Like many others, I have been watching with interest as the the first images have been coming back from the Phoenix Lander on the Martian surface. Being able to follow the descent through the Martian atmosphere in real time along with the mission scientists was particularly cool. There is one things which is really starting to bother me though:
Why are all the images coming back from the lander only in black and white?!
Surely a team of scientists living in the year 2008 could have managed to include a camera capable of taking colour images. They must have a good reason for doing things this way. I just can’t think of what it would be.
Possibly bandwidth is the limiting factor? I have heard that the link to the lander is only 4 kbps (with a latency of over 9 minutes!). Maybe colour images just take too long to be practical at this stage in the mission.
Is there anyone out there who can anyone shed some light on this for me?
Manchester United have won the UEFA Champions League with a fantastic win over Chelsea in Moscow today! The boys have now been crowned Champions of England and Champions of Europe, and it was a great way to cap off a fantastic season.
To top it off, almost everything about Chelsea annoys me. The attitude and style they play with really rubs me the wrong way. That meant that beating them twice this season was all the more sweet 
“We’re United, go United, we’re the best team in the world!”
Myself and many others have been high frustrated in recent months to hear the large number of tech journalists who have made incorrect comparisons of AIR and Silverlight. I’ve even heard respected tech journalists confusing Flex and AIR. These are people who really should know better, and they in turn create wide spread confusion within the wider internet community.
Peter Elst has started a badge campaign to help spread the word, and Mrinal Wadhwa has created a badge that people can use on their blogs (see the top of this post). What you do makes a difference! Just incase someone ever asks you about Silverlight and AIR, here’s a great quote I read on Mrinal’s blog:
Microsoft Silverlight is a browser plugin and is sort of similar to Adobe’s Flash Player and Flex Framework taken together.
Adobe AIR is cross platform desktop runtime that allows developers to build desktop applications using web technologies, it has no real equivalent in the Microsoft world.
Spread the word!
Computer World magazine ran this article today on SmallWorlds. SmallWorlds is gearing up for a public release in the next little while, and the latest version looks fantastic! Built entirely in Flex and Flash, SmallWorlds is launching the next generation of online virtual world which users don’t have to download and install.
| If you work with Flex, and would like to see the potential of Flex get some wide spread publicity (or if you just think SmallWorlds is cool ), please help us out and Digg the article. Thank you! |
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My LoadingImage component takes a regular Flex Image component, and adds a self contained ProgressBar to it to show its own loading progress. I have wanted a nice simple component like this a few times now, so having nothing better to do this evening, I decided to whip one together.
Check out the demo by clicking on the image below. Full source code is available by right clicking on the application.
Scanning through the news headlines this morning, I came across this article saying that the local phonebook company was expanding its digital media unit. That sounds like good business sense to me, but the thing which troubled me was a quote from the company saying that
… that does not mean that print directories are on the way out.
That quote makes me wonder if they get it. In my opinion, print media is on the way out pretty much across the board. The only exception I can see is possibly news papers, where the “scanability” of the print edition is a significant advantage. However, anyone who uses RSS feeds, and follows blogs knows that print news papers are no longer the first source for news.
I find it hard to imagine why any company would choose to deliver several kilograms of phonebook to every house and business in the country, when a simple website, or even a CD could do the job far cheaper. Even if they did still have to send printed books to the small percentage of people who still wanted them.
Is print media dead, or will it live on for decades to come? What do you think?
Manchester United won the English Premier League for the 10th time in 16 years on Sunday with a 2-0 win over Wigan. The team deserve credit for a fantastic result, and a well deserved title which came right down to the last game of the season.
All focus will now switch to the Champions league final which will be played in Moscow in 10 days time. One more win against Chelsea will earn the boys a fantastic double!
“We’re United, go United, we’re the best team in the world!”
I have now made 100 blog posts since starting this blog back in June 2007. It has taken me 344 days to reach this milestone, and I am both proud and happy to have reached this point.
Knowing that this would be my 100th post, I have spent some time reflecting on the highs and lows of my foray into blogging.
HIGHLIGHTS:
- My PostACard app winning the Community category in the 360|Flex API contest, and getting my shiny, new Playstation 3!
- The massive, and steady increase in traffic this blog gets every month
- The growing number of people who tell me that the find my little slice of the web useful
STRESSES:
- Having to upgrade my web hosting plan on short notice after I got a huge bill in November after a sharp increase in bandwidth use
- Trying to find time to blog all of the ideas which float through my head every day
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