Software Reality

Petabyte-chomping big sky telescope sucks down baby code

My latest article at The Register:

Robert Heinlein was right to be worried. What if there really is a planet of giant, psychic, human-hating bugs out there, getting ready to hurl planet-busting rocks in our general direction? Surely we would want to know?

Luckily, big science projects such as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), which (when it's fully operational in 2016) will photograph the entire night sky repeatedly for 10 years, will be able to spot such genocidal asteroids - although asteroid-spotting is just one small part of the LSST's overall mission.

Two years ago we spoke to Jeff Kantor, LSST data management project manager, who described the project as "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."

I caught up with Jeff again a couple of weeks ago, and asked him how this highly ambitious project is progressing.

...

They now have a prototype system of about 200,000 lines of C++ and Python representing most of the capability needed to run an astronomical survey of the magnitude typically done today. Next, they have to scale this up to support LSST volumes. According to Jeff: "We hope to have all of that functioning at about 20 per cent of LSST scale of the end of our R&D phase. We then have six years of construction and commissioning to 'bullet-proof' and improve it, and to test it out with the real telescope and camera."

Read the full article here.

Behind the Kindle, under the iPad: an unholy alliance

Here's my latest at The Register - some thoughts based on my recent trip to the Frankfurt Book Fair:

If some of the speakers at this year's Frankfurt Book Fair are to be believed, your life — or at least the part of it that involves snuggling up in bed with a good book and mug of hot cocoa — is about to be turned upside down.

Sure, we've heard plenty on books going electronic, but the coverage mostly focuses on the devices — Kindles, iPads, et al. — rather than the books themselves.

I've written a number of books on software development, and recently began my own publishing company, Fingerpress. I therefore approached this event from the perspective of an upstart book publisher trying to figure out how our published works should fit into the e-publishing space.

I expected the answer to be a bewildering mix of grey areas, but surprisingly — despite the diversity on offer — the answer turned out to be quite clear-cut.

Der Frankfurter Buchmesse 2010's crowded halls feature several so-called technology Hot Spots. The Devices Hot Spot is oddly named because it isn't about devices. Instead it features advances in content creation and delivery — that murky zone in between the device and the customer. One company inhabiting this area is exhibitor Stilo, which specialize in converting content into XML and EPUB formats. Smashwords, which wasn't at the show, converts to a much broader range of platforms for free — provided you use their distribution service, of course.

The Mobile Hot Spot was exactly that, while the Information Management Hot Spot supposedly bought together "the latest developments in workflow processes, content management systems, multimedia integration and advanced content delivery platforms."

There were also Hot Spots for publishing services, literature, special interest (top shelf, sir?), and education.

The predominant message behind almost all of the tech exhibitors at each Hot Spot was this: e-books are here, they're cool, and we should all be using them. Whether that's actually true or not is a different matter.

. . .

The problem is that books — novels especially — are entrenched in our habits and expectations. People love a good novel, and that's unlikely to change. They don't want the formula to be messed with too much. And as for fragmentation? It's always been easier to print a leaflet than a novel, but novels still sell by the million, whereas "short-shorts" don't.

What is changing, and rapidly, is the way that books are delivered to us, along with the medium the words are displayed on. From the Apple iBookstore to Kindle to Kobo, it's never been easier to buy a book and be reading it a few seconds later. And while the device is where the excitement is, the real war is to potentially own the e-publishing "middle tier" — the site that readers go to in order to buy their books.

>> Read the full article at The Register.