Finally something to show for my seven months on Mars

So I quit my job in newspapers last May and hauled my then-pregnant wife across the country to work for NASA.

I've been a busy little bee, working on all sorts of projects, mostly involving Drupal and/or jQuery. But sadly, not one has been allowed to see the light of day.

Well, no more. Though it's not officially released, I'm putting my latest work out there - a unified Mars Image Explorer that'll eventually replace a half dozen or more different kludgy sites with a single easy-to-use interface for images from a variety of instruments orbiting Mars.

I'll eventually write up a case study, but it's an interesting mix of technologies:

Drupal powers the page generation, user management and access control, jQuery runs the AJAX interface, Python/web.py manipulates images in real time efficiently, and Java servlets deliver instrument data.

So there. I actually have been doing something.