Astronomical instruments needed to answer crucial questions, such as the search for Earth-like planets or the way the Universe expands, have come a step closer with the first demonstration at the telescope of a new calibration system for precise spectrographs. The method uses a Nobel Prize-winning technology called a 'laser frequency comb', and is

There is a project called Crazyhorse the might be the new admin for WordPress starting at version 2.7. I’ll put up 3 screenshots and if anyone would like to me make a demo of the this let me know. Also please keep in mind this is still early in development and a lot of the functions do not even work yet. That’s something I should of said with the 2.4/2.5 admin demo.[Show as slideshow]

The betas for Dreamweaver CS4, Soundbooth CS4, and Fireworks CS4 are now out. CS4 will better integrate the programs Adobe acquired from Macromedia into the rest of the Creative Suite. Soundbooth also now supports multi-track aditing. Head on over and try out Dreamweaver, Soundbooth, and Fireworks.

WordPress 2.6 SVN has a new feature called Speed Up! It will use Google Gears to to locally cache images, scripts and stylesheets to speed up load times. I hope by final it will support using the admin fully offline since using a plugin just to cache some images and scripts doesn’t really seem worth it.

I think this is a really interesting article. It’s about how Zappos will offer to pay employees $1000 extra to quit after a week to see if they are truly dedicated. I think more companies should look into this, especially for employees that deal directly with customers. Source: Harvard Business Publishing

A new kind of attack called phlashing could one be a real issue. Phlashing is when a device is remotely flashed to either run a firmware with a backdoor, or even a corrupt firmware that can render a device useless. It will be interesting to see what methods will be used to combat this. Source: Engadget

We just opened the SideStream Media site as a public beta. The new site is built on WordPress MU which allows us to easily have a lot of sub sites under one install and login. I know this isn’t what it was built for but it does the job perfectly. The Podcast site is based off a theme called Options by Justin Tadlock and the Blog is based on Prologue by Automattic. We are still working on the WordPress sections which will be for WordPress theme development. So far the only known bug is an issue with the top site wide nav on the podcasts page not working in IE7 and FireFox 2 but that should be worked out soon. Check out the site and let us know what you think.

For SideStream Media, we will be dealing with vidcasts along with podcast. This creates an interesting new challenge since vidcasts come in such a large variety of format and codecs, while the majority of podcasts come in just mp3 and maybe offer an enhanced aac feed as well. Usually I will just edit the podcasts in a variety of programs and then encode it in iTunes. The benefit of this is that it will make the file name nice and add good ID3 tags. But iTunes doesn’t work as well for videos. When I import audio files it will change the names and put them in organized folders for you, but with video it just dumps everything in 1 folder and doesn’t rename then, even when you change the ID3 tags with iTunes. So what I am asking is, does anyone know of a good program that support multiple codecs ( at least h.264 ) and will allow me to add ID3 tags and rename files to be user friendly?

One of the things Ben and I want to do on the SideStream Media website is allow for category specific CSS files. The reason we want to do this is so we can move all of our podcasts to one site and still make each podcast’s page look a little different. Revision 3 does this with it’s show pages, http://revision3.com/tekzilla/ and http://revision3.com/systm/ as 2 examples. The way we solved this issue was by calling on a .css file based on either what category page you were on or what category the post you are viewing is in. The code for this is : <? if (is_category()) { ?> <link rel=”stylesheet” href=”<? bloginfo(’stylesheet_directory’); ?>/<?php single_cat_title(); ?>.css” type=”text/css” /> <? } elseif (is_single()) {?> <link rel=”stylesheet” href=”<? bloginfo(’stylesheet_directory’); ?>/<?php foreach((get_the_category()) as $cat) {echo $cat->cat_name. ”;} ?> .css” type=”text/css” /> <? } ?> This code should go right after the link to you main CSS file. Once you have done this you just need to create CSS files in your themes folder by the same name as the category, and for most servers this will be case sensitive. You can see this code in action on some of the categories on this site. If you have any questions or know of a better way to do this please let me know.

FTA “Here’s an experiment in keepings things small and confined to one Javascript file.” Gotta love it especially considering that making anything in Java “small” and “lightweight” are extreme tasks. read more | digg story

For SideStream Media, we will be dealing with vidcasts along with podcast. This creates an interesting new challenge since vidcasts come in such a large variety of format and codecs, while the majority of podcasts come in just mp3 and maybe offer an enhanced aac feed as well. Usually I will just edit the podcasts in a variety of programs and then encode it in iTunes. The benefit of this is that it will make the file name nice and add good ID3 tags. But iTunes doesn’t work as well for videos. When I import audio files it will change the names and put them in organized folders for you, but with video it just dumps everything in 1 folder and doesn’t rename then, even when you change the ID3 tags with iTunes. So what I am asking is, does anyone know of a good program that support multiple codecs ( at least h.264 ) and will allow me to add ID3 tags and rename files to be user friendly?

hyper123

It looks like Sony BMG wants to kill all piracy, except for when they do it. After Sony tried to call PointDev, a company that makes administration software for windows, Sony BMG gave them a pirate license. This prompted PointDev to to mandate a seizure of Sony BMG servers which showed 4 servers containing pirated PointDev software. PointDev also claims that up to 47% of software on Sony BMG computers could be pirated. I wonder if Sony will find a way out of this are have to pay up. Source: Arstechnica

The FCC has finally redefined broadband to increase the minimum speeds to 768 Kbps. While this is still slow it is at least a start to push more companies to increase speeds. Source: Engadget

Jack Thompson twisted the recent NIU tradgedy to promote himself… unfortunately for him though we’re not all gullible idiots. Read this to see why he’s a douche and always will be. read more | digg story

I just updated the WordPress 2.5 demo to the newest version and you can see it it much farther along than the last demo. Go check it out.

Microsoft, Google, Verisign and IBM have joined OpenID. I think this will finally make OpenID a reality. All the site I run support OpenID through plugins and I think you will soon see CMS’s supporting OpenID natively. Source: Techcrunch

Unlike AT&T, Verizon won’t monitor its network to block unauthorized copying. That would violate customer privacy, it says, and would be expensive too. read more | digg story

ICANN has started to switch some of the root DNS servers to support IPv6. This is one more step in moving from IPv4 to IPv6. I wonder how much longer we will need to wait for ISPs to switch over.

Source: ars technica

The RIAA wants to cut artist’s royalties from 13% down to 9%. Apple is pushing for the royalties to be dropped down to 4%. Is this the RIAA response to piracy? Do they plan to make up the money by giving less to the artists? Source: Gizmodo