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Journal Journal: Dazzling image captures violent birth of stars

Journal by slayermet420 on Wednesday April 25, 2007 @08:20PM

CNN is reporting about the amazing new image captured by the Hubble telescope. The image, released by NASA's Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, is more than 50 light years wide. It shows the chaotic Carina Nebula, through the birth and death of stars. It really is an amazing picture, available directly

Submission + - The Hoax of Hydrogen and its true cost

Submitted by Tangential on Wednesday April 25, 2007 @08:04PM

Tangential writes: An article on Adamant by Russell Seitz discusses the incredibly high cost of Hydrogen.
From the article:
H is for Hydrogen — the cleanest fuel there is . As long as it is made out of water. Which it is — right ? Dream on- hydrogen produced from H2O is a rare and precious commodity , costing a quarter its weight in silver because of the high price of American electrical power — most of which comes from coal. But don't count on cashing in the contents of your bathtub just yet . Though the hydrogen in a pound of water is worth $22 on paper, pure hydrogen produced by water electrolysis can't compete with the ordinary stuff, made from natural gas — it sells for $6.00 a kilo liquefied . The two processes costs don't cross until electrical power gets _almost _ too cheap to meter — under thee tenths of a cent per kilowatt hour.

Submission + - Release of two quake3 engine spin-offs

Submitted by

Thilo2

on Monday April 02, 2007 @04:43AM

Thilo2 writes: "With id software releasing Quake3 under a GPL license, finally two stand-alone games have popped up that make use of that very source code. Funny enough, both the World of Padman and Urban Terror projects have released their files at the same time on first april that can be downloaded at no cost and no, this is no delayed april fool's joke. Both games are based on the ioquake3 project, which is dedicated to cleaning up and improving the quake3 engine. World of Padman has installers for Windows, Linux and MacOSX and can be played natively on these platforms. Urban Terror's engine has not been released yet, at the time of this writing. By compiling your own engine though, you can get support for many additional platforms, like *BSD or even Solaris!"

Submission + - Battlestar Galactica: Beyond the Red Line

Submitted by doh123 on Monday April 02, 2007 @01:19AM

doh123 writes: Battlestar Galactica: Beyond the Red Line, the free Freespace 2 engine stand-alone game that has been in the works a long time has a Demo now available for download. Windows only at the time of writing this, but the Linux and Mac OS X versions should be available soon. This is probably the coolest game in development in a long time, and its not from any of the major game companies. Anyone who is going to try it, please help seed the bittorrent downloads. http://www.game-warden.com/bsg/

Submission + - Math: Making it fun, again

Submitted by macaday on Sunday April 01, 2007 @11:03PM

macaday writes: The desire to learn math and science in school is about as popular as eating Brussels sprouts. Students do not understand the need to learn it and the focus has shifted to standardized test-prep in the classroom. The folks at Shodor are making available free on-line software that makes learning math and science interesting and interactive.

Submission + - E8 structure finally decoded

Submitted by arobic on Monday March 19, 2007 @05:25AM

arobic writes: A group of mathematicians from US and Europe succeeded in mapping the E8 structure, an example of a Lie group. These were developed by the well-known mathematician Sophus Lie (pronounce Lee) in the last century and are used for many applications, mainly in theoretical physics. This is an important breakthrough as it could help physicists working on Grand Unified Theories (aka GUTs).

Submission + - Driving games make drivers dangerous

Submitted by

kilauea

on Monday March 19, 2007 @04:45AM

kilauea writes: "According to this BBC new story, some german scientists are telling us that playing driving games makes you take more risks while "doing the real thing". Sounds fishy to me. For one they state that people who play games are more likely to crash, well we already knew that the demographic here overlaps. Secondly they state they reaction times are a second slower, and there is more than enough science to suggest that playing games will actualy increas your reaction times. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6457353.stm"

Submission + - Sharepoint: Microsoft's new operating system

Submitted by

AlexGr

on Monday March 19, 2007 @12:19AM

AlexGr writes: "InfoWorld Matt Asay has an interesting observation: "I've been beating on the Sharepoint drum for nearly two years now, but this is the first time I've seen anyone outside the ECM industry think along the same lines. Sharepoint is very clearly the future of Microsoft. And, not coincidentally, it is the future of how Microsoft locks customers into its software (benevolently or malevolently — you choose)." http://weblog.infoworld.com/openresource/archives/ 2007/03/sharepoint_micr.html"

Submission + - TextMate: Power Editing for the Mac

Submitted by

honestpuck

on Monday March 19, 2007 @12:16AM

honestpuck writes: "About six months ago I switched to using TextMate, a text editor with a clean and well designed interface that hides a great deal of power, replacing both BBEdit and vim. I felt like a baby duck that had been ripped away from its mother, but I was determined to switch to a single editor. I have since become familiar with the power of TextMate and it's extensions. Getting a copy of "TextMate — Power Editing for the Mac" (TPEftM) made me feel like I'd gone from baby duck to Leo DiCaprio, dating a supermodel.

TextMate, like many Mac applications, seems like a simple, easy to use application but underneath the hood it has four types of additions to customize the editing experience — snippets, macros, commands and language grammars — and a method of tying them together into a mode called a bundle. Grammars control syntax colouring, indentation, text folding among other features. TextMate also seems to have been designed from day one to integrate well with Mac OS X and its Unix underpinnings. First, it includes a great command line tool, "mate", that has a couple of neat tricks like automatically creating a project when passed a list of files or a directory name, and a GUI that can easily run shell commands and scripts. TextMate can't give me a list of unique lines in a file but it is trivially easy to pass a selection to 'uniq' and have the results replace the selection, for example.

I don't want to spend half this review describing TextMate, suffice to say that it is an incredibly powerful and conformable editor. The extended features are all well covered by TPEftM.

Taken as a whole this book is a marvelous second volume to the TextMate manual. Though the first section summarizes information covered in the TextMate manual the rest of the book takes a huge leap forward and gives you details on how to get the best from one of the finest text editors it has been my pleasure to use. If you want a well written manual for the advanced and malleable parts of TextMate then this book is pretty good, the details it is missing, such as the plugin API, are covered by the manual and where the manual is thin on detail this book fleshes it out nicely.

It's broken up into three sections, "Editing" which contains three chapters (and the introduction) covering the basics of creating projects and files, moving around, selecting text and find and replace (a nice little regular expresson engine), "Automations" which contains five chapters covering the built in bundles and how to write your own snippets, macros and commands and "Languages" which covers the development of language grammars, preferences and themes.

This is a useful book. It's not a classic, it won't revolutionize your thinking about anything, nor will you learn new coding techniques. It will, however, reward any effort you make towards working through it with a much improved editing experience.

TPEftM is also a hard book, reading it can be almost a chore with the need to digest and try out some fairly complicated topics. TPEftM isn't a great learning aide, it's more a technical manual than a textbook. I wish I could blame the writing but the book is well written and edited, it just has a technical style. At times I thought a lighter touch in the writing would have been good to allay some of the density. It also seems light on examples, while the discussion of each topic is well constructed and understandable a little more attention to the number, length and content of examples would have improved the book's usability.

It is best to give TPEftM a quick read and then use it as a guide to doing some customizing of your TextMate environment. The chapter that I remember well is the one on snippets since I've used the book to guide me in writing several. In fact my first foray into 'programming' TextMate was to alter some snippets in the built-in automation.

The O'Reilly page for the book just contains a book description and some marketing information. For more useful information you can go to the Pragmatic Programmer's page for the book which has a link to download the code, an errata list, a table of contents and links to two excerpts from the book. You can also buy the PDF version or both the PDF and paper versions on the Pragmatic site.

In conclusion this is a great book if you are currently toying with using TextMate as your Mac OS X editor. It is a good book and second manual if you are already a heavy TextMate user and want to know how to get the best out of the programmability of TextMate. So all TextMate users should consider this book a must buy. This is one hunk of extra documentation for TextMate, at only 182 pages it isn't a large book but it is full of information. For your $30 (or less, almost everywhere) you'll have an immediately useful book that will take you months to digest."

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