Geek Drivel

A lesson in Bad Science from NASA (predictably on Global Warming again): if the facts get in the way of your favorite theory, ignore the facts.

Want a good cell phone/organizer, but don’t want to pay through the nose for a proprietary and closed-source system that limits you in all sorts of ways? Looks like there’s an alternative coming Real Soon Now.

Apparently a lot of people have decided to avoid Windows Vista. Good for you, guys!

A sad farewell to Windows XP. It wasn’t the greatest, but it was a lot better than the piece-of-excrement successor that Microsoft is trying to force on everyone right now.

It seems that the LP is making a comeback, thanks (indirectly) to the iPod.

This is an old (1992) paper on writing cross-platform C programs, but it’s useful nonetheless. A lot of the problems highlighted in it have all but vanished over the intervening years, but the general ideas are still valid, even on Windows machines. (Have you ever tried writing a non-trivial Windows application, using the raw Win32 API, that’s portable between Win9x and NT-based systems? “Fun” doesn’t begin to describe it.) The solutions that they suggest are good ones, though the Boost libraries and projects like wxWidgets go a long way toward making them unnecessary.

“Pot, meet kettle.”

GoddessJ had a wedding shower to attend, so we packed up and took an overnight trip to the shores of Lake Huron. It was interesting… I saw a large number of power-generating windmills, including a couple that were still being put together (the first time I’d seen them close up — they’re freakin’ huge! I was fascinated by them, much to GoddessJ’s bemusement), and met someone who works for a large company’s “executive e-mail” section (one of many people who handle the e-mail directed at the company’s president). I managed to get a small but crucial portion of Project X coded too… I love portable computers!

We were staying at the home of the bride-to-be’s mother, who doesn’t have Internet access. I knew that in advance, and made preparations. But when we returned this afternoon, I discovered that blog-comment spammers had pounded Geek Drivel unmercifully in my absence… roughly eight times the usual level of spam comments, on a variety of posts. Do spammers have some kind of spy watching me or something? If so, it didn’t help them, Spam Karma stopped every one of them before they were published.

Now back to your regularly scheduled drivel.

The climate-change debate isn’t finished, but a British scientist has put some hard numbers on the various carbon-neutral energy plans that people have put forward for dealing with it. Interesting reading.

Yes, the Phoenix lander has found water ice!

With water-ice proven to exist on Mars, it becomes a lot more likely that life, of some familiar sort, could be there too. It also means that human habitation of Mars could be viable (a lack of water would make a Mars colony prohibitively expensive).

No wonder NASA “whole-heartedly used the 2007 Word of the Year — w00t.”