Archive | October, 2003

From The Doc Searls Weblog: “Storm of Light.

NASA’s October 2003 Aurora Gallery has some amazing photographs of the aurora show that the current series of solar storms has been putting on. Here’s a shot from the USAF Defense Meteorological Satellite Program that shows auroras that are not only brighter than the city lights below them, but blurring the city images as well. If you look at the yellow outlines of state, provincial and Great Lake boundaries, you’ll see that the brightest auroras ran in a line from Southern Quebec and Ontario through Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota and South Dakota ÷ right over the cities of Quebec, Montreal, Toronto, Detroit, Milwaukee and Sioux Falls.

That was at 0214 UTC on 30 October, or 9:14pm, EST in the U.S. and Canada on 29 October. In other words, the night before last. Since auroras run up to 800 miles high, they are visible up to 1000 miles away or more. Which is why we have sightings as far south as Florida and Texas.

Though subsiding, the latest storm is still going on (as of dawn here in Santa Barbara). According to the NOAA POES Auroral Activity Map, there is still intense activity where it’s still dark: over the Northern and Yukon Territories of Canada, nearly all of Alaska, the entire northern border of Russia, and the southern reaches of New Zealand and Australia.

NASA has a terrific page on Space Weather that includes photos of auroras from space and 9MB movie titled Animiation of CME impact on Earth’s magnetosphere. A great watch if you have the bandwidth.”

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

I’m looking for external hard drive solutions for making disk images and backups of a couple of our office laptops. Any opinions on 4200/5400/7200 rpm and bus-powered vs. transformer-powered would be welcomed. Tom’s hardware had a good review in “Mobile Data Storage: Up To 160 GB via USB and FireWire,” “External, But How? Mobile Storage Solutions Compared,” and “Smart and Simple: Portable 2.5″ Hard Drives from Fujitsu and Valueplus.”

My conclusion so far is that Firewire (built into one of the laptops and available in PC Card for the other) is the best way to go, and a 3.5″ drive the best choice. A fan is wise, and I think 7200 rpm is attractive, but worry about the noise and heat.

Any experiences would be welcomed. Epinions has some relevant reviews. A package deal like this at USB-Ware.com – 160 Gb, 7200 rpm, 2 Mb cache in an ADS Firewire/USB2 case for $270 – looks like a pretty good deal.

A friend let me know that my page was throwing a scripting error in Internet Explorer. I hadn’t thought of trying that – it works okay in Mozilla and Opera. Here’s the dialog box. Notice the editbox on the bottom half? You can’t copy the text from the dialog. Why would you? Perhaps you want to log the error. Or post it to a newsgroup seeking help. Or search online for the error. Or send an email to Craig letting him know he, too, has a scripting error. If you don’t want to let people edit it, why would you put it in an editbox? Stupid user interface design.

Joe Average User Is In Trouble. Opinion Where’s my security blanket? [The Register]

A rare thing, a calm and reasoned opinion piece from The Register. A call to arms for computer professionals to help the computer helpless.

From Scripting News: “I’m at the Zap Your PRAM conference in Cavendish, PEI. ”

That sounds like quite the get-together. Several friends and collegues have kicked around the idea for years that we need to have a conference and not invite attendees, just speakers, or participants. Sounds like what these folks are doing. I’ll be interested in how they get the dynamics to work out. It can be difficult when everyone in the group is a Type A extrovert.