ANDREW PENG

Update: Edited the embed because the original video was removed.   When commercial space tourism becomes attainable (but not necessarily affordable), I’m going to have to see this for myself.

Estimate the mass of an Airbus A320 at about 170,000lb, start the accelerometer based dyno tool on the iPod touch, and wait for takeoff! For the record, the estimation based on a 170000lb aircraft was 28596 hp 60′: 4.71 sec@18.5 MPH 1/8 mi: 13.89 sec@ 66.5 MPH 1/4 mi: 19.40 sec@94.2 MPH A rather poor 1/4 mile time that [...]

Yelling at your servers can measurably negatively affect their performance. No joke. Make sure to treat your servers with respect, and keep it quiet in the datacenter! Perhaps there is a “brown note” for disks (“rust note”?) – some harmonic that destroys their performance; although based on what we think is happening (disk heads being [...]

Here’s a lazy liner that I cooked up to rip music from MixRiot.com – simply replace the URL variable with the page that contains the music and it will dump the music using wget with an MP3 extension! url=”http://www.mixriot.com/category/essential-mix/browse-show/broadcasts/bbc/radio-1/2009″; IFS=$’\n’;title=();id=();for i in `GET $url | grep FlashVars | egrep -o “mixriot.com%2Faudio%2Fplay%2F[0-9]{4}” | cut -b 30-`; [...]

Right here, thanks to Telegraph.co.uk 8th ring discovered around Saturn. Well crap, why didn’t see see this sooner? It turns out that the ring is only visible in the thermal band, not the visible spectrum that we’ve been staring at it for so long with. When you point Nasa’s Spitzer Space Telescope (which observes in [...]

Things I like about Houston: Elevated driveways to help prevent local flooding Road labels and signs painted on the road itself EZ-TAG also integrates a real-time traffic monitoring system Every day is bright and sunny Things I don’t like about Houston: When it rains, it rains Elevated driveways are like small mountains to my car [...]

I had my window tinting done by “The Beav” over at American Auto Tint. After watching him work, let me say this – the man knows what he is doing.  It is like watching the master of an art practicing his form. In under 2 hours he managed to get all 5 rear windows tinted, [...]

Extreme sheep herding, using lots o’ sheep, a large helping of skill, and some LED lights to make a rather amazing display!