Global Spin

According to a recent AP article, Space Shuttle Discovery is “ready to launch on July 13th”:http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/science/20050628-1403-spaceshuttle.html. Perhaps even more interesting is a little blurb at the end of the article: _The Iran Non-Proliferation Act would effectively bar U.S. astronauts from staying on the space station after April 2006. The bill, passed in 2000, had aimed [...]

Posted by Chris in Space on June 28th, 2005 | 2 Comments »

I’ve been using GMail a lot lately. I’ve shunted my public-facing e-mail address through it, and the spam filtering has been surprisingly effective. I’m also interested in the AJAXy goodness they’ve implemented, which gets around some of the interface headaches inherent in Webmail. Unfortunately, I’ve noticed something disturbing when using GMail in the same context [...]

Posted by Chris in AJAX on June 27th, 2005 | Comments Off

It’s good to be back on “CPAN”:http://search.cpan.org/. It’s been over a year since “Apache::PSP”:http://search.cpan.org/~radcliff/Apache-PSP-1.00/ went 1.0, and I haven’t had much chance to come up with publicly-useful Perl modules since then. That’s why it felt really good to post the “EVDB::API”:http://search.cpan.org/~radcliff/EVDB-API-0.6/lib/EVDB/API.pm module for work. It’s a spiffed-up version of a module Chuck (our CTO) wrote [...]

Posted by Chris in Web 2.0 on June 25th, 2005 | Comments Off

For those of you in the San Diego area, be sure to check out “Velvet Smog”:http://www.velvetsmog.com/, our own Mike Roufa’s jazz trio. They’re playing this Sunday (6/26) and next (7/3) at Hennessey’s Tavern in the Gaslamp. (Details are on the “Global Spin calendar”:http://evdb.com/calendars/1237.) If you can’t make it to one of the gigs, be sure [...]

Posted by Chris in Music on June 25th, 2005 | 1 Comment »

Cosmos 1, the solar-sail probe launched yesterday by the “Planetary Society”:http://www.planetary.org/, has apparently “failed on launch”:http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/local/states/california/northern_california/11958311.htm. The failure was in the first-stage rocket launching the probe into orbit, not the probe itself, so it seems that the thing to do is to build the same thing over and try it again.

Posted by Chris in Space on June 22nd, 2005 | 3 Comments »