Assassinate Kennedy.

From WiredNews.com:

"A new video game released Monday allows players to simulate the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

The release of JFK Reloaded is timed to coincide with the 41st anniversary of Kennedy's murder in Dallas and was designed to demonstrate that a lone gunman was able to kill the president.

"It is despicable," said David Smith, a spokesman for Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy, the late president's brother. He was informed of the game on Friday but declined further comment."

Read the rest...

Jet-engine for your laptop?

Alan Epstein, Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT has an interesting approach to solving the portable power problems facing our future. "The engines on three 747s put out as much power as a nuclear power plant," Epstein says.

From FuelCellsWorks.com:

"Although Epstein envisioned his micro version working roughly the same way that a conventional gas turbine does, much about micro-jet engines was a mystery. Would silicon crumble under 1300 C temperatures? Could microscopic bearings handle a million-plus revolutions per minute? With funding from the US military, Epstein tapped into the expertise of neighbouring MIT labs in fluid mechanics, materials science, structural engineering, and microfabrication. The project team eventually swelled to dozens of researchers."

Read the rest...

Blender 3D 2.35!

It has been released! Blender 3D 2.35 has been released and many things have been fixed and added. Among them is new select modes for face and edge select, as well as scale, extrude, and rotate modes.

For those who don't know, Blender 3D is a modeling and rendering program aimed mostly at game designers. It features a game engine which can create full executable files, as well as an animation editor to create full video's, animation sequences, or still frames. Blender is a free Open-Source program and can be downloaded here.

For a list of what has changed since Blender 3D 2.34 take a look at the release notes.

Blender gives you materials, opacity, lighting, and everything else you need to create convincing models of anything you can put your mind to. For samples look here.

Word of the day.

har•mo•ni•um
n.
Pronunciation: (här-mO'nE-um)

An organlike keyboard instrument that produces tones with free metal reeds actuated by air forced from a bellows.

Would you like to know more?

Down with ME.

Wait, I'm not talking about myself here. There is another ME which I am referring to. An evil ME. No, this ME is not a twin, in fact I would be embarrassed enough to commit suicide if I was of any relation at all to this ME. I must say that I am embarrassed at the fact that a close family member of mine is using ME, and I have no control over it. Ok, ok, ok, I am talking about Windows Millennium Edition. This family member which I embarrassed because of just so happens to be my Mom, and the reason for bringing up this discussion is my current anxiety level associated with the re-installation of this operating system. This two day venture involved over 50 reboots, half of which were blue screen induced, but I will say on a more positive note that the computer is now up and running in what seems to be stable condition and not one piece of information was lost in this process! In-fact, the old hard drive is now installed on the system and can be booted from by changing the boot order in the CMOS.

This works for now, but trust me I hate Windows ME (just ask my Mom, she is sick of hearing how much ME sucks by now) and XP will be replacing it just as soon as $100 bucks for an OEM licence shows up. Oh yeah, don't expect to be upgrading ME to XP that would just be asking too much.

I spent a good 10 minutes today trying to figure out how to get ME to stop trying to connect to a domain. Apparently if you have a network you probably connect to a domain server... anyway.

So now that my Mom has a new hard-drive, a new installation of Windows ME, all of her email and bookmark settings from Mozilla transfered, and a few of her basic programs and drivers installed she is back up and running on her speedy 1000mhz Micron (actually a really good box for what she paid and when she got it) and with all of that my Windows ME adventures are hopefully concluded for the year (knocking on wood while crossing fingers and holding rabbits foot.)

In conclusion don't put too much peanut butter on the bread, it sticks to the roof of your mouth.

Firefox 1.0

Well it hasn't been long since the pre-release of this version was released, and I have been using it ever since it was without any problems at all. Now the full version is out and I am in the process of installing it as I write this post.

One of the coolest things about Firefox is that it comes completely bare of extra features and eye candy. The reason that is a good thing is the existence of many extensions for the browser. Extensions are plug-ins which can enhance the browser in many ways. Now you have full control over how many features your browser has, and there are in some cases multiple choices for a given function. If you have a computer which might perform better without extra functions to crowd you memory, you can run Firefox without any extensions.

If you haven't used Firefox before (just so you know the Firefox browser is very similar to the Mozilla browser, in-fact they are both based on the Gecko engine) you definitely need to give it a shot. Because Firefox comes without very many features it is a small and easy program to use and get used to, and in fact can be made to look just like Internet Explorer if that is what you are used to. You can check out and download Firefox on the Firefox section of Mozilla.org.

I recently ran into this article on eweek.com which explains some of the more common extensions.

Editing my blogger template.

Who wants a default template? Not me that's for sure. To change mine, there wasn't really much to it. I added a background image, a header image, and changed the color of both the link and text fonts. Other than that the only changes I made were to the side bar to add links and a counter.

For those who aren't really CSS savvy, you can have my theme if you like it. Simply email me at david@davidmonaghan.com and I will send you the template text and the images which I used along with instructions on how to install these items. (You will need somewhere to host the images, and no you can't use my host sorry.)

If you feel you can make the changes yourself, or you wan't to learn how here is a very simple way to get your feet wet with HTML and CSS.

Before you edit your template text, first you should be sure about the template that you are using. The template changes I made were to the Minima Black theme create by Douglas Bowman. If you wish to use the following examples to make changes to your blog, I recommend you first select the Minima Black theme in your blog's control panel.

Now, to add an image to the background of the page we will need an image. Let us say that we have an image at http://www.imageserver.com/image/location/image_file-name.jpg. This http link also known as a url will serve as an address to the image in the CSS code. Now where would we put such a strange string of characters inside another even stranger list of characters? Perhaps in the background property of the body tag? Whoever said that gets a gold star. Now what is the body tag and where in it is the background property. Let us take a look;

body {

    background:#000;

}

Now we have three lines in this example, which contains only the one property which we are interested in, the background property. The first line is the start of the body tag, the second line contains the background property, and the third contains the end of the body tag. In this example the background is set to #000 which is shorthand for #000000, the color code for black. Now we need an image there, but we also want to keep our background black, just in case. Take a look at this new tag which has an image on the background which will not repeat nor will it move if the page is scrolled. The image is also centered on the page rather than having the top left corners lined up. This way the image is in the center no matter how big or small the users resolution and browser window size is.

body {

  background:#000 

url("http://www.imageserver.com/

image/location/image_file-name.jpg") 

no-repeat center fixed;

}

Now in order to make sure this image works all the way up to a screen resolution of 1600x1200 the image must be 1600x1200 (not really exactly unless you are considering full screen browsing, which I do every now and again.)

The header image follows the same basic principals and code, only the image was in my case about 660x150px.

Changing the colors of links and images is pretty straight forward. With links you have three tags which control color. :link color :hover color and :active color. You can change each of these to get a rollover effect if you want. Setting the :link and :hover colors the same will take away from this effect, though you can use another property like text-properties to get a line-through or other effect. If you change the property of the a:link, a:hover, and a:active which fall right after the body tag, all of the links on the page change which are not explicitly set elsewhere. In my case this was all I changed.

I also added images to the background of the post titles which are controlled by the
.post-title tag. In my case the width of the images are 410px wide. Another note in the editing of the post title background is the orientation of the text in the box. My particular background, being comprised of two objects on the right and left which happen to be the same color as the text, it was important to arrange the text around the background image. To achieve this goal I created a margin of 25px on the left and right of the post header. Here is what the code looks like to achieve this, minus everything else around it.

.post-title {

  padding:0 25px 4px 25px;

  }

And that about wraps it up. Again, if you wan't my code I'll be happy to hand it to you. I may post more information about creating the images if requests come in :).

Keyhole Nebula.

This image located on the Hubble Heritage image gallery is one of my favorites on the site. There are of course many others which I recommend you check out if you are into astronomy.