Coleman Web - Anthony Coleman’s Personal Website

PETITION TO U.S.A. PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH

Your administration’s proposal to cut the budget for NASA’s Space Science and exploration programs will inflict long-term, possibly irreparable, harm to the future of space exploration.

Your own Vision for Space Exploration is being distorted. This budget, if passed, threatens to cancel decades of vital exploration, the very thing that gains the United States international respect and admiration. What’s more, in allowing NASA to alter its own mission statement to eliminate the phrase “to understand and protect the Earth,” your administration has discarded an absolutely essential component of the space program.

As a Member of The Planetary Society, the world’s largest and most respected space interest group, I urge you to take the lead in restoring vitality and innovation to space exploration and all of NASA’s crucial program areas. I urge you to fully fund space science and exploration at NASA and salvage its proud history of innovation and exploration in space — before it’s too late.

Anthony P. Coleman

Yet another link sent to me from my Dad that I thought was worthy of a note. The title is a good enough description for this so go ahead and give it a try.

Falling Sand Game - hosted by Chirag Mehta @ chir.ag

Tomorrow sees the first day of the UN small arms confenence in New York. Control Arms campaigners will hand over the Million Faces petition to Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the UN.

Here is an extract from the Control Arms Website detailing the petition:

Lack of controls on the arms trade is fuelling conflict, poverty and human rights abuses worldwide. Every government is responsible. The Control Arms campaign is asking governments to toughen up controls on the arms trade.

Add your face and join the million like me and demand a global arms trade treaty.

As I stopped running Seti@home on my computers in the past few weeks (due to numerous crashes caused by the new enhanced seti@home workunits) I decided to revisit some websites of other distributed projects I had bookmarked.

I am now running the Majestic-12 search engine client. I found out about this project throught a The Guardian Newspaper article. This project actually distributes the indexing of the Majestic-12 search engine to volunteer participants who install the client. Unlike the Seti@home project which utilised the unused CPU power of the computers it was installed on, the Majestic-12 client downloads a list of URL’s to visit from the Majestic-12 servers and then utilises the internet conections of volunteers to index the websites on the list by visithing them. Once the list is run through the information is compressed and then sent back to the Majestic-12 servers. This is then added to the search engine index. Of course, I have just briefly summarised the client here, so visit the Majestic-12 website for all the in-depth detail.

Running the client is makes intensive demands on an internet connection and should not be run without reading up at the website. Failure to do so could result in slow connections if you wish to run the client and use the internet at the same time for other things such as surfing the net. If you are on a capped internet connection this client may use up your capacity very quickly so be warned. I myself am on a capped service and will only use the client towards the end of the month, as my caps reset on the 1st of every month. I am also planning to only run the service at night after this month, so as to keep my ISP happy (they normally are!).

Here are some details on my contribution:

Number of URL’s crawled: