As successor to COBE, the first year survey of the WMAP probe has produced some interesting findings. According to this paper, the universe is 13.7 billion years old, the universe conforms to a flat model (so we might be destined to a cold death at some point in the future), and the universe is composed of 4.4% baryons, 22% dark matter and 73% dark energy.

The WMAP probe has 30x greater resolution than the COBE satellite, as can be seen on p.17 of the paper. Values for the atomic density, Hubble constant, age of the universe, and matter density are all also stated in the paper. If you’re interested, you can get the data yourself and take a look at it.

I’ve just decided to get back into microcontrollers, and I wanted to start out with a cheap programmer for a cheap PIC. The simplest one I found (and it’s REAL cheap) is right here. It connects via parallel port, and is capable of programming the PICMicro PIC16F84 and similar chips. I’ll post pics when I build it (if I do). Anyone know of any good robotics projects I should take a look at?

I’ll probably just end up testing the PIC with some simple programs, and once I get a handle on it, I’ll start thinking about a real design. Here is a good page with some projects to look at to start. Note: These sites aren’t new, just new to me

Ok, this isn’t exactly a a real shell, but it supposedly does a good giving you some shell-like features. Neat. I really just wanted to post this link so I’d have it when I get some time to install it and check it out. It can be found by clicking right here. I’ve done a cut-n-paste of the features :

* What can CGI-Shell do, what can’t it do?

CGI-Shell allows the execution of any application and any command on the web-server. Various “comfort-features”, such as a history and auto-completion with the tabulator are included - CGI-Shell offers in principle the same comfort as any other shell does. Unfortunately, applications interacting with the user (those that ask for input from the user), e.g. passwd are still a problem.

* Which rights do I have on the server?

You have the rights of the CGI-directories owner - normally user-rights.

* Can I do “bad things” with CGI-Shell?

You can do “bad things” with almost everything - but that’s not why I wrote CGI-Shell. Rather, it intends to help webpage-owners to maintain there page comfortably. If CGI-Shell also makes webhosters pay a little more attention to their server’s rights-management - or even better - gives you SSH-access, I’m happy, too.

* How does CGI-Shell work?

CGI-Shell consists of 2 parts. One is a little CGI-script placed on the server. It gets commands as parameter, executes them on the server and returns their output.
The other part is on your own computer and simulates a shell. All commands you put in, are sent to the script on the server - and the returned output is presented in the shell.
If you want to know it more exactly you have to read the source code.

* Is CGI-Shell secure?

At the moment, CGI-Shell is more like Telnet than like SSH. The password-protection is realised with htaccess - so username and password fly without encryption through the web. Also all other communication between you and the web-server not encrypted right now. But I will change this soon.

* Which operating systems are supported?

Until now, I tested CGI-Shell only with Linux. Actually, it should run everywhere Perl is running and some Perl-modules are available - e.g. with BSD or maybe even Windows.