You Decide

Watch this video and then ponder: which Ted do you think more accurately reflects the views of the majority of Americans -- Kennedy or Nugent?


I know what I think...

They're Baaaack!

The old blog photos, that is. All 3,000 of them!

Well, almost all. There were few images that were incompatible with Blogger (mainly animated GIFs). But everything else is there!

Geek Alert! Do not continue reading if you are not a geek...

It has taken me exactly one month of spare-time programming and diddling and tweaking to get there, but I have finally succeeded in transforming my old blog (which ran on Pebble, on a Tomcat platform) to the Blogger platform. With minor exceptions, everything is back the way it was. Here's what it took:

1. I wrote a program that converted the Pebble posts (each in an XML file) to Blogger posts. I used JDOM to read the Pebble XML files, and the Blogger API to post them to my blog. The main challenge in this program was to convert the non-HTML markups in Pebble to HTML for consumption by Blogger. This involved porting a bunch of classes called "Decorators" in Pebble to my conversion program, and making a style sheet that rendered the posts properly in Blogger. The Blogger API is very easy to use; the only real problem I ran into there was that Google initially limited me to importing 50 posts per day. After I begged for a break, they raised the limit to 500. This code took me three days to write and debug, and then it took a week to get all the posts on Blogger.
   
   
2. Next I wrote a program that transferred all the images on the old blog to Picasa, using the Picasa API. This was necessary because the Blogger API doesn't provide any means of posting images. The main challenge for this step was the need to convert all image file types to JPG files; to do this I had to learn the ImageIO API in Java, including a series of quirks related to "transcoding" from one file type to another. Trust me, it was a pain in the neck! This program also built a database that kept track of the image URLs as they appeared in the old blog and the new Picasa URL. I ran this program over the past weekend; it took 11 hours over a high-bandwidth connection to transfer the 3,004 images from the old blog to Picasa.
   
   
3. Next I wrote a progam that munged all the old posts on Blogger, changing the href and src references to point to Picasa instead. I used the Blogger API again for this program. The main challenge in this program was identifying and correctly tranforming the many variations of IMG and A tags my blog had accumulated over the years.
   
   
4. Finally, I wrote a popup viewer (in JavaScript) to more elegantly handle the display of a large image when a thumbnail is clicked. Picasa serves up any image in up to 17 different sizes; my viewer attempts to pick the most appropriate size, taking into account screen resolution, window size, etc.

This is one project I'm very glad to have behind me!

Tower of Power

What on earth is this gobbledygook?

Free Energy for Spaceship Earth

Free Energy for Spaceship Earth will take you on an incredible journey, revealing the means to provide a nonpolluting, unlimited source of energy that will stem the tsunami tide of global warming and make free energy available to the entire planet. Over thirty years ago, this solution to the world energy crisis was presented as an advancement of Tesla technology. Discover how this new technology, based on the interdimensional science of energy, will enable scientists to develop Nikola Tesla's vision of a World Wide Energy System and Power Tower.

The new video program also includes Infinite Concept: Lesson #3 - Part 1. This enlightening lesson focuses on energy and mass, explaining how they are interchangeable and how energy functions by well-ordered principles in the interdimensional cosmos.

Ask the Unarians; they've got this interdimensional thing down pat...

Summer Nights...

This morning the dogs woke me a little earlier than usual, and I was up, showered, and ready to take them for a walk just before 4 AM. At this time of year, that's just before the first hints of dawn start showing in our northeastern sky -- so the sky was still pitch-black (the moon had set hours previously).

When my eyes adjusted to the darkness, the first thing I noticed was the Milky Way splayed out across the sky, passing right over my head. Beautiful! And as I stood their gawking at it (with an uncomprehending puppy bouncing around on the end of a leash), I saw a meteorite flash briefly in the northwestern sky. A few seconds later, another one flashed in the northern sky. Over the space of the next few minutes, I counted six meteorites in total; one of them a "long trail" meteorite with a visible flame trail -- and even a smoke trail lit by dimly by the pre-dawn sun at higher altitude.

Getting back in the house, I looked up the meteor showers predicted for June. The Boötids reach their maximum in just two days:

Prior to 1998, only two definite returns had been detected, in 1916 and 1927, and with no significant reports between 1928 —1997, it seemed probable these meteoroids no longer encountered Earth. The dynamics of the stream were poorly understood, although recent theoretical modelling has improved our comprehension. The shower's parent Comet 7P/Pons-Winnecke has an orbit that now lies around 0.24 astronomical units outside the Earth's at its closest approach. It was last at perihelion in 2002, and is next due in late 2008. Consequently, the 1998 and 2004 returns resulted from material shed by the comet in the past, and which now lies on slightly different orbits to the comet itself. Dust trails laid down at various perihelion returns during the 19th century seem to have been responsible for the last two main outbursts.

If you're an early riser, you might want to go outside and do a little observing the next couple of mornings!