thetomcraig

In college, I had an internship at JPL writing software to help collate, transform, and combine pictures of Jupiter, for use with NASA’s JUNO mission.

My coworker and I created a GUI application in IDL (similar to FORTRAN), that would allow the user to open up several images of various wavelengths and combine them into a cylindrical map of the planet, showing its entire surface at a given point in time. After working on this for several months and creating a functional, and actually useful program, we realize that there was a blank space in the toolbar and we had no button that needed to be there. So we put in a button with a cat GIF that literally did nothing. We planned on having it do something jokey, but ran out of time.

I will always remember demoing this to my mentor, basically the world expert on all things Jupiter, showing him what the program did, thus justifying why JPL had spent several thousand dollars to have me as a research fellow. The disappointment in his eyes when he saw that dumb, useless, cat button was priceless.

Nit Pick feedback: it should read: “the right _number_ of features”, not “_amount_ of features”. Other than that, love the look of the site :)

> Ask a nontechnical Windows or Mac user where their files are stored - they have no idea.

This. The move towards “everything on the cloud” was a double edged sword for non-power users. It’s great that you don’t have to make Grandma plug in a external USB drive and use Time Machine, but yes nobody knows where things are anymore. Does Grandma know what “the cloud” even is?

I feel like Apple is the biggest proponent of moving away from the idea of “files” and having your “content” be something you shuttle around between different apps. But each one has a slightly different “share” and “import” and “export” paradigm as well. And now there is an iCloud Drive “files” app! What does that mean? And how do I know if it’s on my phone or I’m just seeing a representation of what’s on my iCloud Drive? Does the cloud icon mean I’ve downloaded it or not, what if it’s it slightly dark gray or slightly light gray? </rant>

It’s amazing that amateur folks can provide this much insight these days. I worked at JPL 10 years ago and setup a pipeline for amateur Jupiter astronomers to get their images to JPL/NASA. Basically JPL figured out that these people were consistently producing such high quality data, that NASA could take advantage of it for the Juno mission. Glad to see this in the news :).