The Mars Phoenix mission gets extended.
“We are literally trying to make hay as the sun shines,” Barry Goldstein, Phoenix project manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, told reporters.
Though I don’t think Barry knows what literally means.
Thomson Reuters is suing George Masons University, sponsors of the Zotero bibliographic software. The Disruptive Library technology blog has details and extracts from the suit.
I’d note that it doesn’t look like the Thomson legal team actually had anyone look at the Zotero code. The complaint alleges that “users of Zotero [are freely converting] the EndNote Software’s proprietary .ens style files into open source Zotero .csl style files and further distributing such converted files to others.”
It’s hard to figure out what Thomson Reuters thinks they’re gaining with the lawsuit, aside from the eternal ire of technically-savvy people all over the world.
According to a story from Courthouse News Service, Reuters is claiming that George Mason is violating the terms of its license agreement by including a function in Zotero that will convert citation styles from the proprietary EndNote format to a format that can be used by Zotero. Reuters also asking for $10 million in damages for destroying the EndNote customer base. Since George Mason is a state institution, the Commonwealth of Virginia is also named in the suit.
The Boston Globe has a gorgeous set of photos from Baikonur.
When NASA’s last scheduled Space Shuttle mission lands in June of 2010, the United States will not have the capability to get astronauts into space again until the scheduled launch of the new Orion spacecraft in 2015. Over those five years, the U.S. manned space program will be relying heavily on Russia and its Baikonur Cosmodrome facility in Kazakhstan. Baikonur is an entire Kazakh city, rented and administered by Russia. The Cosmodrome was founded in 1955, making it one of the oldest space launch facilites still in operation. Here are collected some photographs of manned and unmanned launches from Baikonur over the past several years.
This drives me up the wall. If you’re not there to vote, you’re not doing your job.
Congress is poised to vote on the biggest government intervention in the financial markets since the Great Depression, but it’s unlikely that any of the three senators vying for the White House will be there, even though all three have talked of little else for over a week.
Seriously, your job is to represent your state in the Senate. If I just ran around the country, without showing up to work, do you think I could keep my job? State governors are not exempt, either.
If you’re running for national office, you should resign your current political job. Period.
I think if you’re the teacher who had to force a student to remove a red, white, and blue t-shirt, you’d have to feel pretty silly.
Officials at the Merced County school confirmed Thursday that Jake Shelly was forced to take off a red white and blue tie-dyed American flag T-shirt on Tuesday. The shirt said nothing offensive just “United States of America Washington D.C.”
Josh Harris quotes John Frame about single-issue voting.
This is not to say that political choices are always obvious. Often we must choose the lesser of two evils. Candidate Mershon may have a better view of one issue than Candidate Beates, while Beates has a better view on a different issue. It is an art to weigh the importance of different issues and to come to a godly conclusion. Each of us should have a large amount of tolerance for other Christians who come to conclusions that are different from ours. Rarely will one issue trump all others, though I must say that I will never vote for a candidate who advocates or facilitates the killing of unborn children.”-John Frame, The Doctrine of the Christian Life (P&R 2008). p. 617.
I haven’t read that Frame book, but I really like how he views the question.
Heh, to each his own. I’ve always held that the Java widgets are some of the ugliest I’ve seen since Motif, but Claudio compares them favorably against Qt.
…tellico is QT and thus ugly as hell (not as important, but not pleasant to work with).
By contrast, JabRef has a very clean interface and the search is fine for my needs (regular expressions). You can even change the look and make it look it like a GTk+ application.
I didn’t know about the Gtk+ theme. I’ll have to figure out if I have that available somewhere on my system.
I have another minor release of Tellico, 1.3.4, available.The changes include:
I drafted a letter last week, after being at the Rose Bowl to see UCLA beat TN, 27-24, in a depressing, but exciting game. I was really disappointed in the UCLA fans for the three and a half quarters. They only seemed to realized that they were at a football game sometime in the fourth quarter.
But I waited too long to send the letter to the UCLA Athletics Dept. or to one of the local papers. Oh well…
Congratulations to the UCLA Bruins and Coach Neuheisel for an exciting win last night. The Bruin defense really kept their team in the game in the first half, and the offense came through when it mattered. The resilience of the football team was impressive.
Unfortunately, the experience at the Rose Bowl as a fan was anything but impressive. As a transplanted Volunteer fan, I was excited about the chance to see Tennessee play in the Rose Bowl. I was sitting in section 14 with five friends, tickets that I was told were in the visiting team section. In reality, it was a fair mix of Vol and Bruin fans. Bruin fans appear to believe that when you go to a football game, you sit down and don’t raise your voice until the fourth quarter. My friends and I were on our feet cheering for most of the first quarter. That didn’t sit well with the fans in our section, who called security over to tell us to sit down. We were rather incredulous when the supervisor told us we were not allowed to stand up again until halftime. Is that what passes for football excitement for UCLA? I’ve never been in a quieter stadium during a game in which neither team ever led by more than seven points.
The security supervisor was very cordial and told us that it was considered UCLA courtesy at the Rose Bowl to stay seated. I hope every Bruin fan who makes the trek to Knoxville next year realizes that they probably won’t be able to see much if they stay seated. If the football monopoly in Los Angeles is truly over, UCLA fans will need to be educated about how to cheer at a real football game.
Raphaël Pinson recently blogged about using Tellico for his collection of board games. He’d emailed me to ask about searching Amazon, so I expanding the Tellico search to include Toys. That’ll be in the next version release, 1.3.4 I guess.
The catch is that Amazon just lumps a lot of the information as BrowseNodes, including the number of players, game genre, age group, and others. And, as my fiancee would say, the vocabulary is not controlled at all. The format is free-form, for the most part. I can’t really blame Amazon for that, but it does make it impossible to sort through meaningfully.
And unfortunately, Tellico and GCstar don’t import and export board game collections from each other yet, so I my suggestion to Raphaël to use the GCstar plugin didn’t work.
I’ll have to take a shot at getting that import working in Tellico, at least. My list of things to work on grows!