Kim Bach . Org

Talk:Alan Kay – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I was just checking the Alan Kay article on Wikipedia, and I switched to the Talk page, to find a comment by the man himself…

He makes this interesting point:

But today, it matters not that Smalltalk was an “improvement on its successors” (as Tony Hoare said about Algol). None of the so-called OOP languages around today are above threshold to deal with programming in the 21st century. I think this is a huge problem, that is made more severe by the vocational temptations to “get good at something bad” in order to make a living. This has produced a staggering legacy of moribund code, that makes it hard for young people especially to think about qualitatively better ways to proceed.

Very well put, but do we have alternatives today? I have no idea.

I remember a BYTE magazine cover story from 15 years or so ago, “There is a silver bullet”. That “silver bullet was OOP. Maybe it was, but the challenges of software development has also changed. Today we slave away using the same patterns again and again, it’s not exciting writing database access classes and wire them up to the UI, usually starting from scratch, since the new app you’re doing, is slightly different.

Currently people are looking into alternatives to C++ like languages, like Python and Ruby, but they’re still rather traditional. But these languages do seem to have some great frameworks, like TurboGears and Rails.

What I really find interesting is a video where Steve Jobs is demoing NeXTSTEP version 3, he’s demoing amazing application development without any coding at all! Why didn’t this catch on?

Another problem. The traditional web has been a nightmare in terms of usability, due to the fact that everybody basically has been writing their own custom UI.

What the web really is, is a list of connected links, URLs/URIs. What we need to start doing is to assign more meta-data to links, so that we can stop using the browser.

RSS feeds are a step in that direction. Direct links to media files and especially streams is another. After somebody posted a collection of direct links for the Danish Broadcasting Corporation’s (DR) radio streams, so that I could use the VideoLAN Client (VLC) to listen to music, I’ve finally bothered with it. Why oh why does the media companies develop their own embedded players, it’s a serious nightmare and completely un-called for.

From Improbable to Unstoppable: a brief history of the World Wide Web – Reboot

Too bad I missed this session at reboot. Looking forward to the video being made available.

In the begining was the word and the word was NeXT@CERN.

Let there be web! Thank you Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

Here’s a couple of slides from the presentation by J.F. Groof. It shows how the first incarnation of the web looked like if you had a NeXT, and if you didn’t – poor you.

ESA – Venus Express

OK OK…Since I always comment the NASA robotic missions, it’s sort of a disgrace that I have ignored the successful VOI (Venus Orbital Insertion) manoeuvre of the Venus Express mission last week. Congratulations to ESA on another success – things are shaping up, and I’ve almost forgotten the disappointment of the Beagle 2 Mars mission.

I must admit that I sort of fail to see the need for a mission to Venus. The Venusian surface, below the heavy cloud-cover has already been mapped, in quite a lot of detail, by one of the few NASA missions of the early 90ies.

But I welcome any science, and it is a real mystery why Venus is such a hostile environment, it’s amazing how “sweet a spot” Earth has hit in it’s orbit of the Sun, the “life as we know it” zone seems to be extremely narrow.

ESA has caught the Podcast wave, and Vodcast? That’s the first time I head that term – I guess that it covers Video Podcasts – really just call it a Podcast or maybe V-Cast – I really hope that Vodcast doesn’t catch on – it just sounds bad?

Google Mars

Wahooo…Great…

And we thought that Google only looked for TWD (Total World Domination), it’s sooo much bigger than that…

NASA – NASA’s Cassini Discovers Potential Liquid Water on Enceladus

The Cassini mission, already a stunning success, seems to have landend another scoop: The possibility that liquid water exists on the Saturn moon Enceladus.

NASA – Robotic NASA Craft Begins Orbiting Mars for Most-Detailed Exam

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft has reached the red planet, and is now performing an aerobreaking manoeuvre over the next 6 months.

Another success for the NASA robotic missions.

NASA – NASA’s Pluto Mission Launched Toward New Horizons

The New Horizons Pluto mission launched successfully yesterday.

Quote from the above press release:

“The United States of America has just made history by launching the first spacecraft to explore Pluto and the Kuiper Belt beyond,” says Dr. Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator, from Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. “No other nation has this capability. This is the kind of exploration that forefathers, like Lewis and Clark 200 years ago this year, made a trademark of our nation.”

Congratulations to NASA with the success, they’re batting a 100.

After the spectacular failures of a number of robotic missions in the 90ies, lead NASA to change it’s traditional complicated space craft designs to simpler, innovative (like the use of airbags for soft landings) and last, but not least, cheaper designs, the success-rate of the robotic missions has been increasing, and it now seems like routine that the missions are so successful, that they are extendend again and again.

Wired 13.12: Slacking Off in Science

I was really surprised by this article in WIRED Magazine. For years and years we’ve been told that Denmark is suffering from a “brain drain”, but according to this WIRED Magazine article, based on information from a number of US and international science indicators, for instance the CIA World Factbook; Science and Engineering Indicators, this is not true.
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The European Homepage For The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope

I just stumbled upon the official website of the Hubble Space Telescope, spacetelescope.org. spacetelescope.org is a great site, the place to go for all those amazing images, that keeps coming, after Hubble has been in service for 15 years.
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ESA – Results from Mars Express and Huygens

The European Space Agency has published results from findings of the Mars Express and Huygens probes.

There are strong hints that liquid water-ice exists deep underground on Mars. Existence of water is a prerequisite for extended stays on Mars, e.g. colonies, where the settlers will have to live off the land.

The Huygens probe, that was hitching a ride with the Cassini Saturn orbiter, discovered that Titan is, in many respects, similar to Earth.

Congratulations to ESA with the success of these missions, and the groundbreaking science that they have provided.