Ants on the Melon
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Today I discovered an iPhone app that I can’t wait to get my hands on: New York Nearest Subway by acrossair.

This is one of those “augmented reality” apps that have been getting attention lately. The idea is to overlay information onto a 3D view of your surroundings. The new iPhone 3Gs makes this possible, and acrossair has taken advantage of it to produce something really useful – locating nearby subways. Watch the video below to see how it works.

Currently they are waiting for approval from Apple to get it into the AppStore. I’d love to see it in there before Saturday morning, since I’m heading to NYC this weekend and I can’t wait to try it out.

Richard told me about this magnetic migraine reliever a while back, but it looks like it’s finally about to come out of testing:

The device, about the size of a hair dryer, is put up against the back of the head, and users push a button to administer the magnetic pulse. The study showed it eliminated the headache within two hours for 39 percent of participants; 22 percent in the placebo group reported no pain two hours later. Study participants used the device twice per migraine episode within an hour of experiencing an aura. Up to three migraines were treated per patient over a three-month period.

The article says this device is primarily for migraine sufferers who experience auras. I’ve never gotten auras, but I do have intense pain behind my eyes during a migraine, and supposedly this device can help with that as well. The only way I can explain that pain is to imagine someone shining a strong flashlight directly into your eyes from about 5 inches away. And this doesn’t stop until the migraine is gone, which can take days.

I am excited to see what the LHC can show us:

Everything about the collider sounds, well, large — from the 14 trillion electron volts of energy with which it will smash together protons, its cast of thousands and the $8 billion it cost to build, to the 128 tons of liquid helium needed to cool the superconducting magnets that keep the particles whizzing around their track and the three million DVDs worth of data it will spew forth every year.

A little over two years ago I began using the Camino web browser on my Mac instead of Firefox and Safari. I really liked how it had the feel of Firefox, with the Mac OS X UI. Lately though, Camino hasn’t been keeping up.

I’ve been watching the development of Firefox 3, and have been looking forward to it being released. I wasn’t sure if I would switch back completely, but I just watched a screencast that gave an overview of the new features in Firefox 3, and well I think I’m going back.

Also, Firefox 3 for the Mac is going to look and feel like all the other apps on a Mac. Just one more reason to switch back. Maybe Firefox will finally reach their goal of 20% browser market share.

Next Monday I’ll be flying home for Christmas on Continental Airlines, so I think I’ll try out their new electronic check-in option, which is being tested at Houston’s Bush Intercontinental Airport.

Finally, an electronic boarding pass that isn’t paper.

From Wired: How Super-Precise Atomic Clocks Will Change the World in a Decade

At that level, clocks will be precise enough that they’ll have to correct for the relativistic effects of the shape of the earth, which changes every day in reaction to environmental factors. (Some of the research clocks already need to account for changes in the NIST building’s size on a hot day.) That’s where the work at the Time and Frequency Division begins to overlap with cosmology, astrophysics and space-time.

And

That means passing a precise clock over different landscapes yields different gravity offsets, which could be used to map the presence of oil, liquid magma or water underground. NIST, in short, is building the first dowsing rod that works.

On a moving ship, such a clock would change rate with the shape of the ocean floor, and even the density of the earth beneath. On a volcano, it would change with the moving and vibrating of magma within. Scientists using maps of these variations could differentiate salt and freshwater, and perhaps eventually predict eruptions, earthquakes or other natural events from the variations in gravity under the surface of the planet.

When I first started blogging about two and a half years ago I would write about just about anything, including the mundane details of every day. It didn’t take long for me to realize that this was almost always boring, and probably only of interest to me. These days I reserve blog posts for when I actually have something to say, like when I’ve visited some new place, seen a new band, or found something interesting on the Internet. But, there are often times that I want to post other things on the web that aren’t always worth a blog post.

Over the past couple of years several sites have emerged on the Internet that allow people to post different types of content to the web. For example, Flickr provides a really simple way to post photos to the web. YouTube created an easy way for anyone to share their home videos with the world. Twitter popularized the concept of “microblogging,” which is basically a single sentence or statement without much (if any) context. Del.icio.us made it easy for people to “share” their bookmarks with everyone on the Internet. MySpace became the site for people (teenagers and college kids, mostly) to post their “profile” pages on the web for everyone to see. The pages could even be decorated to be as gaudy as only a 14 year old redneck teenager could imagine.

These sites essentially became publication houses for content on the web. You publish your photos on Flickr (or Photobucket). You publish your videos on YouTube. You publish your random one-liner thoughts on Twitter (or Jaiku). You publish your bookmarks on Del.icio.us. You publish your personal data on MySpace (and/or Facebook, etc, etc, etc). And of course, you publish your blog on LiveJournal, Blogger, WordPress, TypePad or even MySpace. Everyone is publishing everything everywhere!

Of course, the point of publishing things is for other people to see them. Sure, I am interested in reading what my friends are blogging, and I like to see the pictures they are taking as well, but do I really want to check all of their pages every day to see if they have updated anything? As more of these “publication” type sites pop up on the web, it’s getting more and more difficult to follow everything my friends are doing online. Fortunately, I think I may have found a solution: Natuba.

Natuba is described as a way to “give your friends a single place to follow everything happening in your online life.” With Natuba a person can continue publishing their blog posts, photos, microblogs, bookmarks, etc in the same ways that they always have, and everything they publish gets pulled into a single place for all their friends to see. Instead of telling people 5 or 6 urls, a Natuba user only has to give a single url to everyone. For example, my Natuba page features content from this blog, my Flickr photos, my Twitter microblog, my gallery, and my YouTube videos.

Natuba was created by these three really cool guys, apparent saviors here to rescue us all from the dizzying swarm of web 2.0 sites emerging from the depths of this great ocean we call the Internet. Ok, so maybe that was a little over the top, but we have worked pretty hard building Natuba, and although there is still a lot we want to do to with it, we think it is ready for the world to play with.

Natuba accounts are available via invitation at this point, so if you would like to try it out just shoot me an email or leave a message in the comments of this post. I know a guy who knows a guy who can get you in.

I’ve updated the sidebar links on my blog here to point to my Natuba page, which is at http://natuba.com/cwright/. There are feeds available for the page as well, so if you are into that sort of thing then you can subscribe to my Natuba feed to follow everything I am posting on the Internet.

I like to check the monthly stats for browser market share and operating system market share, and I have noticed that it seems like a lot of people are still using Firefox 1 or 1.5 rather than the much improved Firefox 2 (which was released nearly 6 months ago).

If you don’t know what version you are running, go here and look in the right side column. It should look something like the image to the right here, if not you should consider upgrading.

Some of the new features are spell checking, session restore (if you quit Firefox, when you restart it all your tabs will open to where they were), better tabbed browsing, and search suggestions. It’s also a lot faster than the older versions. You can download Firefox 2 from getfirefox.com.

I never was really big into the whole IRC scene, but I do have a few channels that I like to keep an eye on, mainly because they are just groups of friends from different points in my life. For a while now I have been using irssi in a screen session from a server I maintain, so that I always have a history of the conversations even when I am offline. Tonight I decided I wanted to figure out how to get irssi to keep separate windows for each of the channels I follow across multiple servers.

First, you don’t need to edit a config file, because irssi can save out its configuration via the /save command.

I want to connect to efnet and freenode upon startup, and join a couple channels right away. We first define a couple “networks”:

/NETWORK ADD Efnet
/NETWORK ADD Freenode

Then define the servers for those networks, and tell irssi to automatically connect to those servers:

/SERVER ADD -auto -network Efnet irc.efnet.org 6667
/SERVER ADD -auto -network Freenode irc.freenode.net 6667

Then tell irssi which channels to join by default:

/CHANNEL ADD -auto #ubuntu-houston Freenode
/CHANNEL ADD -auto #blahblah Efnet

To make it easier to switch from window to window without having to type /window goto 2 or /window goto #ubuntu-houston I added a couple aliases:

/alias ubuntu /window goto #ubuntu-houston
/alias blah /window goto #blahblah

This allows me to simply type /ubuntu and /blah (using tab completion) to switch between channels.

Now that I have the settings the way I want them, I can save them to the startup config by running:

/save

And that’s it. The next time I run irssi it will automatically connect to the right servers and join the channels I want it to.