Crouching tiger, coding monkey

So the world and the news this morning are all talking about the successful destruction of a US spy satellite. Apparently the satellite was channeling its inner three year old by refusing to stay where it was told (i.e. orbit) and threatening to take its ball and go home in a huff (i.e. bring its fuel tank full of a toxic witch’s brew back down to the earth.)

I would venture it safe to say that the insurance industry wasn’t looking forward to claims which read:

Act of God
Act of US espionage program gone awry

Technologically it was a very interesting event. The news outlets are calling it “hitting a bullet with a bullet” but that might be a tad on the over simplication side. It’s more like hitting a big, fast object full of explosive fuel with another big, fast object full of exposive explosives. Oh, and instead of aiming with a sight on the end of a barrel they used a super duper expensive Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruiser.

The most amazing part to me is that this event wasn’t even the most notable technological thing in the news yesterday. It came in a strong second to be sure, and that’s nothing at all to be ashamed of, but the bigger news was that there is an AJAX version of Mathematica coming. Hard core numerical computation that used to make the college lab computers beg to be put out of their misery now done by way of Javascript? That’s just crazy.

I know I know, I might be overstating things here just a tiny bit. But Mathematica (or more correctly its competitor Maple) really saved my bacon in college Calculus. I mean, I’ll be honest here, the chances of Hydrazine napalm falling from the heavens and landing on me are really, really remote. The chances of me tanking out of Calculus without having the lab projects to prop up my pitiful exam scores are so high that no casino in Vegas would dream of taking a bet on it.

On the plus side, with this new version of Mathematica students everywhere will be able to slog the misery that is Calculus so that someday they too can build anti-ballistic missiles that we can then use the next time a government spy satellite throws a temper tantrum. Who would have ever thought in a million years that we would be saved by Javascript?

So I finally got around to uploading a new Xcode howto video. This time it is an example of how to write a custom QuickLook plug-in using Seapine’s SoloBug application.

You’ll also notice that this time I’m using Viddler instead of YouTube. Through my fighting with encoding/uploading I’ve found that Viddler has a much higher quality level when it comes to being able to actually read the text on a screencast. It also doesn’t have the “Your video must 10 minutes or shorter because if it is longer than that you simply must be uploading copyrighted content” restriction like YouTube.

That last bit is important when you go all the way through making a video only to notice that it runs around fifteen minutes. D’oh.