Chandler's Zen

I attended the British Grand Prix on Sunday to watch my daughters team, Red Bull, record a 1, 2 victory. I am really pleased, particularly as it appears that the car has made a step forward in terms of perfomance. Lets hope this proves to really be the case for the following races in the season and they do even better.

What was particularly pleasing at the start, was to watch Sebastian Vettel pull away in the lead at over 1 second per lap. Each time the cars came past Becketts (because that was where I was), the lead was visibly increased. It was of course equally frustrating to see Mark Webber not able to get close enough to have a chance of passing Rubens Barachello (Mark in 3rd place, Rubens in 2nd) during this same stint – although the fact that he was able to jump Rubens at the first pit stop gave heart eventually.

Although there were other activities back down the field, one of the big downsides to actually being in the stands rather than at home in front of the TV and a laptop tuned into the Formula 1 live timing site is that you don’t know quite what is going on.  It was only later, when I saw the recorded program did I realise the Heidfeld had been holding up Alonso with a broken car and that explained the huge gap there was back to them as the field went by, or which Ferrari was which (I recognised the cars, but not the drivers helmets).

I will try to upload a few photos of the event later

The jury is still out on the use of d_cubed (an extension of TiddyWiki to support “Getting Things Done”. It is doing a very nice job of keeping track of the next action on a range of projects, but it still has the limitation that you are tied to the computer to make an update. So it is still a toss up between that, and a simple action list written down in a small notebook.

However, I have been using the TiddlyWiki as a design and documentation tool for the rewrite of my AKCMoney program I am writing. Being able to document in small snippets (tiddlers) aspects of the user interface or aspects of the design, and then link these all up is proving to be a massive shortcut to me getting clear in my head precisely what I should be programming.

I wake up this morning to the news that FOTA have, last night, announced a breakaway series to rival the FIA Formula 1 motor racing series.

This is interesting news – and I am on tenderhooks to find out where it all leads. It could be that by the end of the day the FIA has compromised sufficiently that FOTA withdraw its threat, or the FIA could dig in, in which case I think we will see court cases related to whether some of the teams have commitments to the FIA to race next year.

I am attending the race at Silverstone on Sunday – I thought with a sad heart that this may have been the last British Grand Prix raced there. Now I am not so sure

I came across a neat piece of software yesterday, called TiddlyWiki which provides you with a single html file, full of javascript, so the whole file acts like a wiki.  My interest was further raised when I found out that there are variants of this software that implement the “Getting Things Done” technique for managing the complexities of life and I spent the day exploring those.

Unfortunately, I think the latter implementations are two structured for my taste, and I will continue using Freemind as a tool for that purpose (although having now understood “Getting Things Done” – which incidentally I was able to summarise and put into a tiddlywiki – I will restructure how I am using Freemind), but the tiddly wiki itself seems a wonderful tool for creating the design and user documentation for the software I am producing.  So I have started up a new tiddly wiki in the supporting directory of my new application.

I will blog more about this application and whether it lives up to its promise as I get more into it.

Yet again I have changed the content management system on my home computer.  This time is was from Drupal to Wordpress.  I have come to the conlusion that it would be better to have a solution that is aimed around me writing these short blog entries rather than the heavyweight full content management system that was Drupal.

I did look at a blog on blogger.com and indeed the remnants are still there, but in the end I decided I could get tighter control and achieve what I wanted to achieve on my own server.  To that’s what I have done

I have been considering the architecture for a web based real time game between two players.  It doesn’t matter what the game is, any game in which there are two players.  I’m thinking of an air hockey simulation, but it could be any thing (tennis maybe).  The basic idea is that each web browser will run a javascript/ajax application to control the player on their side, and will want to pass messages very rapidly to the other player.

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