Coding In Paradise

The Next Great Space Race: SpaceShipOne and Wild Fire to Go For the Gold: "A piloted rocket ship race to claim a $10 million Ansari X Prize purse for privately financed flight to the edge of space is heating up.

Aerospace engineer, Burt Rutan, leader of Scaled Composites of Mojave, California, has formally announced a timetable for back-to-back flights of the firm's SpaceShipOne rocket plane.

Rutan and his team have given its official 60-day notice, with the first X Prize attempt set for September 29 from the inland Mojave Spaceport in California. To win the $10 million, SpaceShipOne will need to make a second flight within two weeks, by October 13.

Hot on Rutan's heels is Brian Feeney, leader of the Canadian da Vinci Project. Feeney also reported today that his team is rolling out on August 5 their completed X Prize vehicle -- the balloon-lofted Wild Fire rocket. The public unveiling will take place at the team's Downsview Airport hanger in Toronto. "

Blogger just recently posted an advanced cross-browser, cross-platform DHTML editing control that is very cool looking. One of the developers on the team posted a note on why this control is useful and technical details on how it was implemented. Most browsers now come bundled with a rich-edit text control that can be scripted in the browser; there is also a Blogger site that pretty intensely lays out what each rich edit control can do on what browser.

You may notice some strange posts on my blog and repeated posts; I was doing some experimenting automating the posting of news articles to my blogs through the Atom API from a Java program I wrote. It worked, but one of the posts broke the Blogger Dashboard, which means I can't delete these posts. I've talked to the Blogger team and they said they are working on it. I just chose articles randomly from other RSS feeds so some of them might be wierd.