Lucky Shots and Trivia

A group of astronomers have developed a new technique for getting pictures better than the Hubble from earth bound telescopes calling it Lucky Camera. It defeats the distortion of the atmosphere by taking several snapshots of the sky and uses software to overlay the pictures and take out the variable distortion of the atmosphere. Better Living Through Computing.

Regular picture

"Lucky Picture"



Today's trivia:
Those little boxes with weird numbers and letters you have to decipher on signup pages are called CAPTCHA for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart".

Time Disappearing

In the following code that spawns a background task, resharper always whines about "_timer" not being used anywhere. So I removed variable and the background task never fired.

private static Timer _timer;
...
 _timer = new Timer(_registrarCallback, textWriter, 0, registrarUpdateInMillisec);

This morning I learned why it needs that reference. Without the reference to the Timer object it can be garbage collected before it ever fires.

Transferring Big Files

I stumbled upon TransferBigFiles.com, which lets you, eh, well ... transfer big files. During our last family gathering each of us shot some great photos of the kids. TransferBigFiles.com is a good way to ship those big zip files between us since google has a cap of 10Meg.

Dual Monitors

A few months ago we got new dual monitors at work. It's been wonderful.

The coolest thing is to put the desktop over two monitors, like shown above.
How to do that? My dell has a 256MB ATI Radeon X1300PRO. I selected "Start/Programs/Catalyst Control Center/Advanced/Catalyst Control Center Advanced" then the "Displays Manager". I set the Desktop area to be 2560x1024.
I know its annoying to have the middle of the virtual screen interuppted with the monitor edges, but two 19" flat panels are really cheap compared to a 38" screen.

Netflix for Books

I ran across an interesting website that loans books like netflix loans dvd. For 20 dollars a month you can have three titles out. What do you think? Will this fly?

Clutter

Paul Graham, author of On Lisp, wrote an excellent article on having too much stuff.

And unless you're extremely organized, a house full of stuff can be very depressing. A cluttered room saps one's spirits. One reason, obviously, is that there's less room for people in a room full of stuff. But there's more going on than that. I think humans constantly scan their environment to build a mental model of what's around them. And the harder a scene is to parse, the less energy you have left for conscious thoughts. A cluttered room is literally exhausting.


At the Fincher household this article initiated a three day cleaning frenzy which has been refreshing. I've always complained our house doesn't have enough storage space, but see now that we just have too much to store.

Fun new promo for book on Continuous Integration

I liked the tone of the vid for this tome.