I've been interested in the Palm Pre and WebOS since they debuted at the 2009 CES, but it was only available on Sprint and I prefer Verizon. The Palm Pre Plus is now available on Verizon so I've upgraded to it from my trusty Palm Treo. The graphics are stunning, touch screen interaction intuitive, and mult-tasking outstanding. The biggest down side is the unimpressive battery life, it's been making it through the day with moderate use, but there isn't much reserve. I think WebOS has a lot of potential, but it'll take some time to get used to doing some things differently than Palm OS.

I couldn't resist the fire sale on Buells since Harley-Davidson announced that they were shutting down the marque. I've been thinking of one to replace my VFR 800 and decided to take advantage of the opportunity. Last night I picked up a 2009 XB12Ss (aka Lightning Long) in Cherry Bomb Red from High Country HD

It's a hoot to ride.

Harley Davidson announced last week that it was shutting down its Buell motorcycle operation and selling MV Agusta. Buell is one of the more interesting Marques and this is sad news. Best of luck to Erik Buell and his merry band of elves.

While most of the private space industry is focusing on commercializing the Earth to Low Earth Orbit market, others are looking farther out. In this interview former NASA astronaut Franklin Chang Diaz discusses the latest milestone achieved for his VASIMR rocket engine for deep space missions, and the next steps for his company, Ad Astra Rocket.

Falcon 1 has made it's second successful launch for SpaceX and first launch for hire. Fly Falcon Fly!

Since I saw their booth at the Denver Auto Show, Lightning Hybrids has progressed from a body shell and bench top drive train demo to a functional prototype. I attended an open house at their facility in Loveland yesterday and am cautiously optimistic about their changes in X-Prize Cup, though I'm still skeptical about the clamshell entry and think their production schedule is a bit aggressive. I wish them luck.

I received my 28 pound Weight for Distance implement form Old Celt over a week ago, but just got around to breaking it in this evening after work. Nice toy!

I attended the Denver Auto Show last night with a couple of friends. With the down economy, they had about two thirds of the floor space as they've had in recent years and shorter hours of operation, but it was still worth the trip. I enjoyed the chance to compare the 2010 Camaro, Challenger, and Mustang. They're all nice cars, but the Mustang GT seems to be the best bang for the buck. Most interesting vehicle was the Lightning Hybrid, a new startup out of Loveland. I'll be watching that one.

Marvell Semiconductor has announced the SheevaPlug, a low power computer the size of a typical power adapter that includes a 1.2 MHz ARM processor, 512 MB RAM, 512 MB flash, gigabit Ethernet, and USB 2.0. It runs ARM ports of several Linux distributions. The development kit is $100, with volume pricing about half that. A lot of interesting, low cost computing solutions could be based upon this.

The Palm Pre looks like a worthy successor to my trusty Treo. Not ready to make the plunge yet, but this is tempting. If only it were world wide capable.

Following Armadillo Aerospace's Lunar Lander Challenge level 1 win, Pixel experienced a failure in their attempt at the level 2 prize. John Carmack reports that they believe the caused by an engine cutoff switch that can go intermittent in some vibration regimes. This is a reminder that adding safety devices can have hidden costs, in this case lower reliability.

Free piston engines could potentially be used to build generators for hybrid vehicles that rival the efficiency of hydrogen fuel cells while begin multi-fuel capable. Drawbacks are immaturity, more noise than conventional internal combustion engines, and difficulty in controlling the free floating piston.

Greg Pfister is looking for killer apps for the wave of multi-core processors that is beginning to appear. I think the embedded computing space could soak up a lot of multi-core processors and a couple of start-ups are betting on it.

Intellasys is sampling a 40 core version of its SEAforth processor and Xmos has begun shipping chips based upon it's XCore processor and XC programming language. The SEAforth architecture is close to the simplest possible multi-core design. It's a mesh of stack machines programmed in a dialect of Forth. The XCore is a reincarnation of the Transputer microprocessor and Occam programming language. Both implement a CSP processing model.

It'll be interesting to see if either of these is a commercial success. SEAforth is simpler and offers more MIPS per buck and per watt, but the XCore has more RAM and looks like it would be easier to program.

Jeff Faust has a nice write up on the DC/X reunion. The DC/X was a prototype rocket vehicle that operated the way God and Robert Heinlein intended, VTOL (Vertical Take-off Vertical Landing). It was a part of the Strategic Defence Initiative to support frequent, low cost access to space and was killed by anti-military elements in the federal bureaucracy. NASA is now busy reinventing expendable launch vehicles.

DC/X did prove the concept viable and others are working to build upon its legacy. Armadillo Aerospace and Blue Origin are entrepreneurial efforts to develop economical VTOL launch vehicles in the X Program tradition, build some prototypes, fly them to find the weaknesses, improve them and fly again.

After upgrading to Fedora 9, WiFi didn't work on my Thinkpad x60s. After futzing around with it for a while, I discovered a little switch hiding under the front edge of the machine which controls all the wireless functions (WiFi, Bluetooth, and apparently GSM) was in the off position. It was apparently bumped to the off position while I was travelling in places where I only had wired Ethernet access.

Would that manufacturers still provided a comprehensive printed manual for their hardware. I'd gladly pay for it.

Those lucky dogs at Autoblog have had a chance to drive the Porsche Boxster RS 60S. Sounds like fun.

The electric sail is a space propulsion concept similar to a solar sail, but using positively charged wires to repel the solar wind. Such an electric sail should be easier to control than a solar. Hopefully, they'll get funding for a proof-of-concept mission.

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.

Rob Coppinger speculates that the SpaceShipTwo unveiling provides hints about the rumored SpaceShipThree plans. SpaceShipThree could be a Dyna Soar like vehicle for hypersonic suborbital trips. The White Knight Two seems to be versatile surface to fairly high altitude hauler that could easily handle this or air launched vehicles like the Orbital Sciences Pegasus. Denver to Singapore in two hours, anyone?

Autoblog has a preview of the LiGHT concept convertible. The frameless top folds flush with the rear deck for good aerodynamics and sleek appearance.