http://neil.fraser.name/ Log of Neil Fraser's thoughts and activities. http://backend.userland.com/rss 86400 http://neil.fraser.name/news/2010/03/03/ Wed, 3 Mar 2010 12:00:00 GMT Will lava lamps work in a high-gravity environment such as Jupiter? This topic spawned considerable lunch-time discussion and no clear consensus emerged. Most people initially assumed that the wax would ... http://neil.fraser.name/news/2010/02/17/ Wed, 17 Feb 2010 12:00:00 GMT While demoing my Robotic Chanter at Robogames last year, a reporter from Robocon Magazine interviewed me. The result is on the left (along with a really dorky photograph). Does anyone know enough Japanese ... http://neil.fraser.name/news/2010/02/13/ Sat, 13 Feb 2010 12:00:00 GMT Google's Chart API is pretty sweet. Encode your data into an image URL and Google will instantly render a pretty graph for you. It's quite flexible. Which of course means it can be hacked for purposes ... http://neil.fraser.name/news/2010/01/31/ Sun, 31 Jan 2010 12:00:00 GMT A few months ago a coworker purchased a very large number of magnetic spheres. This became a major source of deproductivity as we engineered ever more elaborate geometrical forms. Abstract shapes soon ... http://neil.fraser.name/news/2009/12/29/ Tue, 29 Dec 2009 12:00:00 GMT In 1958 Isaac Asimov wrote a short story titled "All the Troubles of the World" (included in the collection "Nine Tomorrows"). It described a world transformed by Multivac, a giant all-knowing computer. ... http://neil.fraser.name/news/2009/12/25/ Fri, 25 Dec 2009 12:00:00 GMT I love christmas. Coworkers are gone, email is quiet, distractions are at a minimum. The perfect opportunity to catch up on the things I've been meaning to get around to all year. One of them is releasing ... http://neil.fraser.name/news/2009/12/23/ Wed, 23 Dec 2009 12:00:00 GMT When a computer misbehaves a frequently effective solution is to reboot. In the process the computer will lose the state it was in, which typically solves whatever the root problem was. A Moo is different. ... http://neil.fraser.name/news/2009/12/08/ Tue, 8 Dec 2009 12:00:00 GMT JSON is a great data interchange format, it complements XML quite well. But whereas there exists an entire industry devoted to XML parsers, encoders, validators, transformers and activists, JSON does not ... http://neil.fraser.name/news/2009/11/29/ Sun, 29 Nov 2009 12:00:00 GMT Last week I went down to the Peninsula Humane Society and adopted a young rat. She had been brought in as a "stray". I asked what that meant exactly, and although they didn't know her particular details ... http://neil.fraser.name/news/2009/11/15/ Sun, 15 Nov 2009 12:00:00 GMT David Bartley (yet another Canadian at Google) and I took photos of Jupiter every night after work for a week using my cellphone's camera mounted to my 4.5" telescope. The resulting animation clearly shows ... http://neil.fraser.name/news/2009/10/27/ Tue, 27 Oct 2009 12:00:00 GMT After building last week's mount to connect my Android camera phone to my telescope, the night sky beckoned. First target, our Moon. Here's a photo of the moon taken at night: [Raw image.] The problem ... http://neil.fraser.name/news/2009/10/18/ Sun, 18 Oct 2009 12:00:00 GMT Here's a reference photograph of the Golden Gate Bridge (partially obscured by clouds). It was taken from my roof-top deck using the camera on my Android G1 phone: Here's a photograph of the arch on the ... http://neil.fraser.name/news/2009/10/09/ Fri, 9 Oct 2009 12:00:00 GMT NASA's Ames Research Center is right across the creek from the Googleplex. Last night they organized a marathon event leading up to the impact of LCROSS on the Moon. Ames is a really interesting place. ... http://neil.fraser.name/news/2009/10/02/ Fri, 2 Oct 2009 12:00:00 GMT As we broke for lunch at DocEng, one of the engineers gathered his things in a neat pile. What caught my eye was that he put the power supply for his laptop on top of his laptop. This made my heart skip ... http://neil.fraser.name/news/2009/09/21/ Mon, 21 Sep 2009 12:00:00 GMT These are my notes from the four-day DocEng 2009 conference in Munich. What follows are my own thoughts on selected talks. This does not attempt to be an objective record by any means. Document Versioning ... http://neil.fraser.name/news/2009/09/14/ Mon, 14 Sep 2009 12:00:00 GMT This week I've been working out of the Google office in Munchen. While much smaller than our head offices in California, I have to say that the food is even better. For most of this trip my German has ... http://neil.fraser.name/news/2009/09/07/ Mon, 7 Sep 2009 12:00:00 GMT In 1987 my mother and I moved to Regensburg in West Germany for a couple of years. I went to a local school, figured out how to speak German and explored the city. Regensburg was one of the only German ... http://neil.fraser.name/news/2009/08/25/ Tue, 25 Aug 2009 12:00:00 GMT One of the criteria for something being a standard is that there must exist at least two independent interoperable implementations. For example, Microsoft's OOXML format[?] is not a standard, since only ... http://neil.fraser.name/news/2009/08/14/ Fri, 14 Aug 2009 12:00:00 GMT Last night I woke up at 2am and realized that there was a fundamental problem with cursor preservation in today's real-time collaborative applications. After banging on the keyboard a bit, I went back ... http://neil.fraser.name/news/2009/08/04/ Tue, 4 Aug 2009 12:00:00 GMT Would a paper airplane launched from orbit survive reentry? A little over a year ago there was a flurry of press about a Japanese plan to throw several paper airplanes off the ISS and track their return ...