I hate that this is true, but it looks like the LA Times (and others) is reporting that Arthur C. Clarke, father of HAL, the concept of modern communications satellites and countless sci-fi stories/books/movies is dead at age 90. I’ve always loved Sir Clarke’s work, and he’s the source of one of my favorite quotes (actually his third law - google it):

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

With his passing, the genre of science fiction looses one of it’s greatest creators and has been dealt a serious blow.

Links:

Los Angeles Times Article
Via Boing-Boing
Photo Credit: Anuradha Ratnaweera, anuradha on flickr.com, source
Arthur C. Clark on Wikipedia.org

I know everyone’s at least seen the so called “Little Bigfoot” photo taken by the Spirit rover. Oh, you haven’t well a few days ago it was the photo of the day on the Astronomy Photo of the Day page. Go check it out. Done? Okay, here’s the thing, I looked at that, and yeah, I saw it. but here’s the thing, same scale, opposite side of the photo (nearly all the way over), there’s a feature I’ve dubbed the “Wolfman of Mars”. Go ahead take a look, here’s a blow up to help find it:

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See anything familiar looking? No? How about if you compare it to this:

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Image from Wikipedia.

Now, I know that NASA is rolling their eyes at this whole thing. All I’m saying is that maybe we’re not looking at the problems from the right angles. Maybe we should be looking for scaled down versions of life instead of microscopic or full sized. Maybe we shouldn’t let our preconceived notions of what life should look like cloud what we see or what we’re looking at. Eh, what do I know. All I know is that Martians are little and red-brown. No wonder we never saw them there before…

UPDATE - 071010 - after further testing I found a couple of errors in my original webapp file. So, I’ve updated the icon and a couple other things and reposted. Enjoy!

Over at Lifehacker they’ve posted about the standalone Mozilla based WebRunner. WebRunner is, well I’ve pretty much been over that already. The point is, you can launch a webapp from a standalone program, allowing you to do things without getting distracted by all that… extra web. I really like this concept, I now have links for Gmail, Google Reader, and all those other nifty web 2.0 apps I like.

I wanted to give this a try myself, so I’ve made a standalone Wikipedia launcher. Get it here. It’s a launcher for the Wikipedia’s English main page.

Make your own! It’s dead simple! All you do is install the WebRunner software, create an ini file for your app, create icons and zip these files together. Rename the zip file to your.webapp and your good to go!

There’s a couple of worrying things about the webapp files - from a security standpoint. The biggest of these is that you can include a js file with javascript that runs at an application level. In other words it has access to everything that the application has access to, like - oh I don’t know - the file system?! (in my best Church Lady voice - oh crap am I revealing my age!). Another is the fact that you’re using a zip format to distribute the rest of your files. Which of course can have it’s own security problems when used with other programs. You also don’t really have the ability to get at a lot of the standard Mozilla settings that WebRunner shares. So you can’t make adjustments to settings for cookies, passwords and the like.

At any rate, it’s still a relatively young application, so I’m sure they’ll get the security issues addressed, but for now, make sure you inspect those files before you run them!

Links:
WebRunner
Lifehacker post
My Wikipedia launcher

Disclaimer

Keep in mind while running these webapps with WebRunner, that WebRunner itself is still a in pre-release/beta stages. Which means that the webapps found on this site, while working to view sites and what not, are not intended to be a replacement for your standard browser. The websites you’ll be viewing were not designed to be used with WebRunner, and therefore not all features on these sites may be compatible with it. I claim no responsibility for any malfunctions related to WebRunner. I’m providing files that allow you to access some websites, nothing more. Feel free to use the webapp files found on this site, but keep in mind you’re using them at your own risk - and without warranty!