kdmurray.blog

The crossroads of life and tech

Daily Archives: August 2, 2008

Mars Phoenix Confirms Water on Red Planet

Earlier this week the Mars Phoenix rover made an astounding discovery.  It was finally able to confirm the presence of water ice.  The find in and of itself marks the first time that water has been confirmed for certain on any heavenly body other than our own azure sphere.

The Phoenix rover uncovered ice crystals and after NASA officials discovered that the crystals had sublimated in a matter of a few days, they decided to run more detailed tests on them — mainly to try melting the ice.

The University of Arizona also put up a good piece on their involvement with the project.

This means that there could, potentially, be organisms in that water if it can stay in liquid form long enough… really that’s the biggest barrier to life on Mars, the water ice sublimates so quickly in the direct heat of Martian daylight that organisms don’t have much chance to develop.

NASA’s official Mars Phoenix mission website has even stated that the mission will be extended by about a month due to the discovery.  It’s now slated to complete at the end of September.

The news is indeed exciting.  It wasn’t a complete surprise to find the ice on Mars as there had been previous evidence from satellite flybys of the Martian arctic.  Space.com has a more complete article on this story including quotes from officials involved in the project.

Investigating the ASP.NET MVC Framework

Over the past few months I’ve been hearing more and more about a new framework being developed by Microsoft and the ASP.NET community.  It’s something that will bring a very common coding practice from the Java world and that’s the pattern of the model view controller (MVC) framework.

Due to the covoluted nature of my own school experience, I haven’t had much in the way of formal exposure to MVC concepts.  In fact it wasn’t until about 18 months ago that I first heard the term when we were rolling out a new Java framework at work.  This was a pretty major shift in direction for my team as we’d been using ASP.NET and webforms to do web application development for the past few years.

The transition hasn’t been an easy one.  Most of the folks involved in the project are new to the company, new to the working world in general and the training on MVC was at a minimum.  (I’m leading a team to replace that framework now, but I’ll talk more about this in some future posts.)

So over the past few months I’ve been reading posts by Scott Guthrie and listening to every episode of the Polymorphic Podcast that I can get my hands on.  The PMP in particular has proven to be an excellent resource for information relating to the ASP.NET MVC framework.  Craig Shoemaker regularly brings on guests who are experts in the field of .NET development and key players in development of the framework.

Over the next few months (in amongst my myriad other projects) I want to take a closer look at the MVC framework and see what all the hype is about.  I need to figure out how to get a decent windows development environment up and running.  For that I’m thinking about returning to a Boot Camp setup to give me a bigger boost when running my Windows environment locally on the Macbook.

Since my new role doesn’t involve a lot of development work, I’m really looking forward to getting my hands dirty again, and diving under the hood once again.