Sunlight into  Hydrogen:  "Hydrogen Solar of Guilford, England, and Altair Nanotechnologies are building a hydrogen-generation system that captures sunlight and uses the energy to break water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. .. Hydrogen Solar CEO David Auty said his company's Tandem Cell technology uses two solar cells that together capture sunlight from every part of the ultraviolet spectrum. The interaction of photons with a semiconductor material causes a photoelectrochemical reaction that excites electrons and causes water molecules to break up into hydrogen and oxygen, according to Auty. Auty said Tandem Cells are coated with a layer containing metal oxide particles that are less than 30 nanometers thick and can convert sunlight energy into hydrogen with 8 percent efficiency. .. In October, the Department of Energy awarded (.pdf) $10 million in research grants to four groups also working on producing hydrogen from sunlight -- GE Global Research, the University of California at Santa Barbara, MVSystems and Midwest Optoelectronics. "  10:14:29 AM    

VMware Upgrade Release:  Mostly SAN interface and SDK improvements.  Also pricing update: "VMware ESX Server 2.5 and VMware VirtualCenter 1.2 are available today. Pricing for ESX Server starts at $3,750 for a 2 CPU machine; pricing for VirtualCenter starts at $5,000. ESX Server and VirtualCenter are available from Dell, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, HP, IBM, NEC and the VMware VIP network."  12:41:50 AM    

Presentation Tips for People running Virtual PC or VMWare: Good tips for tech demos, even if you aren't running VMs.

  12:34:53 AM    

ZoomIn for Windows: "ZoomIn is a screen magnification program allowing you to view any area of your screen under magnification. ZoomIn allows you to control the amount of zoom, view a pixels location and color, and save it as a bitmap.  Use ZoomIn is a very simple program to use. Place your mouse over the main window and click and hold the mouse button then drag the "zoom" window over the area of the screen to enlarge. "

  12:29:57 AM    

Inside VMWare Workstation 5.0 Beta: Short report with good screenshots of key VMware 5.0 features:

• snapshot manager, for more than one snapshot per VM
• V2V function, to convert images from MS Virtual PC 2004
• movie maker, to make file (.avi format) of a VM session
• an improved command line interface for simple scripting

Performance of graphics appears improved.  Support for special USB devices (eg, webcams) is reported.  Update:  Beta program is now public, with many screenshots.

  12:21:52 AM    

BCFacts.org - The BC Government's Environmental Record: Interesting model of environmental information service for a single state (in this case provincial) government.  Outbound syndication spreads the newsfeeds to partner sites, and inbound syndication supplies info from partners and volunteers.  12:12:39 AM