Listening to: Dil Cheez - Bally Sagoo

I had a rare taste of the future today.

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.

Listening to: The Garden Of Allah - Don Henley

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.”

Listening to: Gypsy Biker - Bruce Springsteen

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.

Listening to: Beautiful Machine - Shihad

I’ll grab the golden ring! We’re real artists! Ponoko 2.0 is out the door. Nice work guys.

Listening to: Faith - Strawpeople

After a bit of a wait:

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.

… now, where is that trucker cap.

Listening to: Dizzy - Jimmy Eat World

Listening to: Shoot Me Again - Metallica

I’m really pleased to see that the RepRap built using Ponoko is making some great progress… nice work Vik (*). It’s really exciting to be able to help out.

(*) and a nod to Don for providing a really forward thinking environment that allows the RepRap work to occur at the current awesome rate.

Listening to: White Shadows - Coldplay

Google App Engine… This has the potential to do for the web what VB and Delphi did for programming Windows Apps.

While I prefer the Amazon approach of decoupled services this service is an in important offer - because of and in spite of it’s limitations. It’s a platform that asks a programmer to provide code in return for massive scalability without worrying about the plumbing. Awesome… I’ll stick with my arrangement of virtual servers, S3 and web services for the mean time thou

Listening to: So Far Away - Dire Straits

The Mindscape guys kicked off just as I was leaving Provoke (happy birthday guys) and as it has turned out they are doing some seriously cool work in the .Net world. Check out the feature highlights for their 2.0 release:

1. LINQ everywhere – LINQ to LightSpeed means .Net 3.5 users can leverage the power of LINQ when writing their queries but still use the performance features that we are known for (like Named Aggregates)

2. Designer support – Full modeling support for your domain models directly from Visual Studio 2008. Drag and drop your tables onto the design surface, have associations automatically set up, easily setup validation attributes on model properties and much more.

3. Database support – SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL and SQLite are all supported. This means that LightSpeed 2.0 will be one of the first data access frameworks that provides LINQ to Oracle, LINQ to PostgreSQL, LINQ to MySQL and LINQ to SQLite!

4. Command line tools – Some folks prefer using command line tools to generate simple model classes so we have included this as well as the Visual Studio integrated designer support.

5. The simplest, fastest and most lightweight O/RM for .NET – The right balance of power vs. complexity has always been our focus with LightSpeed and this hasn’t changed for version 2.0. There has been considerable work done to tweak, optimize and enhance much of LightSpeed

As I was waving au revoir to the Microsoft world LINQ emerged - a seriously cool concept. The Mindscape team is onto a real winner by providing that facility over the leading open source database systems. Nice work!