Strings, Rings, and Other Things

Here's what I want as my computer desktop image, or maybe as a screensaver:

I want a pretty landscape, maybe a mountain lake with some nearby woods. I want the lighting of the scene to follow a more or less real time 24-hour day/night cycle (including shadows, appropriate tints for dawn and dusk, things like illumination by moonlight, and stars in the sky at night). If possible, I want the appearance to adjust to follow the seasons in real time, too. (Including a bit of variation in weather or at least clouds would be interesting as well, though I'd want to be able to forbid completely overcast skies.) Something like this may exist: anyone know?

But... I want this simulated landscape to be located on a habitable, Earthlike moon of a gas giant planet. (Rings? Maybe.) The scene's lighting should be based on not just the sun but also light reflected from the sunlit parts of the central planet (and perhaps on any other moons that pass nearby in their own orbits), and the planet's appearance in the sky should be scientifically accurate. The seasonal cycle should be based at least generally on some calculation of solar heating based on the orbits involved. (That might not be much different than what we're familiar with, but I'd want to check. Would there be any significant monthly cycle on top of the annual one?) It might even be fun to include some mildly spectacular feature somewhere in the night sky, too: a nearby nebula or cluster, maybe. Bonus points if there is a practical orbit for another inhabited moon of the gas giant to occasionally come close enough to see continents and weather patterns (and city lights at night).

I'd be amazed if anyone had actually written a program encompassing this whole idea, but I think it should be possible today. If it were done well (with good attention to both art and science, and with configurable details if possible), I'd be willing to pay a fairly substantial price for it.

This weekend, Kim and I are going to Penguicon, a "Science Fiction and Open Source Software Convention" near Detroit. I've never actually been to a con before, so it should be a fun experience. This one's a little unusual with its "open source" aspect, but Kim figures that's a plus for me: if there's a time when the sci-fi side of things doesn't match my interests, I can go hang out with a bunch of Linux geeks and pretend I never abandoned them for a Mac. :) (I've still got at least some open source cred, since I've contributed a few bits of code to Firefox in the past.)

Any advice for how to have an enjoyable con experience? (I wonder if I should try to perform my Silmarillion-inspired Simon and Garfunkel parody at one of the Open Filk nights. Hmm.)

I appear to unexpectedly be the owner of an Eee PC. I know very little about these things, but it seems to be a fairly high end recent model (EEEPC 1005HA), with an Atom 280 processor, 1GB RAM, 160GB hard drive, multi-touch capability, and a bunch of other features. It apparently runs Windows XP, though I assume I could install Linux on it if I tried (though I'd need to figure out how to do that without an optical drive).

So, who out there has used these before? What sorts of things should I expect to work well, and what should I watch out for? Given that I'm reasonably comfortable with both Windows and Linux (despite being mostly a Mac person these days), is there any especially good reason to get rid of Windows? Either way, should I expect much trouble getting Firefox up and running?

It's very cute, regardless.

Well, my fears that my entire laptop was quickly turning into an expensive paperweight have receded. Someone pointed out that even fairly thorough memory tests may not catch problem RAM, and that a better test would be to actually pull out RAM modules and see if the problem persisted. Sure enough, ever since I replaced the new memory upgrade I'd gotten a few months ago with the smaller original module, the problems with my laptop seem to have gone away. (Whether Leopard will be happy with just 512MB of RAM is another question, though it seems to be doing fine thus far.) I wonder why it took so long to give out?

Anyway, whew. Now I can actually do some of the work I've been putting off over spring break.

I figure I'd mention this separately, since it's actually kinda cool. (I have no idea how recent this is, but I hadn't seen it before.) When I wanted to contact Amazon.com to tell them that their apparent price gouging (intentional or not) was not reasonable, I noticed that there was now an option to talk to them on the phone. But they don't list a number.

Instead (and you have to be logged in to do this), you are asked to give your phone number so that they can call you. You can specify when you want to be called: 5 minutes, 10 minutes, etc. I chose "Right away", and I clicked the submit button. And it was pretty eerie: my phone started ringing, right away. I picked it up, and after a brief "your call may be monitored" message, I was transferred immediately to a customer service agent. (No menu system, no hold music, nothing.)

He seemed to understand exactly why I was displeased by the behavior of the site, apologized, and said that he was sending the issue to their website team. (Of course the website team may just trash the complaint and tally one more mark in the "noticed the scam" column, but at least I did something.) All in all, a highly pleasant customer service experience; I recommend it to anyone who needs to contact them. (His Indian accent wasn't too hard to understand, either.)

Just as an offhand request, does anyone out there know of a simple program for managing and searching simple lists of data? ( Continue for details... )