Space is beautiful.
Source and more images: HubbleSite Gallery
While experimenting with the Google Similar Pages addon for Google Chrome, I tried it on this site:
I blame the addon’s “beta” label.
Speaking of, Google Chrome Extensions are out, and they are great — except for ‘Similar Pages’, of course.
Google has just launched a DNS service similar to OpenDNS, which I’ve written about previously. The service, dubbed “Google Public DNS“, aims to make domain name lookups (i.e. “What does www.google.com mean?”) faster, and is one of the steps in their plan to make the internet faster — or taking control of it, depending on how dramatic you want to sound.
You can test it by setting your computer or router’s DNS settings to the following DNS server IP addresses:
- 8.8.8.8
- 8.8.4.4
For instructions, see the Google Public DNS configuration instructions.
Unlike OpenDNS, which supports itself by providing advertisement-powered search pages for unresolved queries, Google promises that it will never do any form of redirection. A little strange, considering Google runs the largest advertisement service on the planet, but perhaps they genuinely just do want to make the internet faster.
In my tests, Google Public DNS had a significantly faster response time than OpenDNS from my location in Stockholm, Sweden (Europe). If you’d like to find out which DNS servers are right for you, Google also recently released a DNS server benchmark tool called namebench, which tells you just that, factoring in all of the major public DNS services as well as regional ISP DNS servers.
Note that you should never use DNS servers that you don’t trust. DNS providers have full control over what ‘google.com’, ‘gmail.com’, etc. mean to your machine, and can redirect connections to these websites to malicious websites without your knowledge.
CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, just succeeded in colliding particles in the Large Hadron Collider after years of pigeons, baguettes and other interesting service disruptions — and hey, would you look at that, we’re all still here.
I’ll regret writing that when I get jumped by headcrabs and vortigaunts in the morning.
See the official press release and the event’s live commentary. To the Higgs Boson!
Readability is a bookmarklet that sanitizes web pages not designed with readability in mind, like the vast majority of blogs. I can’t remember how many times I’ve caught myself reading eye-fraggingly small text on a site with a left-oriented, 10% width content column, and wondered why I need such a deliciously large monitor.
Go to the website, customize your design, drag the bookmarklet to your bookmarks bar, then go to a non-aesthetic web page and click the bookmark — voilà! Hopefully, you should feel no need to use the bookmarklet on this site. If you do, though, let me know why.
Check out the Arc90 Lab for more stuff from the authors of Readability; they make some pretty cool stuff. I especially like HashMask and HalfMask.
A branch called chromiumos was just added to the official Chromium git repository, and the contents of the index files there indicate that Chromium OS, and in effect Google Chrome OS, is based on Ubuntu Linux. From chromiumos.git/src/package_repo/repo_list_image.txt:
71 fontconfig 2.6.0-1ubuntu12 optional utils pool/main/f/fontconfig/fontconfig_2.6.0-1ubuntu12_i386.deb 72 fontconfig-config 2.6.0-1ubuntu12 optional libs pool/main/f/fontconfig/fontconfig-config_2.6.0-1ubuntu12_all.deb 73 gcc-4.4-base 4.4.1-1ubuntu3 required libs pool/main/g/gcc-4.4/gcc-4.4-base_4.4.1-1ubuntu3_i386.deb
Here are some videos from the Chromium OS website that just went live:
What is Google Chrome OS?
Chromium OS Security
Chromium OS & Open Source
Chromium Fast Boot
There’s a live transcript of the Google Chrome OS event speech by Google VP of Product Management, Sundar Pichai, over at TechCrunch. They have also just posted a video demo of Google Chrome OS recorded at the announcement event in Mountain View, showing off the interface, bootup times, and more.
Update: Ars Technica has just published an excellent analysis of Chrome OS.
It seems very likely that Google is planning to release their own phone; not ‘merely’ a phone based on their mobile operating system, Android, but the Google phone — their take on the iPhone. Michael Arrington thinks the phone won’t be a traditional cellphone, but rather rely on data connections/VoIP via Google Voice entirely. Google already has the technology (they can rebuild him?) to give users of its Google Voice service real phone numbers; it seems like a logical next step.
Google is building their own branded phone that they’ll sell directly and through retailers. They were long planning to have the phone be available by the holidays, but it has now slipped to early 2010. The phone will be produced by a major phone manufacturer but will only have Google branding (Microsoft did the same thing with their first Zunes, which were built by Toshiba).
There won’t be any negotiation or compromise over the phone’s design of features – Google is dictating every last piece of it. No splintering of the Android OS that makes some applications unusable. Like the iPhone for Apple, this phone will be Google’s pure vision of what a phone should be.
I wonder if Google is having a serious go at world domination right now. First browsers, programming languages, operating systems, internet protocols, Wave, and now phones — where does it end? Oh well; for now, I don’t want it to.
Grab your windbreaker jacket cause it’s a cold, stormy day in hell. Microsoft is going to release the Windows 7 USB/DVD download tool under the GNU General Public License, the de facto Open Source license.
Okay, so they might have a strong moral, even legal, obligation to do so since the tool contains code licensed under the GPL already (you cannot change source code licensed under the GPL without making your changes publicly available under the same terms) — still, it’s the thought that counts, ..right?
See Microsoft Open Source Community Manager Peter Galli’s official announcement and the original license violation claim by Rafael Rivera Jr. for more information.
The NASA Ames Research Center has just discovered a significant amount of water on the moon:
NASA today opened a new chapter in our understanding of the moon. Preliminary data from the Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, indicates that the mission successfully uncovered water during the Oct. 9, 2009 impacts into the permanently shadowed region of Cabeus crater near the moon’s south pole.
The impact created by the LCROSS Centaur upper stage rocket created a two-part plume of material from the bottom of the crater. The first part was a high angle plume of vapor and fine dust and the second a lower angle ejecta curtain of heavier material. This material has not seen sunlight in billions of years.
“We’re unlocking the mysteries of our nearest neighbor and by extension the solar system. It turns out the moon harbors many secrets, and LCROSS has added a new layer to our understanding,” said Michael Wargo, chief lunar scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
Scientists have long speculated about the source of vast quantities of hydrogen that have been observed at the lunar poles. The LCROSS findings are shedding new light on the question of water, which could be more widespread and in greater quantity than previously suspected.
For the full story, read NASA’s official announcement. There are also graphs and images related to the discovery.
Science rage!
