Nothing Is Perfect
   


About
life, the universe, and everything

Hank Dolben

Subscribe
to a syndicated feed (RSS) of my weblog.

Links
These are a few of my favorite things.

  • Pan-Mass Challenge
  • Dolben Company
  • Mark4

    • Here is some notable software that runs on Mac OS X.

  • BlueJ
  • MathPad
  • NetNewsWire Lite

    • Archives

  • 2003 Oct
  • 2003 Sep
  • 2003 Aug
  • 2003 Jul
  • 2003 Jun

    • _________________

    		       
    Thu, 2003 Oct 16

    Version 1.0.6 of NetNewsWire Lite Released
    NetNewsWire Lite version 1.0.6 was released today "to fix one particular performance bug, where during a refresh sometimes HTML descriptions would be slow to appear."

    [/Internet] permanent link

    Fri, 2003 Oct 10

    Version 1.0.5 of NetNewsWire Lite Released
    Here are the changes to NetNewsWire Lite in version 1.0.5, announced Wednesday. NetNewsWire Lite is the freeware version of NetNewsWire, "an easy-to-use RSS Web news reader for Mac OS X."

    [/Internet] permanent link

    Thu, 2003 Oct 09

    New York Times Blunder: Soccer Ball Is Dodecahedron
    In the science section of The New York Times the article "Cosmic Soccer Ball? Theory Already Takes Sharp Kicks" presumes that the basic geometry of a soccer ball is the dodecahedron, while in fact it is the truncated icosahedron, otherwise affectionately known as the buckyball. Of course, the two polyhedra are closely related forms in everyday three dimensional space, and the article is concerned with a subject where the geometry is non-euclidean. To be fair to the Times, it could be that the mathematician Jeffrey Weeks is a bit fuzzy about footballs. From an article on the same subject in New Scientist:

    According to Weeks, the WMAP results point to a very specific illusion - that our Universe seems like an endlessly repeating set of dodecahedrons, football-like shapes with a surface of 12 identical pentagons. If you exit the football through one pentagon, you re-enter the same region through the opposite face and you keep meeting the same galaxies over and over again.

    [/education] permanent link

    Wed, 2003 Oct 08

    Java on LEGO Mindstorms Robots
    One of the coolest hacks of all time is leJOS, a Java&trade virtual machine, API, and tools for the LEGO® MINDSTORMS&trade robotics computer (RCX). Like Sun's Java products for small devices, the leJOS JVM does not support a complete Java environment, but at an amazingly miniscule size of about 16KB is more powerful than most other systems for controlling the RCX.

    [/education] permanent link