30th September 2008 by Giles Smith
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A True Image from False Kiva Credit & Copyright: Wally Pacholka (Astropics.com/TWAN)
Explanation: Is there any place in the world you could see a real sight like this? Yes. Pictured above is single exposure image spectacular near, far, and in between. Diving into the Earth far in the distance is part of the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy, taken with a long duration exposure. Much closer, the planet Jupiter is visible as the bright point just to band’s left. Closer still are picturesque buttes and mesas of the Canyonlands National Park in Utah, USA, lit by a crescent moon. In the foreground is a cave housing a stone circle of unknown origin named False Kiva. The cave was briefly lit by flashlight during the long exposure. Astrophotographer Wally Pacholka reports that getting to the cave to take this image was no easy trek. Also, mountain lions were a concern while waiting alone in the dark for just the right exposure.
This is a fantastic photo, as an amateur photographer I can really appreciate how difficult this shot was to take and the amount of patience required to get exactly the right exposure!
Lighting the cave with a flash really gives the whole photo quite a surreal effect, very impressive.
Follow NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day Archive (no RSS feed I am afraid, you will have to do it the old fashioned way and just visit the site!)
Tags: astronomy, false kiva, jupiter, mesa, milky way galaxy, nasa, Photography, wally pacholka
Categories: Up in Space •
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29th September 2008 by Giles Smith
Rain on Mars (Credit: NASA
Images of layered sedimentary deposits and deltas on Mars have provided evidence for lakes and flowing rivers that carried eroded material downstream. A team of researchers also believes there is evidence for precipitation in the Red Planet’s past. “For years scientists have been suspecting that the current appearance of the landscape has, in part, been shaped by rivers that cut into the surface,” said Ernst Hauber of the German Aerospace Center. “We can see layered sediments where these valleys open into impact craters. The shape of certain sediments is typical for deltas formed in standing water.” Hauber and his team also believe that surface runoff from rain or snowmelt completes the picture of past water on Mars.
There seems to be more and more evidense coming from NASA’s HiRISE that Mars was once very similar to Earth, in both it’s surface and it’s atmosphere. At some point however Mars has taken a very different tack and ended up as very cold, very dry and very barren. Other recent photographs from Mars show dried up lakes, river valleys, estuarys and other features associated with a once wet planet.
Whatever did happen was very brief in Mar’s overall history and any precipitation that did occur dried up around 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago.
Read more on Universe Today
Tags: earth, ernst hauber, german aerospace center, hirise, mars, nasa, precipitation, rain, red planet
Categories: Up in Space •
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26th September 2008 by Giles Smith
I don’t know how genuine these really are, because in my opinion they don’t look very different at all from Vista. Another build of Windows 7 was circulated a few days ago and inevitably a few screen shots were leaked.
Windows 7 Media Player
You can see a much lighter interface for Windows Media player and a few changes to the control panel. Maybe cutting back on the graphics a bit might actually speed up Windows 7 a bit as Vista was a dam nightmare!
Windows 7 Solution Center
Go here to see loads more, but hurry they probably won’t hang around forever!
Tags: microsoft, screen shot, windows, windows 7
Categories: IT, Tech & Internet •
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26th September 2008 by Giles Smith
Original Article on The Register
Hands on Ruby on Rails has become a popular framework for developing database-based web applications using the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern.
Before Ruby on Rails, though, PHP was hogging the web-development limelight. Problem was, there was no Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework for PHP.
With Ruby on Rails, though, PHP developers have come to realize the timesaving benefits of MVC – a fact that led to the development of various PHP frameworks that are actually based on Ruby on Rails.
Among them, the Akelos framework and PHP On Trax.
In this article we shall develop an MVC Create-Read-Update-Delete (CRUD) application using the PHP On Trax Framework. Why this particular framework? Simple: it is a direct port of the Ruby on Rails framework.
I haven’t managed to try this out yet but it I didn’t see anything in it that would’t be able to be set up in a linux environment, The article goes into a fair amount of detail (3 pages) in how to get it working. If anyone has had a go at this let me know how you have got on, I don’t really have the time at the moment!
Tags: model-view-controller, mvc, php, ruby on rails, web development
Categories: IT, Tech & Internet •
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3rd September 2008 by Giles Smith
Serve and Protect with the Peacemaker
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The Richland County, South Carolina Sheriff’s Department (that’s them above) just obtained an armored personnel carrier, complete with a belt-fed, .50-cal turreted machine gun. Sheriff Leon Lott has charmingly named the vehicle “The Peacemaker,” and insists that using a caliber of ammunition that even the U.S. military is reluctant to use against human targets (it’s generally reserved for use against armored vehicles) will “save lives.”
[..]
Like most of these military toys obtained by local police departments, the Peacemaker will inevitably be used on drug and gambling raids—that is, to enforce laws against consensual activities. Or, as we’re now seeing in Minnesota, perhaps on raids against leftist political activists.
Umm what exactly can I say to this, I could come up with something cliched like “Only in the US” but I think that everyone has become used to the fact that appears to be hiding behind a collective intelligence that only a privileged few have access to. Oh and in my experience the ‘chosen ones’ don’t appear to be in the US they are all over here in Europe.
Who on earth do these boys think they are going to be arresting, I just don’t understand how an apparent pioneer of world peace can think it needs to treat its own people in this way?
Tags: armored vehicle, machine gun, sheriff, south carolina, United States of America
Categories: Mistfits & Humour •
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