Mike Mullane's book about his life as a NASA astronaut and Shuttle mission specialist in the 1980's is an excellent book where political correctness is pretty much absent. It should be on the bookshelf of anyone who is remotely interested in spaceflight -- it is well written, full of insight, entertaining, and for me, able to bring forth both tears of joy and loss. Thank you, sir!

So, I received an HTC Hero last year, and after playing around with it for a while, I decided to release a beta version of one of my projects to the public (oh dear!). Consumers of the application can view the results here, while Android owners can download the application from the Market. It's called RoughlyHere, and uses mobile provider based GPS positioning to give people a rough idea about your whereabouts. Peruse the documentation RoughlyHere for more information.

Uh, I got editor credits in Gordon Lyon's Nmap book. You might want to check it out, it's pretty good (see http://nmap.org/book/ for reviews and more information). In other news, I recently read 4 books on the SR-71 "Blackbird": Blackbird Rising: Birth of an Aviation Legend (Donn A Byrnes (Col. USAF (Ret)), SR-71 Revealed: The Inside Story, SR-71 Blackbird: Stories, Tales and Legends, and Flying the SR-71 Blackbird (all three by Rich Graham (Col. USAF (Ret))). If you are at all interested in some spectacular aviation history, you might want to order these (I ordered mine directly from the authors).