Austin Bay has some thoughts on Saddam's execution. The trial and exectuion were triumphs of the Rule of Law over the personal power of a tyrant. With luck, they foreshadow the spread of democracy in that benighted corner of the world.

The Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity are still plugging away though Spirit is limping a bit.

In Singularities and Nightmares David Brin looks at extremes of optimism and pessimism about the future. He feels that the openness of the enlightenment offers the best chance for dealing with future.

This Technology Review Article looks at likely robotic developments for 2007. We're seeing continuous improvement, though it isn't getting a lot of attention.

We took the new truck to Oklahoma for a shakedown cruise and to visit friends. We made it in between blizards.

Our trusty Mercury Mountaineer has served us well and done a respcetable job towing our camping trailer, but I decided to take advantage of Ford's year end incentives and bought a 2007 F250 diesel. The thing's huge, but should be about as economical in light duty use as the Mountaineer and considerably better when towing the camper.

David Beers on the open sourcing of the Access Palm/Linux Hiker Application Platform for mobile development. Thanks for the present Access.

and to All a Good Night!

I consider my Palm Treo to be a pocket computer that also happens to be a cell phone. Since a proper computer should be programable, I've purchased Quartus Forth for it. This provides an interactive, on-board development environment that can generate efficient executables for Palm OS devices.

Camless engines have been used in racing. We may see them on production cars soon. They promise less weight, more power, and better fuel efficiency.

Wings to the Orient by Stan Cohen recounts the history of the Pan American Clippers from 1935 to 1945. Popularly called China Clippers, these great flying boats pioneered commerical air transport across the Pacific and captured the imagination of people everywhere. The book is organized by topic with many photos and illustrations making it a good reference, but I'd prefer a more chronilogical treatment.

From the announcement:

PyTables is a library for managing hierarchical datasets and is designed to efficiently cope with extremely large amounts of data with support for full 64-bit file addressing.

Version 1.4 is a new major release of PyTables, and probably the last major one of the 1.x series (i.e. with numarray at the core). On it, we have implemented better code to deal with table buffers, enhanced the capability for reading native HDF5 files, enhanced support for 64-bit platforms (but not with Python 2.5: see Special Warning section below), better support for AIX, optional automatic parent creation and the traditional amount of bug fixes.

As blizzards go, it wasn't too bad. We've had about two feet of snow in the last 24 hours. I shoveled a path to the street and will finish digging out he Mountaineer after breakfast.

The recent TacSat-2 launch was significant in a couple of respects. It was the first orbial lauch from Wallops Island in about 5 years and the satellite's computer runs Linux.

Concurrent programming is inherently difficult, but the real world is unavoidably concurrent, so we need to deal with it. Robin Milner's Turing Award Lecture on communiating systems and the pi-calculus describes a model of concurrent programming in which sequential programming is a special case.

Hat tip Lambda the Ultimate.

Thinking Forth by Leo Brodie is now a Sourceforge project available for download as a LaTeX or PDF file under the Creative Commons license. While Forth is genrally thought of as a programming languge, it can also be an operating system, and has been implemented in hardware. In this book, subtitled A Language and Philosophy for Solving Problems, Brodie approaches Forth as a software development methodology. It embodies many of the ideas popularized by the current agile software development movement, particularly continuous refactoring and test driven development. The presentation is light and humorous, and you may find it helpful even if you never tackle a Forth programming project.

I got this in an email today. I think the Cayman is the most beautiful Porsche to date. It's also probably the best handling. Porsche America really knows how to tempt me.

I've been hoping Honda would produce a hybrid electric version of the S2000, though I've seen no indication that they will. This might be ever better, a hybrid clone of the Lotus Surper Seven.

This ACM Queue article discusses the potential of Transactional Memory to make concurrent programming using shared memory safer, particularly for the threads. TM is still a research technology and requires a programming language construct to specify atomic transactions, but could be an enabler for multi-core processors.

Data storage pioneer Al Shugart has died at the age of 76. He was CEO of Seagate when I began working there and, though he had his faults, he made people proud to be part of his team. He'll be missed.