Software Reality

What I like most about Google's Chrome is...

... Firefox can be made to look just like it.

Let’s face it, we’re all shallower than we like to admit when it comes to our web browsing experience. The web itself is mostly words and pictures painted across a million miles of surface gloss. Of anyone who tried the beta of Google’s Chrome browser, I bet you all initially rushed to install it because of the concept of each tab running in an isolated sandbox, and the prospect of V8, the powerful new JavaScript engine... but what really wowed you about Chrome when it revved onto your screen? Yep, its cool streamlined appearance. Don’t know about you, but that more than anything tempted me to switch from Firefox and make Google’s stealthy new beast my main browser.

The isolated processes stuff sounds important, but it solves a problem I didn’t know I had (aside from Firefox eating up resources and needing the occasional restart). And the other touted big advantage of Chrome, its faster JavaScript engine, may already have been left in the dust by Firefox's in-the-pipeline TraceMonkey engine. So for all the hype and excitement (which has admittedly died down considerably now) around Google’s new browser, what’s the main attraction of Chrome? Its looks.

Book Review: Little Brother

Title: Little Brother
Author: Cory Doctorow
Publisher: Tor Books (April 2008)

Summary: Fast-paced and exciting but trips over its own good intentions. An uncomfortable blurring of truth with fiction detracts from an otherwise important message.

What happens if the co-editor of a popular blog like Boing Boing decides to write a novel gathering together his favourite posts and concerns from said blog? Answer: You get a fun, suitably paranoid page-turner called Little Brother.

Little Brother (LB) reads like a novelisation of the more sinister “see how the Government is raping our freedom this time” pieces on Boing Boing. If the masses are truly victims of their Government or the local council’s petty surveillance-obsessed mania, sometimes it pays to stand before the omnipresent CCTV camera and be counted. And this is where Little Brother fits in.

Mapping the universe at 30 Terabytes a night

Check out my interview with Jeff Kantor, data management project manager of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) currently under development. (Edit: Story also picked up by Slashdot). The telescope itself will be located in Chile where initial data processing will be done, with the full day's data sent nightly to the U.S.

The LSST is, in Jeff's words, "a proposed ground-based 6.7 meter effective diameter (8.4 meter primary mirror), 10 square-degree-field telescope that will provide digital imaging of faint astronomical objects across the entire sky, night after night."

When it's fully operational in 2016, the LSST will: "Open a movie-like window on objects that change or move on rapid timescales: exploding supernovae, potentially hazardous near-Earth asteroids, and distant Kuiper Belt Objects.

"The superb images from the LSST will also be used to trace billions of remote galaxies and measure the distortions in their shapes produced by lumps of Dark Matter, providing multiple tests of the mysterious Dark Energy."

Read on for some details about the software development process aspects of developing some of the world's most advanced image processing software...