Status-Q

"Europe is set to launch the biggest, most sophisticated spacecraft in its history."

Oh, and it happens tomorrow. Splendid stuff.

Intelligent Life magazine has a light-hearted article by Will Smith... I liked this:

Football involves a lot of running around and people trying to stamp on your feet. Rugby involves a lot of running around and people trying to stamp on your scrotum. Cricket involves a maniac hurling a piece of red concrete at every part of your anatomy. But golf: I think golf could be the sport for me. There's no body-contact, and it involves strolling round a large garden.

Yesterday I visited the Møller Centre here in Cambridge.

Interesting architecture, and a great view from the tower:

There's some other quite interesting architecture visible if we zoom in to the right:

The buildings on the right are the Centre for Mathematical Sciences, and the other tower, on the left, is the University Library, designed by Giles Gilbert Scott, who created several other rather Stalinist-looking buildings but redeemed himself by designing the iconic British red telephone box.

Giles was continuing in the family business - his father was also an architect responsible for some notable buildings, and his grandfather designed the Midlands Grand Hotel which formed the front of St Pancras' Station. Now, that is something to be proud of... take a look!

Today's quotation comes from Oscar Wilde...

To be really mediaeval one should have no body.
To be really modern one should have no soul.
To be really Greek one should have no clothes.

There's a lot of buzz in the Apple-related blogosphere about ExpanDrive. John Gruber likes it a lot, and so does TUAW. Based on very brief experiments, I have to say I rather like it too.

If there's a remote server you can connect to with SSH or SFTP, ExpanDrive lets you mount the filespace as a drive. I've mentioned MacFusion before, which does the same thing. They share a common heritage:

• FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace) is a project which originated on Linux. It provides a framework for creating things which look like filesystems in ordinary programs, rather than them having to be part of the operating system. There's a variety of fun stuff you can do with this.
• MacFUSE is a Google project which implemented FUSE for the Mac.
• ExpanDrive and MacFusion provide a nice GUI that implements the 'remote SSH server as local disk' in a way that ordinary users can make sense of it

The upshot is that you can open a file in any application just as if it was on your local machine, even if it's on the far side of the world. MacFusion is free, ExpanDrive costs money. They both work. But at present, the latter seems to be faster and more reliable, so I'm quite likely to hand over some of my hard-earned pennies.

"Hard to go wrong with a little bit of DisplayLink" says Engadget.

The FT has an article about my pals at AlertMe. (They have a fun product - low-power wireless devices that monitor your home and can report back to you in a variety of ways. We have one of their early kits in the CamVine office.)

The article talks about the benefits for a UK startup of getting US-based funding, something we also did for DisplayLink in the early days. I suspect, though, that the relative speed with which they accomplished it is more down to the nature of the funding round, the particular fund they attracted, and the fact that there was only one investor rather than several, than it was to a real difference between the US and UK.

With CamVine, I decided to go for Angel rather than VC investors for the first round, and even stayed clear of Angel groups. I think dealing with just a few individuals made everything much easier. Perhaps we were just lucky, but we got a great group of investors... from this side of the Atlantic!

Developments in alternative energy sources are accomplishing some wonderful things. Yes, yes, so they could reduce greenhouse gases and our dependency on polluting fossil fuels. But that's old news.

More exciting things are in store. Take, for example, these illuminated garden birds.

Admit it, you've been wanting these for years! Well, now you can have them without the wiring hassles which have plagued installers of illuminated garden birds in the past.

Had forgotten about this until a friend's mention of Weird Al Yankovic brought it back from the murky depths of my memory. About 20 years since I last heard this... which means, now that I think of it, that I had never heard of the web, and certainly had no idea that YouTube would come along...

Since Michael has been brave and put some of his GarageBand creations up for public appreciation, here's one of my sillier ones from a couple of years back.