marypcb at the Chandelier Tree in Leggett, California.

And yes, I did drive a car through it. And through another tree further up the Avenue of Giants. Yet more trips to Roadside Americana so you don't have to. Actually driving through a tree is pretty cool, and remember, P.J O'Rourke applies^*.

^*"There's lots of argument about what kind of car drives best. Some say a front-wheel drive car. Some say a rear-wheel drive. I say it's a rental car. There are things you can do with a rental car that are just impossible with any other kind of vehicle."

It's been a while since I've posted anything at length here - and that's mainly because I've had so much to do over the last few weeks. Still, much of it is out the way (and there's enough in the pipeline to keep the wolf from the door, too).

All I need to do now is a handful of screenshots, and I'll have finished what will add up to 20K words or so of work researched, coded and written, on topics as diverse as a couple of whitepapers on social networking business models (thank you LJ for a fine example of how not to engage with a committed userbase), on building applications with Microsoft's new DeepZoom technology, on using the beta of the iPhone SDK, on Internet Explorer 8 for Designers and Developers, an introduction to software testing tools, and a 30,000 ft look at Oracle 11g for developers.

Phew. All done. And, more importantly for the bank balance, all invoiced.

In other, more interesting news, I recently had the opportunity to meet someone who's work I've admired for a long time, going back to my ubicomp days at GEC Hirst. Bill Buxton is one of the greats of HCI, and it was a great pleasure to talk to him about the role of research (with a capital R) in industry, and the importance of design in application development. he was launching a rather fascinating report on the role of design in the next generation of computer systems (both hardware and software), something that's left me with a lot to think about.

I learnt a lot of my HCI lessons the hard way in the relationship between design and technology and business the hard way, in the old .com boom days, when cross-disciplinary teams had to work together outside of their old silos.He's now working with MSR, and evangelising the role of design and HCI in applications. It's going to be interesting to see the effects of what he's doing on Microsoft over the next few years.

In somewhat more annoying news, one of the drives on out Buffalo NAS seems to have lunched itself, so I'm going to have to spend some time resurrecting the box. Hopefully things can be recovered - as it's RAID 5, but I suspect it'll take some time. While I've got a fair portion of my photos on this PC, quite a chunk are on that server, so getting them back is quite important (not to mention having to re-rip every single CD in the house...). In the meantime I've set up an alternate backup drive for the house server. I suspect this puts commissioning the new server up the agenda.

Right. Off to San Francisco tomorrow. We'll be doing RSA2008, the HP Partner Summit, and the Web 2.0 Expo. Perhaps we'll see some of you there?

Walking up the stairs to our room in a Santa Monica motel, we found ourselves standing by the shimmering neon of the welcoming MOTEL sign. I found the E somewhat more alluring than the rest of the sign. It might have been the jet lag, or it might have been that it was in just the right place for an interesting photograph.

Santa Monica, California
February 2008

Raven in the mists.

Photographed near Keene, in the Tehachapi Mountains, California.
January 2008

Shishito peppers are the ideal dish for Las Vegas. You're presented with a bowl of sweet peppers, sprinkled with writhing bonito flakes. Then the fun begins.

Who gets the hot one?

Most are mild, but every now and then there's one that bites back. It's a burst of several scovilles that shocks the mouth and stirs the tastebuds into action.

It's a gamble with every bite.

Mmmmm...

Day Three of CES has dawned bright, sunny and cold. We've got miles of stands to walk and an ever growing number of meetings in our diaries. I could spend ages writing a post about the event, but we've got to walk a chunk of the Strip in a few minutes. Instead I'm going to distill the last few days into a set of meaningless statistics.

Number of days the press events start before the show: 1.5
Number of times walked between the Venetian and the LVCC: 3
GB of press releases on memory stick: 9
GB of press releases on MP3 players: 4
Number of press conferences quueued for: 7
Number of press conferences to full to get in: 2
Number of keynotes attended: 4
Hours spent queuing for the Bill Gates keynote: 3.5
Number of maps of exhibit halls: 4
Number of times lost in exhibit halls: 7
Number of sessions attended: 5
Number of sesssions with Xena the Warrior Princess: 1
Number of sessions with Neal Stephenson: 1
Number of articles submitted: 5
Number of emailed announcements: lost count
Number of cups of coffee: lost count
Average hours worked each day: 19.5
Amount of sleep: not enough

Two days to go. Normal service will be resumed shortly.

Once more into the breach...

Spotted in various places:

The rules are simply to note those places where one has stayed away from home for a night or more. If you have stayed somewhere more than once, with a gap between, mark it with a star.

So here's my list:

Williams AZ, South Rim AZ, Las Vegas NV*, Mojave CA, Cambria CA, Campbell CA*, Munich, Everdon, Jersey*, Hurricane UT, Springdale UT, Ruby UT, Orlando FL*, Pasadena CA, Los Angeles CA, Paso Robles CA, San Diego CA, Cincinatti OH*, Fort Myers FL, Palm Beach FL, San Jose CA*, San Francisco CA*, New York NY, Kirkland WA, Mariposa CA, Cary NV, Barcelona, Berlin.

We've visited many more places, of course, with our May trip hitting 10 US states: AZ, UT, NV, CA, CO, IN, OH, KY, FL, TX.

I can also add in the usual list of aircraft:

Boeing 747-400, various models of 737 (mainly -500 and -800), my first 717, a couple of 757s, and a BBJ.
Airbus A340, A320 and A319
Dornier 228, 328
Eurocopter EC 134

Not as much Europe as many years, but a lot of US trips. Beijing would have been on the list, but family circumstances forced us to cancel. We'd have also been in Malta if we hadn't been ill. Next week it all starts again, and should see us clocking up some new places in Arizona, too.

I've been worrying that our CES plans would be derailed by upcoming industrial action at both Virgin Atlantic and BAA. Both have now been announced, and I suspect many people will be relieved that there won't be any disruption to holiday season travel plans.

Luckily for us we're not travelling on any of the strike days for either dispute. As we're using miles for our tickets, I suspect it would have been quite hard to get rebooked on anything sensible.

Phew.

Waiting for my flight home from this week's flying visit to Silicon Valley, I sat with a coffee and watched passengers get on the Virgin America flights that share the international terminal. In the silence of the emptying terminal I watched this man slowly pull his bags to the gate.

He could have been me.



San Francisco International Airport, California
December 2007

I've been wondering where the new front page background on Dopplr was. There was something very familiar about it, but there are lots of airports in the world.

Then I found a gallery of photographs at Gadling, a look at some of the best airport architecture around. One picture caught my eye - the original for that image on Dopplr.

No wonder it was familiar, it was the recently remodelled concourse at Seattle-Tacoma. The original picture shows the wonderful spiralling sculpture that fills the void behind the coffee bar. The sculpture is rather amazing: a mobile composed of small plastic toys, it's a 3D image of a bald eagle reaching for a salmon, and its reflection. The rippled reflection is made out of fish, the bird of soaring gulls. Suddenly you realise that some of the outlying components aren't fish or birds - instead they're random plastic toys.



The photo is marypcb's - from her excellent Airport Art group on Flickr. It's a small community, but growing, now with nearly 100 members and over 300 shared images.

And if anyone wants a Dopplr invite, drop me a line...

Though sadly my laptop is...

Some jerk sat in front of me on a flight the other day slammed his seat back into the screen of my trusty tablet, rendering it rather dead. It still works, but only when the screen's at an impossible angle. However there is a shiny lining to this cloud, as the folk at HP have loaned me one of their really quite lovely new ultraportable tablets. It is, as they say, "teh shiny". So, after a couple of days of reconfiguring stuff, I'm back on line.

So, Seattle: the weather's lovely, and I've been taking lots of photographs of the mountains in between meetings. We've been up the top of the Olympics, and to both high access points on Mount Ranier

Also, in other good news, after many moons of searching I managed to find a green laser pointer for a silly low price in a branch of Frys. elimloth's cats are now most exercised. The laser's 5mW is enough to pump the ruby in marypcb's engagement ring - so it's now an engagement laser in its own right...

I've also got my paws on the anti-iPhone, an OpenMoko device. It's rather lovely, though not ready for the end user yet. I'll be writing about it for various places, so keep your eyes peeled!

Normal service to be resumed shortly.

Time to enjoy a little time travel, as I pop back a few weeks and detail some recent pieces written for that most estimable of green tops, the Developer Register.

Up this morning, is my fairly hefty review of Google's Mashup Editor and its GME web programming language:

Software as a Service (SaaS) is one of this year's biggest trends. It's one that's also moving away from simple applications to whole hosted development platforms.

Google's Mashup Editor is the latest online development platform to appear. Like Microsoft's Popfly and Yahoo!'s Pipes before it, it's a tool for building hosted JavaScript applications. Unlike Popfly and Pipes, however, it's much more of a barebones solution, leaving the graphical front-ends firmly at the door.

Launched at Google's recent Developer Day, it's taken a while for the beta test invites to make their way outside the Googleplex. That's probably a good thing, as the service isn't just a development tool for mashups – it's also the showcase for Google's own XML-based declarative web programming language (fully compliant with all the latest Web 2.0 buzzwords), along with a hosting platform that takes advantage of the Google Base APIs to give you a place to store and manage data. Applications are published on the googlemashups.com domain – so you'll need to use iframes or similar techniques to embed them in your sites and services.

Then, from our recent US foray, a piece from Microsoft's TechEd on Visual Studio's new Eclipse-like openness:

Pop along to Sourceforge and you’ll find many different programmers’ editors, many of which have been abandoned long before they’re ready for use. There’s not really any point developing an editor, when toolkits like Scite exist. The same is true of IDEs, when there’s the extensible Eclipse IDE to use. As a result it’s been gaining more and more market- and mindshare with development tools vendors around the world.

Despite its many excellent features, Microsoft’s Visual Studio was starting to look a little left behind. The Visual Studio Integration Programme (VSIP) let developer tool vendors add features and functions to Visual Studio, but it wasn’t open to the whole community and included royalty payments to Microsoft.

Redmond is aiming to change the game with the upcoming release of Visual Studio 2008, and the introduction of a new programme – the Visual Studio Shell – announced at Microsoft’s TechEd 2007 event in Orlando. This will make the key editing and design tools available to anyone who wants to use them, opening up the old Premier Partner Edition to the whole world. With over 8 million Visual Studio developers, that’s a hefty market of coders who will already be well along the learning curve before they even start to use your tools.

A week or so earlier I was in a hotel conference room in Santa Clara, listening to Salesforce.com deny rumours of its tie-up with Google, as it announced its SOA strategy:

The elephant in the room was one of the presenters at Salesforce.com's one day developer conference in Silicon Valley yesterday.

With rumours of an upcoming Google partnership sparking financial news, the company's CEO Marc Benioff joked that he wasn't going to talk about the rumours – though he did proceed to hint that there may be some truth in them.

Certainly, Google's presence could be felt throughout the event, with keynote demonstrations showing Salesforce.com's platform working with Google's APIs.

Most Salesforce.com events focus on the end user and the casual developer who wants to work with the software as service pioneer web forms. This one was different, and looked at some of the service's newer developer-centric features.

And finally it's back to a hot and sticky Orlando and RIM's announcement of a new development platform for the Blackberry:

With as many.NET developers as there are BlackBerry users, it’s about time Research in Motion provided some Visual Studio development tools. There's not too long to wait, as RIM used its Wireless Enterprise Symposium this week to unveil its first Visual Studio plug-in.

Don't be confused - this isn't a .NET solution, and RIM hasn't ported the .NET CLR to its BlackBerry handsets. The company is remaining resolutely Java. Instead, RIM is taking its MDS Studio rapid application development tool and is turning it into a VSIP Visual Studio extension. As MDS Studio uses JavaScript and XML to deliver form-based applications that consume web services, it's easy to see how this fits in with Visual Studio and .NET.

As always there's more to come in plenty of other places, including a report on Mix07 in Web Designer, and a big piece from O'Reilly's Maker Faire in next month's PC Plus.

As something of a unicorn chaser to the last image, here's a picture of a raptor skimming the edges of the peaks around Zion Canyon.

Zion, Utah
May 2007

Sometimes you get the oddest bits and pieces when you wander around the various stalls at a conference exhibition. However, I think one of today's pieces may just win a no prize.

Where 2.0 is a conference about digital mapping and the neogeospatial movement. The conference's sessions cover everything from using GPS fitted pigeons to map California's smog, to building mashup ecosystems around Google's and Microsoft's mapping platforms. If it's anything to do with maps and computers, it's part of Where's remit.

Why oh why oh why then, did I pick up a paper set of roadmaps of the continental US?

Actually they'll come in useful nxt week in Florida, as our GPS only has west coast maps!

Well, we're in the Bay area at last, and heading off to Maker Faire in the morning.

Ping us if you're there and want to meet up. I'll be wearing a Euro Foo t-shirt, and marypcb's braids are distinctive...

Could anyone coming over to either Maker Faire, FiRe, Baycon, Where 2.0 or TechEd (or just the Bay Area), pop over to marypcb and this entry.

There's something waiting for her in the UK that she needs over here, and it's proving a little tricky to get it posted or couriered. Don't worry - it's nothing illegal!

I have a secret obsession that many of you already know about - because many of you share it.

I collect songs about Apollo and the moon landings. Sometimes they appear at just the right moment. We were driving through the high desert plains of Utah last weekend, through red rocks and green trees, and I was reminded of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars books, watching plants struglge to grow in thin air and dry red soils, as ice pellets fell from a cold blue sky. I found myself thinking that I'd never see that fantastic landscape for real, that as wonderful as robots on Mars were, there's nothing that beats the images of people walking on a new world - exploring that old high frontier.

The high plains were once that frontier, and it seems we have turned our back on the new one...

Then this song came up on the old iPod shuffle, an apt piece of poetry from the Bard of Barking:

When I was young I told my mum
I'm going to walk on the Moon someday
Armstrong and Aldrin spoke to me
From Houston and Cape Kennedy
And I watched the Eagle landing
On a night when the Moon was full
And as it tugged at the tides, I knew deep inside
I too could feel its pull

I lay in my bed and dreamed I walked
On the Sea of Tranquillity
I knew that someday soon we'd all sail to the moon
On the high tide of technology
But the dreams have all been taken
And the window seats taken too
And 2001 has almost come and gone
What am I supposed to do?

Now that the space race is over
It's been and it's gone and I'll never get to the moon
Because the space race is over
And I can't help but feel we've all grown up too soon

Now my dreams have all been shattered
And my wings are tattered too
And I can still fly but not half as high
As once I wanted to

Now that the space race is over
It's been and it's gone and I'll never get to the moon
Because the space race is over
And I can't help but feel we've all grown up too soon

My son and I stand beneath the great night sky
And gaze up in wonder
I tell him the tale of Apollo And he says
"Why did they ever go?"
It may look like some empty gesture
To go all that way just to come back
But don't offer me a place out in cyberspace
Cos where in the hell's that at?

Now that the space race is over
It's been and it's gone and I'll never get out of my room
Because the space race is over
And I can't help but feel we're all just going nowhere

At his best (and this is one of his best), Billy Bragg can capture a complex feeling in just a few words. You can find a live version of the song here.

I guess I'll still keep dreaming...

3,000 entries and still going strong!

I seem to have bought Baycon memberships for myself and marypcb .

We had a ball at the last one we attended, so we're looking forward to seeing lots of folk again...

It's spring, it's conference season and we're off on the road...

If you'd like to meet up with us for business or pleasure, here's where we expect to be and when.

April 27	Fly to Las Vegas via LAX
April 30 - May 3	MIX 07 and MEDC in Las Vegas
May 4 - 7	(Zion National Park and environs)
May 8 - 10	Wireless Enterprise Symposium in Orlando
May 11 - 17	Los Angeles - Windows Hardware Engineering conference and meeting time
May 18 - 21	San Jose: Maker's Faire in San Mateo, Salesforce.com Developer Day
May 22 - 25	Future in Review in San Diego
May 26 - June 3	San Jose (May 29 - 30 Where 2.0 in San Jose)
June 4 - 8	TechEd in Orlando
June 11	Fly back to London

Do get in touch if you have projects, clients, lunch ideas or events you think we'd be interested along the way.

We're off to Beijing for a week or so soon, attending Intel's Spring Developer Forum. We've filled out all the forms and sent off all the letters we needed to get the press accreditation that came through yesterday, and I'll be fast-tracking our visas first thing on Tuesday morning.

It's going to be our first time visiting the PRC, so, it's time to ask all you wonderful and well-travelled readers: is there anything we should know that'll make our stay (and getting about) easier?

I seem to recall that a few of you have been there recently...

It looks like my phone will work there, so that's one thing off my mind.

It's the invention that changed the shape of our cities, and it's just celebrated its 150^th anniversary.

Without them there would be no high-rise city. But when it comes to the passenger lift - now celebrating its 150th anniversary - are you a lost soul or a welcome wagon?

It's one of those unglamorous inventions that's so widely used it goes largely unnoticed. You go to the lifts, push the button, and even if it only takes a few seconds, it still feels like too long.

Then you get inside, and as the doors close you take a close-up look at your fellow passengers, get irritated if they've stopped the lift for only one floor, and get even more irritated if not only can you see them in unexpected proximity, you can also smell them.

Erecting skyscrapers
The invention of the lift made skyscrapers possible
But without the lift, which is celebrating a low-key 150th anniversary, the urban landscape would look utterly different. High-rise apartments and thrusting corporate tower blocks would have remained distinctly low-rise if we still depended on the stairs.

Going up!

The highest and fastest I've used are the set that go up the CN Tower in Toronto. The most peculiar were a set that descended into the Gouffre de Padirac in France...

Apologies to all the folk wanting to fly from Newark to Orlando yesterday afternoon, and who had to wait an extra hour and a half for their flight. My flight from Gatwick was late in, and it seems the universe decided I really did need to make that connection...

Orlando is as hot and muggy as ever, and for some reason my hotel seems to think it is a cross between somewhere on a pacific island, a flying boat, and an ocean liner. I suspect this is one of those "themes".

Oh dear.

Still, the bed was comfortable, and I actually managed a complete night's sleep.

An early start, as we're off to Las Vegas to look at lots of shiny cameras.

We've not been to PMA before, so this should be fun - and we get to stay at the Bellagio, one of our honeymoon hotels...

The period between the end of April, all of May, and the beginning of June looks extremely interesting technology conference- and event-wise.

• Mix07/MEDC in Las Vegas 30^th April to 3^rd May.
• RIM Wireless Enterprise Symposium in Orlando 8^th to 11^th May
• WinHEC 2007 in Los Angeles 15^th to 17^th May
• FiRE 2007 in San Diego 22^nd to 25^th May
• TechEd 2007 in Orlando 4^th to 8^th June

It's looking as though we could do those all in a single trip, with some logistical juggling. It'll depend on internal flights for much of it, but doing it with one transatlantic trip would make a lot of sense.

You know, that might just work...

Jersey gets its link to Heathrow back at long last.

British Airways stopped its flights to Heathrow in October 2000, saying the route was losing too much money.

Now bmi, formally known as British Midland, will operate a twice-daily flight from 26 March.

Sorry BA, I think I may be flying bmi next time I go home...