The ZX81 can easily be credited as the milestone that launched the computer revolution in Europe – Apple IIs and Atari 800s were very expensive in Europe at that time, and there wasn’t much else yet that could inspire young people to take an interest in computers.

And on March 5th 1981, everything changed. The ZX81 was ridiculously cheap, about $100 – a feat only possible by accepting some hair-raising compromises: 1K of RAM, which was also used as shared video memory. A tiny, flat pressure sensitive keyboard. Memory extensions that were plugged straight onto exposed copper on the main board. A tape drive mass storage system that had to be operated without feedback. No sound. No color.

But the machine sold incredibly well and it introduced a generation of teenagers all across Europe to programming. It would be superseded within a year by the much more advanced ZX Spectrum, but for that one glorious year it was a roaring success and Sinclair could hardly produce enough of the little black boxes.

It was the first computer that I owned, and I have happy memories of spending nights typing game listings in Basic out of computer magazines into the little machine, always careful not to push the keys too hard to avoid kicking loose the memory extension. We’ve certainly come a long way in 30 years…

Happy Birthday, ZX81!

The search for planets outside of the solar system has been heating up considerably over the last few years and we have now hundreds of planets in our maps in a slowly expanding sphere of several hundred light years from earth.

However due to the current detection systems, our exploration skews heavily towards larger gas giants very much like our own Jupiter and Saturn. Earth-sized planets are much harder to detect across the void of space.

But now we have our first breakthrough: The red dwarf star Gliese 581 (picture courtesy of Digital Sky Survey / ESO) seems to have at least six planets, where two discovered over the last few years are borderline near the habitable zone – and one recently discovered planet at three times the mass of earth sits exactly in the center of the habitable zone!

The best part: Gliese 581 is only 20 light years away.

This is amazing news on so many levels. This can be seen as a first hint that earth-like planets may be much more common than even the most optimistic researchers had been hoping for – it’s extremely unlikely that in our Milky Way galaxy the only two planets in habitable zones sit within twenty light years from each other – the Milky Way has more than 100 billion stars and is nearly 100,000 light years across. With a hundred billion stars (100,000,000,000+) we are now potentially looking at millions of planets in habitable zones.

Tonight, look up and wave. Somebody out there may be waving back!

There are a few things to talk about, but before I get back to the usual blogging routine, here’s an update on my daily commute: It still rocks!

Last Thursday was a beautiful day in the Bay Area, warm and not much wind, so I was really looking forward to my bike ride back home across the Golden Gate, and I was rather disappointed to see the fog move in from the ocean just before I made it to the bridge.

And the fog was as thick as pea soup by the time I’d made it to the south tower, so I didn’t expect any photo opportunities… near the north tower, visibility was down to about twenty meters, when suddenly from one second to the next, the sun broke through!

It was glorious! Here is a still picture taken from the north tower:

Click through for a large version.

What no picture can can show is the amazing speed of the wind-whipped fog as it blows through the narrow gap of the Golden Gate. Here is a short video of the same scene – sorry for the shaky camera, but the wind was strong enough to almost blow the camera out of my hands.

Also commute-related, I’ve started a Tumblr blog as a little experiment. It’s linked here in the sidebar and it’s called Bay Crossings – I’ll try to post a picture or two every day from my commute across San Francisco Bay.

Here are two videos of David Humphrey’s presentation on the state of the Audio Data API (same content but different angle):

What blew me away when I saw the video is that one part of Dave’s presentation (at about the 2 minute mark) was based on my JavaScript Spectrum Visualizer – let me just say that I am honored! [virtual happy dance]

Everybody in the web development community owes a big Thanks! to Dave for working so hard and tirelessly to bring full, interactive audio to web browsers. Over the next year or so we will see some HTML5/JavaScript experiences that will blow your socks off – and that is in no small part because of Dave and the team of audio/video coders and artists that have been pushing the boundaries of what browsers can do.

…and here it is!

Amanda did a great job with this picture – I really love the way she captured the dark & wet atmosphere of that evening, with the glittery lights of broadway reflected in the rain-splattered street.

The textures in this painting are amazing – it’s certainly something I haven’t seen done in watercolors before.

Great job, Amanda!

Of all the writeups I’ve found, here is the one I’ll use for my resume:

OK this must be the bleedingest-edge project I’ve seen in a while. To actually see it I had to download a pre-patched version of Firefox 3.7 alpha pre1 and it uses a draft recommendation of a Mozilla extension to the HTML5 draft specification.

This is from the Awesome But Useless blog, which certainly has one of the most entertaining blog titles I’ve seen in a while. And I am honored to be featured there – it’s great company. Thanks!

On March 18 at 1:13am Luke Akira arrived, changing our lives forever. And while he is not always as peaceful as in the picture above, he has already enriched our existence beyond words.

Welcome, Luke. We’ll have an amazing time together…

FlightGear is very far advanced at this point and much about the architecture of the platform is very attractive. All the scenery files, plane models and the AI traffic definitions are done in XML – there is a lot of stuff to poke around in… not that I really need another time sink at this point…

Flying in FlightGear was very nice. Similar to Microsoft’s FlightSim, but maybe a little bit more of a realistic aircraft handing (which is not always good for the casual pilot!). The scenery around the Bay was gorgeous and the clouds and sky (which is what a pilot will see the most) are near perfect, at least as good as FS9.

With versions for Mac and PC and as a free download, what is there not to like?

Now what would you be hearing there? From my casual listening, there is a constant low roar in the line, almost like white noise, which is actually kind of relaxing, and then suddenly there are loud cracks, booms and whiplashing metallic noises whenever the ice shifts.

From what the institute website states, there is a good chance of catching the songs of various kinds of seals and whales, but today I’ve only heard faint, low noises that may have come from whales. I’m looking forward to hear them close up.

But even just the echoing booms of the ice are fascinating and the stereo effect of the microphone is quite startling. Not sure if that makes me sound weird, but I could listen to this audio stream all day!

And work-wise I’ve spent as much time as possible reading up on the new HTML5 and CSS3 features – and there are many.

On my more experimental site – Stories In Flight – I’ve started to create a whole section with small cheatsheets and tutorials around things in HTML5 that have caught my eyes:

• There is the master cheatsheet for HTML5 and CSS3, which gives you a good overview of some of the highlights like box shadows, rounded corners, SVG and Canvas tags.
• I’ve created a little tutorial around the basics of Ruby Annotations and there’s also a suggestion of a practical use in language training.
• An exploration of CSS3 multiple background images and – rather a surprise – how this can be used quite efficiently for JavaScript animations. I will revisit this feature in the near future with several interesting new ideas…
• A quick look at the basic HTML5 audio tag, including a script solution that allows to easily create whole soundscapes with multiple channels of sound that will come in handy for JavaScript games.

The more I research all the new HTML5 features, the more excited I get for the future of interface engineering – after years of very little progress, where almost all interesting new interface developments came from the Flash side, we are now seeing a renaissance of HTML.

Yes, there will be browser incompatibilities, and yes, Flash will not go away, but I think we will be able to define a much better model where Flash will really only be used where it is necessary. No more reason to kill accessibility and SEO with Flash navigation elements.

We will see exciting new HTML websites exploding onto the scene, lightweight, accessible and kicking all kinds of visual butt.

I can’t wait.