Today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day is an incredible long-exposure picture of star trails above Mauna Kea:
I think the picture says it all.
Category: Tech
IE/Mac: The Final Nail
The WaSP is reporting that Microsoft will end support and cease distributing Internet Explorer for the Macintosh at the end of January. It’s been about eight months since the latest version of Mac OS X shipped without IE, and almost three years since Apple launched Safari.
While there is an “end of an era” feeling to this, it’s kind of like losing the last veteran of World War I. It’s of more historical significance than anything else. When Microsoft released IE5/Mac, it was hailed as the most standards-compliant web browser available. But Microsoft abandoned it years ago.
Fortunately, not only is Safari a worthy successor, but there are other options as well. What’s great about the web browser field these days is that the major players are constantly improving their offerings and working toward greater compatibility. And soon any website that wants to cater to Mac users will no longer be able to fall back on “Just use IE!” They’ll have to test in Safari, and of course the easiest way to build a website that works in IE/Win, Safari, and Firefox (the two defaults and the major alternative) is to start with standards-based code in the first place—which improves compatibility with even more browsers. Users get more choices, and websites get more users. Everyone wins.
Daystar!
I saw the planet Venus four times on my walk to and from lunch today! Yes, in broad daylight!
Someone on Slashdot mentioned it was possible last week. I took it seriously because back in high school, I used to watch Venus fade into the brightening sky on winter mornings. Often I could still find it once I arrived at school, since I knew exactly where to look.
I tried unsuccessfully a couple of times over the past week, but today I had a ~20-minute walk mostly facing southward, so I thought I’d give it a shot.
I used the Moon as a guide, trying to guess the distance based on how far apart they were last night. As I passed through a building’s shadow, I spotted a stationary white dot in the right area, a bit more than a hand span away from the crescent Moon in the direction of the sun, barely visible next to some wispy clouds. I couldn’t find any sign of a con trail, and it didn’t move, so it clearly wasn’t an airplane, but I was able to look away and back and still see it. Continue reading
Venus Shadows
Venus is apparently so bright this month that it’s casting visible shadows. Now that’s cool! Unfortunately, while I can see Venus perfectly well, there’s way too much light around to see anything resembling a Venusian shadow. I don’t think I’ll have a chance to drive out into the desert by sunset in the next few days.
Low-Tech Phish
I found a flood of crude phishing attempts in our postmaster account this morning.
How crude?
The hook was, “Simply reply to this email with your online login and password.”
No forms, no imitation websites, no swiped logos, no links of any sort at all. One of them even had multiple recipients visible on the To: line. It’s like a throwback to the early days of spam-n-scam.
The headers were full of things like %RNDDIGIT27, suggesting a broken spam generator, and of course there’s the fact that they actually targeted the postmaster account.
Online Organleggers
Here’s the WTF?!?!?!!!! moment of the day. Actual spam received over the weekend:
Sell Your Organs Online!
Reply to this message if your interested in selling your organs!
Seriously, what the hell?
Forget the fact that selling organs is illegal in the US. And I’m sure mailing them across state lines would be a felony. And you sure as heck can’t list them on eBay. Or Amazon—can you imagine? “15 new and used livers available.” “Customers who purchased kidneys also bought…”
Uh, that’s a negative
The Los Angeles Times website had an interesting way of describing the results of yesterday’s state election:
It’s hard to believe that all eight propositions failed. Even the four Orange County measures failed. Every item on the ballot in our district was rejected!
On a related note, I still don’t like the voting machines we have in OC. The interface is cumbersome and the display is godawful slow. The controls consist of a dial, which moves the cursor, and a button, which selects the current item.
The display is so slow you can watch it redrawing the title and summary of a ballot item when it highlights it. First the rectangle turns blue, then it redraws the text, line by line, in white. It’s like watching print preview in Word Perfect 5.1 for DOS on a 386. You just don’t see that kind of performance on modern computers unless they’re massively bogged down.
As for trying to use the machine, it’s kind of like entering your name in the high score list on an arcade video game with only a trackball and a fire button. I’m sure they chose it for durability reasons—a touch screen would be much more usable, but much easier to break—and went with the low-powered processor to keep the costs down.
I actually liked the punchcards we had before. It was so much more satisfying to slam down that lever.