I recently attended one of the tech talks put on by the LDS church. For me the most exciting session was the one on family history. The presenters, Gordon Clarke and Kevin Ward, spoke about the major projects underway in the Family History department of the church, including the new FamilySearch (formerly Family Search Family Tree), the digitization and online delivery of scanned microfilm records from the Granite Mountain Vault, and a personal research assistant. Brother Clarke expressed great confidence that we would see the new Family Search system released this year (probably well before the end of the year) The church is now underway on beta 2 for that project.

The church is also now in the design stages of a new open-source personal record manager that will interface with the new system and will perhaps take the role that PAF plays now. They're early enough in the project that the development language is still undecided. Brother Ward asked what language we would prefer. I suggested Perl, others suggested Ruby or Python. His reaction to these suggestions ("scripting languages..."[1]) suggested that he had other things in mind (probably C#, C++ or Java), but afterwards I spoke with him and expressed my opinion that if the code were in one of these "scripting languages", the church might find more individuals willing to work on the project, as Ruby, Perl, and Python would be more "approachable" than languages like C#, C++, or Java. I suggested that if nothing else, a plugin system with bindings available for each of these "scripting languages", would certainly add to the interest in the project. He seemed to agree on that.

Perhaps the most exciting news was that the new Family Search system and the digital image delivery system will have web service APIs available for them. Ultimately (not likely to happen this year though) the church hopes to be able to have us link these digitized images as source material into the new FamilySearch trees.

This means all the personal record manager vendors have probably been scrambling to make sure that when the new system goes live their software will be able to interface with it. The folks who make PAF Insight will have a much easier job :-). But beyond the "big" vendors, I see this as a huge win for the "little guy" (like me) who just has a personal itch to scratch, and with the data available via APIs the sky's the limit as to what can be done.

There's lot's more I'd like to blog about before FHT. Hopefully I can find some time to do so.

[1] I'll never view Perl as just a "scripting language" after hearing Andy Lester's lighting talk at OSCON 2006 about why Perl isn't just a "scripting language" (it has objects, inheritance, polymorphism, introspection, closures, and on and on and on...)"

This site has been established by Motorola for the use of Q users. It has been seeded with the contents of the in-box user guide. Additional content will be provided by Q users as they explore the Q's capabilities.

As a teenager, I received a small, cheap telescope for Christmas one year, out of which I milked the best possible views of the planets I possibly could. The first time I was miraculaously able to pinpoint the tiny disk of Saturn flanked by its rings through that wobbly scope was a magical moment.

As an adult, I have far less time to devote to the hobby, but I still enjoy looking out into the very depths of eternity on a dark night when the milky way paints a broad swath across the sky. Despite the limited time I spend under the stars I still enjoy reading about the topic. When I heard O'Reilly was creating a Hacks book on astronomy, I was eager to get my hands on a copy.

Imagine being able to cull the best information and guidance out of years of attending star parties, years of tips gleaned from rubbing shoulders with the 'old-timers', and putting it all into one book. Such a book would probably be something like Astronomy Hacks, in which long-time amatuer astronomers Robert and Barbara Thompson and their colleagues share a number of useful tips and hints devoted to helping you get the most enjoyment and fulfillment out of amateur astronomy.

The book contains 65 'hacks', each a short article about a particular topic in amatuer observing. A wide range of topics is covered, from selecting equipment, to guidance on observing tactics, to software you can use to enhance your experience. Some of my favorite topics included selecting the right set of eyepieces for your scope, working your way through a single constellation to become more familiar with that particular piece of sky, tips for completing a successfule Messier marathon, and recommendations on how to get the best scope without breaking your bank. You'll find useful information regardless of whether you've got a lot or a little to spend. A full table of contents can be found at http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/astronomyhks/toc.html

The book's authors do a very good job at providing lots of detailed and useful information in each hack. The book is authoritative and its suggestions are backed by plenty of experience in the field. In addition to the technical nitty-gritty, the book also provides a good introduction to the culture of amatuer astronomy and will help you "ease-in" as you get acquainted with your local group of astronomy enthusiasts.

Overall, the book provides heaps of practical information and tips that might take you years of experience to gain otherwise. The book repects its audience, there's no dumbing down here, just plenty of what's useful to help you get more of your time under the heavens. If there's one thing lacking from the book it's that there's only 65 hacks, whereas most of the Hacks series have 100. But nonetheless, what's there is very good.

Overall Rating: 9/10

The result is a copy of the Book of Mormon that reads more like a novel or a history. In my opinion this would be a great way for someone not familiar with the book to approach it, and for someone who has read it many times, it provides a refreshing and enjoyable experience with an old friend. Nuances that you might miss among all the verses show up in this narrative form. Overall, as I've read through several chapters in Alma, the text flows more smoothly.

You can download the finished product as a PDF (2.1M) or purchase a hard copy from lulu.com

Rosetta "incorporates a complete and uncompromising implementation of 'The Third Manifesto' (TTM), a formal proposal by Christopher J. Date and Hugh Darwen for a solid foundation for data and database management systems (DBMSs).

Genezzo "is a micro kernel style enterprise-strength SQL database server currently under construction. Genezzo runs efficiently in a distributed fashion across dynamic clusters of servers." It's also written in Perl. (See the CPAN Page as well).

The Rosetta author is intending to have Rosetta provide the language layer on top of Genezzo for the database engine.

Cool stuff I'd like to play around with whenever I can find some of that elusive 'free time'.

What's amazing to me is that they've done this even though I'm not using a common blog engine like wordpress. They've somehow taken the time to figure out the form fields (they even submit a bogus IP address) on my little blog which doesn't get a huge amount of traffic. </Rant>

At any rate, I've sent their garbage to /dev/null and have utilized captchas.net to add a captcha image to each comment submission form. There's even a nice Perl module, WebService::CaptchasDotNet that makes using the service a matter of a few extra lines of perl and HTML. If you've got a blog, a wiki, or anything that's getting spammed, captchas.net is an easy solution.

Someone needs to make something like the Church sign generator for this.

The Flashbag

We need this technology on our NetApps :-).

http://www.cnn.com/2006/HEALTH/conditions/04/03/engineered.organs/index.html

The silly part of me asks, will I be able to grow a new brain?

/me hears echoes of Dorothy, "What would you do if you had a brain?"

The serious side of me remembers a close relative who had cancer surgery years ago in which his stomach was removed. Could this type of technology be used to restore 'faulty' organs that have been removed under such circumstances?

But if those hurdles could be overcome, you could (in terms of storage) scale your MySQL without worrying about adding disks or volumes or power or whatever. Latency issues will probably be some cause for concern. Is this kind of thing even worth pursuing?

Perhaps a better idea (for us Perlish folks) would be a DBD::Amazon::S3 Perl module.

Ahh, a million ideas, and no time to do much with them...*sigh*.