Exciting Times

Posted on by thomas

We are living in exciting times!

The search for planets outside of the solar system has been heating up considerably over the last few years and we have now hundreds of planets in our maps in a slowly expanding sphere of several hundred light years from earth.

However due to the current detection systems, our exploration skews heavily towards larger gas giants very much like our own Jupiter and Saturn. Earth-sized planets are much harder to detect across the void of space.

But now we have our first breakthrough: The red dwarf star Gliese 581 (picture courtesy of Digital Sky Survey / ESO) seems to have at least six planets, where two discovered over the last few years are borderline near the habitable zone – and one recently discovered planet at three times the mass of earth sits exactly in the center of the habitable zone!

The best part: Gliese 581 is only 20 light years away.

This is amazing news on so many levels. This can be seen as a first hint that earth-like planets may be much more common than even the most optimistic researchers had been hoping for – it’s extremely unlikely that in our Milky Way galaxy the only two planets in habitable zones sit within twenty light years from each other – the Milky Way has more than 100 billion stars and is nearly 100,000 light years across. With a hundred billion stars (100,000,000,000+) we are now potentially looking at millions of planets in habitable zones.

Tonight, look up and wave. Somebody out there may be waving back!

Cloud City

Posted on by thomas

It’s been a bit quiet on this blog lately, mostly due to complete exhaustion and sleep deprivation – ahh, the life of new parents…  :)

There are a few things to talk about, but before I get back to the usual blogging routine, here’s an update on my daily commute: It still rocks!

Last Thursday was a beautiful day in the Bay Area, warm and not much wind, so I was really looking forward to my bike ride back home across the Golden Gate, and I was rather disappointed to see the fog move in from the ocean just before I made it to the bridge.

And the fog was as thick as pea soup by the time I’d made it to the south tower, so I didn’t expect any photo opportunities… near the north tower, visibility was down to about twenty meters, when suddenly from one second to the next, the sun broke through!

It was glorious! Here is a still picture taken from the north tower:

Click through for a large version.

What no picture can can show is the amazing speed of the wind-whipped fog as it blows through the narrow gap of the Golden Gate. Here is a short video of the same scene – sorry for the shaky camera, but the wind was strong enough to almost blow the camera out of my hands.

Also commute-related, I’ve started a Tumblr blog as a little experiment. It’s linked here in the sidebar and it’s called Bay Crossings – I’ll try to post a picture or two every day from my commute across San Francisco Bay.

Audio Data API at Mozilla Summit 2010

Posted on by thomas

Unfortunately I couldn’t go, but it looks like the Audio Data API presentation at the Mozilla Summit 2010 in Vancouver was a big success.

Here are two videos of David Humphrey’s presentation on the state of the Audio Data API (same content but different angle):

What blew me away when I saw the video is that one part of Dave’s presentation (at about the 2 minute mark) was based on my JavaScript Spectrum Visualizer – let me just say that I am honored! [virtual happy dance]

Everybody in the web development community owes a big Thanks! to Dave for working so hard and tirelessly to bring full, interactive audio to web browsers. Over the next year or so we will see some HTML5/JavaScript experiences that will blow your socks off – and that is in no small part because of Dave and the team of audio/video coders and artists that have been pushing the boundaries of what browsers can do.

Watercolors in the Rain

Posted on by thomas

My photo “Dancing across Broadway” has long been a favorite of mine and so I was delighted when I got a request from Amanda Spencer if she could use it as inspiration for one of her watercolors…

…and here it is!

Homeward

Amanda did a great job with this picture – I really love the way she captured the dark & wet atmosphere of that evening, with the glittery lights of broadway reflected in the rain-splattered street.

The textures in this painting are amazing – it’s certainly something I haven’t seen done in watercolors before.

Great job, Amanda!

Binary Data and JavaScript

Posted on by thomas

It’s probably some sort of sign of a new phase in the JavaScript life cycle – dealing with binary data.

For the longest time there wasn’t much of a reason to worry about binary files – JavaScript was near exclusively used for text operations and simple number crunching. A multidimensional array maybe. Some objects and of course the DOM.

But binary? A while ago I’ve started work on a still-unfinished 68000 emulator in JavaScript (almost there!), and it was actually surprisingly hard to find good information about the bit operators in JavaScript.

And then there is the problem of how to get binary data into the script engine to begin with. It’s not exactly easy. And after re-inventing the wheel several times in the last few months, I’ve finally posted my current favorite solution for this specific problem to the Stories In Flight site here as a reminder for myself. And if you’ve read this far, you may be interested in that binary loader, too. :-)

The Bleeding Edge

Posted on by thomas

My Spectrum Visualizer has made quite some waves across the blogosphere and it’s been a lot of fun to check out the considerable traffic to the Stories In Flight server.

Of all the writeups I’ve found, here is the one I’ll use for my resume:

OK this must be the bleedingest-edge project I’ve seen in a while. To actually see it I had to download a pre-patched version of Firefox 3.7 alpha pre1 and it uses a draft recommendation of a Mozilla extension to the HTML5 draft specification.

This is from the Awesome But Useless blog, which certainly has one of the most entertaining blog titles I’ve seen in a while. And I am honored to be featured there – it’s great company. Thanks!

HTML5 Getting Closer

Posted on by thomas

The HTML Working Group at the W3C has published a full set of Working Drafts for the specification of HTML5.

This is another important step to move HTML5 and its associated technologies closer to become an “official” standard and will certainly speed up the implementation of many of these features in modern browsers.

Here are the links to the various documents that have been published:

And just as a reminder, here are my examples for some of the new features of HTML5.

Cool Open Source: FlightGear

Posted on by thomas

This is very cool: I’ve just done a lazy flight around San Francisco Bay with FlightGear – an open source project that has been going on for about fifteen years now. Not sure how I managed to not hear of this before, since I’ve been having bad withdrawal symptoms since I’d ditched Windows and Flight Simulator a few years ago.

FlightGear is very far advanced at this point and much about the architecture of the platform is very attractive. All the scenery files, plane models and the AI traffic definitions are done in XML – there is a lot of stuff to poke around in… not that I really need another time sink at this point…

Flying in FlightGear was very nice. Similar to Microsoft’s FlightSim, but maybe a little bit more of a realistic aircraft handing (which is not always good for the casual pilot!). The scenery around the Bay was gorgeous and the clouds and sky (which is what a pilot will see the most) are near perfect, at least as good as FS9.

With versions for Mac and PC and as a free download, what is there not to like?

Audio Under Ice

Posted on by thomas

Here’s another one of those things that is quite amazing in that special Internet kind of way: The German Alfred Wegener Institute maintains a station on the ice shelf in Antarctica and some enterprising scientists have lowered a microphone through the ice into the water under the ice shelf and the resulting audio stream – after bouncing via satellite to Germany – can be listened to live by anybody who has an Internet connection.

Now what would you be hearing there? From my casual listening, there is a constant low roar in the line, almost like white noise, which is actually kind of relaxing, and then suddenly there are loud cracks, booms and whiplashing metallic noises whenever the ice shifts.

From what the institute website states, there is a good chance of catching the songs of various kinds of seals and whales, but today I’ve only heard faint, low noises that may have come from whales. I’m looking forward to hear them close up.

But even just the echoing booms of the ice are fascinating and the stereo effect of the microphone is quite startling. Not sure if that makes me sound weird, but I could listen to this audio stream all day! :-)