My new favorite site on teh intarwebs is the Mt. St. Helens Volcano-cam. So serene! So pretty! So different from the view out my office window, which always seems to include at least one screaming firetruck, particularly during conference calls!

Ahem. Anyway, the volcano-cam picture on the main site is updated every 5 minutes (ish). I wanted it to be my desktop background and update more or less in sync with the online version.

To my surprise, I could find no way to set this up in the OS X control panels. Read the rest of this entry »

The ACM has just announced that Fran Allen has won this year’s Turing Award. The Turing is computing’s Nobel Prize, and Allen is the first woman to win it. In the 1970s she did pioneering work in compiler optimization and parallel execution that made supercomputing possible. The availability of supercomputing, in turn, led to scientific breakthroughs in many other fields. Here’s a fluffier piece with a nice picture.

I don’t know why this made me so happy this morning. I usually roll my eyes when I see “The first woman to X! Omigod!!” news releases, but this one I forwarded to my mom and said “this is the award I’m going to win someday.” I never even thought about the Turing before, but now I feel strangely empowered.

I guess I better get working on that PhD. ;-)