Things that go fast and explode

autopope's main blog points to Encyclopaedia Astronautica's history of Project Dynasoar.



A fascinating piece on the military implications of a skip-glide orbital vehicle - along with the liquid flourine/hydrazine rockets that could have been used to launch it. Imagine the down-range effects of a trail of hydrofluric acid...

A whole section? For a hotel?

I'm off to Las Vegas in a couple of weeks for a conference, and so I thought I'd buy a guidebook to see what was worth seeing and doing while I'm there. I was amused to discover that the hotel I'm staying in merited its own section.

Then again it does seem to have a copy of the Grand Canal in the lobby...

Internationalisation

Linux for the Russian market?

It must be time for some more shameless self promotion...

...and so here are some more pieces from the Guardian: a piece on what I think will be the key enterprise IT themes and issues for 2004, some ruminations on the effect of the outcome of Microsoft and Sun's Java lawsuits on developers, a look at how to start building service-oriented architectures, and a look at Microsoft's Small Business Server 2004 and some alternative approaches.

What a lovely name for a band...

"Knights of the Occasional Table"

Gotta love those purveyors of ambient bleepy stuff, they do have a sense of humour...

Water, water everywhere...

Apparently Coca Cola's new bottled water really comes out of a tap...

Plane sailing

Watch aircraft taking off and landing at Los Angeles International Airport in near real time (there's a 10 minute delay on the information feed) with Airport Monitor, a rather handy Java application.

There's also a list of other airports that subscribe to Airport Monitor, so you can see what's happening at your local airport (if you're in certain US cities!)