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One of my clients keeps getting a summons to appear in court...it's phrased very legal sounding and intimidating...always comes from suchandsuch@something-lawyers.com ...I had to add a bunch of Spam Assassin filters in the cPanel to filter out all the various permutations of *@*lawyers*.com to get rid of them.
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I did another night-time time-lapse the other evening, when the ISS was going over.
Unfortunately...
My sense of direction (and, to be fair, the compass on my iPhone) let me down, and the camera was initially pointing in the wrong direction.
My angle estimation was way out - it seemed to be a lot higher in the sky than I had aimed the camera!
My focussing skills are letting me down. I have found that the 'maximum' focus on my lens seems to be slightly further than infinity  so I have to manully focus just a bit short of the lens stop. I got it wrong, so the photos are all somewhat blurred.
I moved the camera as soon as the ISS appeared, so at least got a few frames with it in!
I left it going after the ISS departed, and when I looked at the photos, saw that I had also captured a UFO (it was, I am sure, a shooting star, but as it was so blurred all I know is it went from out of the field of view to below the horizon in < 45 seconds (it is on three frames, each with a 15 second exposure) - but that sounds like a long time for a meteor!
Perhaps it was :alien: checking up on me
PooperPig - Coming Soon
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Do you get just a blob of light or can it actually resolve the shape of the ISS. Not being a camera nut and living in a city that washes out 99.9999% (I can see about 5 stars) with light pollution I am curious as to what you get.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity
RAH
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The ISS looks only like a very bright star with the unaided eye. You can see when it is passing over by going to http://heavens-above.com/[^]
The difficult we do right away...
...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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We are scheduled for the shuttle to come over tonight, 1 Aug, at 17:45. It is a 6 minute sighting so if the weather cooperates it should be a good one.
<edit>
The weather didn't cooperate. Totally overcast, couldn't see anything in the sky.
</edit>
Once you lose your pride the rest is easy.
I would agree with you but then we both would be wrong.
The report of my death was an exaggeration - Mark Twain
Simply Elegant Designs JimmyRopes Designs
I'm on-line therefore I am.
JimmyRopes
modified 1-Aug-14 9:41am.
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 That is still my most favourite xkcd up until now. 
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A man and his wife were getting a divorce at a local court but the custody of their children posed a problem.
The woman jumped to her feet and protested to the judge that since she had brought the children into this world, she should retain custody of them.
The man also wanted custody of his children, so the judge asked for his side of the story.
After a long moment of silence, the man rose from his chair and replied: "Your Honor, when I put a coin into a vending machine and a Coke comes out, does the Coke belong to me or to the machine?"
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Apparently someone hasn't found a girl friend yet, now I know why!
"the debugger doesn't tell me anything because this code compiles just fine" - random QA comment
"Facebook is where you tell lies to your friends. Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers." - chriselst
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I've been looking at this article for the last couple of days (OK, since yesterday): Why many programmers don’t bother joining the ACM[^], and I couldn't think of anyone I've ever known that was a member of the ACM.
Do they exist? Anyone here? Is there value in it?
TTFN - Kent
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There was mention of it when I was in college (late 80s), but as I create software, rather than hardware, I have never been interested.
Similarly, as I'm not an engineer, I'm not interested in IEEE.
You'll never get very far if all you do is follow instructions.
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FYI, the ACM is not a hardware organization, even though its name would imply otherwise.
Gus Gustafson
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Kent Sharkey wrote: Anyone here? Is there value in it?
I liked the ACM journals but the price was fairly expensive in terms of consumer journals that at least at the time were providing similar material. Not to mention that the consumer journals were a lot easier to read and had a lot more information that was useable day to day.
The journals represent a significant store of research material but it is hard to utilize, because as noted in the article, one must pay to access it, and it isn't cheap. It has been quite a while since I attempted to use it but at least then searching it required that one basically knew what one was looking for in the first place (and it wasn't long enough ago where I would have expected that.)
As per the other part of the article the comment about the usefulness is that I can't say that I can ever recall seeing anything that was objectively useful. But there were certainly articles that were interesting. I would have probably subscribed to even more journals, but again the cost was prohibitive (and this is from someone who spent a lot on non-fiction literature in the first place.)
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There were two journals that were published by the ACM: Communications of the ACM and Journal of the ACM. JACM specialised in computing theory and mathematically/formally oriented articles and CACM carried articles that talked about implementation details of compiler or operating system concepts.
Dijkstra's famous "Goto Statement Considered Harmful" was published as a letter to the Editor in CACM, because it was too short to be considered an article. In the early days of computing, when language compilers were barely understood, there were special articles such as how to implement call-by-name in Algol, etc. Graduate students were encouraged to become members of ACM so that they could keep up with the technical trends. I consider myself to have learned more from CACM than from the classroom lectures.
Later, CACM morphed into a magazine that contained very little scholarly articles -- unless you consider puff pieces on social impact of computer security and similar as scholarly articles.
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Dijkstra's Goto considered harmful was submitted to the ACM as an article. The reason that it was published as a letter was simply speedy publication. The editors knew that the peer review of an article would take a while. Also the content was so inflamatory (at the time) that peer review would become more argumentative than productive.
Gus Gustafson
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Vivic wrote: There were two journals that were published by the ACM
Not exactly sure what you mean, but the umbrella of the ACM publishes a large number of journals and has done so for decades. Perhaps you are referring to the journals directly related to the ACM itself and not the sub-organizations.
http://www.acm.org/publications/journals[^]
Vivic wrote: Graduate students were encouraged to become members of ACM so that they could keep up with the technical trends.
I remember getting the same message which might have been true in the early days. But in terms of the OP I doubt it is currently feasible. Both because of the lack of readability of most of the articles (in all of the magazines), the vast, vast breadth of software and hardware now, and because at least a non-trivial amount of the articles deal with esoteric material that is unlikely to ever be relevant (some might of course but reading all of the rest for something that might only become relevant in 5 years is an extreme stretch on the usefulness factor.)
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I have never heard about ACM before. After scanning the article in your link and a few of the comments, I see no reason to look further into it.
Soren Madsen
"When you don't know what you're doing it's best to do it quickly" - Jase #DuckDynasty
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ITWorld wrote: The ACM, created in 1947, is dedicated to advancing computing as a science and profession and currently has more than 100,000 members.
They must be real good at keeping a low profile.
Never heard of them.
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
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Only 100K I belong to a group with over 10M.
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Eddy Vluggen wrote: They must be real good at keeping a low profile.
Probably true.
But a quick google gave me 48 million software associated people world wide and that doesn't include hardware. So 100k isn't that big of a number.
Most ACM references I have seen are usually in highly academic type articles. I have also seen ads for conferences for them in consumer technical magazines.
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Seems like a club for snobs to me.
Jeremy Falcon
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I occasionally take a look, but cost and relevance always stops me from joining, plus the fact that there's a vast amount of information that doesn't require an ACM subscription. In general, it's all too abstract and theoretical for my tastes (strange coming from someone who writes a lot of abstract and theoretical articles, haha!)
Marc
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I was a member of the ACM for several years, but found that the cost was too much to continue. When I was in grad school the first time, I found their "Algorithms" section (all were in Algol back then) quite useful. Now when I need some info from their journals, I find them through the university library.
CQ de W5ALT
Walt Fair, Jr., P. E.
Comport Computing
Specializing in Technical Engineering Software
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When I was in college in the early 80's, I had access to a few of the ACM publications through the CS department library. They were useful back then, especially when I was working on my independent study project.
As a professional developer I've never seen the need for them. Their topics are of academic interest, but have relatively little practical application.
As Marc mentioned, the cost is prohibitive. I used to get ads from them wanting me to join - I could have spent over $1000 on publications a year.
Software Zen: delete this;
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