Just a note for those people that actually subscribe to my RSS feed even though I haven't posed in almost a year, I'll be attending WWDC 2007, staying at the hostel on Mason St (nr. Union Square). I'll be around from about 2pm saturday if anyone wants to meet up? Comment or IM me.
Finally good scientific reasoning and common sense have prevailed and Pluto has been officially demoted from planet status. As you can tell I am pleased with the IAU's decision, and that the ‘fact’ that the public think it should be a planet—because that's what they grew up learning—is patently absurd. Firstly, most of the public couldn't give two monkeys, and secondly, those members of the public who are aware of Pluto's small size, the Kuiper Belt, the other TNOs, and the body's inclination and eccentricity, yet still want to call it a planet, appear to only want to do so for historical reasons.
Having said that, I do disagree with the wording of the definition of ‘Planet’ that they adopted, specifically clause (c) which stipulates that a body must have “cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit”, which is clearly not the case for the other eight planets, who all co-orbit with many other (though much smaller) bodies. Also, clause (a) which states that a planet must orbit “the Sun” rather than a star. Technically this means that extra-solar planets don't count either. This wording should be cleaned up to correct for these flaws.
After almost a year's delay since the previous shuttle launch, the US shuttle Discovery has just docked at the International Space Station delivering one new ISS crew member, German Thomas Reiter, who spent six months aboard Mir ten years ago. Also amongst the shuttle crew is British astronaut Piers Sellers, himself a spaceflight veteran who flew aboard STS-112 in 2002. Sellers follows in the footsteps of NASA's most experienced astronaut, fellow Brit Mike Foale.
If like me you've been watching the developments of Sandvox, the Mac‐only web authoring tool, you may be pleased to hear that the developers think it is almost ready for release. If you've not heard about this, I urge you to check it out and sign up to their mailing list.
Google have today released a new lab experiment which aims to challenge the likes of Sandvox and iWeb. It's called Google Page Creator and requires Firefox at present. It has some browser sniffing which seems to ignore the reported user agent and actually check for the functions it uses before giving unsupported UAs the following message:
Sorry, your web browser is not yet supported.
Our programming wizards tried their darndest to get Google Page Creator to work with as many browsers as possible. But alas, even the most expert practitioners of web sorcery must sleep now and again, lest their JavaScript magic run dry.