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This is a pretty incredible sight - a Hubble Space Telescope image of a planet orbiting a star 25 light years away from Earth. I am in awe. It’s not the first one ever taken of an extrasolar planet, but it’s certainly the clearest, and the first of one orbiting a normal star similar to the sun. The planet is about the size of Jupiter and estimated to be around 200 million years old. Amazing!

Read more about it here.

Well, this Tuesday night was certainly historic for many reasons. Barack Obama will be the next President of the United States of America. Personally I am extremely proud of the country for the level of democratic involvement this year - there was a very high voter turnout, possibly exceeding 62% according to an ambiguous WSJ article.

I am also proud that we will have a professor of constitutional law as our president, who seems to understand the role of the president as the executive, who carries out and executes the will of the people, and is not “the decider,” as it were. It’s also nice to have a Vice President who understands he is not the leader of the senate. See, our country was founded by some excessively intelligent people who debated and theorized and figured out a system of democracy that is truly genius, with a balance of power and safeguards against tyranny. It’s only fitting that we should expect our president to share that understanding.

I believe Obama will be a good president. Indeed, our standing in the world has already improved, and that’s a good sign. Time will tell if he can live up to the expectations, but I have hope that someone who understands just how diverse and complex this country is can have a chance to bring it together to its full potential.

Anyway, here in Berkeley, the people rejoiced and danced in the streets (literally) with joy. It’s amazing to see Real Americans ™ happy and proud for their country again for all the right reasons.

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You know what that means? Uptime reports today this server has been running for exactly 1 year uninterrupted.

A small milestone, but a nice one nonetheless. Thanks to Slicehost for some seriously great hosting! Clearly, I have been 100% satisfied over the past year. They were recently bought by Rackspace, but I’m sure they’ll continue to have great service.

You may also notice the Mac OSXness. Well, I’ve been waiting for the next MacBook Pro upgrade, and since Apple released some new ones last month, I decided I’d pick one up, and here I am, the proud owner of a 15″ machined-aluminium shiny-screened MacBook Pro. I think I’ll write more on it later, but in short, angered reports of glossy screens stabbing eyeballs and blinding users have been greatly exaggerated. This thing rocks

A lot has happened in the past year, but the server kept on rockin through it all. Here’s hopin it lasts to 730!

Let me try to put this album, Brooke Waggoner’s new “Heal for the Honey”, into words. This is difficult, please bear with me.

Most albums are like candy. You’ve got some that are like skittles, where it’s all sweet and tangy, or pop rocks (which works amazingly well with this little analogy) or a snicker’s bar, or M&M’s, or really good dark chocolate, or the mixed jellybean bag where only two or three flavors are actually worth eating and the rest are just filler. But most albums are pretty much candy - you’ve got good candy and bad candy, but it’s all pretty sweet.

This album is like really smooth milk chocolate with a 20 karat diamond embedded in it.

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I just finished the release of Zenphoto 1.2, another great package from the ZP team. You can read all about it on the Zenphoto.org news page, or go download it now.

My contribution (the first large one in a while) was the move/copy/rename interface in the Edit screens of the administrator’s control panel. It allows you to move, copy, or rename any image or album without losing any data associated with the item. This is a welcome new feature and was one of the biggest complaints we heard from users, and hopefully it satisfies that need well. Let me know what you think.

I’m really impressed with how far Zenphoto has come since 1.1. We now have full translation support and a half-dozen included major languages with more to come, a full plugin system, automated setup, video and audio support, tagging, RSS feeds, password protected private albums… the list goes on.

I’d like to personally thank the Zenphoto team for all their hard work in continuing the improvement and usefulness of their software, all while keeping it true to the Zenphoto philosophy of being simple, useful, and flexible. Great work!

Wow, is it well into July already? How did that happen? Feels like it was winter just yesterday, and now suddenly everything’s exploding into Summer. And by that of course I mean the fireworks. I had a great 4th of July, marched in a parade in Sausalito, and afterward had the classic combination of barbecue and blowing stuff up! Sweet. Saturday and Sunday were spent mostly working out, climbing, playing tennis, or hanging with friends (mmm… Zachary’s pizza). Today, it’s back to the grind, sore in a good way from all that excercise, just sitting here recovering and working productively.

Well, during work I do two things: work, and listen to music. It’s a good combination. I’ve been using a few different music listening services, but mostly Pandora recently (especially now that they have this awesome desktop player, using Adobe’s AIR framework). I go on a Pandora spree to discover things, bookmark all the songs I like, and then go to Rhapsody or last.fm to listen when I want. If I like a whole album, I’ll buy it as mp3 off Amazon or go pick up the CD, and it gets into my collection, which I play with Winamp as I have for many years, or in my car on CD. When I get tired of a set of new stuff, there’s always more to discover. It’s a good music lifecycle.

So, read on for a list and comments on some great recent discoveries.

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Ah, isn’t it great when you get finished with a nice productive day of work and are rewarded with a few days to do whatever the heck you want? I love these long summer weekends.

Speaking of summer, it is, in fact, the first day of summer (woo!) - the summer solstice, and the longest day of the year. I actually almost woke up at 5:47am this morning just to watch the sunrise from the top of my building, but my awesome Ikea bed was way too comfortable. Sunset is at 8:34pm, making the day a good 14 hours and 47 minutes long. Sweet.

It’s also unnaturally hot here in the bay area - I can only imagine what it’s like further inland (sorry people from the central valley, I hope you have pools). It was 93 degrees here today, and it still feels like it. I went to the gym at lunch and worked up a sweat, and then stopped at the car wash just to feel the spray from the high pressure nozzle! Then after work I scrubbed my bathtub, cleaned my sink, and took a cold shower, just to cool down.

I’m not sure why I enjoy cleaning and organizing things, but I won’t question it too much, since I think it’s a good thing. It’s got to be something about being physically productive after spending all day being virtually productive. I mean, you can program all day and all you might have is something that goes a little bit faster than before, but scrub a grimy bathtub and man you can tell the difference! It feels good to get something real done in-between lines of code.

Aaaaand I’ll leave you with that thought. Besides cleaning bathtubs, what are y’all doing to beat the heat this summer?

Not that I’m perpetuating stereotypes, because I like all kinds of weather, but this actually does happen in the summer!