February 2012, The Greening Continues: New Eclectic Examples of Environmental Technologies

By Harry {doc} Babad, © Copyright 2012, All Rights Reserved. Introduction This month I’m temporarily reverting back to earlier tid-bit type entries because I’ve be deluged by input. Being an information junkie requires not only a large hard drive, but also a fairly good memory – so far so good!   Enjoy Note, many of the technologies [...]

January 14. 2012 – SkyFi Wireless Telescope Control

By Ted Bade, © Copyright 2012, All Rights Reserved. Product: SkyFi Wifi to Serial Adapter Vendor: Southern Stars (http://www.southernstars.com/index.html) Price: $149.95 Introduction SkyFi is another fine product from Southern Stars, who sell SkySafari software for mobile devices and Mac computers, as well as other telescope-related hardware products. SkyFi uses WiFi to connect the RS232 control data [...]

Reflections on Completing a Third Semester of Grad School (December 28, 2011)

By Mike Hubbartt, © Copyright 2011, All Rights Reserved. I just started my second year of graduate school at the University of St. Thomas (UST) in St. Paul, MN, and I am working on a MS in Software Engineering degree. In my first year of classes, I enrolled in 2 classes per semester which is a [...]

November 29, 2011 – Energy (fuel efficiency): US Courts and Sciences, and Balancing Healthcare Costs

— Three National Academies Recent Studies An Op-Ed Piece; doc’s eclectic views November 1, 2011 By Harry Babad, © Copyright 2011, All Rights Reserved  — Used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License Introduction As is my want, I periodically check the National Academies Press web pages for workshop notes/articles/reports that appeal to me, not as nuclear [...]

November 20, 2011 – Wolfram Tides Calculator iPhone App Review

By Mike Hubbartt, © Copyright 2011, All Rights Reserved. Software: Tides Calculator Vendor: Wolfram Research (www.wolfram.com) Price: $.99 Wolfram’s Mathematica (now version 8.0.4) is a mature product used by many professionals and academics, and the past couple of years Wolfram has started getting developing mobile applications. I’ve already reviewed their Astronomy and Chemistry course assistant apps, [...]

The Thorium Fuel Cycle – Technology Advantages

By Harry {doc} Babad, © Copyright 2011, All Rights Reserved.  Revision 2 (corrected 1/2/2012) Introduction Over the years there has been On-N-Off again interest in using thorium rather then uranium to fuel our energy needs. The interest came in part because of the greater availability and more widely distributed quantities of thorium in the earths crust. [...]

November, 2011 – The Greening Continues:New Eclectic Examples of Environmental Technologies

By Harry {doc} Babad, © Copyright 2011, All Rights Reserved. Introduction – Jest a bit of preachin’ I do have an attitude and am seldom politically correct, only well referenced in my sources and always biases to evidence, grey as it might be, in my opinions.   Note, many of the technologies I share are in [...]

September, 2011 – The Greening Continues:New Eclectic Examples of Environmental Technologies

By Harry {doc} Babad, © Copyright 2011, All Rights Reserved. Introduction Note, many of the technologies I share are in various stage of first, development, and are often far from being a commercial success. Their inventors and supporters still have to prove that they are reliable, durable and scalable, Remember There Ain’t No free Lunch and [...]

August 27, 2011 – The Greening Continues: New Eclectic Examples of Environmental Technologies

By Harry {doc} Babad,  © Copyright 2011, All rights Reserved. Introduction Note, many of the technologies I share are in various stage of first, development, and are often far from being a commercial success. Their inventors and supporters still have to prove that they are reliable, durable and scalable, Remember There Ain’t No free Lunch [...]

Wolfram General Chemistry Course Assistant (July 26, 2011)

By Mike Hubbartt, © Copyright 2011, All Rights Reserved. Software: General Astronomy Course Assistant Vendor: Wolfram Research (www.wolfram.com) Price: $4.95 Many modern students use their smart phones in school, and Wolfram understands this so they are releasing a series of course assistant applications for smart phones and devices like the Apple iPhone and iPod touch. I’ve [...]

Solar Transition of the Last Shuttle Docked to the ISS (July 12, 2011)

By Tobias Lindemann, © Copyright 2011, All Rights Reserved. Introduction I was not happy when Atlantis lifted off last Friday, because I thought we would not have a chance to see it here in Europe. I was relieved when a friend told me that there would be a Solar-Transit of the ISS (International Space Station) near [...]

July 10, 2011 – The Greening Continues: New Eclectic Examples of Environmental Technologies

By Harry {doc} Babad, © Copyright 2011, All rights Reserved. Greening Introduction REFERENCES AND THEIR USES – A late night musing The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is making changes to improve its scientific integrity. The move comes in part because of mistakes discovered in the panel’s 2007 assessment, including the incorrect statement that [...]

An Attendee in Presentation Hell – Death by PowerPoint (July 8, 2011)

Doc’s Eclectic Views — A doc_Babad EDU-Torial Article for MHReports By Harry {doc} Babad, © Copyright 2011, All right Reserved Introduction Over the years I have both given and attended a variety of presentations made by colleagues, fellow volunteers, and subject mater experts. Alas, most of the ‘seminars and presentations by any other name, I [...]

The Manga Guide to Relativity Book Review (July 2, 2011)

By Harry {doc} Babad,  © Copyright 2011, All Rights Reserved Authors: Hideo Nitta, Masafumi Yamamoto, Keita Takatsu and Trend-Pro Co, Ltd. Publisher: No Starch Press — An O’Reilly Media Imprint Web Site: http://nostarch.com/mg_relativity.htm Updates/Errata: http://www.nostarch.com/mg_relativity.htm Review Rating:  4.5 Quills Cost: List Price: $19.95, Ebook:  $16.00 (PDF format),  Print +Ebook $21.95 [USD], Street Prices:  $10.88 [USD],  [...]

Signup for a Remote Source Code Repository (July 2, 2011)

By Mike Hubbartt, © Copyright 2011, All Rights Reserved. In the old days, developers used file system directories with customer naming conventions to organize their code and support files. This was a problem if the files were stored locally and the computer hard drive failed, and it made it difficult to keep code in sync when [...]

New Updates to SkySafari iPad/iPod Software (June 27, 2011)

By Mike Hubbartt, © Copyright 2011, All Rights Reserved. Last week several of my iPod touch apps were updated, including SkySafari Pro and SkySafari – both were version 3.0.1. I contacted Southern Stars and they sent me a list of fixes/enhancements that are current for the 3.x release – click here to see them. I installed [...]

Configure Mac IDEs to Access a Remote Git Repository (June 24, 2011)

By Mike Hubbartt, © Copyright 2011, All Rights Reserved. Code repositories are server-based applications to store common code. Our post Configure Mac IDEs to Access a Remote Subversion Repository (June 15, 2011) provides instructions on connecting an IDE to a remote SVN repository (Centralized Version Control System), while our post Configure Mac IDEs to Access a Remote [...]

Configure Mac IDEs to Access a Remote Subversion Repository (June 15, 2011)

By Mike Hubbartt, © Copyright 2011, All Rights Reserved. There are commercial repositories and open source repositories. The commercial repositories charge, usually based on the number of people accessing the repository. Open source repositories can be installed on internal company servers or there are companies that host open source repositories for no or little cost (also [...]

Reflections on Completing a Year of Grad School (June 11, 2011)

By Mike Hubbartt, © Copyright 2011, All Rights Reserved. I graduated with an undergrad degree in Computer Science in the Spring of 2010, and I enjoyed it so much I decided to go on to graduate school and ended up enrolling at the University of St. Thomas (UST) in St. Paul, MN, and started on a [...]

Aquarius/SAC-D Mission Launch Successful (June 10, 2011)

By Mike Hubbartt, © Copyright 2011, All Rights Reserved. This morning NASA used a Delta II rocket to successfully launch the Aquarius/SAC-D mission from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. This new satellite will help scientists measure the amount of Sea Surface Salinity, which is important for global climate studies. The mission was accomplished with cooperation [...]

May 23, 2011 – The Greening Continues: New Eclectic Examples of Environmental Technologies

By Harry {doc} Babad, © Copyright 2011, All Rights Reserved. Introduction I am again this week taking advantage of the harvest of clippings I gathered during March and April while I was tied up with other work and family matters. Do remember, yes I trust Wikipedia as a secondary source of information, but only if I’ve [...]

Wolfram Astronomy Course Assistant (May 21, 2011)

By Mike Hubbartt, © Copyright 2011, All Rights Reserved. Software: Astronomy Course Assistant Vendor: Wolfram Research (www.wolfram.com) Price: $4.95 When  I returned to college to earn my undergrad degree in Computer Science in 2007, I was surprised to see how many students used their smart phones in school. I started on a Masters degree (MS in [...]

May 14, 2011 – Fukushima Daiichi Reactor Crisis

By Harry {doc} Babad, © Copyright 2011, All Rights Reserved. Sources of ‘BIAS-Neutral” Information on the Japanese Reactors at Fukushima Daiichi and Dani — It’s time to get away from the headlines and nucleophobic hysteria and look at long and short term realities; both good and bad and the ugly! Introduction Since the first announcement [...]

Mathematica 8.0.1 Now Available (May 18, 2011)

By Mike Hubbartt, © Copyright 2011, All Rights Reserved. I know it seems like yesterday when Wolfram released Mathematica 8.0, but they just released an update: version 8.0.1. This version is not an incremental update, so the entire application must be downloaded and installed. This update is free for owners of Mathematica 8.0, and it can [...]

Retrieving Amazon.com Ecommerce Web Services Information (April 22, 2011)

By Mike Hubbartt, © Copyright 2011, All Rights Reserved. I wanted to write a program to access Amazon’s web services information and this was the process I followed. Part 1: Get setup with Amazon AWS Create a new blank document called AWS Keys with your favorite word processor. Enter the following 2 rows to the [...]

Apple 4th Generation iPod touch Review (June 1, 2011)

By Mike Hubbartt, © Copyright 2011, All Rights Reserved Apple iPod touch 32 GB 4th generation iPod Price: $299.00 From: Apple (www.apple.com) I’ve been an early adapter for several of Apple’s products. I bought (and still have) Apple’s 1st generation Shuffle, Mac Mini (G4 CPU), and AppleTV. I like them even though better versions of the [...]

Is Wind Power an Oxymoron? (February 27, 2011)

By Harry {doc} Babad, © Copyright 2011. All Rights Reserved. I have lately been inundated by wind power articles, trying to convince me that (subsidized) wind power for the US, is the next best thing to sliced white bread. One of my thought, ignored by most commentators is that it does mater to me whether I [...]

Develop PHP Code with Eclipse and MAMP (January 21, 2012)

By Mike Hubbartt, © Copyright 2011, All Rights Reserved. I like using MAMP (Mac Apache MySQL PHP) to develop server-based code when not connected to a test server, and one of my classes in school had several projects where we use PHP and MySQL, so this short piece is on the basics of configuring and using [...]

Final Mission of Shuttle Discovery (March 9, 2011)

By Mike Hubbartt, © Copyright 2011, All Rights Reserved. The US space program had good news today (February 24, 2011). NASA successfully launched Discovery for its final flight (STS-133), which is a trip to the International Space Station (ISS). A great video of the launch from NASA can be seen here, which shows the take and [...]

Getting Started with Python on Mac OSX (February 18, 2011)

By Mike Hubbartt, © Copyright 2011, All Rights Reserved. Python is a good programming language for web developers, and I enjoyed my first experience with it. Our web development class was given a simple python web server and some HTML files and told to extend both to render images. Since I had not used it, I [...]