One of Hubble’s most famous images: pillars of creation where stars are forming in the Eagle Nebula. Credit: NASA/ESA

What are new upgrades in Hubble Space Telescope version 2.0?

1. They will make the Hubble telescope 100 times more powerful.
2. And, big news, they will add Web 2.0 functionality on the companion website “hubbl.”.

You’ll be able to submit your theory about the data that Hubble collects, and it may gain wide acceptance by the scientific community (if it’s not too funny).

“It’s time to bring the project into the 21st century. Sure, top scientists have great ideas, but so do people on the Internet. Why not open it up to them? We’re also adding a social networking aspect. Were there any other buzzwords I left out?” said NASA project manager Damon Evans.

Besides the exciting science parts of the upgrade, you will also be able to bookmark favorite stars and galaxies, and if anything happens from those areas you’ll be notified in your “HubbleFeed.” Please check the feed frequently or you can miss alien’s messages sent to Earth some day!

Profits from advertising on the site will fund the “Hubble Space Laser Cannon” project which will be used to destroy incoming asteroids and the upcoming invasion from the Andromeda galaxy - oh, this sounds very practical . Are you ready to publish your “Bigger Bang” yet?

(Notice: This is just a rumor for people who have some sense of humor only!)

Free Website Magazine: Know more than your competitors with Website Magazine

Don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss out on future posts!

Oh, my first thought was “It’s silly to add Java to Rails” because normally GWT uses the Java language to generate JavaScript. But I changed my mind after reading Jon Crosby’s answers to a short interview from InfoQ:

Most of Java’s weight comes from JEE, which is not part of GWT on Rails. Client side GWT uses the Java language to generate JavaScript; The heavy server side platform never makes it into the picture. In the past, using GWT may have been…

Tim O’Reilly opines on notable tech books from 2007 — just have a quick look on his list.

1. Mac OS X Leopard: The Missing Manual: this book sold out of its 50,000 copy first printing in a few of days. In the fourth quarter of 2007, the total size of the market for books on Mac operating systems was about 60% the size of the market for books on Windows. Mac is hyped again!
2. iPhone: The Missing Manual. This is the first…

David H. Hansson - Photo: 43people.com

InfoQ had an interesting interview with David H. Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails and its biggest proponent. He revealed many improvements in Rails 2.0 and how to upgrade from previous version. Here are some points:

• Rails 2.0 is polished in a way that’s very hard to describe meaningfully in words, but very apparent when you use it with hundreds of tiny changes.
• Migrating from Rails 1.2.x to 2.0 wouldn’t be too painful. Rails 1.2.6 is packed with…

Yahoo co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang showed glimpse into the future of Yahoo: “At Yahoo we want to be most essential starting point for your life,” and “take the complexity of the Web and simplify your life through very powerful technologies,” in his inaugural CES appearance.

Yang also showed that Yahoo Mail will serve as the hub, but open interface to third-party applications and include social context. Communication frequency and volume are basis to calculate the strength of contacts (or connections…

According to this report from security firm Fortinet, anyone who has installed the third party Facebook application “Secret Crush” is at risk of installing spyware.

The app allures users by saying “one of your friends my have a crush on you” and after installed it attempts to download the well-known spyware Zango.

Over 1 million Facebook users may have been infected due to the way this application encourages invites to 5 or more friends: “Before you can find out who might have a…

I found this stuff really great!

download (m4v)

In this presentation, Julien — author of the YUI Compressor and the YUI Browser History Manager — covers several major performance topics:

• Developing for high performance
• High performance page load
• High performance JavaScript
• High performance DHTML
• High performance layout and CSS
• High performance Ajax
• Performance measurement tools

You can download PowerPoint slides here or view them on Slideshare

Thanks for sharing so useful practices. This helped me to revise and improve the performance of my application (a feed reader under closed beta now) in many places.

Free Website…

You may never use object extension in Javascript just because you, and many others, believe that a prototype based OOP languages like JS are unable to support this classical OOP feature.

Matt Snider has comprehensive articles about object extension in JavaScript that show how JQuery (<= v1.2) and Prototype (<=v1.5) frameworks use “member copy” method, a brutal force technique to iterate through all object members and copy them to other object, in comparison with a better technique: “Prototype Clone”.

Member Copy as…