SpaceX had a successful launch of their Falcon 1 launch vehicle today. It is the first privately developed orbital launch vehicle. Congratulations to the SpaceX team. Ad Astra!

We took a little excursion to Wyoming. The highlight of the trip was Wyoming Highway 130 through the Snowy Mountains. Very nice scenery and we saw our first Moose in the wild and had lunch at the Snowy Mountain Lodge.

Practical Programming for Strength Training by Mark Rippetoe and Lon Kilgore blends the limited research published on this subject with their years of experience as competitors and coaches. They point out that most anything works for untrained individuals, but some things work better than others. They cover the changes required take an athlete from novice, to intermediate, to advanced, and for the few, elite performance. This is a great resource for coaches and athletes who are developing their own lifting programs.

IPython version 0.9.1 is out. This fixes some Python 2.4 compatibility issues in 0.9.0 which is the real news. IPython 0.9 merges the IPython1 parallel computing work with the main IPython 0.8 branch. IPython is like the nice, friendly Python shell on steroids. It's a very productive working environment for Python programmers. The parallel programming features will become huge as multicore processors proliferate.

We're 7 years into a long war. Don't Tread On Me is a video commemorative. Think about it.

Researchers at Dartmouth have engineered a bacterium that produces cellulosic ethanol more efficiently than previous methods. Producing fuel from waste paper, corn cobs, and such rather than corn would take some of the pressure off of food and fuel prices.

I competed in the Longs Peak Highland Games today. They're larger and better known than the other games that I've entered, with athletes from as far away as Ontario, Canada. I did reasonably well, with a personal best in the 16# hammer. I still haven't turned a caber, but I'm getting better control over the beast, so with a little more practice, I should be there.

APL, A Programming Language or the Array Programming Language was:

• The first language with functions acting on whole arrays.
• First interpreter with dynamic memory allocation.
• First efficient garbage collection system.
• First computer language used to describe the architecture of a computer.
• First computer language independent of all human languages.
• First IBM internal time-sharing system.
• First IBM system which worked without an operator (unattended).
• First computer language used in elementary education (Atlanta, Georgia, in the sixties).
• First high level language implemented on a microcomputer (MCM 70, 1973, APL Computers Ltd.)
• Second language implemented on a desktop computer (IBM 5100, 1974).
• First program using the INTEL math co-processor in IBM PC (APL/PC version 1, 1983).
• First language which worked on an array processor (Analogic, 1983).
• First language which worked on a vector processor (APL2 Rel.3, IBM 3090, 1987).