Doubt's Log

I really enjoy Joel's writing. He does a nice job explaining the state of affairs: Martian Headsets - Joel on Software

As I learned from the Slate GabFest Cocktail Chatter segment, we have learned a bit more about how breast milk was giving an IQ boost. Turns out that some 10% of babies do not have the genetics to receive the IQ boost. The overall theme, It's Genetics + Environment, not Nature vrs Nuture.

Science Friday: Under the florescent light, these transgenic mice brains truly light up.

My first reaction to the news was, ah so that's how they will allow people to develop and test their apps for the iphone. Then we loaded it up on a test box and I had three reactions. First: Why does the window frame look like crap? Second: Why is all their web page text so fuzzy to the point I felt sick? Third: How the heck does one open a new tab? It seems to be the pattern that whenever apple ships software for windows it looks much uglier then a default hello world message box type app. Hopefully they will someday improve upon their porting kit and make something that doesn't look so awful. I can also understand apple's hostility to windows, if I had to use/test apps that looked like that all day I would be hostile too. :)
Oh and a couple more quick usage notes:

• The back button on my mouse doesn't do anything in Safari
• Not having an edge of the window to use for resizing is pretty annoying
• I can't find any way to add wikipedia to the search box
• If you don't have any binary legacy support to worry about, why are you going 32bit only? Get the extension market used to 64 bit now before it becomes a legacy hassle.
• Drag and drop customization of the UI elements is pretty cool
• CFNetwork.dll? This could be fun to play with...

Overall, this has a serious case of portcitus, when your app looks or acts lame because you are more focused on a compatible source tree and exact rending with the other platforms then taking advantage of the platform you are porting to.

Update: Oh yeah... and do some security testing :)

Go watch the screencast about Microsoft Popfly. It's a mashup builder using Silverlight. It looks awsome and the screencast includes using World of Warcraft data to build a Mashup Site.

One little peice of code I wrote a while back is a cascade cycle daily ride ICS file that can be used with Outlook 2007, Windows Calandar (in vista) and ICal (untested). Now that we are back into riding season I expect to start getting more use from it. Also since vista and office 2007 are out, maybe some other people might get some use from it too. It attempts to estimate how long the ride will be based on the speed and the estimated legth, but it's only a guess. Enjoy.

  Anthropology.net via JWZ:

Stephen Juan, an anthropologist from the University of Sydney answers Lee Staniforth of Manchester, UK question, "Do humans have a compass in their nose?" He writes about some scientists at California Institute of Technology discovered that humans possess a tiny, shiny crystal of magnetite in the ethmoid bone (pink bone to the image on your right), located between your eyes, just behind the nose... but doesn't give us any clue as to where the research was published.

Check out this windows mobile or java client for looking at maps, traffic, driving directions and local search.

The New York Times has developed a pretty cool windows client using the avalon Windows Presentation Framework in .Net Framework 3.0. The pp downloads the articles so that you can browse the news paper offline, it re-flows the content to intelligently display articles based on the size of the windows, has great search features, keeps read state, lets you annotate the articles save it off, etc. It's a pretty powerful demonstration of what new windows applications can be like.  Right now it uses the free NyTimes registration. Check it out!