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By David, December 23, 2008

Like most Londoners, I was sorry to see the much loved Routemasters phased out a few years ago in favour of the much hated bendy buses. But all is not lost! In July our Mayor, Boris Johnson, launched a competition to design a new bus for London inspired by the Routemaster and a design by Foster + Partners and Aston Martin has just won first prize. How cool is that?

I like the design. It incorporates two of the great things about the original Routemasters: the open platform at the rear and conductors. And look. It’s a number 19!

It’s hi-tech too.  Apparently, “the new bus is zero emissions ready, accessible for all and will set new standards for sustainable public service vehicles. Passengers benefit from views from the top of the deck through a glazed roof which incorporates solar cells to generate energy and filter daylight to control the temperature inside.”

So when can we expect to be leaping onto the rear platform of these Astons? According to TFL, a competitive tendering process will determine to which company the final contract to build the new bus is awarded. This should be decided by the end of next year. The first prototype of the new bus will be on the streets of London by 2011.

I can’t wait!

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By David, December 20, 2008

I just upgraded to WordPress 2.7. I’ve done a few WordPress upgrades now so it usually goes pretty smoothly but I know from experience how difficult some people find upgrading web apps which is why I thought this comment on the WordPress blog was interesting:

… this may be the last time you ever have to manually upgrade WordPress again. We heard how tired you were of doing upgrades for yourself and your friends, so now WordPress includes a built-in upgrade that will automatically notify you of new releases, and when you’re ready it will download them, install them, and upgrade your blog with a single click.

This is something we’ve talked about doing with OpenX so I’ll be interested to see if it works when the next WordPress version is released.

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By David, December 9, 2008

I’ve decided to start another blog. It’s called f1buzz.net and it’s about Formula One. Clearly I have too much time on my hands.

I’ve started it because I’ve been looking for a good F1 blog to fill the long cold void between seasons and haven’t been that impressed with what I’ve found. The teams have their own sites as does the Formula One Administration and there are quite a few “news” sites like ITV and the BBC but there aren’t that many other good blogs around, at least not in comparison to the number of tech blogs. Probably the best is F1 Fanatic.

I’m not an expert on F1 but I hope I can contribute something vaguely interesting at the same time as learning more about the sport myself and that this post will motivate me to keep at it.

Image: Marc Evans

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By David, December 6, 2008

I guess it’s to be expected. The guys at NASA obviously have more opportunity to take cool photos than I do but, boy, they have some really cool pictures in their archives.

Check out the picture to the left of the Space Shuttle Endeavour landing at the Kennedy Space Center or this picture of NASA research pilot Bill Dana watching NASA’s NB-52B ‘Balls 8‘ mothership thundering overhead after a flight in the HL-10.

Naturally Bill Dana sounds like he had the Right Stuff. He was a project pilot on the hypersonic X-15 research aircraft and flew the rocket-powered vehicle 16 times, reaching a top speed of 3,897 mph (mach 5.9) and a peak altitude of 307,000 feet (technically, that’s in space!) In almost 40 years of distinguished service to NASA he received NASA’s Distinguished Service Medal and was awarded the Milton O. Thompson Lifetime Achievement Award by the Dryden Flight Research Center and the NASA Exceptional Service Medal.

Cool guy.

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By David, December 2, 2008

It seems I’m not the only one who thinks the new PHP support in NetBeans is pretty cool.

Roumen’s blog points to a post on the zend forums:

My company bought 3 3-year licenses for Zend Studio earlier this and up until a few weeks ago, there was nothing else on the market that even came close to meeting our requirements. Then Netbeans released 6.5 with PHP support. Right out of the gate, their PHP and JavaScript support is on the whole, so much better and faster than Zend’s product, with so many fewer bugs, that despite the fact that we spent $1000 this year investing in Zend’s product, and I personally have spent time with Zend’s tech support and developers (good guys, very helpful), I am assisting my team in migrating over to use Netbeans for most of our development.

and a comment from Demian there really hits the nail on the head:

As a Zend license payer for many years I believe I’m entitled to share my opinion on the emergence of netbeans as an Eclipse and Zend Studio killer, at least as far as PHP support is concerned.

This is not a superficial “ide war” as suggested above, but probably more a reflection of the fact that PHP developers have had to endure low quality IDEs for years, so the relief felt now that a decent product, netbeans 6.5, has appeared on the market, is tremendous. Netbeans is far more than just decent though, it is clearly head and shoulders above Zend Studio for Eclipse, you only need to watch the videos or use it for 5 minutes to realize.

The Zend Studio product on the other hand maintained the same bugs in its product for literally years, releasing updates less than once a year, and showing an apparent total lack of interest in responding to the requests of its customers.

Then with the move to Eclipse customers were burdened with an even slower, more bloated and memory hungry app with possibly thousands of unnecessary configuration options and with an odyssey of undertaking required to get debugging working. I’m not surprised, given the context, that there is a lot of emotion being expressed now that a decent product is finally available.

For years we had to put up with Zend Studio’s bugs simply because there wasn’t anything better. Now there is.