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I don't think I've had as much fun in a very long time.

Today was the first day I did a presentation to third grade students using the StarLab portable planetarium. StarLab is awesome enough, but the kids inside StarLab are far more awesome.

Just a few things that knocked their socks off:

• That there are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on all the beaches in the world.
• That we are "stardust" -- literally made of the stuff that came from ancient exploding stars.
• That it takes 100,000 years for light to get from one end of our galaxy to the other.

I love seeing the world (universe) through their eyes.

If it were only possible to make a great living do this a few times a week, I would be

Check THIS out!

New system makes any digital camera take multibillion-pixel shots.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, in collaboration with scientists at NASA’s Ames Research Center, have built a low-cost robotic device that enables any digital camera to produce breathtaking gigapixel (billions of pixels) panoramas, called GigaPans.

First of all, this is a great idea; making it possible for ordinary people, all over the world, to create multi gigapixel panoramic images of their environment.

It was back in January that I purchased a Meade LX 90 telescope. Why I didn't post back then, nor since, I don't have an explanation for.

The LX 90 comes in various apertures (or ... sizes in common parlance). The aperture is basically the size of the mirror (most economical telescopes are built using mirrors as opposed to refactors which are very expensive).

The bigger the mirror (aperture), the more light the telescope gathers and therefore the more (dim) objects in space you

Crackle has secured the exclusive, worldwide distribution rights to Mr. Deity, the brilliant, biting original comedy from writer/director Brian Dalton. Saturday Night Live alumna Julia Sweeney has dubbed it "Hilarious! I laughed really, really hard." The 10 episodes currently on the site have received over 5.7 million views since March 2007. As a result of the overwhelming viewer response, Crackle has committed to an additional 10 episodes for Season Two which will premiere in Moving Targets, Crackle's upcoming sketch variety channel.

This is great news!!

For those of you who do not what Mr. Deity is, I highly recommend you stop by and watch.

I have been reading quite a bit of Ray Kurzweil lately. In particular, his book The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence. A computer scientist, inventor and futurist, he has a lot to say about the subject.

The book is about The Singularity, described as the massive transition of humanity once we create machines that are smarter than we are. Vastly smarter. Kurzweil believes this will happen within this century. Indeed, he believes it will occur well within the

For a 'blog titled "Art and Software," I really don't write a lot about art. Jeez. I'm going to have to change that.

Anyway. Today was the conclusion of a very frustrating two days of bug hunting. As it turns out (and this is pretty much always the case), it was something simple. Something in plain sight to someone with fresh eyes. This is so typical that I must relate why I have a love affair with bugs -- especially bugs I created.

The guy I work directly under set me on the right track by pointing out that what I was doing didn't quite make sense from the perspective of the project we are working on. We are building something that is going to be deployed in Europe. I was testing using a configuration for

As I mentioned in my previous post, Amazon.com allows their developers to use whatever tools they want, including whatever languages they want.

The natural question that arises from this is: how can they possibly manage all of that? How can such a diverse software base be deployed reliably? What about coding standards? Where is the accountability? What if it doesn’t work?

Naturally, I can not go into how Amazon does its development. But I can say this:

I enjoyed reading this interview with Amazon's CTO, Werner Vogels. It is interesting timing, too; I currently am working for Amazon. I just started a little over a month ago.

Amazon has embodied a simple philosophy that I generally only see in the Extreme Programming camp: the concept of

After working in software for more than 15 years, I have had my fair share of interview questions. What I have found most interesting is the spectrum of questions. In particular, the far ends of the spectrum; the really good interview questions and the really bad ones...

Over the years, I have worked with small, medium and large companies. In fact, some of them have been very very large. What I find interesting is the contrast regarding building large applications in Perl between people in small companies versus those in very large corporations.

With regard to using Perl in a large application, people in small development companies seem to have a consistently pragmatic, optimistic perspective. They don't rule out building a large application using a so-called "scripting language." PHP, after all, is a scripting language. Lots of large web sites, for better or for worse, have been built using it. Javascript is a "scripting language." For better or for worse, it is used on many sites in conjunction with XML to produce what we now call "AJAX" applications. Zope, a popular "content management" tool, was written entirely in Python...