Jsoftware released the final version of J 6.01 some time ago, but I just got around to upgrading from the beta which worked fine for my casual use. Though I'd like to see it on more platforms, particularly handhelds, it does run on Win32, Linux X86, and Mac OS/X PPC. See the release notes for details of the changes.

When I was at the X Prize cup last week I spent some time looking over the prototype RRL racer and spoke with the test pilot. He told me that had two teams signed up for next year's racing season. Now they have a third team so it looks like it'll be an exciting inaugural season.

When the Ampere WS1 came out, I wanted one. At the time notebook computers were rare the the idea of an APL systems you could carry around like a book was intriguing. Now I have something similar to the Ampere with my Sony Vaio running Linux and A+.

I didn't follow the X Prize Cup Space Elevator Challenge as closely as I would have liked while I was in Las Cruces. I watched the climbing attempts and they seemed to doing well, but didn't see anything that gave a current status other than occasional reports on the monitors.

It turns out that they did not have anyone in the money for either the climber or tether challenge. The wind was a problem for the climbers, and while they looked good, the best was a couple of seconds over the maximum allowed time. The best tether entry would have won last year, but the bar has been raised and they fell short.

The Python array programming extension NumPy has reached its 1.0 release.

RDFLib 2.3.3 is out for programming the semantic web in Python.

Rand Simberg has some comments on the X Prize Cup. He thinks the Armadillo Aerospace team should have done more engineering analysis, particularly for the landing gear. I don't disagree, but I also think that their software design was too rigid. It should have had more room for real world variance. On the other hand, they had limited time and resources and did a good job with what they had.

Thursday I drove from Lyons to Las Cruces, then east to the Valley Vista Bed and Breakfast in Organ, NM in the foothills of the Organ Mountains overlooking Las Cruces. The vast vista of the high desert is quite impressive by day. At nightfall the lights of Las Cruces and the stars is equally beautiful. The other guests at Valley Vista were also visiting New Mexico to attend the X-Prize cup.

The crowd at the X-Prize Cup was moderate and on Friday included many groups of school children. I splurged for a VIP ticket and spent about half my time in the VIP area near the Space Elevator Challenge, which also had a good view of the other Challenge activities, and the remainder wandering around the exhibits. The VIP area was sometimes crowded, sometimes not, as others were doing the same as I. I chatted with some of the people that I met, including a couple from SpaceTec, a National Science Foundation funded consortium of junior colleges developing new standards for technical training for the aerospace job force. The FAA's A&P certification is in need of updating.

The competitions were interesting. Armadillo Aerospace was the only qualifier of four or five entries in the NASA Lunar Lander Challenge. The Level 1 Lunar Lander Challenge required the rocket to climb to an altitude of 50 meters above the ground, hover for 90 seconds, translate 100 meters horizontally, then land on a target pad. The Armadillo team made three attempts with varying degrees of success. They had some problems and didn't win the $350,000 prize, but I'm sure they'll be back next year with a stronger entry after applying the things they learned in this year's competition. We can expect two to four teams to qualify for the next event.

The Space Elevator Challenge had several qualifiers. One was pure solar powered, while others used beamed power, either microwave or laser. The teams put in a good showing. Last year none of the climber teams made it to the top of the tether in the allotted time, but this year four made it.

There was also a series of rocket launches and several fly-bys. These provided some action between the typical hurry up and wait pace of experimental equipment.

All in all a very interesting event. I'll be back. I drove back to Lyons today with beautiful weather.

It appears that monetary losses and physical pain are processed similarly by our brains. This makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint as either could threaten us. I wonder if there's a correlation between pain thresholds and physical and/or monetary risk aversion.

The Vector has a very nice memorial issue for Ken Iverson. He was an original thinker and a good teacher who touched many. I never met him, but his work influenced my intellectual development.

Lyx is a document processor that that uses LaTeX for a file format. While you can use any text editor to generate LaTeX file, Lyx provides a nice graphical environment for working with LaTeX. The Lyx team describes their effort as a WYSIWYM or What You See Is What You Mean system for developing publication quality documents, with the goal of allowing the writer to concentrate on the content rather than the format.

I haven't used Lyx extensively, but it seems to be pretty good. I've just upgraded my old Red Hat 9 laptop from Lyx 1.3 to Lyx 1.4.3 and plan to give it a test drive on some writing projects that I have in the queue.

I'm taking another look at the A+ dialect of APL. I liked versions 4.18 and 4.20-1, but could only get them to build on Red Hat 9 and lacked the motivation to get it working on a more modern Linux distribution.

I now see that I missed 4.20-2 when it came out last year. I've installed it on Fedora Core 2 and CentOS 4.3 in addition to Red Hat 9.0. The installation script could use a little tweaking though, I had to manually copy some files to the locations that XEmacs was expecting in order to get the IDE working.

A+ is a streamlined APL that integrates well with Unix. It gives up some features like complex number support in exchange for excellent speed and OS integration.

A number of private spacecraft builders will be showing their stuff at the X Prize Cup later this month. I'm planning to attend.

Beowulf's Children is speculative fiction at it's best. This sequel to Legacy of Heorot describes the surprises and difficulties experienced by Earth colonists on an alien Earth-like planet. The detailed treatment of a similar, yet truly alien ecology is perhaps the books strong point, but it's also an exciting adventure story.

Clark Lindsey discusses orbital launch costs, and the importance of current sub-orbital programs in paving the way for lower cost technology. NASA and DOD planners seem to have given up on significantly lowering launch costs. An existence proof is needed, which we should have within the next few years.

Hat tip to Rand Simberg.

Sometimes I think of getting something with a little more room than my Honda S2000. The new BMW 335i sounds interesting. I'd have to minimize the options to be able to afford it, but I could live with that.

Kamaelia is a Python framework for concurrency and distributed computing that emphasizes simplicity. It's Open Source Software sponsored by BBC R & D intended to support scalable content distribution. It runs on Linux, MS Windows, Mac OS/X, and the Nokia S60. Very interesting.

Since Sharp has abandoned the U.S. market for the Zaurus, software support is a bit of an adventure. I just used the standard applications included with the SL-5600. Dynamism did a decent, if not complete, job of Anglicizing my Japanese model SL-C3200, and I'm using it with the modified Sharp software for the time being. The Zaurus User Group has a some information in the absence of Sharp support.

There are alternative software ecosystems for the Zaurus. Sharp calls the Zaurus, a Portable Mobile Tool, though the supplied software isn't quite there for me. I'll be checking these alternatives out to see what suits me best.

• Handhelds.org
• OpenZaurus
• OpenBSD/zaurus
• OpenEmbedded
• linux-to-go.org
• Python for ARM Linux

We had an Oktoberfest dinner last night at Andrea's She has a special menu and an accordion player weekends though the end of October.