2008/04/22

Served up in a fine china Meatri Dish

Love the Steak and Save the Cow:

"PETA offers a $1 million prize to whoever can come up with tasty, edible, lab-grown meat, an advance they say would save billions of animals while still satisfying our carnivorous cravings."


Of course there's another solution, courtesy of the late, great Douglas Adams:
The animal staggered to its feet. It gave a mellow gurgle.
'A very wise choice, sir, if I may say so. Very good,' it
said, 'I'll just nip off and shoot myself.'
He turned and gave a friendly wink to Arthur.
'Don't worry, sir,' he said, 'I'll be very humane.'

2008/04/17

Why Lockheed Martin signed on w. the Spaceport

From KRQE in Albuquerque: Spaceport launch tests future spacecraft




"It looks a bit like the space shuttle and would fly to space and return the same way. But even the big version would not carry people, just satellites.

The goal is to get to orbit faster and cheaper thanks to an automated reusable spacecraft run by its own computers and just a handful of people for a launch crew."

New Scientist: Revealed: the Asian source of the annual flu epidemic

Revealed: the Asian source of the annual flu epidemic - health - 17 April 2008 - New Scientist:

"Better surveillance in east Asia should lead to better predictions of how flu is evolving, and what is likely to be needed in next year's flu vaccine, says Smith."

2008/04/08

Thank you, wsgi

Thanks to all of the developers behind wsgi.

When I first heard about it, wsgi struck me as an unnecessary complication. Then someone showed me how it could simplify testing of web applications. And now:

High-Scalability:

Google App Engine supports any framework written in pure Python that speaks CGI (and any WSGI-compliant framework using a CGI adaptor), including Django, CherryPy, Pylons, and web.py. You can bundle a framework of your choosing with your application code by copying its code into your application directory.

2008/04/04

Visual Web Developer "Failed to start monitoring changes"

I keep forgetting about this...

I'd like to do development on an ASP.NET web application which resides in a VMware Fusion shared folder. Unfortunately, as noted in the Microsoft Forums, Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition (at least) does not support hosting on a UNC share.

So, AFAICT, the only option is to do development in a local folder. To access that folder from the host operating system, it needs to be shared from the Windows VM.

VMware Fusion, OpenSUSE 10.3 x64, copy and paste

I recently installed a 64-bit OpenSUSE 10.3 virtual machine under VMware Fusion. Everything worked fine except cut&paste -- the vmware-user executable was not launching when X11 started.

ldd showed a dependency on libexpat.so.0, in addition to libexpat.so.1. I installed that using yast, rebooted, and -- huzzah -- cut&paste now works.

yast_install_libexpat.png

More details are available in the VMware Fusion discussions forum.