The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives yesterday released a study title "Canada's Housing Bubble - An Accident Waiting to Happen" in which they state that "for the first time in 30 years, six of Canada's hottest real estate markets are in a housing bubble." The study examined trends in house prices in Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Montreal and Ottawa between 1980 and 2010.

Brian Weeden of the Secure World Foundation has a very interesting article on The Space Review titled Dancing in the dark: The orbital rendezvous of SJ-12 and SJ-06F which details the apparent on-orbit rendezvous of two Chinese satellites.

"The rendezvous of two Chinese satellites demonstrates that China is broadening its space capabilities, but also touches on the greater issue of perceptions, trust, and safety in space activities that could impact the long-term sustainability of the space regime."

I have to say I'm fairly excited at the news today that Amazon is making available a new instance type for Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service called Cluster Compute Instances. Specifically designed for high performance computing (HPC) applications, I can how this new service will be attractive to new start-ups who need HPC but don't want to spend the considerable money on their infrastructure just yet.

When the New York Times objected officially to Apple about an iPad application called Pulse they shot themselves in the foot. Pulse is an innovative yet simple RSS news aggregator for the iPad.

For whatever reason the New York Times has decided to target Pulse and now perhaps anyone who aggregates their news feeds. According to Kara Swisher at All Things Digital, a Wall Street Journal web site, Apple received a letter from the New York Times which stated that "The New York Times Company believes your application named 'Pulse News Reader' infringes The New York Times Company's rights.".

TechCrunch is reporting that Microsoft could be taking over the search on Apple's iPhone with the upcoming release of the next iPhone operating system. It's become obvious that Apple and Google are clashing these days in several areas including the mobile sector, and now with Google TV, with home entertainment.

Apple does not have search technology of its own and that's a big setback for a company that's repositioned itself the last few years from being primarily a computer hardware company. So what do you do when you don't want a rival to have a foothold in your territory? You turn to a lesser rival, at least in Apple's eye.

I haven't used one and I can't buy one yet, as I'm Canada, but I do have some thoughts on why the iPad will be a success.

It's a Consumer Device not a Geeks Plaything

I've read quite a few reviews on the iPad including the Wall Street Journal's Walter Mossberg's and Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow's and they both touch on the subject but don't quite nail it down.

I received two Bigelow Space Station models today. They are 1/30 scale model and include one B.A. Standard Module, two Sundancer Modules, one Propulsion Bus, one 5-Point Node and three Crew Transfer Vehicles. I'm in a rush so I hastily put together one model. The pictures below do NOT include the provided solar arrays. I'll add those later. I'll also take better pictures at some point. A nice little touch is the application of Canadian flags on each module. The model itself is about 0.9 meters wide (3 feet) by 0.75 meters tall (2 1/2 feet).

My thanks to Bigelow Aerospace for providing these models. One will be on display in Vancouver, hopefully at the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre, when I can arrange it.

Anil Dash has an opinion piece today on CNN which basically says don't let a service like Twitter or Facebook be the only game in town. And he has a point.

SpaceRef has recently started using Twitter as an additional marketing tool as part of our advertisers campaigns. We don't spam our various Twitter accounts with a bunch of advertising but provide relevant tweets to each of our Twitter accounts with no more than one tweet per day per advertiser per Twitter account. The results have been nothing less than spectacular.

I hate it when a perfectly good computer just sits around doing nothing. In this case it's my old Apple 12" PowerBook G4 with the following specs: Processor: 867MHz, Memory: 640MB SDRAM, HardDrive: 40GB Ultra ATA.

Why would I replace the beautiful Apple OS with Linux?

There are two reason. The first is that as soon as Apple decided to go Intel with their processor's they dropped support for the PowerPC version of the OS like a hot potato. I was none two pleased. The second reason is that I can do more with linux running on these hardware specs than I could running Apple's now unsupported OS.

Why Yellow Dog Linux?

It really wasn't a hard decision picking Yellow Dog. My research showed that this distro had the most up to date support for PowerPC processor based computers. Ubuntu also supports the PowerPC but not nearly as well as Yellow Dog.

Getting and Installing Yellow Dog

Installing Yellow Dog was actually quite easy thanks to clear instructions on its web site and an install process that is smooth. First you need to get the latest distribution for the PowerPC. For me that was downloading the YDL 6.2 single ISO from one of it's mirrors.The download is a 3.8GB file which took me about 40 minutes. I have a pretty fast connection. Once you've got the ISO you need to burn to a DVD. I did this on my Mac desktop. You can follow these basic instructions.

Once you've got the ISO burned to a DVD you can download the YDL v6.2 for Apple instructions for a quick and easy install. I went with a single boot with a total wipe of my previous Apple OS.

What Yellow Dog Looks Like When Installed

From left to right you see: The main screen running the Yellow Dog E17 desktop, Terminal and OpenOffice apps open and lastly FireFox with a screenshot of the new SpaceRef web site under development.

What's Next?

Well the laptop will be used to test various code I write and may be used on any expeditions I go on.

I also have an Apple Power Mac G5 which I'm looking to turn into a test server platform so I'll probably put Yellow Dog on it after I've backed up the data. But that project is for another weekend.