Angus Thinks…

The Onion on a new Mac …

🙂

They got that Mac tradeshow look so perfectly too.

The iPhone Shuffle,
(Advert 1)

(Advert 2)

(Advert 3)

🙂

Plus the obligatory Wired.com article (a bit more serious though)

In movies like Airplane! the pilots have all been incapacitated and a desperate call goes around “is there a pilot on board?” To which some brave soul then stands up and says something like, “Yes I can fly the plane”.

What’s weird though is that something a little like this actually happened recently.

An Air Canada Boeing 767 (C-FMXC) on a flight between Toronto and London was midway across the Atlantic when the First Officer showed signs of being confused and unwell. The captain decided the first officer should be relieved of duty and he was removed from the flight deck.

At this point the passenger lists were inspected to see if there were any airline pilots on board, unfortunately there were not, however one of the flight attendants held a commercial pilots license and she was asked to assist the captain. (There is suggestion on one forum that this flight attendant was either former or reserve Canadian Airforce)

The aircraft diverted to Shannon airport in Ireland where it landed safely. The captain later commented that the Flight attendant sitting in the second seat was “not out of place”.

The ill first officer was taken to a nearby hospital in Ireland and later flown back to Canada.

So that is an outline, but it raises so many interesting questions, many of which I may never know the answers too. The most important one of course being, how many cabin crew have piloting qualifications?

The accident report (by the Irish AAIB) is suitably detailed but, quite correctly, doesn’t include enough information to identify the people involved, so I may never know the complete story. Hopefully someone will make a documentary out of it. (But changing the names perhaps to keep the privacy of the ill pilot)

Irish AAIB Report

Guardian Article
(Mostly the same as the official report)

I was looking at my wallet and I realized that I have a whole collection of loyalty cards.

Am I really loyal to all of them? I don’t think I can be, since some of them are for direct competitors.

This post from yesterday on the cocoa-dev list seems to suggest that it is.

I wonder what is happening?

(Although it doesn’t affect me much because I’m still not doing iPhone development at all yet)

I was sad to read that the National lighthouse museum in Penzance appears to have closed.

It was an interesting place to visit and it had lots of real exhibits including light house lamps, optics and models. It was also in a building which had been used to prepare stone work for the Wolf Rock lighthouse construction, so there was a sense of history about the place.

Hopefully the exhibits will get put on display somewhere else, but it’s still a shame.

Since I got confused by this one the other day:

http://unicode.org/faq/basic_q.html#14

Q: What is the difference between UCS-2 and UTF-16?

A: UCS-2 is what a Unicode implementation was up to Unicode 1.1, before surrogate code points and UTF-16 were added as concepts to Version 2.0 of the standard. This term should be now be avoided.

When interpreting what people have meant by “UCS-2” in past usage, it is best thought of as not a data format, but as an indication that an implementation does not interpret any supplementary characters. In particular, for the purposes of data exchange, UCS-2 and UTF-16 are identical formats. Both are 16-bit, and have exactly the same code unit representation.

The effective difference between UCS-2 and UTF-16 lies at a different level, when one is interpreting a sequence code units as code points or as characters. In that case, a UCS-2 implementation would not handle processing like character properties, codepoint boundaries, collation, etc. for supplementary characters.

The Google Chrome comic is a work of art, it’s both functional and artistic, and it manages to explain so many really important points in a way that is easy to understand.

If you haven’t read it, and you’re interested in browsers at all, you should go and read it. 🙂

The people at 280 North have released the The Cappuccino framework as open source. The Cappuccino framework is the system that powers the 280 slides web app, which is sort of Keynote in a browser.

I’ve been playing around with the framework today a bit and it looks really great. The interesting thing is how many AppKit features have made it across. It wasn’t hard to modify the sample app to use a CPURLConnection object to fetch data asynchronously and then display it in a suitable text view.

My test app for this btw was an ajax clock. I built a simple php script that displays the output of the php date method and then used ajax calls to update the clock in the browser. It’s not exactly useful but it worked really quite nicely and the coding is relatively easy too.

I’m now wondering what else can be built using these tools, because it seems a really nice way of doing web apps (if you have a desktop software background)

I’m very impressed. 🙂