Month: January 2004

I’ve been following the news from Mars this morning.  Everything looks good, but the rover won’t be heading out for another 7-9 days.  You’ve got to power up and check out the skateboard, after all.  Here are the links that I have been using to keep myself informed:

• Mars Exploration Rover Mission at JPL
• SPACE.com: Mars Rover Special Report.
• NASA TV (Real Player link)
• Maestro is a java-based program for viewing data from the rover.  You can currently download it and play around with data from the test/sim environment.  You should be able to feed it real data within the next day or so.  #maestro on irc.freenode.net can keep you up to date.
• Press release images from JPL’s MERM site. (these are smaller images)
• NASA Planetary Photojournal: Mars has larger TIFF files from the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) and Mars Global Surveyor (MGS)
• Another JPL MER site has links to photos and news updates.
• Raw images from Spirit.
• Via Joi Ito, animations by Maas Digital are quite amazing.  I had seen the EDL part before, but there is some awesome animated footage of the rover coming to life and moving about.  Tres cool stuff.

The MER is sceduled to wheel around mars for 90 days, but scientists hope that the rover will last longer than that.  Sojurner was designed to last 30 days and lasted around 90 IIRC.  Another rover will be attempting bounce-down in less than a month in a different location.  Hopefully we can decrease the near 2/3 failure rate of Martian probes.

Wow.  It looks like NASA’s latest rover managed to touch down after a Rube Goldberg-like landing sequence.  There was a lot that could go wrong in those crazy six minutes.  I’m glad everything went as planned.

It’s going to be several days of diagnostics and power-ups.  Release the skateboard!

Yep, windows and tabs have been accumulating again.  It’s time to clear them out:

• UMLet 2 ” is an open-source lightweight Java tool for rapidly drawing UML diagrams, with a focus on a sound and pop-up-free user interface.”
• Edd has quite a conference lineup this year.
• The 8bitpeoples have some awesome retro-fun mp3 albums, including some excellent Christmas interpretations.
• It looks like Groovy is filling out quite nicely.
• I need to set up an account on Mobile RSS so I can keep track of things on the go.
• PDAPortal.us currently lists 463 PDA-friendly sites.  It looks like Opera on a mobile phone would rock with some of these sites.
• Russ lists the apps on his 6600 that he uses all the time.  I need to compile a similar list for my 9290, retro as it is.
• Best. Panoramic of Times Square. Evar!
• OPL Wiki: Dialogs.  They’re currently in the 1.0 release for Nokia Communicators, and should be arriving on S60 in the next few months.  I can’t wait.
• As pointed out on #mobitopia, WiGLE.net is a place to dump and search your raw wi-fi stumbling data.
• Todays Get Fuzzy is funny… and not.  So true.  Right now I’m getting double doses of Get Fuzzy every morning… one in my aggregator and another on the ‘Scratch a Day’ desk calendar.

*Whew*  The buffer has been cleared and culled.  I hope that everyone is doing well in the new year.

Wi-Fi Free Spot is a listing of commercial but free (as in beer) Wi-Fi hotspots.  See also the Wi-Fi Free Spot Weblog.  They seem to have the obvious things listed in my area.  YMMV, of course.

Yep, it’s a few hours belated in GMT-5, but happy new year to all!