Graham Glass, etc.

Cool Stop-Motion Music Video

The music is great and the video is even better! It's called "Her Morning Elegance" by Oren Lavie.

My New Desktop Background

Here's another beauty, this time a cool-looking cloud over New Zealand. [original]

EDU 2.0 Technical Update

We've recently added a ton of new functionality to our online education system edu 2.0, bringing the total code base to a whopping 25,000 lines of Ruby. The back-end architecture is also maturing, and uses the following components:

• Mongrel clustering for the Rails applications.
• Fiveruns monitoring and mangement system.
• Memcached for session and page caching.
• Sphinx text search engine and thinking_sphinx gem.
• Automatic forum and message translation using Google translate.
• Incremental backup system.

Our roadmap for 2009 is very ambitious, and includes launching a commercial version (edu 2.0 for business) in Q1, support for audio and video recording from your browser, offline support, mobile phone access, SMS integration, and seamless integration with a 3D virtual world.

Should be an interesting year!

Le Louvre

The Louvre museum is stunning after dark.

The large pyramid is surrounded by water.

In this picture you can see the baby pyramid as well.

La Tour Eiffel

The Eiffel tour was particularly beautiful this Christmas, lit up pale blue with its searchlight scanning the sky. And every hour it would shimmer with 20,000 sparkling white lights!

With shimmering in action:

Here's a nice close-up of the base: