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Photograph and explanation of two colliding galaxies
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Intending on using this improved recipe for strongspace backups. Time Machine for local and Strongspace for remote /Documents backup
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John Siracusa's excellent 10.5 Macos X Leopard review. Lots of great technical detail, it is worth puching through all 17 pages. 10.5 looks like a fantastic release for developers.
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arXiv, the Physics preprint server now has an API. In the physics community the majority of research is trafficed through this service, most papers are read prior to publication.
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Detailed changes from the Apple Ruby team it seems.
October 2007 Archives
Apple ship Mac OS X 10.5 tomorrow, hot on the heels of fantastic results, as sharply written up by John Gruber. I don't think I'm going to make it to the launch event tomorrow, but will be getting Leopard pretty soon. The guided tour is pretty informative, standouts for me from the video are Time Machine, Cover Flow and Quick Look. The ability to look inside files without waiting for applications to launch will be super. Time Machine solves a hard problem in backups, giving you the ability to head back to a single file, without reverting the entire disk to that state. The integration with individual applications looks clever too, hopefully it will be simple to integrate this with non-Apple applications.
The sharing tools in iChat look really smart and Spaces seems like a clean implementation of the unix virtual desktop metaphor. There is also a ton of developer level updates in this release from improved Automator and Applescript to Ruby on Rails as a shipping tool.
For a bit of fun I have a nice picture of a Leopard who is just waiting for your captions too.
Tags:
apple, macosx, leopard, caption competition
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Tim Bray announcing the closing of the AtomPP working group, as the RFC 5023 is now published. Excellent news and an excellent piece of work, I think AtomPP is a super piece of work, we're using it internally already.
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wonderful stuff
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Five new skyscrapers by 2011, pretty much in a line from Liverpool St to London Bridge
Today, I managed to nearly watch the shuttle take off, live. Mission STS-120 will put a new European designed Harmony module onto the ISS. The exciting part was watching the post launch live video stream and listening to the chatter between the shuttle crew and ground control. I was watching the live camera feed off the main fuel tank when it peeled off the shuttle and fell to earth. Not something I'd ever seen before, but utterly amazing.
Space is still exciting stuff, I quietly wish that more money would be invested in space research, like habitats and near earth orbit asteroid mining, than is invested in weapons and wars, idealist eh? The whole back to the Moon and onto Mars thing doesn't really excite me as much as I thought it would. There is plenty of interesting stuff to be done between here and the Moon. Plus only a few people will ever get to Mars, if there is an active private space programme, then many more people will get into orbit and perhaps I can join them before I get too old. I can hold out for the Space Elevator I guess.
We looked into buy a car after Oscar arrived, the previous summer's heat and fitting things in and out of a three door car was getting to be a pain in the back, literally. So the quest began, five magazines and dozens of webpages later we settled on a second hand, but recent Renault Scénic. It is the original European MPV, sort of a big hatchback, ours has only five seats. It is not a 4x4 nor a minibus, it has acquired the totoro nickname catbus already. It delights in the colour Ottoman Blue, as shown.
The factory where they are made in Douai, near Lille looks intriguing on Google Maps, but you can get a peek in these aerial shots, the lowest level of detail on Google is hidden, so as to not give away the prototypes I guess.
What else did I learn on the journey, well car magazines mainly disagree with one another, but on aggregate say similar things, but they often are contradicted by their user reports. I learnt a lot about car technologies, as our last car was eight years old and they have got a lot safer and have more toys now. Euro-NCAP have been doing a great job at raising the debate on safety now that rust-proofing and reliability are pretty much a given.
We've now had the car for a year or so and we love it. Clever things like the lack of a car key, it uses an RFID credit card sized token instead. This handsfree car key is excellent, with a baby boy in one arm, I only need open the door, it unlocks for me. Then there are nice simple automation touches like the automatic windscreen wipers or the headlights that work out if it is dark and turn on, perfect in tunnels.
It is also quite nippy, turbo diesels are surprisingly powerful these days. If you want numbers 130bhp and 0-60 in under 10 seconds. It makes driving feel safe, knowing that it can pull out of a situation easily, particularly in the 30-50 mph on the bigger roads in London. Last summer we drove to the Loire in France and it was delightful, quiet, fast, fun and held everything.
When chatting to fellow fathers soon after the birth of Oscar, it became clear that most people had got a new(ish) car around that time and virtually all of them had got a turbo diesel. It seems they are the engine of choice, at least in Europe, I'm aware they have an undeserved reputation for being noisy in the USA. I suspect it is a way of getting a more powerful car without buying the ludicrous petrol top of the range model. It looks like a quieter beast, but secretly it is quite a brute.
The Scénic is one of the few cars in the world which had a woman as the primary designer, I think you can tell. There are so many practical additions to the car, like rear seats on rails, so that you can slide your child towards you from the front seats. Sunblinds which are attached to the door, clipping to the top of the window, so that they don't fall off and you could open the window for some air, whilst leaving the sun blind attached.
Buying a new car is not something we did lightly, as they take a lot of energy to produce. We sold on our old car, so it is still being used. We take the train to work everyday and use the car for longer journeys. Perhaps we could live without a car altogether, like some friends do, but with a child a car feels more justifiable.
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A word game, guess the right meaning and they donate rice to aid agencies. Quite addictive.
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Heads up display at 7g, 12 hour battery and 160x120 image. Commerical product in the next year or so, very interesting.
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Totally awesome, jumping out of a space craft after becoming an astronaut
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Animated map of Europe and Asia, plus North Africa, showing posession over the last 5000 years, interesting seeing how much things have changed. Yet the divide between Europe and Asia is there from 1400 onwards.
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How keyboards have evolved, surprisingly readable. That the windows team equated ctrl-c and cmd-c is amazing
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Delightful essay from Clay Shirky on the problem for the designer. Arrogance without humility is a recipe for high-concept irrelevance; humility without arrogance guarantees unending mediocrity
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It won't be cheap, but it'll be lovely. The new Canon 200 f/2, a replacement for the out of production 200 f1.8
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old rumor proving true, noting a new canon 200 f2 from autumn 2006, as announced this week
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I wish I was a little bit taller, I wish I was a baller This has been running around my head for years
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Interesting open source release from dopplr. Matt Biddulph has made available the code for finding contacts on other services.
The passing of time is something that web applications often miss. Many events that we model have a fixed progression from browse to purchase and ship, or edit to publish. However some of them have a state which is semi-permanent. I've been involved with a couple of these recently and both were around roles in software. One was for work and one was in discussion with friends. The details are not that vital, so I'll discuss the general case.
The basis issue is that we let people take a role on our software and then something structural changes. Usually outside the world of our software, but that means the person can not or should not fulfil that role anymore. An example is employment, a person might have a role on a site, as they are employed by a certain organisation. If their employment status changes, then two things need to happen.
They need to be able to change or have changed the role they play on the site. Their previously contributed content needs to be flagged that it was contributed by a past employee. It is really easy to miss this kind of detail when building out the first pass of a site, but it is worth planning for it, as it can become urgent if the person moves to a competitor.
Thinking through the language to describe the person's previously contributed content and allowing for a history of roles on their profile will help explain to other people on the site that Simon was the admin of this group, but he is no longer.
The profile is worth further discussion, if you are allowing people to create an affiliation, you need to allow for change and past affiliations. I've worked for the BBC and I'm now working at Nature, ideally I'd be able to list both of these appropriately on sites which cover the past 3-4 years. Maintaining a single bio or profile might not be enough. Conference websites are a good example of this, as your career progresses your bio will change, but the bio and the conference presentation come from a particular time period.
Technorati Tags:
time, social software, role, groups, moderation
