Jill Tarter's talk at OSCON 2010 (her speaker bio)

Being copied to mirrors as we speak. Final update will be Saturday, July 10th.

credit:C G-K

The 1.1.8 release of Log4r has the following changes:

• Fix for bug #28021 - major change to how Log4r handles thread synchronization, now using Monitor class instead of directly using Mutex. Yann Golanski reported what appeared to be a deadlock related to Mutex not being re-entrant.
• Move files from src directory to lib directory, following convential ruby gems.
• Add %T to pattern formatting, allowing for truncated file path, this runs opposite to the c vs C patterns. e.g. %t outputs /fully/qualified/path/filename.rb, %T outputs filename.rb
• Added example to illustrate logger inheritence rules see: examples/ancestors.rb
• Added "levels" method to Logger
• Incorporating STARTTLS support via Nitay Joffe wrapping change with a check for ruby < 1.8.6 to require 'smtp_tls' and handle different calling characteristics. Dan Sketcher submitted an almost identical patch a month later. Added examples/gmail.yaml and examples/gmail.rb to illustrate usage.
• Modifications to behavior of rollingfileoutputter.rb by David Siegal. Can automatically purge older files, intelligently picks up appending where left off, or deletes existing log files and starts at the beginning again.

Other changes that I did not blog about earlier:

Internet2 (yes, that's the logo)

Yes, the Internet 2 exists. Yes, they continue research into tools and protocols for high speed networks. This afternoon, I wanted to set up a server running the Internet 2 Network Diagnostic Tool. I wanted to run it with their "fakewww" server so that it would be isolated away from other services on the server I set aside. While fakewww allows one to specify the port it binds to, it does not allow it to bind to a specific address. Again, I am made sad. So, I fixed it and submitted the patch to the fine folks at Internet2, if they take the patch, I'll edit this to point at the release with the patch.

NDT servers are pretty nifty, here, try out ours: http://ndt.hcro.org

Image of planets around HR8799, source: C.Marois et al doi: 10.1126/science.1166585

The star HR8799 hit the news in 2008 when direct images of planets orbiting it (seen at right, labeled b,c and d) were published by Christian Marois and his team at the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics. Taking direct images of planets around other stars is extremely difficult, as the brightness of the star exceeds the reflections from its planets by many thousands of times and, up until now, required using the most sophisticated telescopes available (Hubble, Keck, etc...).

However, a counter intuitive relationship between resolution and primary mirror size can enable this sort of direct imaging of exoplanets on much smaller telescopes.

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