FeeBee Squirrel

This is feebee squirrel, just after we brought her home from the rescue shelter. We had her chipped and were about to get vaccinations when the vet said he could feel three kittens, so no jabs.

She has since been behaving like she is in heat, so I’m pretty confused. She is much calmer today though, so we will see…


IEC Fusion gets injection of money

This is really good news – the company formed by Dr Robert Bussard, EMC2, has just been awarded more money to build another ‘Wiffleball’, called the WB-8.
There’s more details at Power and Control: WB-8 In The Works, including a very good primer on this particular brand of fusion at Bussard’s IEC Fusion Technology (Polywell Fusion) Explained.

Time lines for knowing whether this will work commercially – 18-24 months. If it does, then all bets are off….


Beautiful Day

Should go for a bike ride as FeeBee Squirrel is going loopy at the moment.

(I should add that FeeBee Squirrel is our new cat, who is behaving like she’s in heat).


Many roads lead to Fusion power

I saw a programme last night with James May talking about ‘alternative’ (his quotes) energy, and there was the usual ones of solar, wave power (I remember the Salter Duck from a while back, but didn’t realise it was government incompetence that killed it off – basically they said it would be 10 times more expensive than nuclear, and that did it in), kite power from the Netherlands and some guys in the States cracking CO2 to create petrol using concentrated sunshine.

So far, so so-so.

Then there was the bit about Nuclear Fusion – the sun uses it, it’s clean, it only creates helium, enough fuel to power the planet essentially forever, and all you need is … 100 million degrees to fuse the atoms of hydrogen together. Cue; CERN, ITER, JET, big computers, sirens, and tokamaks (toroids – doughnuts). Then – some very nice footage of James looking at a screen that’s showing some actual fusion going off in a the toroid – sexaay!

Except there’s a lot more to fusion than the tokamaks….
Read more

iPhone developers will need servers to push

From iPhone developers will need servers to push.

Former TUAW blogger Erica Sadun has a cautionary post for developers regarding the pending push notifications coming to iPhone OS 3.0: better get yourself some reliable servers. The implication, delivered via headline, is that smaller developers won’t be able to afford push notification. Indeed, as Erica says, coding for an app that can run in the background is one thing — you may need to scale things down a bit for resource management — but deploying a reliable push notification system is a tall order by comparison.

Instead of coding once and deploying, developers will now have to manage servers to handle the load of users who will be receiving push notifications.

There’s more (of course).

If you’re going to need industrial-scale servers to run your push-enabled app. then this will have an upward pressure on the application price, and is an opportunity for people using lightweight frameworks such as Twisted to come to the fore.

It may even kill off fart-apps. We can but hope…

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