At noon today the Presidential website changed. The differences are not just cosmetic, but promise new priorities: communication, transparency and participation. There is now a blog with an RSS feed and a weekly video address. Under the hood there are big improvements in how search engines can access the site.
There is also an as yet unfulfilled promise to post President Obama’s Inaugural Address. You can read it or view it here, and compare it to the other addresses here or here.
Harrat Khaybar Volcanic Field, Saudi Arabia
Just as NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day reveals the marvels of the heavens, its Earth Observatory shows a spectacular new view of the surface of the our planet. Alan Taylor’s Big Picture blog on Boston.com has a collection of some of the the most beautiful.
Slashdot today links to John Dvorak on the the 30th Anniversary of VisiCalc, the original computer spreadsheet program. When Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston created VisiCalc for the Apple II in 1979, it was, as Robert X. Cringely noted,
the last element required to turn the microcomputer from a hobbyist’s toy into a business machine.
In retrospect, it was an astonishing invention. 27,520 bytes of code, running in 32k of RAM, it was about one-thousandth the size of the current version of Excel and had about 90% of the functionality most people use today. Dan Bricklin offers a free download for Windows PCs.
How to convince your children to avoid a career in computer science–spend a few minutes on this site. Long-suffering programmers submit their tales of woe about pointy-headed bosses, incomprehensible code (usually so obscure that only true nerds get the joke) and classic bugs (this story from 1984 was actually the same leap-year bug that shut down all the Zune mp3 players this month).
Apostrophe -- Bert Collins's Blog 