Anita and I will be travelling for the next few days. First down to visit my parents on the Oregon coast, then back up to Portland for OryCon over the weekend. I will try to get the rest of the 'best of' posts up when I can. (I have posted tons more verbage than seems reasonable in the last year, so there is lots to go through.)

Cue music: 'On the Road Again'

Eric Raymond's blog 'Armed and Dangerous' has moved here. Which may be a good thing, he is certainly posting more. His latest rant tears a new asshole out of the ". . . dope-smoking ponytailed dimwits . . ." who create stylesheets with absolute font and box sizes. (AKA graphic designers...)

Well I know what RSS is of course, but you might not. And I could tell you, except Mark Pilgrim does a better job of answering the question 'What is RSS?' than I could. So you should read that.

(It seems odd to call this post 'Best of: The Columbia Disaster' when there was nothing 'best' about the Columbia disaster. However this is the first part of a series of entries linking to my best posts in the past year, and these posts certainly qualify.)

According to Richard C. Hoagland NASA may have accidently set off a nuclear explosion on Jupiter when they sent the Galileo probe plummeting into its depths.

A fascinating idea, and the background information is very interesting on its own. However Hoagland's tendancy towards conspiracy theories makes him an unreliable source. In so many ways...

Via Flutterby.

One year ago today I posted my first /. journal entry. From the beginning I have used this /. journal as more of a weblog than a personal diary. Although I have sometimes talked about my personal life, and occasionally posted a rant or an essay or a review, most often I just posted links to something I found interesting at the moment and wanted to be able to find again in the future. So,

I am driving one handed while I fumble for my cell phone. Quick glance, select the number, press 'Call'. Put phone to my ear. It rings.

"Hello?"

"Anita, it's me. I am driving down Pine and guess what I just saw in the sky?"

"What? Oh, the Concorde. Very cool! It was supposed to come in at 3:00."

"Ya, I think it was on final approach to Boeing Field."

"Well, now you have something to blog."

Nelson Minar thinks so. According to him Python has reached the point that you can create the same kind of quick and dirty Windows applications VB is best suited for. He has pointers to lots of good Windows Python tools.

Via Ted Leung.

Some time ago SF writer Bruce Sterling gave up his blog on my friend Eileen Gunn's webzine Infinite Matrix in order to start a new blog for Wired magazine. This trend towards subsidized blogs is an interesting one and I hope it brings enough value to continue (and perhaps be extended to 'regular' bloggers like myself).

I spent my High School years here in the Seattle area, in the days before Microsoft, Amazon and Starbucks. Back then Boeing was king and one rite of passage for young men was going to a dance at the Sons of Norway hall and (this was extra points) eating some Lutefisk without puking. (Note that you didn't have to be a son of Norway to go to a Sons of Norway dance, there were plenty of that sort around and they would always invite their friends. Probably so they could laugh uproarously when the

Left in Front thinks that /. is too ugly to link to and goes on to opine that "In this day and age, superficiality most times supercedes content." Brendyn then goes on to beg the /. people to overhaul the look and feel.

Notes Toward a Moderation Economy is a fascinating Kuro5hin article that takes an economic view of moderation/reputation systems like /. and Kuro5hin.

Processing is a Java based language and environment that translates to Java and compiles to run on the standard JRE. Processing has syntactic sugar for a wide range of built-in multimedia and 3D run-time APIs and the rest of the language has a clear, clean syntax. If you are developing cross-platform or browser-based multimedia apps Processing should definately be in your toolkit.

Say it isn't so! After 150 years Levi Strauss & Co. is changing the fit of their classic 501 jeans. Apparently they are making the legs and rear a bit wider.

I predict Jay Leno is going to be all over this. "What is happening in this country? Are our butts so big now that even Levi's has to do something?"

Chris Phoenix has published a design for a personal 'Nanofactory'. Quote: "This paper describes the mechanisms, structures, and processes of a prototypical macro-scale, programmable nanofactory composed of many small fabricators." It seems this design could build many products, including a duplicate nanofactory. Of course it would be even more cool if the nanotechnology existed to create the first one...