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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...)

Such have been the bane of my existance when doing websites as well. Nothing sucks more than getting an email saying "Do the page exactly like this." with a 3 mb graphic created in photoshop attached.

P.S. I cut off my ponytail more than a month ago...

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.

But why am I answering a question you haven't asked yet? Well, because even here on /. people are trying to use it and because I am working on something that does cool things with it. So I think talking about this is very timely and I think you should want to know about RSS even if you don't know that you want to know. That's why.

After the Columbia disaster I was fairly upset with the regular media reporting and with NASA's lack of open discussion. However NASA did release some telemetry information gathered right before the shuttle breakup. That information seemed to contain some clues as to exactly what had happened, but it was pretty hard to understand. Being a visual thinker I needed a more graphical view of the sensor results over time, so I created my own animation of the data.

Veiwing my animation and a picture taken of the shuttle right before the breakup led me to the conclusion that one of the leading edge carbon/carbon shielding blocks had failed, just outboard of the wheel well. For whatever it is worth, I turned out to be 100% correct!

However being right did not make me feel good. Instead I was irritated on several levels. First off, I was an amateur using those little bits of information openly released to come by my findings, while NASA engineers with access to even more information were silenced -- even after the 'official' findings were released. Something that took another four months. Certainly they arrived at the same conclusion long before I did; why weren't they alowed to speak and why did it take so long?

Furthermore none of the various news sources, any of whom could have done the same thing I did, paid any attention to this data at all. Yet another case of someone in the blogosphere getting it right while the media yammers about inconsequentials. Oh well. And it didn't even lead to fifteen minutes of fame for me. Probably a good thing...

• Columbia Disaster
• What happened to Columbia? An amateur analyzes the data (Initial release of the animation, February 9th, 2003)
• More indications my Columbia theory is correct (April 3rd, 2003)
• I called it on the Columbia disaster! (The CAB releases their findings, corroborating my own on June 25th, 2003)

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.