The Higgs Discovery Near?

I love Europe. This would not be possible without their investment in Physics and LHC. (The RIM guys did good here in Canada as well)

And whether it is finally found or not, we can be sure it will be either "proved" or "disproved" in the next short while (short - relatively.. months or a few years max).

Exciting either way.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16116230

(Almost) fixed back pain, and how it relates to 2 years off from open/free source tinkering hopefully over

Since I was a teenager I had issues with my back. Perhaps not so surprisingly, they always got worse not by doing "something" (physical like sports) but rather doing "nothing" (such as sitting at a desk, thinking, and/or coding uninterrupted for weeks of 16 hours a day if not more). Playing hockey once a week did not really help much. Over the years I did more and more of it, not only doing paid work or things that would initiate it, but also did large amount of tinkering and playing with open source stuff.

Finally, over two years ago, I had an extensive busy period at work, while starting software for a shutdown planning prospective business, and also playing and involved with Etoys, Squeak and other software that interests me.

Unfortunately the load also resulted in an extended period of back trouble to the point it was hard to even do my work. So about two years ago or so, I decided to quit everything but software I need to do for living to save the sanity of my back. I still did follow things like Etoys, but spent way less time. Also I started doing things to fix things - gym, five minute breaks, better posture, and general "being aware" when things go bad.

All that waiting seems to be working so I plan get back to do more things for fun. I started to investigate Google's Native Client as a way from the prison of "web architecture", ran into some early issues on Opensuse but that got resolved. I plan to look at Yoshiki Ohshima's Squeak port to Nacl and see if Etoys can run that way instead of in a plugin. Not quite a "commitment" but a plan.

Exponential Growth of Interest in Dart

Exponential Growth of Interest in Dart

So,  the GOTO in Aarhus is long in the past. Dart was introduced. It's features are good as one would expect from people who know what they are doing. I would prefer a Smalltalkish-Newspeakish syntax but did not really hope for it too much - the world does move slowly after all.

I kept an interesting statistics the first few days after Dart was announced. I keep my links on delicious and every day I checked number of delicious bookmarks marked as dart for http://www.dartlang.org/. It was surely non exact, the count was taken at different times of the day, rounded them, some days I forgot, but it went like this:

2011-oct-10 : 712 saves
2011-oct-11 1924 saves
2011-oct-12 3800 saves
2011-oct-13 6700 saves

2011-oct-14 ??? saves

2011-oct-15 12585 saves

2011-oct-16 ??? saves

2011-oct-17 ???? saves

2011-oct-18 24000 saves

2011-oct-19 28500 saves

Now, the count is at 42121 saves. Count multiplied by 2 every day the first several days looks like an exponential growth of interest in Dart. 

The Dart mailing list goes steady around 25 messages a day and it looks like a vibrant community being  created. Dart is evolving, good and needed platform. Perhaps we are getting a safer, faster, concurrency friendly language and platform that will make programming for the web a better place.