Digital Brainwaves

Rep. Dave Weldon (R-FL15) had a column yesterday on TheHill.com regarding NASA’s “greatest regret and greatest concern” — needing to rely on Russia for access to the International Space Station during the estimated five-year time frame between the retirement of the Space Shuttle program and the start of its successors, Project Constellation and the Orion spacecraft. His proposal involves flying the shuttle as is for an additional three years, and accelerating the design and creation of Constellation, but, sadly, the plan hasn’t met with much success in the House:

Some have criticized my plan citing the fact they believe the Shuttle is a “flawed” vehicle and must be retired. But if the Shuttle is so inherently dangerous why are we still flying it today? The Shuttle won’t be any more dangerous to fly in 2013 than it is in 2010. The bottom line is – NASA is flying the Shuttle because it is worth the calculated risk. NASA currently recertifies the Shuttle’s safety each time it flies.

Sadly, Congress was set to act on the gap but, Speaker Pelosi dealt two significant blows to NASA - making more challenging our ability to address this problem. In January 2007, Speaker Pelosi shepherded an omnibus bill through the Congress cutting $570 million from the Constellation program. Then late last year House Democrats stripped $1 billion from the Senate approved NASA budget. $1.5 billion would have been a strong down payment toward closing the gap. Pelosi said no.

Give it a read.

Someone shot last Monday night’s launch of Endeavour to start STS-123 from their backyard. Awesome video.

(Hat tip: Little Green Footballs)

Common Craft is a web site that attempts to explain confusing things “in plain English.” Their site’s visitors have made a request of them:

We’ve received a number of requests from people who want their
friends to use the micro-blogging service Twitter, but can’t seem to explain it well. We hope this video helps.

Not many of my friends use Twitter at the moment. This video might explain a bit why I do, and maybe inspire them to join too.

I doubt I’m the first to toss this idea out, but I had a thought the other day about the supposed revenue sharing being done between Apple and its exclusive iPhone carriers.

Almost every comment and blog that I’d read about it assumed it was just a plan to make more profit from the iPhone. And to be fair, the rumored amounts (as much as $9/month from AT&T over the life of the contract, for example) do make them a fair penny.

Only when a new software update for the iPhone in January that includes several new features did it all make sense, though. The iPhone got the software update and its new features free of charge, but the addition of previously unavailable iPhone apps to the iPod touch, along with the new updates to match iPhone’s January update, cost $19.95. When asked about it, Apple had said that they account for iPhone revenues on a subscription basis, but cannot, for legal and accounting purposes, provide new functionality on the iPod touch without charging for it. Steve Jobs mentioned the same thing with regards to the upcoming software version 2.0 (featuring native application support) due to be released in June.

I hadn’t thought about it before, but what if the iPhone revenue sharing with the carriers isn’t just a profit stream, but a means-to-an-end for providing free software updates to iPhone users? Most cellular phone users get any software updates from the carrier for free, so what if this is just Apple’s way to make the books work legally in order to do the same thing?

I’m a space shuttle junkie, and will be eagerly watching for a possible launch this afternoon of Atlantis into orbit to work on completion of the International Space Station. Follow along at Spaceflight Now’s STS-122 Mission Status Center, or watch NASA TV online.

Forty-one years ago this past Sunday, we lost Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee.

Twenty-two years ago this past Monday we lost Dick Scobee, Michael Smith, Judith Resnik, Ellison Onizuka, Ronald McNair, Gregory Jarvis and Christa McAuliffe.

Five years ago today we lost Rick Husband, William McCool, David Brown, Kalpana Chawla, Michael Anderson, Laurel Clark and Ilan Ramon.

Let us never forget the sacrifices these brave men and women made in humankind’s exploration of the final frontier.

Lately, I’ve been getting errors on my laptop that my hard drive is full, and virtual memory is running low.  I’m thinking, after over two years, it’s time clean things out, back everything up, and start fresh again.

A little after the last time I started over on this computer, I got a spare hard drive for the machine for a project that never went anywhere. Shortly thereafter, I put the drive in an external case, which connects to my computer via USB 2.0. Convenient place to put backup data, no?  I thought so too.  But then I had a thought today.

The drive in the external case is, ostensibly, identical to the drive in my notebook. The easiest way to make sure everything that needs to be backed up is backed up is for the original to be the backup.

Sometime later this week, I’ll pull the drive from this machine and swap it with the drive that’s currently in the external casing, and install the OS on this new drive. Time for a fresh start on my computer again.

Ultimately, I’d like to make a fresh start on new hardware… and not PC hardware.  But that’ll take some investment.

The wiper blades on my car had been in bad shape for a while, and I finally decided today they needed to be replaced. Knowing I could get good brands inexpensively at Wal Mart, off I went.

I was just about set to pick up a pair of Anco Winter Blades (the metal frame is encased in a thin rubber boot to keep the snow and ice out) when I spotted a model I hadn’t seen before from Michelin, called Radius.

The Radius wiper blade doesn’t have the metal frame with multiple joints that most blades have. Instead, it’s a single long, curved rubber beam that keeps the blade against the windshield. The blade is also supposed to last longer, as Michelin uses what they call “M-Guard Advanced Rubber Technology” in building the rubber compound to make the blade. I didn’t happen to see it on the packaging, but the website also indicates the top of the blade is designed to act as a spoiler, allowing wind resistance to help force the blade down onto the windshield.

It’s early in the season yet, so who knows what it’s going to do against snow and ice on my windshield. But I can definitely say that it’s the quietest wiper blade I’ve ever had on that car. If I didn’t see it moving and wiping while I was driving, I’d never know the wipers were on.

To be fair, these blades are a smidge under twice the price of the ones I was about to pick up instead. But running quieter, longer, with no way to clog from ice, I’m predicting it’ll be a good investment. I’ll be sure to report back continued good news and bad news on these blades as I come across it.

Sorry, I’m going to babble about my iPhone some more.

John Gruber has an in-depth article this week about what third-party applications might mean on the iPhone. Of course, as he says in the article, there’s a lot of Kremlinology involved, but it’s still an interesting read.

ArsTechnica is reporting on sources inside Apple that the iPhone will not plan to support native code on the iPhone “for the foreseeable future,” although they are working on adding additional capabilities to WebKit and Safari for iPhone, including offline storage, enhanced connections from JavaScript to iPhone functions, and potentially, the ability to have Home Screen icons point to offline web applications on the device.

This sounds to me like an interesting best-of-both-worlds compromise, particularly offline storage: web-based applications remain sandboxed in Safari, while allowing the ability to store data for faster access/offline access. Optimally, such web pages could be locally stored to run completely on the device, not needing to hit the web at all.

Ultimately, the question at this point is, when might something like this appear? Says Ars, “Apple is currently aiming for an unspecified ‘January’ deadline on these updates, and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that it will likely be announced at Macworld 2008.”