It you've got an Xbox 360 and 400 Microsoft points (about £3.40), then run, don't walk, to the Community Channel and download Kodu.

Learning to program has never been so much fun - and the simple graphical programming environment lets kids of all ages build their own apps. I was programming seconds after downloading the code, and there's a whole world of functionality I've yet to explore

To be blunt: Kodu just rocks. It's educational programming done right for today's console generation. This is their BBC Micro.



Here's why:

Learning to program used to be easy. Turn on a BBC Micro and you'd be ready to write your first BASIC program, and Sinclair's machines had programming shortcuts printed on their plastic keys. Then there was Logo, with its simple approach that let beginner programmers build more and more complex behaviours for its turtle cursor.

But something went wrong along the way. Good old BASIC vanished, and along with it the fun of programming. It was work now, and that's the way it always would be. Kids would play games on consoles before growing up to write Visual Basic applications in the office. Programming was now officially boring.

A group of researchers at Microsoft Research had a different idea. People had experimented with visual programming techniques before (remember the keypad on the back of BigTrak?), and applications like Microsoft's Robotics Studio were mixing it with declarative programming concepts

Experiments like Popfly had shown there was interest in programming for what Microsoft's Jon Montgomery called the "non-programmer" – the person who puts a Facebook badge or a Yahoo! widget on their web page. However the Microsoft Research work went in a completely different direction, bringing visual programming to the world of gaming.

Read more at TechRadar.

Look - it's got a turtle!

Congratulations to Bryan Talbot on being awarded an honorary doctorate at the University of Sunderland.

From his fan site:

Bryan is being awarded an honorary doctorate for his “outstanding contribution to the Arts as writer and graphic artist” by Sunderland University. He says: "I've been saying that working on Alice in Sunderland was being like doing a Phd – not something I said lightly as my wife is a Phd and I saw first hand the sheer amount of work involved – it turns out now I was virtually doing one! The graphic novel did take a lot of time and one hell of a lot of research. I'm sure that the doctorate is mainly for producing this book, though they are going to cite the whole canon at the ceremony."

According to comic historian Paul Gravett, this is the first time that a doctorate has been given for work in the comic medium in the UK. Is this another sign of the increasing acceptance of comics as a legitimate art form, an art form that Bryan has relentlessly pioneered for over thirty years? The ceremony is on 17th July at the annual Sunderland University award ceremony at The Stadium of Light, Sunderland.

Having been one of the photographic sources for Alice in Sunderland (Bryan: "Can you guys just nip down to Guildford and photograph Lewis Carroll's grave..."), does this make us honorary research assistants?

Well, we're about to find out, as Google's Chrome OS takes on not Microsoft but mobile network operators...

We recently met up with Jon Lilly, Mozilla’s CEO. During our conversation he talked about the philosophical difference between Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. Chrome, he suggested was “A window into the web”, marked by its lack of toolbars and its integration of Google’s web services.

This morning we woke up to the news that Chrome the browser is also the front end to Chrome the OS, a thin Linux kernel with a browser intended for netbooks. It’s not Android, but it shares some key concepts - and will run on Intel and ARM processors. There’s still a lot missing from what Google’s said, and much remains to be revealed when Chrome OS finally arrives on hardware - but part of me is wondering if Google has fallen into what I think of as “The Gilder Trap”.

George Gilder was sort of famous in the early days of the Internet. He wrote a couple of popular economics textbooks, and one of his suggestions was that wired and wireless would swap places. Data would flow through the airwaves, into pocket devices and all manner of mobile computing hardware. After all, in the air bandwidth was essentially free. Sadly he missed a trick or two. Bandwidth may be free, but the hardware needed to support it certainly wasn’t - and the back haul from base stations to the wider network needs to be hefty. Copper and fibre still remain the most bandwidth efficient way of delivering that last mile, and wireless data is really only just starting to get significant traction - and is already starting to creak at the seams, especially in busy city centres, as well as in the country. Even so, people still believe his 1990s words…

You may think the 50:1 contention ratio for your home DSL connection is high, but that’s nothing compared to the connectivity at a central London cellular base station. Your 3G data card may well be connected at 3 or even 7Mbps, but there’s often not more than a 1Mbps SDSL connection from the base station to the net - and you’re sharing that with everyone else. Trying to get email over a 3G dongle can be trial, especially at peak hours.

Now imagine having to do that with a million other people using Chrome OS-powered netbooks.

Read more at our IT Pro blog.

Somewhere high over the Big Island loom two huge shield volcanoes: Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea. We didn't see them much while we were there, though we could feel their effects every time the warm rain fell. They're cloud busters, sweeping moisture from the tradewinds. But high above, on the peaks, the air is clear and dry.

That's why Mauna Kea is home to a large collection of telescopes, run by teams of scientists from all over the world. They sit there, high above the island, white domes in the mountain stillness.

Driving from Waimea to the Kona coast we crossed the high plains at the north of the island, home to massive cattle ranches. Suddenly there was a gap in the clouds, and we could see the observatories there, haloed in a patch of blue. I pulled over to the side of the road and cranked up the zoom.





Mauna Kea, Hawaii
June 2009

It's Monday, so why not start the way we mean to go on, and by that I mean "with something completely nuts"?

For your daily recommended dose of insanity, here's something I found on IO9 this morning, a remixed trailer for Roland Emmerlich's 2012.

"Run away from plot! Run away from character! You just want some... Disaster!"


2012: THIS IS A DISASTER from Garrison Dean on Vimeo.

Gotta love those bongos!

Shouldn't they have called the GI Joe movie Action Man over here?

After all, where would we be without those gripping hands, realistic hair and eagle eyes?

Curious minds and all that.

Footprints on a black sand beach.

Kalapana, Hawaii
June 2009

Lava pebble on a black sand beach.

Kalapana, Hawaii
June 2009

Getting up the mountain to Mountain Thunder can be a little tricky. Two roads spiral around each other as they climb up the steep mountain slopes.

1000, 2000, 3000 feet. You're up in the cloud forest when you arrive, tall trees disappearing into the mists.

It's a long climb, but it's worth it. Our hire car was struggling by the time it reached the top, but the farm's staff were there with cups of fresh brewed coffee for us to taste. It was good, possibly the best coffee I have ever drunk. Mountain Thunder's an organic farm, and there are plenty of animals under foot - all manure for the carefully tended coffee beans.

You'll see plenty of coffee bushes as you drive up the volcano, and there are plenty of cherries growing on the bushes. Most were still green, so a few weeks from harvest.



Unlike many of the other Kona farms, Mountain Thunder roasts on site.



The finished product, 100% Kona coffee



Mmmmm. Coffee.

Why yes, we did bring some back with us, all the way to London...

It's a toss up whether Kalapana or Punalu'u is Big Island's most famous black sand beach. Certainly Punalu'u is the most striking, with its dark sands suddenly stopping at the edge of a bright green forest. It's also one of the best places to see honu, as the green turtles haul themselves up the beach to bask in the sun, after feeding for algae in the wild surf.

There's a sign in the middle of the beach, advising you to keep well away from the turtles. That's where you'll find them. The afternoon we stopped at Punalu'u there were two on the sand, still wet from the waves, glistening against the black sand and crumbled lava flows. I kept well back, and cranked my camera up to maximum zoom. Luckily I managed to avoid getting an illiterate family in shot, who had to be hauled back from the shy beasts.

I'm particularly pleased with this shot.



Punalu'u, Hawaii
June 2009 

In honour of the first moon landing, there's going to be an evening of Clangers music at the Royal Festival Hall.

On the 40th Anniversary of the first moonwalk Southbank Centre and the Heritage Orchestra celebrate by bringing you an evening of the music and visuals of the Clangers alongside other lunar delights.

I found a particularly apt episode on YouTube:



40 years since I stayed up all night to watch those grainy black and white images.

Wow.

The Honu is the Hawaiian Green Turtle, a gentle giant of the islands. You'll find then (now that they're protected) in rock pools and on beaches all round the Big Island, feeding on the green algae that coats the lava rocks. The old royal fish ponds at Keauhou are home to a small group of these beasts, and you can watch them gently scull through the cool water. At the hottest part of the day you can watch them haul themselves out of the water to rest and bask on the rocks.

One morning I scrambled over the rocks around the pool to get as close as possible to where they were feeding. You could see them sculling, their huge fins sliding out of the water.

Two turtles had a bit of a disagreement over who had right of way. Needless to say the biggest beast won.



One sculled around the pool, looking for the an unoccupied patch of algae.



Another came very close, and I was able to photograph its delicately patterned shell,



Beautiful beasts.

Keauhou, Hawaii
June 2009

Keauhou, where we stayed on the Kona side of Big Island is more than a tourist destination (though the local definition of built-up means that it's two or three miles between hotels and resorts, and the tourist strip is less than half a mile long).

It's also the site of some of the island's holiest places. There were three heiau in the grounds of our hotel, currently being restored. They were massive stone platforms, built on lava flows that rolled out over the reefs. Artificial rock pools kept fish abundant, food for the local royal family who used the sacred pools in the woods.

One evening we waded into the pool, avoiding the grazing honu turtles, to watch the sun set.



I couldn't help but think of a few lines from The Waterboy's song "Don't Bang The Drum":

Here we stand
On a rocky shore
Your father stood here before you
I can see his ghost explore you
I can feel the sea implore you
Not to pass on by
Not to walk on by
Not to try...

Keauhou, Hawaii
June 2009

I bought a new microphone the other day. I needed something better for recording meetings, and as I work direct-to-disk in OneNote (timestamping interview audio with my notes), I decided to look out a high-quality USB microphone.

To be honest it didn't take me long to find the device I wanted. Blue Microphones have an excellent reputation and their chrome-retro styling has a certain 30's space opera feel that I found appealing. The fact that they were getting consistent good reviews for sound quality also helped a lot. Most of their devices aren't that portable, but I found the one I wanted very quickly: the Snowflake.



Sound quality's good so far, and it'll work with my Macs and my PCs. It is a little larger than I expected, but not too large, and the base doubles as a carry case for the USB cable and as a clip to hand the mic off the back of my PC. I do like the way the microphone folds into the base for travel, and the ability to twist the head to point where I want is definitely a plus.

All in all, I'm very happy.

Now to go out and interview some people.

A while back I blogged the some of the photographs I'd taken of a combined pod of thousands of dolphins feeding their way up the Big Sur coast.

As I said at the time, it was one of the most amazing things I'd ever seen - so many animals all working in concert. It was one of those things that make you realise that we humans aren't the only intelligent animal on this planet. Superpods are rare, only taking place when the right food source is in the right place. But when they happen they bring in dolphins from all around the area - tens and hundreds of miles.



I was noodling around the BBC news site today when I found a video taken in the middle of one of these superpods - just off the Welsh coast:



Fascinating stuff.

Fifteen books that will always stick with me?

That's a tricky one, seeing how much I read. However there are some books I keep coming back to, keep rereading. So, without further ado:

1. Hardwired - Walter Jon Williams: Written as a homage to Zelazny, this is cyberpunk as country-and-western song, with Cowboy riding panzers across a balkanised USA accompanied by Sarah and her weasel.
2. The Saga of Pliocene Exile - Julian May: All four books, taken as one here. May mixes Jungian archetypes with The Ring Cycle (and a dose of pure 50s SF) to deliver a remarkably fun science fantasy series that takes mitteleuropean myth and drops it into deep time.
3. Don't Look Down - Jennifer Crusie and Bob Meyer: a romance author (albeit snarky) and an ex-Green Beret men-with-guns-save-the-world writer collaborate on a delightfully funny romantic thriller. Contains Wonder Woman bondage scenes.
4. Vacuum Flowers - Michael Swanwick: a picaresque journey around a far future solar system, where changing your mind is as easy as slipping on a new shirt. Underneath it all is the question "What does it mean to be human".
5. Understanding Comics - Scott McCloud: McCloud's look at the semiotics of sequential art is also one of the great textbooks of design. It's better than Tufte if you're working on the web.
6. The New Dinosaurs - Dougal Dixon: Dixon's speculative evolutionary books take a turn into a world where dinosaurs didn't become extinct.
7. Managing Internet Information Systems - John Udell: This is the book that built UK Online. It's also as relevant today as it was nearly 15 years ago.
8. Computer Lib/Dream Machines - Ted Nelson: The book/s that pretty much made me who I am today - and shaped the trajectory of my career through the intertwingled worlds of engineering, computing and writing.
9. Neuromancer - William Gibson: "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." Enough said, this is the seminal cyberpunk novel.
10. Between Planets - Robert Heinlein: A favourite juvenile, with Heinlein mixing colonial politics with the story of a violently suppressed revolution. The Venusian dragons are one of his finest creations.
11. The Ophiuchi Hotline - John Varley: Another solar system picaresque. Here it's Varley's Eight Worlds that is centre stage. A fine book for a 13 year old islander to read (if you want to blow his tiny little mind). Clones, invincible alien invaders and the hierarchy of life. Humanity is learning its true place in the universe, and it's a particularly lowly one...
12. The Terror - Dan Simmons: The most recent book on this list, but a powerful and extraordinarily well-written slice of secret history that delves into the lost years of the Franklin expedition. Simmons mixes Victorian rationality with the myths of the Esquimaux to deliver a post-modern, post-colonial take on the monster story wrapped up in a homage to Edgar Alan Poe.
13. The Shockwave Rider - John Brunner: The most optimistic of the futures in the Club Of Rome quartet, this mixes Toffler's Future Shock with the Whole Earth Catalog (and the Point Foundation) to give us a book that defines the modern security industry.
14. The Bridge - Iain Banks: This is the book that should have an "M". A never ending bridge, a Glaswegian barbarian, and the nameless life of a man on the road to disaster converge in three parallel stories. And it's got knife missiles!
15. Moominvalley in November - Tove Jansson: The best of the Moomin books doesn't contain the titular family, off at sea fulfilling Moominpapa's dreams. It's a sad, wistful novel that's really a tale about growing up and finding your own way in life. No wonder it's the most adult of the Moomin novels.

That's a start. You can find most of what I read on my LibraryThing.

High above the Kona coast, in the cloud forests that rise up the slopes of Mauna Loa, the climate is just right for growing coffee. The bushes rise up above the twisting Hawaii Belt Road, disappearing into the mist that shrouds the slopes.

It was pouring with tropical rain when we visited Greenwell, one of the many coffee growers on Big Island, where you can watch coffee move from cherry to bean, and then taste the final roast. It's one of the oldest coffee farms on the island, and the bushes grow tall and strong.

The coffee cherry is ripe when it's red., but the green fresh cherries covered the bushes in a riot of embyronic caffeine.



Captain Cook, Hawaii
June 2009

Last night I went up on the roof terrace.

There was a spider in the railings, repairing its web after a day in the sun. All that was left of something it had eaten had was still there, just a small wing on the threads.

Nature, green in fang and ichor.



Putney, London
June 2009

I like a good sunset, where the sun meets the edge of the world, and sets the clouds on fire.

One of the best places I've found for them is Seattle. There's something about how the combination of Puget Sound, the Olympics and the Cascades come together, along with the northern Pacific light.

Here's the view one night back at the start of June, from the hill above elimloth and spiritmoving's condo in Kirkland.





Kirkland, Washington
June 2009