John Topley’s Weblog

Time for a quick quiz. What do the following have in common?

• The Compact Disc
• Mark Thatcher gets lost
• The Mary Rose

If you answered “the year 1982” then maybe you remembered those events from the time, or perhaps you just guessed from the title of this post. A bit of a give-away, that. My main memories of that year also include:

• The Falklands War
• The Sinclair ZX Spectrum
• Channel Four
• The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾
• The Ford Sierra

Why am I telling you this? It’s because I can’t quite believe it’s twenty five years ago and specifically, it’s a quarter of a century this month since my father took me to the Birmingham International Motor Show, where we were party to the UK launch of the Ford Sierra: Man and Machine in Perfect Harmony. Much more on that later.

I don’t remember a great deal about 1982 as I was only eight years old, but I recall watching live television showing the Mary Rose being raised from the depths of The Solent, where she’d rested since 1545. Specifically, I remember the TV commentary being a bit more exciting than the pictures, which as far as I could tell showed huge yellow cranes lifting up a few old planks of wood. Fortunately, I have a better developed sense of history and occasion now!

Channel Four Television launched in November 1982, a fact that only comes to mind because it’s referenced in that hilarious book of the year, Sue Townsend’s “The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾”. I remember reading the fictional diary whilst staying with an uncle and auntie and for some truly bizarre reason I spent the first half of the book thinking that Adrian Mole was a girl! Anyway, having a fourth UK terrestrial television channel was a big deal, because this was at a time when television was only on in the evenings—if I remember correctly, apart from school programmes you got the test card during the day (breakfast television didn’t start in the UK until 1983).

My memory of The Falklands War is simply of it being on the news a lot and of doing a school project on it whilst it was going on. Predictably, it seemed like an exciting event to a young boy at the time. I don’t remember having much of a sense of the horror and suffering of it, although perhaps I did and those memories have faded.

I probably saw the newfangled Compact Disc demonstrated on Tomorrow’s World at some point that year, although I didn’t actually get to hold, own or listen to one until 1990! I was still impressed though. I wish the BBC would bring Tomorrow’s World back as I used to really enjoy watching it, even if most of the inventions and breakthroughs they showed didn’t end up making it into our everyday lives. Perhaps it’s because of the age I was that the early 1980s seemed like a very exciting time, technologically. We seemed to be on the verge of some golden new technology age, the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the 1950s and 60s. Digital technology was starting to come through with digital audio and fibre optic cabling and with computers starting to appear in homes.

I suspect that like many households, our first home computer—if you ignore a Binatone TV Master games console from the late 70s: were they even computers?—made it through the door under the guise of being able to help with the household accounts or being good for John’s homework. Naturally our 16K Sinclair ZX Spectrum soon earned its keep as a games machine!

My memory of the arrival of the little rubber-keyed black box of magic is that for some reason my Dad ordered it directly from Sinclair Research in Cambridge rather than buying it from a shop. I think the parcel may have come on a Friday and we spent hours that night trying to set the damn thing up correctly! There was no monitor, you connected it to your TV which had to be tuned to the computer signal. I think that may have been the problem. Fortunately we eventually got it all working and were able to load the bundled Psion “Horizons” cassette of demo programs and were soon playing the “Brick the Wall” game, which you probably know as “Breakout”. There was some crazy stuff on that tape, I can tell you. Such as a biorhythms program—still not entirely sure what they are—and a program that simulated population growth in rabbits! Good times.

No one born after about 1985 can possibly appreciate the sheer excitement and feeling that you’re living in the future that came from having a home computer in the early 1980s, in the same way that I probably can’t appreciate those thoughts and feelings arising as a result of building an Altair or owning an Apple ][ in the 1970s.

Some time in the autumn of 1982 my Dad asked, apropos of nothing, if I’d like to go to the forthcoming Motor Show, a biannual event then held at the huge Birmingham NEC complex. Although I don’t think I was particularly into cars, I did have an interest in things shiny and mechanical so I eagerly agreed. The day arrived and we hit the road early. I think it was on this first Motor Show trip that I sat in the passenger seat and decided to break up a dull motorway journey by giving the thumbs-up sign to any lorry drivers that we overtook. Surprisingly, they all cheerfully reciprocated. You should try it some time. On second thoughts, it probably works best if you’re eight or under!

This day at the Motor Show is possibly one of my most treasured childhood memories, so you’ll have to indulge me whilst I write about it at length for a bit. My overriding memory is that I found it incredibly exciting. For lots of reasons—a boys’ day out with my Dad, the overwhelming excitement of going to my first Motor Show and the fact that it marked the British debut of the new Ford Sierra.

It’s difficult for me to convey just how radical the Sierra was when it was launched. This was the car that replaced twenty years of the Ford Cortina, a favourite with both fleet and family buyers in Britain. By 1982 the Cortina was looking pretty tired. It was still a best seller but by all accounts it wasn’t a great drive and the technology was pretty agricultural. In spite of which, Britain was still buying masses of them.

By contrast, the new Sierra looked like nothing else around, aside from the even more radical Audi 100 which came out at the same time. I think the Sierra was more important though because it was a mass market rather than executive car. Ford put on a huge splash to introduce the Sierra to the vital UK market at the Birmingham show. I remember that they had a massive stand that was packed with promotional material such as videos and cutaway displays as well as plenty of the actual cars. Undoubtedly the Ford hype machine was in top gear but it was very exciting to me at the time and it must also have been pretty stimulating for the adults present. It’s not often that something genuinely sensational comes along that marks a complete break with what’s gone before. I remember being blown away by the sheer effort that Ford must have put into their new car, because from reading the launch brochure it seemed like it was breaking ground in so many new areas, although principally in fuel-saving aerodynamics, a direct consequence of the fuel crises of the 1970s.

It’s hard to believe now, but people used to stop in the street and stare when they saw a new Sierra on the road, as if it were a spaceship. Sure, the Sierra had four wheels, an engine and a body but it had impact resistant, moulded aerodynamic bumpers made from polycarbonite, when other cars made do with a bent bit of steel bolted onto the front and back. It had an ergonomically designed dashboard with a centre console that was angled towards the driver like in a BMW, with controls that were arranged in logical zones. I remember that the brochure proudly proclaimed that the steering wheel, pedals and driver’s seat were all aligned, whereas in most cars they’re slightly askew. I read somewhere that the design brief was to “make the driver feel important”.

Ford were proud to show off their high technology in the Sierra brochure. It was all about how Ford’s computers had helped design the car and how robots would build it. There was talk of how Finite Element Analysis had enabled the car to be built using less metal and how those same computers that had produced the Sierra had helped NASA to design the space shuttle, which had had its maiden flight only a year earlier.

The Sierra was lighter, roomier, more fuel efficient, quieter, safer and much more aerodynamic than its predecessor. In fact, when new the Sierra was 21% more aerodynamic than the class average. By contrast, modern cars tend to be bigger and heavier than the cars they replace. Some of this is undoubtedly down to much tougher safety legislation and market forces but I can’t help thinking that sometimes the car makers just aren’t trying as hard. The only car in modern times that has struck me as outstanding in the same way that the Sierra did was another Ford: the original Focus. Even then, it was a brilliant complete package with original styling, rather than the major technology-driven step ahead for all cars that the Sierra represented.

I came away from that Motor Show feeling inspired. In those days I used to love drawing and I remember spending hours afterwards churning out endless pictures of the Sierra. I think it must have been about that time that I got my first inkling of what I wanted to be when I grew up: a car designer! The trend continued and Dad and I went to subsequent Motor Shows—1984: radical new aerodynamic Vauxhall Astra!—and even the Motorfairs held on odd-numbered years at Earls Court in London. However, none of these shows seemed quite as good as the first time. In fact, they seemed to get worse each year in the sense that the car manufacturers didn’t seem to put as much effort into their stands, or maybe it was just because I was older and less susceptible to marketing hype.

In a fit of nostalgia I recently used eBay to track down a few issues of Car Magazine from that era just to satisfy myself that this car really was big news in the motoring world and had not gained extra significance in the over-active imagination of an impressionable eight year old. I’m pleased to report that my memory doesn’t fail me and that the Sierra really was big news for 1982. October 1982’s Car had “Sierra Shock: It really is a good car” on the cover and a glowing report inside. From reading that issue it’s clear that everyone thought that the Sierra was going to be a massive sales success and maintain or increase Ford’s 35% share of the British car market. Of course it didn’t turn out that way, a turn of events that I took surprisingly personally at the time, for I couldn’t understand why seemingly nobody else understood what an exciting and brilliant car the Sierra was!

Unfortunately when it went on sale the Sierra was a bit too radical for the British public and Ford initially had trouble shifting them. The car was soon nicknamed the jelly mould and the early models had a well-publicised stability problem in cross-winds. If you look carefully you’ll see that all but the very earliest Sierras have little plastic “ears” behind their rear three-quarter lights which Ford fitted to cure the problem, at the slight expense of adding extra drag. The Ford sales organisation went into overdrive and the introduction of sporty models to the range such as the XR4i and later the infamous Sierra Cosworth helped to lift the car’s image and sales figures, although it never did the business in Britain that the Cortina had.

By 1987 the Sierra was given a mid-life facelift and no longer looked like the odd one out, for the style of aerodynamic design it had pioneered was now mainstream. In the early 1990s it was finally replaced by the Mondeo, a thoroughly modern, competent and boring car. It was telling that Ford decided to drop the Sierra name, as they were haunted by the spectre of its relative failure for years afterwards and following the equally radical Granada/Scopio retreated back into conservative design for much of the 1980s. Fortunately they found their bold streak again in the 1990s with “New Edge” designs such as the Ka, Puma and Focus.

People who know me may be surprised to read all this car talk, for the supreme irony is that I can’t drive! I guess I’ve always been more interested in cars as technology, engineering or object d’art than as a personal means of transportation. I think I appreciate cars in a more abstract way now, when the reality is environmental damage, traffic jam misery, speed cameras and increasing ownership and running costs. However, if I were to come across a pristine silver 2.3 Sierra Ghia on a Y plate then I might be tempted to buy it. For posterity’s sake you understand…

I can’t remember the last Motor Show I went to with my Dad—I think it was in the mid-1990s—but as you’ve read I can certainly still remember the first one we went to in October 1982. Sadly I wasn’t able to reminisce about all this with the one person I shared the experience with, as my father died early last year. When memories are the most personal thing that you have left of somebody it makes you realise how precious they are and how soon and easily the present fades into years ago.

In Mac OS X you can slow down some of the animation effects by holding down the Shift key whilst activating them. For example, minimising a window or activating Exposé. I just tried it with the Front Row keyboard shortcut of Command + Escape but it didn’t work. However, it does work if using the key combination again to return to the Desktop. Weird!

Hello! It’s John here. John Conners to be precise (from John’s Adventures fame). Way back in March John (Topley) wrote an article on my site titled ‘The Case For The Mac‘. At the time I was a lifelong Windows user (well, since Windows 3.1) and for as long as I’d known him John had been trying to persuade me to buy a Mac. As you can see from John’s eloquently written article, he made a very good case. Fast forward to April (only a few weeks later) and I wrote about the fact that I’d finally caved in and bought a Mac - a Macbook to be precise. At the time I was smitten since I’d just bought the thing and was overcome by the amazing styling and classy touches.

So here I am five months so later and I thought it was about time I wrote about my experiences being a proper Mac user. And what better place to do that than the blog of the man who made it all happen?

First of all, in true John Conners style, I went all out. I gave my Windows laptop to my wife, blitzed my desktop PC at home and that left me with only my Macbook to do my web surfing, emailing, Windows software development (more about that later) and any other computer related activities. And you know what? I’ve never looked back!

Moving from Windows to Mac OS X was a little tricky at first. I had to work out where everything was and what all the keyboard shortcuts were, but in no time I was moving around like a pro. I didn’t find myself missing the overly cluttered Windows taskbar and Start button one bit. I love being able to SSH onto my web server rather than going through a Windows app. I love the look and feel of Mac OS X, it seems to be much less cluttered than Windows and it makes intelligent choices about what you’re trying to do rather than badgering you with endless wizards filled with stupid questions. Being able to see all the windows for a current application at the same time (via F10) or all applications (F9) has now become second-nature and when I’m on a PC I really miss it. There are a hundred other things I could cite but in short, once I got used to the different operating system I started to love it and any time spent on a PC felt incredibly frustrating, as though it was trying to get in my way.

My wife’s less-than-perfect experience of her Vista laptop randomly restarting itself for ‘critical’ updates and it frequently failing to connect to our wi-fi unless I restarted the networking was in contrast to my stress-free life with my Mac where everything just works. In only a few weeks I had turned into one of these “you should buy a Mac” people just like John - evangelising Macs at every opportunity. (So far I’ve managed to get one friend to buy one - result!).

Having been constrained to the more business-oriented Windows machines I was suddenly free to be creative. I could take a bunch of photos from a holiday, turn them into a slide-show, put them on a DVD that my father’s DVD player could play. I could write and sing my own score without it sounding terrible (GarageBand has some effects that make even the worst singing voice sound reasonable), I could edit video clips and put them as a chapter on the DVD and do a host of other cool things. I could create and order an surprisingly high quality photobook (in fact our wedding photo album was made in iPhoto and looks fantastic). It’s possible to do all these things on a Windows box but you’d have to track down and buy the software, it would either cost a fortune or integrate poorly - whereas it all comes as standard on a Mac and works seamlessly together while actually making it fun to do so. I shudder to use marketingspeak but I really felt “empowered” for the first time in my computing life. And I still do.

I’ve bought a couple of books on the subject of writing software for the Mac. It’s a completely different language and toolkit to what I’ve used before but it seems sensibly organised and I’m enjoying learning something new - along with the user interface design guidelines which are quite different to the Windows ones. I’ve always been keen to try and create usable software and I feel that Mac software takes usability to a higher level.

As I mentioned before I still do my Windows development (plug: John’s Background Switcher) on the Mac using VMWare Fusion. Since my Macbook uses an Intel processor, Windows runs almost as quickly inside Mac OS X as it would do on its own. I have no problems at all using Visual Studio inside my Mac (which is still the best development tool I’ve ever used) and it means I get the best of both worlds.

I have an office in my house that I used to use whenever I went on-line. However now I just fire up my Mac while sitting on the sofa in the lounge and do what I need to do. From pressing the power button to firing up a browser takes less than 30 seconds - compared to several minutes on my wife’s Windows laptop (a couple minutes more if it won’t connect to the wi-fi). I think it’s fair to say that I love my Mac. From its beautiful curves to its sleek shape to the feel and sound of the keyboard. I know it’s wrong to feel love for an inanimate object but I do. I’d never say something like that about a Windows machine and I’d never go back to having one as my primary machine.

So thanks John. You showed me the light and turned me into an even bigger Mac fanboy than you!

Two amazing facts that you may not know about atoms:

1. There are more atoms in a glass of water than there are glasses of water in all the world’s oceans
2. If you were to remove all the empty space from all the atoms that make up the six billion+ people in the world, then the whole of humanity would occupy less volume than an apple:

As part of my process of continuous and sometimes arduous improvement of my AssetsGraphed web application, I’ve recently added slightly better localisation support. Localisation—sometimes called L10n—in the context of software means adding special features for a specific locale. It usually follows internationalisation (i18n), which is the full-blown support of different languages and cultures.

AssetsGraphed isn’t currently internationalised, and unless there is suddenly a massive demand for it to be, I have no plans on changing this. So the user interface text will remain in English and read from left to right, as that’s what I know. I also know that proper internationalisation is a bit more involved than that! What I have changed however is how the display of currencies is handled. As you might imagine this is a fairly significant part of a financial asset tracking application.

AssetsGraphed has supported multiple currencies from day one and users can select which one they want to use on the Settings screen. The example below shows an extract from the Assets screen with the U.S. Dollar as the currency:

That’s all well and good, but it’s not always appropriate to prefix the amount with the currency symbol, and not all cultures group digits using a comma. In France for example, they use a period. ISO 31-0 mandates a space character. To accommodate all this, the digit grouping symbol is now a per-user setting and as the system administrator I can control whether the currency symbol is displayed before or after the amount. Here’s what it looks like with Swiss Francs:

After nearly six months of waiting, the day is finally here. All across the United States people are getting ready to put down at least five hundred Dollars in an Apple or AT&T store for the privilege of owning an Apple iPhone. Some of those people are so eager to get one that they’ve been waiting in lines since Monday. Are they mad? Quite probably. Are there more important things in the world than a new mobile phone, even if it is the first one Designed by Apple in California? Definitely. However, to dismiss the iPhone phenomenon as calculated and viral hyperbole is to miss the opportunity to revel in its glorious design and detailing. The iPhone is the finest expression yet of Steve Jobs’ great taste and Apple’s talented team of industrial designers led by Jonathan Ive.

People are excited by this phone. I’m excited by this phone dammit, even though mobile phones are one of the few gadgets that usually leave me cold, and even though I can’t even buy one in the continent where I live! The level of interest that’s been shown towards the iPhone just shows how inspired people get when someone finally goes to the trouble of doing things properly. The hardware and software fit together beautifully in a way that’s definitely not been seen before on a mobile phone.

Over the past few weeks, those of us who have been watching have learned more and more about the iPhone. Delicious little details have been revealed through adverts and informational videos posted on Apple’s website. Earlier this week, the first reviews came in and have more or less confirmed that the facts Apple have presented to us about the iPhone are all true. Undoubtedly AT&T’s EDGE network is hopeless for data transfer and everyone seems to be agreed that this is the most serious shortcoming of the iPhone. Hey, I never said it was perfect! It seems inconceivable that Apple won’t bring out a future version of the phone with 3G and that they won’t address the other shortcomings that have been widely mentioned, such as the lack of a proper SDK. Remember, this is version one of an entirely new product in an entirely new market for Apple, one that’s been years in development. They had to stop work and get it out of the door at some point.

I recently bought a Motorola RAZR which is a fine phone in many ways, deservedly popular and undoubtedly the best out of the three mobile phones that I’ve ever owned. I love the slimness of it and the one-piece keyboard that looks like it’s been machined out of metal. The battery goes on and on and on. The phone’s software is where it falls down though. It’s not terrible, I’ve found my way around it easily enough and can do everything I need to do. There are lots of little quirks though and features that I just don’t really understand. That means that I don’t feel entirely in control of it, which is not good for something I’ve paid money to own.

Let me give you an example of one of these quirks. When I’m sending a text message I press the soft key under Send To and get a list of my contacts. So far so good. Next, I scroll to the contact I want and press the same soft key which now represents Send. Only it doesn’t work because I first have to click the button in the centre of the cursor keys to select the contact before I can send them my message. In other words, the user interface for sending text messages is optimised for the send to multiple contacts use case. It works great for this, only that’s something I never do. In fact, I can’t think of a single occasion when I’ve sent a text message to more than one person at the same time.

There are some features on my RAZR whereby I haven’t a clue what they are, or if I do have an idea then I don’t know how to use them, and that means I’m afraid to find out in case I can’t undo whatever it is I just did. I’ve even looked in the instruction booklet, but that just gives you the steps needed to access the feature without telling you what it actually is. Here’s a brief list of bafflers:

• Show ID/Hide ID - whose ID?
• Add Digits - what digits am I adding and to what?
• Talk then Fax - how?
• Notepad - something to do with phone numbers
• Info Services
• Cleanup Messages - how does it choose which messages to clean up?
• DTMF: Long

—It’s enough to turn even the most ardent technophile into a technophobe! The difference with the iPhone is that if I were to somehow find one lying about then I know that I could pick it up and use all of its features straight away. Based on watching Apple’s videos, there’s not a single aspect to the phone that looks awkward or difficult to use. Everything seems obvious and natural and as it should be.

As I said before, there are no dark crevices. You get to this happy position by obsessing over the details again and again and again until they’re right and until they make sense. Sadly, only Apple seem to be doing that at the moment. They’ve even thought about the experience of buying the iPhone. You pick one up, pay for it, take it home and then activate it on your computer through iTunes. What you don’t have to do is spend twenty minutes sat with some dodgy acne-ridden youth who was the first to accost you as you stepped over the threshold and into the store. Sat bored whilst he takes you through the phone’s features and sets it up, all whilst smearing your new purchase with his sweaty fingerprints! Seriously, everyone has to earn a living but it’s great that Apple have eliminated another completely unnecessary part of the mobile phone experience along with crap usability.

Happy iPhone Day everyone. The Mobile Phone for the Rest of Us is here. Regardless of whether you’ve been queuing for days to be amongst the first to buy one, or if you’ve vowed never to go anywhere near one, its impact will be felt across the industry. Now we can all look forward to better mobile phones.

I was born too late for the Apollo era. If I could choose to observe any momentous moment in history, then I wouldn’t choose to see the invention of the wheel because we don’t know when it was invented or by whom. There probably wasn’t much to see anyway—some guy discovering that you can more easily roll a round rock than a square one. Viewing the Big Bang is out because I think even the TARDIS would struggle with the physics of being present at the creation of everything without getting sucked into it all. No, I’d choose to go back to July 1969 to witness the culmination of eight years of incredible effort with the first moon landing. I really can’t think of anything more significant that Mankind has achieved.

Sadly it looks like the closest I’m going to get is via third-party sources such as books and DVDs, although I do always enjoy seeing the Apollo 10 Command Module whenever I visit the Science Museum in London. I just stare and think about the fact that the strange-coloured small thing in front of me has actually travelled a quarter of a million miles and orbited the moon. It looks primitive when you see it for real, with its thick copper-coloured exterior and big bolts that give it the look of a piece of heavy engineering from Victorian times. That tiny cramped capsule did the job though, and how.

I just bought a DVD of the excellent From the Earth to the Moon twelve part TV series that came out in 1998. Sort of following on from Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 film, it tells the story of various aspects of the Apollo space programme, from the tragedy of the loss of the Apollo 1 crew, to the Grumman engineers who gave seven years of their lives to the development of the Lunar Module. Like the Apollo 13 film, Tom Hanks is involved too, although he only briefly appears on-screen to give an introduction to each episode. He’s obviously a space nut and From the Earth to the Moon is great viewing if you have any sort of interest in that great endeavour of the 1960s and early 1970s.

Talking of Apollo, NASA are running a story on their website about how one of their teams have been inspecting the umbilical connection that supplied electricity and oxygen etc. from the Apollo Service Module to the Command Module. They’re looking at it to improve the design of the Orion spacecraft that will replace the Space Shuttle. The article says that they had difficulty finding an intact umbilical—it was normally severed before the CM returned to Earth—but that they got a break when they came across a family’s holiday photos on the Internet that showed an intact unit at the Saturn V complex in the Kennedy Space Centre. This worries me. A lot. Don’t NASA even have a list of the Command Modules that were built and where they ended up? Why not just work through the list until you’ve inspected all the surviving CSMs that are on Earth? It’s not like these things change hands on eBay. Isn’t leaving it to a chance encounter on the Internet a bit hit and miss?! And what about the original plans? Have NASA lost those?

The proposed design of the Orion spacecraft is strikingly similar to the Apollo CSM. It’s like the Space Shuttle never happened. I guess it shows just how much the people who worked on Apollo got right forty years ago. It makes sense to stick with things that are well understood when you’re risking people’s necks by sending them a quarter of a million miles to the moon. Of course, Orion will benefit from the significant technological advances that have been made in materials, computing and other areas and will be able to carry more astronauts.

I don’t know if Americans felt like they were being heavily taxed in the 1960s, but the United States has been a rich country since the end of the Second World War and I don’t think the ordinary folks of the time were crippled by high living costs. They were almost certainly paying a pittance for fuel compared to their European counterparts and still are in fact. The Apollo project was costing about 4% of the total federal budget, which sounds like a lot until you learn that the Vietnam War was costing about 12%. Somehow we can always find money for killing people.

It’s too early to say if Project Constellation is going to be a success. NASA’s last big idea of a low-cost, reusable space plane didn’t turn out to be a resounding success in either of those two objectives. The Space Shuttle now seems to be regarded as a failure and as not really having delivered much for the money. I’m sure there are many people who are closely involved who would strongly disagree, and I’d cite the Hubble space telescope alone as being worth the cost of admission, but my perception is that people are no longer interested in the Shuttle. Perhaps the tragic loss of two crews has tainted the whole endeavour forever. It’s a shame because I remember my seven year old self being excited by the Shuttle when it first flew in 1981.

Unfortunately flying about in Earth orbit doesn’t really capture the imagination of the general public, who when it comes to space exploration, are only ever going to be observers rather than participants. Apollo had that vision thing and at one stage NASA even had plans to use the mighty Saturn V for a manned flyby of Venus. You couldn’t say NASA were lacking in ambition at the time! However, the public got bored very quickly with the moon programme after the highs of Apollo 11. It took the near-disaster of Apollo 13 to re-awaken interest and show that this stuff is far from routine or ordinary.

George W Bush is no JFK and there’s no Cold War imperative to drive the project forward through seemingly impossible barriers. I do hope it works out. It would be really exciting to watch a moon landing sometime in the 2020s. Even though it’s been done before, there are a lot of us who weren’t around to see it first time around and who feel like we’ve missed out. Sometimes I just stare up at the moon and imagine seeing the Earth at the same scale from space. Or I stretch out an arm and hold my thumb up and imagine it obscuring the Earth and the whole of the rest of humanity. It’s easy to see why Apollo 8’s “Earthrise” photo is so affecting. We should go back to the moon and not stop this time. There are still so many things to do and learn there. Then let’s go to Mars.

I just got a skeletal Ruby on Rails application running on a Java Virtual Machine using JRuby:

—This is running on Windows XP which is running in a Parallels VM which is running on my Mac. To recap: it’s Ruby on Java on Windows on Mac OS X. Who could have predicted that a few years ago! Next steps: hook up a database and try to deploy a Rails application to a servlet engine. I think this could be very useful in future!

I absolutely love this spoof commercial from the Rails Envy guys, so I make no apologies for embedding it here in case you haven’t seen it yet!