Thursday, July 31, 2008

Busy Times

Last week was the ATS Conference, this week (and next) is work back East.

The conference was a blast. Found tons of cool invertebrates, only kept one: a Diplocentrus scorpion. She is SO CUTE, like a miniature emperor. I also won a Salmon Pink Birdeater sling in a raffle, and purchased a Trinidad Chevron and ... drum roll ... my FIRST POKIE!

Yes, I bought a regalis and she is gorgeous. I had quite a time getting her into her new cage, it was very amusing. My wife made me do it outside while she watched behind the sliding glass doors. Everytime the pokie (haven't named her yet) zipped in, then out of her cage my wife jumped and screamed. It was very amusing. I was laughing too. I would like to note that despite her zipping about (I understand the reference to teleporting now) she never once acted aggressively.

The Trinidad Chevron (a beautiful, olive green arboreal Tarantula) acted a bit defensively at the conference but once she was out of her container she was nice enough. She was not defensive at all moving her into her new cage. She dutifully marched out of the old into the new.

I will take some pictures for my gallery next week or the week after. But I am still excited about owning a pokie. It was a big step for me.

Friday, July 18, 2008

Sensationalism in Science

Today I was reminded about what is wrong with science:  Sensationalism.  I understand that magazines geared toward the lay person are trying to sell subscriptions and keep science interesting, but it also damages the very nature of what science should be.

The particular article that caught my eye was titled "What would Earth look like to alien astronomers?"  I thought, "well this sounds interesting."  Fortunately this particular article did not waste too much of my time because it noted in the very second sentence that pictures taken by an Earth probe show the Earth as it *might* appear to aliens who had "telescopes far more powerful than our own."

This sort of sensationalist reporting is rampant in science.  The article itself was not a bad one, but the fact that they provide a title that really has nothing to do with the underlying science is irritating and misleading.

The title, by the way, should have been "Telescopic filters could help map extrasolar planetary surfaces."
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Thursday, July 10, 2008

Development woes

Coding on VMS was a wonderful experience.  Writing simple utilities was as easy as pie.

Not so on UNIX-like systems.  For example, I wrote a program that I called "to" on VMS.  It was sort of like a super-duper "chdir" on UNIX.  It had short term memory (remembered the last couple places you defaulted to) and long term memory (you could create aliases on the fly, shortcuts).  When you said "$to disk:[dir]" you were there.  You could add aliases like "$to add home sys$login" and from then on you could say "$to home" to get there.

In UNIX every program runs in its own process space (as it did in VMS) but does not have direct access to the environment variables of the shell from which the application was executed, at least not in a simple, callable method that I have yet to find.

I really want to write my own "to" program for mac os x, since I do a lot of bopping around via terminal.  It would be nice to have it contained in an app with a little SQLite db instead of creating a billion bash aliases.

Oh well.
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