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This was a royal pain in my ass to get working, and frankly, it’s not that interesting. I’ve been scouring the net for a way to display large panoramas recently. I was looking for a flash app, initially, but I couldn’t find anything I didn’t have to pay for. I finally decided to try out a javascript approach from here.

Getting it running in a stand-alone HTML file was not too bad. But I just killed a good chunk of my evening getting the stupid thing to display correctly in the post. Eventually it got to the point where it was actually working, except that I somehow triggered chrome’s cross-site scripting detection. I still have on idea why. But, it seems it only happens in the preview, sooooo….here you are. Aguereberry Point, in Death Valley:

Higher-res version of the shot is on flickr.

I’d just like to point out that if you search for “electric clipper” on google images, there is a picture of me with a hole in my hair on the first page. Woohoo! But, if you add an ’s’, I am lost in obscurity.

CERN lab goes ‘colder than space’

That’s an impressive task: Keeping a 27km ring under vacuum and chilled to 1.9 degrees Kelvin. Looks like it is working though. Now they just need to guide7TeV protons around it.

Mary and I spent the 4th of July weekend in San Francisco, where we saw a fireworks show unlike any I’d ever seen: Fireworks through fog. Actually, we couldn’t even see most of the good stuff. But when it got really loud and the clouds got really bright, you knew it was a good part. The crowd didn’t seem too put off. Neither were we. San Francisco is an awesome city! We rented bikes on Saturday and went on a nice long ride around the city, going over the Golden Gate Bridge, and riding through Golden Gate Park.

On the way out Sunday, we stopped by the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Unfortunately, I didn’t bring in the camera, but this place was cool. And free! We got to see a working demonstration of the Babbage Difference Engine #2 which was built a few years ago by a guy from the London Science Museum. I saw an older version of the Babbage difference engine in London when I was there, but it was in a glass case and I didn’t really understand how it worked. In mountain view they give demonstrations regularly where they go through how it works and actually crank out the first 30 values of a polynomial. In the demo we saw, the machine got jammed and the terms after that ended wrong. I think I’ll stick to my silicon-based computing. But it was cool to see none-the-less. They also had all kinds of old computer hardware, including a 2ft diameter hard disk platter (it stored 10MB, I believe it was)! They have a video about the museum on youtube.

A few more pictures after the jump…

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Honda is preparing to release 200 fuel cell powered vehicles, called the FCX Clarity, on Southern California and Japan. I think I want one. They claim 270 miles distance between fillings, and they apparently are working on a home based electrolysis system so you can refill in your own garage! The cost is $600/month to lease. Not cheap, but not as high as I would have guessed.

Just one more reason I smile every time I see the cost of gas rise.

Check out this BBC article, or Honda’s FCX Clarity Page.

Thanks to a co-worker, I’ve recently purchased what might be the best mouse ever. There are a number of great things about it. First of all, it is well-built, small, and the sensor works really well on any surface. But a few things in particular stand out.

First of all, the wheel works in two modes, which you can select by pressing it down. In the first mode, it works like every other mouse-wheel I’ve used, “clicking” through a series of position as you scroll it. In the second mode, the wheel is nearly frictionless. When you give it a spin it keeps on spinning until you stop it, allowing you to fly through long documents. This can be amazingly handy (although also a tad difficult to get used to).

Secondly, the receiver is small enough that you hardly see it, and I can leave it in my laptop while throwing it into my backpack without any fear of breaking anything.

Thirdly, it came with a nice little remote USB port (connected via wire) that I can plug into my desktop and place on my desk for easy plug in if I want to use it on my desktop. This, by the way, proves much more useful for other devices (flash drives!) than the mouse, as the mouse pretty much lives with my laptop.

Finally, it comes with a nice little bag for transport. It can be had for about $50, at places like tigerdirect.com. If you’re thinking that $50 is more than you’re willing to pay for a mouse, think about this: How long have you had that mouse you’re clicking with now? That $50 purchase should be around a long time!

Looking for some good streaming music? I’ve recently discovered Pandora, where I can enter a few artists or song and create a “station” that will play a set of songs similar to the ones I’ve entered. I’ve been impressed. I’ve heard a lot of good music, some from artists I’ve never heard of, and they  do a remarkable job of determining what is “similar”. And, it’s free (like I’d pay!).

From Pandora.com:

On January 6, 2000 a group of musicians and music-loving technologists came together with the idea of creating the most comprehensive analysis of music ever.

Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or “genes” into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song – everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It’s not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records – it’s about what each individual song sounds like.

Since we started back in 2000, we’ve carefully listened to the songs of tens of thousands of different artists – ranging from popular to obscure – and analyzed the musical qualities of each song one attribute at a time. This work continues each and every day as we endeavor to include all the great new stuff coming out of studios, clubs and garages around the world.

If there was ever any doubt about the importance of the International Space Station, it should be put to rest now, as it is to be used as launching platform for the first paper airplanes to perform atmospheric reentry. As published in this Science article, the Japan Origami Plane Association and the University of Tokyo hope to launch 100 folded paper airplanes, constructed from a heat-resistant paper, from the station to descend to earth with multi-lingual messages providing instructions on how to return any that are found. A 7cm long model was tested in a high-speed wind tunnel and shown to survive airspeeds of Mach 7!

If we assume all 100 planes survive reentry, and the earth is 70% covered by water, then 30 planes should land on dry land. Now the question is, how much of that land is actually populated such that there is any hope of finding the plane? Even in populated areas, I’d predict it is no better than 50/50 chances that somebody actually picks it up. Still, it would be cool. They have not yet, it seems, gotten a go ahead from NASA for this little experiment. But, what could it hurt? It can’t cost much to launch some paper airplanes up along with a shuttle!

So I’m here killing time at Panera again; this time waiting for Mom and Dustin’s  delayed flight to get into LAX. Today’s observation involves computer lust. The guy across the room from me is setup with this laptop, which really isn’t a LAPtop at all! But if you are looking for portable screen real estate….wow. At first, I thought he had brought a stand-alone monitor to Panera with him! My laptop feels so small now. Of course, I’m going to walk out of here comfortably with mine in my backpack. I don’t think I’d want to carry his very far!

Engadget review:  http://www.engadget.com/2006/06/01/dell-xps-m2010-reviewed/

I had my first Disney theme park experience recently. Mary finally took me after talking about it forever! All in all, I’d have to say I was pretty impressed. Nothing like the roller coasters of Busch Gardens or Kings Dominions, that’s for sure. In fact, there were only really two rides that qualify as roller-coasters as far as I’m concerned. But they definitely go all out on the immersion factor. Whether it is the stars flying by in the dark and the music of Space Mountain, holographic ghosts on haunted house, or images projected on sheets of dry ice smoke, I spent a lot of time going, “Wow that’s cool! How’d they do that?”.

They also really know how to run a theme park. Compared to others I’ve been to, it is way cleaner, people are nicer, and they amazingly efficient at moving a line through a ride. I mean, they run double loading stations, have non stop loading on conveyor belts, and have a “Fastpass” system, so you can get a certain number of bypass the line passes per hour, and can then come back at a future time (marked on the pass, depending on demand) and bypass most of the line. Also cool: Interactive rides. On Astroblaster, you get to go through the ride shooting targets with a laser, competing for a high score. Nothing like competition to make the ride more fun . The California Tower Hotel (Tower of Terror) was also pretty cool. I can almost see why people would want to travel across the world to visit the place. For a young disney fan at the right age, I think it would seem downright magical. Pictures can be found here. Also, this girl was going crazy on a rope on the Lion King float in the parade!