Southern California Surf Forecast: Ocean Science 101: How our surf is made
Topic: Science
9:54 pm EDT, Jun 20, 2008
Ocean Science 101: How our surf is made OK this will probably review for a lot of you, but I thought I would go back and cover some of the basics in surf forecasting. I have been posting forecasts, reports, maps, and other random nonsense for a while now and I started to realize that a lot of the stuff that I have been throwing at you assumes that you have an idea of how our surf is generated. It isn’t really that hard to find on the interweb, (I mean, come on, that is what Wikipedia was invented for people), but I decided to throw it up here too so that you didn’t have to hunt around for it.
Why it matters
I am sure that there are some of you out there that don’t really care about where the waves come from and are fine with just knowing if the surf is going to be good tomorrow. That is totally cool…I hope that I keep my forecasts simple enough that you can keep scoring…or at least save some gas money now and then.
Personally I think that you become a better surfer, and a better waterman, if you get in tune with the ocean, the weather, and the processes that create the conditions that we, as surfers, are looking for. You don’t need to be a forecaster or anything but I do think that knowing the general principles behind how waves are made will keep you a step ahead of other surfers, which is nice, particularly when that step could mean the difference between scoring empty surf and slogging it out with the rest of the crowd that is a day late and a dollar short.
A light tank, called the Honey in Britain. Machine gun ports in the hull help distinguish this model, as well as the hexagonal commander's hatch. The M3A1 ditched the hull mounted side machine guns.
At least this mudhole is shallow, one in France swallowed up a later M5 model in 1944.
June 1942. "Why greases must be saved. Introducing two good soldiers of the home front: the housewife who saves her waste household fats and greases, and the butcher to whom she gives this salvaged fat after she has collected at least one pound, strained it through a metal sieve and poured it into a large, wide-mouthed can. Butchers displaying the poster shown here will pay househoulders for the fat, and sell it to rendering plants thereby turning this valuable material into industrial channels where it will be processed into ammunition for America's fighting men." Medium format negative by Ann Rosener for the OWI.
"It must be ice," said Phoenix Principal Investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson. "These little clumps completely disappearing over the course of a few days, that is perfect evidence that it's ice. There had been some question whether the bright material was salt. Salt can't do that."
The chunks were left at the bottom of a trench informally called "Dodo-Goldilocks" when Phoenix's Robotic Arm enlarged that trench on June 15, during the 20th Martian day, or sol, since landing. Several were gone when Phoenix looked at the trench early today, on Sol 24. [University of Arizona Mars Phoenix Mission]
Mac OSX Software - MultiFirefox 2.0 | Code Contortionist
Topic: Technology
10:08 pm EDT, Jun 19, 2008
For those of us who work on the ‘front end development’ side of things, there’s a careful balance we hang in regarding new browser releases. The short version is that as new browsers approach their release candidate status, we need to be checking and double checking our work in them to make sure that their change logs don’t break our work.
At the same time, there’s a known issue with the fact that, more often than not, running the latest beta or release candidate alongside with the production version (and, if you’re a really good developer, one previous version back from the most current production release to take care of things). Internet Explorer is notorious for this and I recall the headaches I went through beta testing it. I essentially resolved to (and continue to resolve to) use multiple virtual machines, one for each version of IE.
[Dave Martorana] created a little launcher app that, when copied to your Apps folder along with the accompanied Firefox3.app file (appropriately renamed so it wont overwrite the stable version), will let you create and/or select an additional profile, as well as the version of Firefox that you wish to use. It’s clean, it’s simple, and it works.
Neat. I have to run 2.0 for web development, but the rest of my crap can go in 3.0
