OK, so most of you who know even the littlest bit about me know that I’m a not-so-small space nerd, which means that the following video clip doesn’t really need a justification for being here on QDN. It’s a series of still frames taken from 31 million miles away from Earth, looking back at our wee little planet, and capturing the moon transiting the frame. It’s breathtaking — and given that whole 31-million-miles-away part, it’s a true feat that the geometry worked out just right to get the shots.

The shots were taken by the Deep Impact spacecraft (which was renamed EPOXI after it finished its primary mission of smashing a little drone into a comet); Phil Plait, over at Discover Magazine’s Bad Astronomy blog, explains the whole thing a lot better than I ever could.

While it certainly reads like a bad Vince Flynn novel plot, I admit to being a bit intrigued by the notion that there might be a secret Executive Order that attempts to override the well-known order of succession to the Presidency in the case where both the President and Vice President die or are incapacitated. Exhibit A of the argument is the fact that there’s both a secret appendix and another set of classified appendices to the 2007 Presidential Succession Act (“Annex A” and the “classified Continuity Annexes”); exhibit B is that apparently, Reagan was the one to issue the original order, and nobody knows what happened to it in the intervening years. Interesting.

If you, like me, let Firefox 3 create a new profile for you when you installed it over the past week or two, you might want to revisit the step you’ll need to take to fix Firefox’s annoying I’ll-forget-all-your-cookies bug feature. It didn’t hit me until today that the reason my bank site couldn’t remember my login name was because Firefox was dropping the relevant cookie…

It’s amazing that we sit here, four years later, and the same broken behavior is accepted by the Mozilla folks.

There’s been quite a bit of press today about bit.ly, a new service from the folks at switchAbit; it’s a service that adds page caching, click-through counting, and a bunch of semantic data analysis atop a URL-shortening service that’s very much like TinyURL and others (and others!). Reading the unveiling announcement, the part that interested me most was the page caching part — they bill it as a service to help prevent link rot (i.e., when a page you’ve linked to or bookmarked then goes away), which would be a great service to those folks who rely on linked content remaining available. (And since they store their cached content on Amazon’s S3 network, robustness and uptime should be great as well.)

That being said, having worked with (and on) a bunch of caching services in the past, I also know that caching is a feature that many developers implement haphazardly, and in a way that isn’t exactly adherent to either specs or the wishes of the page authors. So I set out to test how bit.ly handles page caching, and I can report here that the service does a great job of caching the text of pages, a bad job of caching the non-text contents of pages, and a disappointingly abhorrent job of respecting the wishes of web authors who ask for services like this to not cache their pages.

Reason #2,331 why Red Sox fans drive me up a f*cking wall: a mere New York license plate is enough for them to attack you with baseball bats and “accuse” you of being a Yankees fan.

The Red Sox are the only team I’ve ever found whose fans are defined more by their hatred of a team than their love of one.

Update: it appears that the guy who wielded the baseball bat, Robert Correia, will remain in jail for at least the next 90 days awaiting his trial; the judge deemed that he’s too dangerous to release into the community. I’m sure that’ll do nothing to incense his fellow New York Yankees haters Red Sox fans…

This might be the least news-containing news story on the web today. I’m shocked that this story got filed, much less then made its way onto CNN.com.

I’m overall pretty happy about the release of Firefox 3, but am I the only one who’s seeing sporadic issues on Macs? On my iMac (2.1 GHz PowerPC G5), it’s painfully slow, so slow that I’ve started using Safari as my primary web browser. And on my MacBook Pro (Intel Core 2 Duo), I’ve had at least a dozen instances in the past three or four days where, during the loading of a tab, I get the spinning rainbow beachball of death and have to force-quit the app.

Ugh.