• Astronomy Picture of the Day: The Milky Way Over Ontario – “Sometimes, after your eyes adapt to the dark, a spectacular sky appears. Such was the case earlier this month over Ontario, Canada, when part of a spectacular sky also became visible in a reflection off a lake.“
• New York Times: The Nature of Glass Remains Anything but Clear – “The arrangement of atoms and molecules in glass is indistinguishable from that of a liquid. But how can a liquid be as strikingly hard as glass?“
• 47 Hats: Stop Stealing – “Letting email/IM/twitter/browser run full bore during the periods of the day you are supposed to be creating something is exactly as stupid and criminal as driving a car while on your cell while texting while watching a dvd player. Someone is going to get hurt, and you’ll be to blame.“
• Magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder – “The Magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder is a freeware open source utility that retrieves your Product Key (cd key) used to install Windows from your registry. It allows you to print or save your keys for safekeeping.“
• Hub2: – “Hub2 seeks to enable local neighborhoods to participate more meaningfully in the design and development of their own public spaces. Residents engage in a process that employs 3D tools and problem-solving techniques to articulate a common vision reflecting the participants’ values.“

• Adam Frisby: Prototyping with OpenSim: Testing out Amazon S3 as a Grid-Mode Asset Server – “The price is right, and the solution is fully programmable via a convenient web API, so it’s snuck itself into all sorts of places. What I’d like to experiment here is using it as a complete grid asset server, for those who haven’t toyed much with the OpenSim asset server under the hood – it’s effectively a webserver with two supported operations: “PUT” and “GET” – funnily enough this overlaps nicely with any network accessible storage system, S3 included.“
• Web Worker Daily: 5 Ways to Rescue an Unproductive Day – “5. Take the day off. Sometimes, no matter what you do, the work just won’t flow. If you’ve got the flexibility, just give up and let it wait for tomorrow.“
• Brian Aker: Drizzle, Clouds, “What If?” – “Have you ever wanted to know what would happen if you had taken a different direction?“

• Cloud Security: Collaboration in the Cloud, Virtual Worlds and the Hacker Mindset – “Sorry boss, someone hijacked my avatar and now I’m stuck on this desert island for who knows how long!“
• Michael Thumann: Hacking Second Life – “During the analysis process no inventory data was discovered, all sensitive data is stored in the central database, but at least automatic some tasks looks feasible because of the integrated scripting language LSL.“
• The Economist: Twin Twisters – “As Fannie and Freddie show, regulators are easily captured and outwitted. The best controls are transparency and competition. When possible the government needs to stand back. Sadly, it failed to do so in the American mortgage market.“
• ThinkBalm: At Microsoft, Cost Of Virtual Events About 1/3 The Cost Of Traditional Events – “About 150 people (avatars) registered for the launch event in Second Life and Microsoft wound up with 220 actual participants – nearly a 150% attendance rate. This doesn’t include the estimated more than 270 avatars that just dropped into the event for a small portion of it.“
• Skeptic Report: Things Creationists Hate – “The main objects of my satire, for so it is intended, are the young-Earth, biblical-literalist types, although other generations of creationists may detect some of their views skewered here also.“

• Chris Pirillo: Gnomedex Initial Speaker Line-up Announcement – “What’s happening at Gnomedex 8.0 this year? Well, apart from a growing list of notable attendees…“
• Thomas Tan: How High Leverage Has Brought Down the Whole Banking Industry – “Why should the whole society have to pay for the bad decision of a few banks at the down side, but never be allowed to participate at the up side?“

• The Fresh Air Fund – “The Fresh Air Fund has provided free summer vacations to New York City children from disadvantaged communities since 1877. This is your summer to help!“
• Seattle: Steve Coast presents OpenStreetMap.org – “Come hear how OpenStreetMap is changing the mapping world and learn what made 46,000 people get involved in this initiative. This event is open to Microsoft and non-Microsoft employees alike. “
• jQuery Sparklines – “This jQuery plugin generates sparklines (small inline charts) directly in the browser using data supplied either inline in the HTML, or via javascript. “
• Successful Soul: Warren Buffet’s 7 Secrets for Living a Happy and Simple Life – “I just naturally want to do things that make sense. In my personal life too, I don’t care what other rich people are doing. I don’t want a 405 foot boat just because someone else has a 400 foot boat.“
• Iotop – “Iotop is a Python program with a top like UI used to show of behalf of which process is the I/O going on. “
• Danny Choo: Stormtrooper Portal – “The Empire rolls you. ” Watch the video!

My wife and a couple of the kids are in Peru this week for a short visit with her father. They spent a couple of days in Lima and are heading to Cusco today. Her dad lives in a city called

Lamay, about an hour outside of Cusco. Here’s a picture of Machu Picchu from a trip that we took in 2001:

I’m taking most of the week off of work, taking care of 101 little things around the house — car maintenance, yard work, and so forth.

I’m also working to move some of my web sites over to a couple of Amazon EC2 instances. In fact, this very blog is now hosted on EC2.

I spent a couple of hours (on and off) loading up a bunch of Yum packages, editing configuration files, and browsing through logs in order to get WordPress up and running. In the past I

have always configured and compiled Apache, MySQL and the other big parts myself. This time I simply installed packages. It was much easier, once I figured out where to find everything.

I spent more time than I should have trying to move my blog to the new machine. I dutifully dumped the database and created a tar file of the uploads directory, and then imported those by

hand, only to find that some of the entries were messed up due to a character encoding issue. It turned out that the Import and Export features worked just fine. In fact, the import operation even copied the images from the old site to the new.