STS-114 has lifted off. They will arrive at the International Space Station on Thursday morning, where they will stay until Friday, August 5. Astronauts Steve Robinson and Soichi Noguchi will perform three spacewalks during the mission, "testing repair techniques and servicing the International Space Station." For a complete schedule see the Timeline of Significant Mission Events.

Check out Heavens Above to see if Discovery and the ISS will be visible from your location. It looks like I'll only have two chances toward the end of the mission, but that might change. I'm not sure whether an altitude boost of ISS is planned for this mission.

According to NASA current timeline and the assumption of a successful mission, this flight is a springboard to some exciting times for space travel including a new vehicle, a return to the moon and manned missions to Mars.

I, along with all member of Spread Firefox, received an email explaining that their server had been accessed by an attacker:

We don't have any evidence that the attackers obtained personal information about site users, and we believe they accessed the machine to use it to send spam. However, it is possible that the attackers acquired information site users provided to the site.

... and a little later in the email ...

We recommend that you change your Spread Firefox password and the password of any accounts where you use the same password as your Spread Firefox account.

This is a great reason that a distributed authentication standard needs to be accepted and used across the web... and soon. A distributed single sign on solution would prevent things like this happening... not preventing servers from being compromised, but preventing attackers from finding usernames and passwords that are potentially (and probably) identical to the credentials used to authenticate on other sites.

Of the potential solutions I've seen, I think I like OpenID the best. But I would like to see people critique and suggest improvements. The solution needs to work, of course, but it should also be simple and extensible.

It's time that we stop trusting every site we use with sensitive information.

del.icio.us has just introduced tagging items for others. This is pretty cool, I guess. It could be done before by just asking your friends to use a certain tag when they wanted to share a site with you. This kinda gets away from a true folksonomy: they're telling you how certain tags should be used. I would rather see this happen organically in the community with no help from the admins. Also, this could open the door for spam... and spam isn't what comes to mind when I think of del.icio.us.

Space Shuttle Discovery is set to launch on July 13, on the first shuttle mission since the Columbia disaster. The independant safety panel says that NASA has not yet met all of its recommendations, and that the 3 recommendations that haven't been yet are the most fundamental, including the preventing the external fuel tank from dropping debris on lift off.

Regardless, NASA is set to launch. On one hand, I wish they would do everything in their power to ensure safety for the crew. After all, another disaster like Columbia would hurt the administration even worse than it already is. On the other hand, I know (and more importantly, the crew knows) that space travel is a risky business. The only way to really improve the "quality" of space travel is to do it. Without mistakes to learn from, we'll never reach our full potential. Eileen Collins is the commander of the upcoming mission. In an interiew, she was asked about the risk involved. She responded

I am a huge believer in human exploration. Just think about the history of our country and the history of the world. People have flourished around this planet because I think we humans have something inside of us, a need to explore.
[snip]
To me, it is very important for humans to get off the planet and go do these things. Because I believe in this so much, I think that yes, there is risk in space travel, but I think that it’s safe enough that I’m willing to take the risk. I think it’s much, much safer than what our ancestors did in traveling across the Atlantic Ocean in an old ship. Frankly, I think they were crazy doing that, but, but they wanted to do that, and we need to carry on the human exploration of the universe that we live in. I’m honored to be part of that and I’m proud to be part of it. I want to be able to hand on that belief or enthusiasm that I have to the younger generation because I want us to continue to explore.

I think that's great. Willing to step out, take a chance. Even if NASA took extra months or years (and money) to fulfill those recommendations, space flight is risky. But space flight is essential, at least for future space flight.

I'll watch the launch on NASA-TV and probably some of the spacewalks and the landing. I'll try to watch the shuttle docked with ISS as they soar overhead during the night. I'm excited... I should have gone into aeronautics.

Here's another gmaps hack that I find very cool. Double click on waypoints, and it will calculate the length of your route... Now, I know that it is precisely 5.053571127021144 miles from my house to the office. Nicely done.