Thu, 15 Mar 2007
A Visit from Google
Two guys from Google stopped by the Space Telescope today. Part of the reason was to grab a copy of the Hubble Archive. They built a neat computer to do this, a little aluminum box with three terabytes of disk drives. They snarf the data onto the computer, put it in a padded suitcase and Fed Ex it to their lab. This is to support their work on Google Sky, the counterpart of Google Earth. One of the guys gave a short talk on this "sneaker net" technology and the other gave a short talk on Google's commitment to open source. I hear that the Space Telescope is going to be one of the mentoring institutions for Google's Summer of Code. As far as my own code goes, I've finished testing the second version of Yeti, my small html templating library. It's really tiny, less than a hundred lines of code and I think it's one of the cleverest things I've written. The only thing left to do is to update the documentation.
I think Heinlein said that a technology is only perfected when it becomes obsolete. One example is the self-wicking candle, which was invented around the same time as the light bulb. So I have html templating code for Perl CGI scripts, hardly the cutting edge of Web technology.
