Microsoft has released its highly anticipate d Worldwide Telescope software, which can be used by astronomer s and non- astronomer s alike to explore the heavens with a desktop client akin to Google Earth. We’l l have a detailed review up shortly. Until then, head over the site and download your copy for free (Windows only). See our previous coverage here [...]

China Earthquake

He's doing well, although the recovery is going slower than he'd like. Men well, etha nz.[Tags: ethan_zuck erman ]

Gray code is a binary sequence encoding in which any state differs from the next or previous state by only one bit. This is an example of a four bit Gray code: BITS 4321 0000 0001 0011 0010 0110 0111 0101 0100 1100 1101 1111 1110 1010 1011 1001 1000 Gray code is useful in shaft encoders, where you want to sense the state of rotation. An optical encoder could have each state represente d by a pie wedge, where the 0 bits are white and the 1 bits are black. The Towers of Hanoi is a puzzl

Among the many reasons I’ve been posting so infrequent ly was wedding planning. My own. Last Saturday, Stacy and I conducted our ceremony at the Hillside Club in Berkeley. Ryan posted a set of 16 beautiful photos from the event. To be truly f orthcoming , Stacy and I were already te chnically married, having done a San Francisco City Hall [...]

The saddest day at the conference is undoubtly friday, when they pack the pavillion stuff and you perceive that the thing is almost over. For some reasons, however, friday has been one of my most important days at the confer ence...

Are you hopelessly addicted to program ming in Sh arePoint? Do you think that everything in the world can be fixed using a custom list, some duct tape, the BDC and chewing gum? If so, read this post!

I recently picked up Ron Paul&# 8217;s “The Revolution : A Manife sto” . I’ve made my way through the first two chapters which do a great job of simply explaining the problems with our g overnment. A few of the highlights include, for example, the 1996 election won by the Republican party: The Contract with America was typical [...]

I’m giving a short pres entation on the  220;future of Web 2.0″ at a CIO roundtable session in Chicago on May 12th. You can download the 14.2MB PDF version of the presen tation:

From time to time people ask what the images in the margins of Scripting News mean. I don't think I've ever answered the question on the blog itself. There are many answers to the question because they mean whatever you want them to mean. The point is to stimulate creativity . If I wrote an article about Fidel Castro, for example, and put a fiery picture of Fidel next to the piece it would satisfy curiosity. "I wonder what he looks like?" Suspense e liminated. That kind of imagery serves to quell

Do you know what Moore̵ 7;s, Metca lfe’ s,and Reed ’s Law are and how they are related? Have your read Wealth of Networks, Democratiz ing Innova tion, Free Culture, The Long Tail, and Small is the New Big? Find out why in this excellent video of Paul Jones talk to TriLug last month. Do you know that iBiblio that hosts [...]SHARE THIS.addEn try({ title: "Paul Jones R 20;Lecture s” on the History of Ibiblio, Laws, and Ideas", url: "http ://sociali zedsoftwar e.com/2008 /05/11/pau l-jones

After waiting four years since my 1st Dan (1st degree black belt) in TaeKwonDo (TKD) I was given the"g reen light " by my Master - Stephen Yeoh - in March to ...

This years JavaOne was a not to be missed event. Here are my views on how the conference has changed.

Approximat ely 250,000 cell phone subscriber s lost service for most of Tuesday this week in Vermont and neighb oring states. According to the Bra ttleboro Reformer, a “s oftware is sue” caused the problem, which caused the loss of Un icel’ ;s cell phone service from about 4:00 am until 2:30 in the afternoon. Public Relations Manager Miriam Svobodny said [...]

New APIs, new algorithms and new pr ogramming language. Want more can a geek ask for?

As I write the last of my event summary reports and follow up action items, I am now officially putting a bow on the TIBCO user conference (TUCON 2008) What a madhouse. I was acco untable for the TIBCO Analyst Summit (TIBCO?s first ever), two days of the Business O ptimizatio n track of presentati ons (combining [...]

Apparently Lucas is up to his old tricks again . How sad . I was hoping that Spielberg might diminish Lucas? influence on the film . *sigh* I?ll probably go see it anyway. On the upside Iron Man was surpri singly good and Prince Caspian looks to be good... (read more)

PocketBuil der 2.5.1 is getting some new samples from our evangelist Ian Thain.

Dave Fish has a number of entries on his blog site demon strating the soon to be released features, including DataWindow ToolTips and New Graph Styl es.Origina l Entry

Stockholm, Berlin, Warsaw, Prague, Munich and Milan are the cities I will be stopping in as part of the second leg of the European on AIR Tour. I will be MCing the event, and giving a session on building your first AIR applic ation with Flex. The first leg was completely sold out, and the second [...]

At the end of this week, I will no longer be employed by BEA Systems. It has been a great 4 years working at BEA, and u ndoubtedly the highlight of my career thus far. I have enjoyed the opport unity to write for the BEA developer community, and to lead Tooling at BEA these last 3 years.

According to Forrester research wider handset av ailability , improved network coverage and new pricing models are going to foster rapid adoption of mobile internet services in Europe.By 2013 they predict that the number of people using the Internet via mobile phone will be 125 million - three times toda y's figure.  Some countries, such as the UK, will adopt even faste r. Im proved handset devices, such as the Iphone 2.0, improved networks, such as 3.5G, better network coverage, and fl

Meet you at the JavaOne Modularity session and BOF on Wednesday (May 7th) to share more about the Java Module System and OSGi support. We will show some simple demos of the Java Module System and how a Java module imports an OSGi bundle.

The ColdFusion 8.01 System Req uirements as shown in the detailed platform support matrix [PDF] indicates that support for 64-bit Linux dist ributions is limited to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and SuSe Linux Enterprise Server 10.1. This fine print appears to often go o verlooked, so I just want to broadcast it a little louder here. I was contacted today by someone reporting installati on problems and mentioned glibc and floating point errors. A bit of Googling turned up this Google Group thread

There have been lots of exciting d evelopment and changes going on in the modularity areas recently.