who brought you Firefox and Thunderbird, are working on a new breed of message reader. The prototype is called Snowl. Clearly, messaging from the consumption side is broken, When I need to fire up several different mail readers to see all my messages, as well as an IM client (thanks for at least aggregating all my online presences into one client, Pidgin) and a Twitter client (twhirl, if you must know) something is wrong. Not to mention my massive feed consumption, which I currently manage with Google Reader. Kudos for Mozilla for thinking about the idea. The last entity -OSAF- that tried to bring fresh ideas to this space crashed and burned and is only now releasing a 1.0 watered down version of their original concept.

FYI, I originally migrated my feeds from the Firefox Sage add-on to Google Reader in an attempt to curb my voracious feed reading appetitive. The theory at the time was that Reader was slower, less intuitive and less accesible than Sage. As it turned out, Reader has matured into a wonderful feed readr -the best IMHO so I'm as infoholic as ever. Sharing and compositing feeds with Reader is a treat as well.

Thursday, August 07, 2008

BUMP IN THE SKY

A high-res video of the failed 3rd launch attempt of SpaceX's Falcon 1. Watch the very end, where the stage separation goes bump. Essentially, the switch between an ablatively cooled engine in the first 2 attempts and the regeneratively cooled main booster engine in the third attempt caused the problem. Because there's residual thrust in a regen-engine -even after engine cutoff- the stages bumped after separation, causing loss of the rocket.

Rocket science is hard.