Armadillo Aerospace continues the development of their modular rocket system with engine refinement and vehicle integration work. I've mostly watched their Lunar Lander Challenge efforts, but that's really a side business opportunity that provides a good arena for testing their ideas. They're after the low cost space launch business, and if successful, their approach does promise to be very cost effective.

We spent the weekend at Castle Mountain Lodge in Estes Park. We mostly relaxed in our cabin overlooking the Fall River, reading, enjoying the scenery and wood fire, and watching some videos. We had a little snow on Saturday and quite a bit on Sunday. After checking out we went for a hike in Moraine Park then stopped at Mary's Lake Lodge for brunch on the way home.

Play as if Your Life Depends on It by Frank Forencich takes a look at fitness training in light of our hunter-gatherer origins in East Africa during a period of rapid geological and climatic change. Subtitled "functional exercise and living for ''Homo sapiens''", it looks at the kinds of activity that humans are adapted for and how our recent adoption of agricultural and industrial lifestyles leaves us somewhat maladapted for our current environment. Our labor saving devices, abundance of high energy density foods, and regimented conformity combine with our inclination to move when we must, and eat and rest when we can, leading to poor fitness and health.

In today's developed world, one very rarely ''has'' to do much physically to survive. Low cost, though high caloric density and low nutrient density, foods are readily available. Relegating physical activity to special times and places makes it hard to ''find time'' to exercise and when we do it's work. Forencich holds that we need more playful activity for both our physical and mental well being. He presents some ideas for incorporating playful, functional movement into our lives. This can be as warm-up and cool-down for more structured exercise, or it can be distributed throughout the day. He provides some interesting arrows for ones exercise quiver.

XCOR has announced the Lynx rocket plane. While it only carries a pilot and one passenger, it may give SpaceShip2 some real competition. It should be less costly and likely to have a faster turn around time than the larger space excursion system. Looks like fun, I want to play.

05:00 workout @Home

• Warm-up
• Deadlift - 135#*5, 225*5, 265*5, 295*5, 320*3
• Standing Press - 45#*5, 65*5*5
• Kettlebell Row - 12 kg (10/10), 16 kg (10/10)
• Lying External Rotation - 5 kg (10,10,10/30)

Version 8.0 of the Twisted networking framework has been released. If you're developing distributed applications, you should take a look at it.

05:50 workout @ Longmont YMCA

- Stationary bike 80 RPM, moderate resistance 10 minutes

- Warm-up

- Pull-ups 5 sets of 5, starting a set every two minutes

- Half Quad Extension 120#/90# (30/30)

- Lying External Dumbbell Rotation 12# (20,5,5/30)

- Air Force Sit-ups 45

18:30 Kettlebell Class @ Bouldercrossfit

• Row 500m / 2:12
• Warm-up - various body-weight exercises
• KB Swings 12 kg (10/10), 24 kg (5/5)
• KB Snatch 12 kg (5/5)
• KB Snatch maximum reps in 5 minutes with 24 kg: 50 (right arm only)
• KB Get-up 12 kg (0/5)
• KB One Leg Deadlift 2*24kg (3/3)

Cheaper, more efficient thermoelectric materials may soon be available, thanks to new nanostructures. Inexpensive thermoelectric generators might replace generators/alternators on motor vehicles, reducing weight and complexity, and increasing reliability.

I spent the day at the Sean Betz throwing clinic sponsored by Rocky Mountain Scottish Athletes. It was held at Sidecreek Park in Aurora. Weather was a factor. It started out sunny and even got a little warm by early afternoon, then turned colder and was snowing by late afternoon. It was an excellent introduction to the Highland Games events and I learned a lot, to say nothing of getting a good workout. Now I need a hot bath.

Andrew Francis gave a talk on Stackless-Twisted Python integration at PyCon. I'd like to have attended, but at least he's posted the slides and promises to update them. He uses the Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL)as the application domain to illustrate this integration, but distributed Agent Based Simulation might be a better one. This talk has some rough edges, but he does demonstrate that the Stackless and Twisted asynchronous programming models can play well together.

Cheap clusters and the emergence of commodity multicore processors are highlighting the lack of one obvious best way to do parallel programming in Python. Bruce Eckel writes about his attempt to assess the state of large grained parallelism for Python from PyCon 2008. He dismisses Stackless, apparently missing the talk given by Andrew Francis on Stackless/Twisted integration. IPython1 is another solution he sells short. It's under heavy development now, but should be a presentable state by PyCon 2009.

SimPy 1.9.1 was released earlier this week. It has a couple of bug fixes and additional documentation. I missed the introduction of SimPy 1.9 which represented a significant performance improvement over previous versions. Worth a look if you need to do discrete event systems simulation.

05:30 workout @Home

• Warm-up
• Kettlebell Swing, 12 kg (10/10)
• Kettlebell Get-up, 12 kg (F/1)
• Deadlift 135#*5, 225*5, 255*5, 285*5, 315*5
• Dumbbell Lying External Rotator, 12.5# (30/30)

06:00 workout @ Longmont YMCA

• Startrack stationary bike level 4 @ 80 RPM to level 8 @ 100 RPM, 2.41 miles in 10 minutes.
• Pull-ups - 5, 5, 5, 5, 5 (one set every 3 minutes)
• Air Force Sit-ups - 30
• Half Quad Extensions 120#/80# (30/30)
• Dumbbell Lying External Rotation 12# (30/30)

Good news for arthritis sufferers. Researchers at NIST and Hokkaido University are investigating the potential of double network hydrogels as synthetic cartilage. They hope to develop a cartilage replacement that lasts many years.

09:30 Evaluation/Treatment @ Lyons Physical Therapy

• Right knee range of motion showed some improvement.

10:30 workout @Home

• Warm-up
• Kettlebell Swings, 12 kg (10/10)
• Kettlebell Halo, 12 kg (5/5)
• Kettlebell Snatch, 12 kg (10/10)
• Kettlebell Get-up, 12 kg (0.75/1.5)
• Kettlebell Snatch, 16 kg (5/5)
• Kettlebell Snatch, 24 kg (0/5), (0/5), (0/5), (0/5), (0/5), (0/5)
• Half Quad Extension, 120#/80# (30/30)
• Side Lying External Rotator 5 kg (20+5+5/30)
• Air Force Sit-ups 40

I wasn't able to attend PyCon this year, but I've been following it from afar. This lightning talk on Python concurrency looks interesting. It touches on four projects, based upon various combinations of threading and process forking semantics.

13:45 workout @ Longmont YMCA

• Warm-up
• "Fran Light": 21-15-9 reps of 65# Thrusters and Pull-ups for time.
  • 16:08
• Swim (mask & fins) 750 yd / 20 min.

Shoulder's feeling pretty good.

Alan Kay's project to reinvent computer programming is a year old and they've published a status report. The goal is dramatically reduce the amount of code necessary to produce useful systems. Specifically, they want to produce the equivalent of a desktop computer software stack including operating system, development tools, graphics, networking, and basic applications in 20,000 lines of code, or about 1% of that required by today's programming paradigms. They're working from both ends of the stack toward the middle and have created interesting prototypes for pieces of the stack. They'll have to invent something even more interesting to tie these pieces together into a functional whole.