Biweekly links for 06/19/2009

• Physicists on Banknotes – Jacob Bourjaily
• .Astronomy | Networked Astronomy and the New Media
  • “The .Astronomy conferences explore the connection between astronomy and the internet.”
• State Dept. to Twitter: Keep site up in Iran – Washington Times
  • Note that the W. Times is not always reliable. But this story seems well sourced: “The State Department asked the social networking Web site Twitter last weekend to postpone scheduled maintenance that would have cut daytime service in Iran on Tuesday, just as protests against official election results were heating up, U.S. officials said. “
• Breadbox64: A Twitter client for the Commodore 64
  • Sadly, I’m not able to test it.
• Quantum To Cosmos Festival
  • The blog for the Quantum To Cosmos Festival, to be held in October, in Waterloo, with people like Stewart Brand (Clock of the Long Now, Whole Earth Catalogue), Peter Diamandis (X-Prize), Neal Stephenson, and Avi Wigderson. Should be fun.
• Twitter Blog: Down Time Rescheduled
  • “A critical network upgrade must be performed to ensure continued operation of Twitter. In coordination with Twitter, our network host had planned this upgrade for tonight. However, our network partners at NTT America recognize the role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran. Tonight’s planned maintenance has been rescheduled to tomorrow between 2-3p PST (1:30a in Iran).”
• appscale – Google Code
  • “AppScale is an open-source implementation of the Google AppEngine (GAE) cloud computing interface from the RACELab at UC Santa Barbara. AppScale enables execution of GAE applications on virtualized cluster systems. In particular, AppScale enables users to execute GAE applications using their own clusters with greater scalability and reliability than the GAE SDK provides. Moreover, AppScale executes automatically and transparently over cloud infrastructures such as the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Eucalyptus, the open-source implementation of the AWS interfaces. “
• Twitter / Search – #IranElection
  • A twitter search on #IranElection certainly gives a lot _more_ news than the traditional media. Sorting wheat from chaff is not trivial, though. (Admittedly, it’s also not trivial to sort wheat from chaff when one relies on traditional media. But it requires a different approach.)

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