Yarrrr! It be talk like a pirate day!

Ye best all be talking like pirates today, landlubbers!

http://www.talklikeapirate.com/

An Interesting Design Post

One of the blogs that I personally follow is Juice Analytics. They're a funky software company in San Francisco that have their heads screwed on right when it comes to designing great stuff. A recent post reiterates a lot of what I was talking about in last week's lecture, so if you can handle yet another Architecture analogy (I know, I know - but it's so apt!), it's worth a quick read:

http://www.juiceanalytics.com/writing/11-parallels-between-architecture-and-interface-design/

An insight into Google engineering design

In about 45 minutes, Google will be releasing a brand new browser onto the net called Chrome. Along with all the hype (you may have seen the press already), Google have released a comic strip that talks about the design decisions that they made as the developed it. Have a read - it's worth it for an insight into the (engineering-oriented) design process at Google.

When you're done reading, Chrome will probably be ready to grab, so get your (Windows only at this stage) goodness here:

• http://www.google.com/chrome

My Sunday Afternoon Web 2.0 Moment

Every now and then, you get blown away by the tech infrastructure we take for granted most days. My latest Web 2.0 moment happened over lunch at Joe's Garage when my Twitter feed updated with a tweet from @drtiki, of TikiBar TV fame (the podcast that I showed in the lecture the other week). The brother of the producer for TikiBar TV, @tuscamosk, is Elon Musk, who founded Paypal which was then sold to eBay for lots of $$$. He used some of the proceeds to start up a space aeronautics company, SpaceX that was looking to become the first privately funded company to launch a vehicle into earth orbit.

Following along via both Twitter and SpaceX's live webcast, I watched in real time as the launch went through a couple of aborts, and then finally liftoff. About 2 minutes in, as the first separation stage was occuring, the engine exploded (live webstream from the rocket going blank). Official word still hasn't come out yet what's happened, but updates from people in the command centre via twitter suggest the engine exploded. Within minutes, video of the aborted launch was posted to various sites, such as here, and Wikipedia had been updated with the details of the failed launch.

So here I am, sitting in Fitzroy eating lunch, and before the engineers have had a chance to say 'who tripped over the plug?' I have watched an attempt at achieving spaceflight history in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, its ups and downs to launch, liftoff and then 'an anomally', with post disaster analysis all in real time; and now I'm blogging about it all before the first media statement to news agencies. All thanks to simple technologies like RSS, twitter and blogs.

Watch the launch here:



Update: news reports starting to filter in. The payload for the flight included 3 sattelites (one of which was a solar sail experiment), and the ashes of astronaut Gordon Cooper and Star Trek's Scotty, James Doohan.

I hope Elon Musk's other project is a bit more reliable than the Falcon 1 - I really, really want one.

Moodle Blogs not really Blogs...

I've just been playing around with the blogging functionality in Moodle and I've got to say, I don't really like it. The blogging function is really Blogging-lite - yes you can post blog entries, but letting other people see those entries is cumbersome, and it's impossible for others to comment on posts, other than by creating their own blog post in response.

One of the advantages of blogs, and one of the reasons we've asked you guys to have a go at it, is to allow multi-way discussions and feedback. The Moodle discussion forums help out here (and is why the Moodle developers didn't implement blog comments), but blogging is a bit different. Once you take comments out of context, such as having to post your own blog entry on your own blog, then you lose the thread of the discussion.

My recommendation to those of you wanting to blog in the unit is to use one of the external tools like Blogger or Wordpress. The disadvantage, of course, is that these blogs will be public by default, so if you're sensitive about that, go with the Moodle blog.

Another design video

Here's a link to another video on design you might like to check out. Just like the Paul Bennett video I showed in the lecture, this is a presentation at the TED conference, but by Chris Bangle who is chief designer at BMW. He designs cars, and as you'll see, he's pretty passionate about it.

First Post

Hello from the lecture!