I had an afternoon to kill yesterday so I checked out ‘Iron Man’. Robert Downey Jr was a genius pick for the role of Tony Stark. The movie is great fun and I figure that as geek (anti-)heros go Tony Stark is pretty good. I left with a silly grin on my face.
I then killed the rest of the afternoon by looping around the Bay using nothing but public transport (I needed to use 3 networks… but it’s doable).
Listening to: Running Up That Hill [12″ Mix] - Kate Bush
Every 12 months or so I find a game that is so compelling I just NEED to play it… I have found just such a game. Chronotron. Simply awesome! Robots, time-travel, non-linear, brain exploding goodness.
One of my personal favorite features of the new Ponoko showroom is that we’re enabled RSS feeds all over the show. Handy when tracking the progress of a competition (RSS) for instance. Implementing this was one of those ‘damn i enjoy programming in Rails’ moments - super powerful and super easy.
I’m out to San Francisco for a week and as usual I forgot something in my packing. This time it was my iPod Touch - in my case this is a big deal because it is a sanity saver. Thankfully I had my phone with me (it’s an iPhone (*) but I never listen to music on it)… and here is the taste of the future - software gadgets rock! I just loaded it up with music and sanity was saved. The whole experience had a delightful maliability to it. A device that I used for one task instantly took on the role of another device. ‘Today you’re going to play music! Make it so.’ I know it’s a bit of a false test but it was a delightful little taste of the near future.
(*) As bad as it looks… I am not a gadget freak - I swear. UPDATE: The missus has notified me that I only just get a way with that claim.
RoughlyDrafted has an interesting retrospective on Apple’s in-house chip design history. The really interesting quote is right at the end (sorry to spoil the surprise):
“PA Semi isn’t a small acquisition, however much Apple’s trying to downplay it. The last company they spent hundreds of millions for was NeXT. At $275M, I don’t believe this is just about better parts for the phone. I think Steve’s got something bigger in mind, although we probably won’t see the results for three years or more.”
I turned off Spaces this morning and life is a bunch better. While I initially felt that it made my computer a bunch bigger I eventually found that it just pissed me off. If you spend a lot of time using many apps to do your job - IDE, command line, browser(s), virutalisation space - Spaces is just plain broken. The core reason is that you naturally start to accrete your windows around where you’re working - you don’t leave them where they were instantiated. The problem is that “Apple-Tab” assumes exactly the opposite - so you end up staring at blank screens.
The first public taste of rocket racing will take place Aug. 1 and Aug. 2 in Oshkosh, Wis., Whitelaw said, at the annual Experimental Aircraft Association air show. It will involve two of the sleek aircraft developed for the league. The racers will also perform at air shows in Nevada and New Mexico.
And interestingly:
The engines will come from two companies, Whitelaw said: Xcor Aerospace of Mojave, Calif., and Armadillo Aerospace of Mesquite, Tex. Armadillo was founded by John Carmack, a high-tech businessman who created successful video games, including Doom and Quake.
