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As we draw closer and closer each day to Cassini’s Saturn Obrit Insertion (effectively when the spacecraft is in orbit around the ringed planet) on July 1st, Hubble and Cassini are taking photos non-stop. Spaceflight Now compares some great shots taken from Cassini’s narrow-angle camera (from 20 million kilometers away) and Hubble’s camera (from a little than billion miles farther away). The rings around the planet are always a great site through any telescope! I just can’t wait for the Huygens probe to descent through Titan’s atmosphere; what sort of weirdness will it reveal? perhaps signs of life?

Since we’re all (still) waiting for Half-Life 2, it’s time to go back to Grand Prix Legends! Every now and then I get the urge to race, and every time I do there’s like some 200+ new tracks and car updates released (the GPL community will have to be one of the biggest in existence). We managed to setup a mini-league with a few friends and so I’m trying to catch up! If you like car racing games (or even if you don’t) you need to see/play GPL. Developed some years ago, it still is the most accurate racing (simulation) game ever written.

Following the upgrade of a Domino server to 6.5.1 at a client’s site, the Extended Search server stopped on it’s tracks. Extended Search was installed in the same box as the Domino server (and God it was a challenge the get the whole damn thing installed in the first place!). All I had to do to get the Extended Search java servlets running again, was to enable Domino Servlet Manager as the Java Servlet support in the server document (after the upgrade it was set to ‘None’ because that setting didn’t exist in R5). The other option is to select ‘Third party servlet support’ which I guess means Websphere.

Getting a good web interface no matter the underlying technology, is always a challenge to say the least. With Domino, (6.x) we now have the tools to create a modern and great looking interface for our web applications, but even so a fair amount of ‘tweaking’ is required to get the optimum result. A while back I came across Bindows, a GUI toolkit for creating web applications that anyone would swear looks & feels like native Windows. It’s very impressive, and relatively easy to use (be sure to check out the samples). Sadly, it’s not free (or open source) but it does demonstrate how much browsers can do these days (although some functions are IE specific). The best example I’d seen so far was with the Oddpost email interface, which again supports only IE. I hope Bindows doesn’t get sued and have the same fate as Lindows.

On the topic of GUI’s, I had a look at the new Workplace rich client (based on eclipse) and it sure looks like a winner! No doubt Notes 8 will be just that.

I like gyroscopes so much, that I just had to have a handheld one. So I found the Powerball at ThinkGeek - I must admit though, it was the recent launch of the Gravity Probe B spacecraft that sparked my interest. The experiment will use four ultra-precise gyroscopes, orbiting the Earth in a unique satellite, to test Einstein’s 1916 general theory of relativity. I can feel space-time warping in my hand with the Powerball gyro! - the dog is scared of it though.

Having missed last night’s total lunar eclipse and meteor shower, I’m determined to follow this year’s astro events more closely. So this month, 2 bright comets will be visible in our night sky (maybe visible with the naked eye under good conditions). Following that, well have a transit of Venus on June 8th, (the last transit took place in 1882). Later on in July 1st, we’ll have the long awaited Saturn Orbit Insertion of the Cassini spacecraft; this will surely make the news!

The Lotus Technology Forum is on tomorrow here in Melbourne - and even when Mike Rhodin, Vice President of Lotus Software was conveniently replaced, I’m still attending (Remember the days when there were so many of those seminars around?). No doubt they’ll be talking about Lotus Workplace 2.0 (and the reason I held off installing 1.1), Lotus Domino 6.5.1 and the usual stuff about the future etc, etc.

Do we feel a little more comfortable now that we know what the Lotus road map is? (Notes 7 & 8). Well, the discussion threads are still very much active at places like LotusGeek, Joe Litton and Bruce Elgort - at least I’m satisfied (for now) with the direction; after all it’s all about innovation and I think IBM have a good handle on it. I just like to see technologies like Python (and what about this Mono stuff) make it into a commercial market but with the current Java and J2EE domination it probably won’t happen at all.