Jer Warren

@[email protected]
62 Followers
1.2K Following
30.8K Posts
Mobile-addicted. Web-dependent. Digital Plumber. Nerd. He/him. No-coiner.

Alt-text enthusiast, lover of having his mind changed.

If you engage to disagree with something I've posted, it probably increases the likelihood of a follow. (But chances are pretty good, anyway.)

Boosts and quote-boosts welcome.
Jer WarrenAug 1, 2023
Can't deal with firefish.social uptime/performance issues anymore, so I'm moving to @nyquildotorg. However, firefish.social is just too overloaded for the migration process, so I'm trying to bootstrap from a previous export for now.

Like Ozzy said, "I'll see you on the other side."
Jer WarrenAug 1, 2023
Charles JohnsonJul 31, 2023
Jer WarrenAug 1, 2023
CosmicRamiJul 31, 2023

A real fascinating story of how an 81-year-old former Air Force chap had come forward to announce he saw pulsars well before they were discovered but could not talk about it for half a century until the military instruments he observed them with were decommissioned and de-classified.

In a nutshell, he was using radar for a Ballistic Missile early warning system and noticed a pulsating signal showing up in his data, which was rising 4 mins earlier each day. He asked astronomers after writing down the location, and it was the Crab Pulsar!

The woman who discovered pulsars, Dame Prof. Jocelyn Bell Burnell - agreed with his discoveries.

https://www.nature.com/articles/448974a

Sent this to our team's slack channel overnight, and my supervisor told me he and another one of our team's astronomers were the folks that the Air Force chap got in touch with!

Small world, and a nice Aussie connection!

https://pubs.aip.org/aip/acp/article-abstract/983/1/642/620966/An-Independent-1967-Discovery-of-Pulsars?redirectedFrom=PDF

#Astrodon #RadioAstronomy #Pulsars #Defence #Science

Air force had early warning of pulsars - Nature

Staff sergeant spotted neutron star before astronomers.

Nature
Jer WarrenAug 1, 2023
In around 2006, I started working on this project built in CodeIgniter, which was apparently itself a fork of CakePHP, but I hadn't used either of them before.

At one point I got frustrated because I really needed to pass a URL in as a parameter, and CodeIgniter was extremely opinionated about how URL routing should work. So I asked my coworker — who had been frustratedly beating his head against CodeIgniter a little longer than I had been — for help.

I said "I need to pass a URL in on a GET request—"

He started cackling maniacally for so long he hyperventilated.

I eventually came up with some ridiculous encoding scheme to accomplish it, but this was my first experience with having to use a stupid abstraction that was chosen by someone other than the people having to work on it. The first of many.
Show threadJer WarrenAug 1, 2023
Turns out it was Friendica I was thinking of. I didn't even look at first when searching because then name was so similar to identi.ca, which I knew wasn't it.

Supports ActivityPub, oStatus, Diaspora, RSS and IMAP but also has a rich plugin system including connectors for Bluesky, Discourse, and a ton of other cool stuff.

Might be worth playing with if you find being part of only one fediverse too limiting, lol.
friendica – A Decentralized Social Network

Show threadJer WarrenAug 1, 2023
@mcc alright, turns out it was Friendica I was thinking of. Reading a little more it sounds like maybe it doesn't mix the content into one feed, instead gives you different feeds for each content type, which includes ActivityPub, oStatus, Diaspora, RSS and IMAP but also has a rich plugin system including connectors for Bluesky, Discourse, etc.
friendica – A Decentralized Social Network

Jer WarrenAug 1, 2023
Show threadI Know How This Movie EndsAug 1, 2023

Update:
Scientists resurrect 46,000 year old worms, which instantly started reproducing

"THEY DON‘T NEED TO FIND MALES AND HAVE SEX, THEY JUST START MAKING EGGS, WHICH DEVELOP."

Scientists Resurrect 46,000 Year Old Worms, Which Instantly Started Reproducing

Researchers have successfully reanimated the bodies of 46,000-year-old microscopic roundworms they found frozen in the Siberian permafrost.

Futurism
Show threadJer WarrenAug 1, 2023
@david no :(
Jer WarrenAug 1, 2023
@alexhammy it wasn't Elgg, but Elgg looks pretty danged nice.
Show threadJer WarrenAug 1, 2023
The software I'm thinking of supported ActivityPub, oStatus, RSS for sure, I don't recall how they were implementing email newsletters but I assume pop3.

It was on my shortlist of Mastodon alternatives for a while and I hate that I can't find it now!