Snow and ice brought much of UK traffic to a standstill today. I flew back home from Edinburgh late afternoon just as the worst of the weather started. Managed to press my trusty P900 up against the window to grab this shot just south of Edinburgh. Shortly after landing at Birmingham International Airport they temporarily closed the runway. I've flown a great many times but today was just a little bit scary. Complete white out until almost on the tarmac then ploughing though the slush on the runway it did cross my mind that we wouldn't be able to stop! Anyway, after a 5 hour drive for the 15 or so miles between the airport and home I finally made it back in one piece. It's below zero tonight so the roads will be just great tomorrow.

With all the recent excitement about Mars many people will be surprised to know that Russia has successfully landed 10 probes, yes 10, on the surface of Venus between 1975 and 1981. All 'Venera' probes survived the landing and four of them transmitted pictures back to Earth. That's an astonishing achievement given a) this was 25 years ago and the Russians didn't have the benefit of bouncing airbag technology and b) the surface of Venus is hotter than your oven with an atmospheric pressure 90 times greater than that on Earth. Oh, and the atmosphere contains substantial amounts of sulphuric acid and other goodies. The probes themselves survived no more than an hour before being fried, crushed and corroded into oblivion.

Some of the pictures taken by the Venera 9 & 10 probes have been dusted off, reprocessed and re-calibrated. And they are every bit as stunning in their own way as those from Mars. All told this was a terrific achievement for the Russian Space Agency.

I've been on the lookout for and have now found an outliner for the P900. Projekt by Kylom is a nice looking and well specced outliner. Projekt allows for styling of text and can export outlines in either text or HTML format, the latter preserves styling. Items can be linked to a contact, calendar item or task. Nice product.

The BBC has conducted a vox pop survey on whether the cost of the recent (and future) Mars expeditions can be justified. Not surprisingly opinion is mixed and split between 'man as inquisitive explorers learning how the universe works' to 'we should instead use the money to cure cancer and prevent 3rd world starvation'. As I've said before this is not an either/or situation, and as a couple of respondents in the BBC poll suggested, in the grand scheme of state funding space exploration costs far less than many earthly pursuits (e.g military funding, treating people with smoking-related illness, treating obesity, to name but three). I think it's also too simplistic to suggest that there's hunger in the world and no cure for cancer (and the rest of the alternative suggestions for how NASA money could be spent) as a result of lack of money.

Out of interest, I thought I'd do some basic fact-finding to put things into perspective:

• NASA's annual civilian space budget; $15bn. Money spent by US citizens on their pets; $31bn (source SpaceDaily web article on the cost/benefit of space travel)
• Cost of the NASA Spirit and Opportunity Mission; $850m (source Washington Post editorial)
• Cost to the UK National Health Service for treating smoking related illness during 2002; £1.5bn (source Action on Smoking and Health).

People, you pays your money you takes your choice.

Amazing! NASA does it again and successfully lands the Opportunity rover onto the surface of Mars. The first pictures are already coming back. The safe landing of these two probes has surely got to give the green light for a manned mission to Mars.

With two working landers (NASA engineers are narrowing in on Spirit's technical problems) on opposite sides of the planet this is going to be an exciting next few weeks.

Whoo-hoo, looks like NASA got Spirit back though it's still not 100% and may take a while to fix! The 'recovery' comes just in time because Opportunity is just 48 hours away.

All this on a day when ESA's Mars Express returned some of the best ever pictures of the surface of Mars.

Oh, and I almost forgot, while we spend millions getting to Mars, pieces of Mars come to us for free. Earlier this week a meteorite that has been confirmed as originating on Mars was found in Morocco.

Well, I've tinkered and I've experimented and I now think I understand how my new template works. I've learnt three things:

1. CSS isn't easy to understand without a book (I've yet to get one, recommendations welcome!). The two column layout without a background image took me ages to figure out.
2. Use an externally linked style sheet.
3. CSS is really powerful!

Yeah, OK, you all knew that already but hey, we've all got to find this out for ourselves. I've now eliminated almost all the traditional HTML tags from my Radio Userland template (not including the tags contained in posts themselves of course) though there's still a lot to do. Thanks to Bryan Bell for creating great templates and thanks especially for making them freely available. The template I'm using now is based upon Bryan's CandidBlue theme though I've changed it somewhat in an attempt to understand how CSS works.

I've got the decorators in so please mind the wet paint. Just trying out a new look, having fun tweaking the CSS and learning a lot as I experiment.

The Martians have struck again as NASA have announced they've lost contact with the Spirit rover. Let's hope it's just a temporary communication glitch as according to the press release "similar events occurred several times during the Mars Pathfinder mission". If this is a major fault and the end of the Spirit mission then it's a poignant end because the last published image received from Spirit was a look back at the empty lander, an image entitled 'Empty nest'. Let's hope this Spirit has yet flown the nest for good.

Although I expect RSSWinterfest won't mention learning object syndication using RSS or the importance of syndicating e-learning content in general, I will still be a virtual attendee in the hope of being pleasantly surprised.

Few can be unimpressed by the quality of pictures coming back from the NASA Spirit Mars rover. But did you know Spirit only has a 1 megapixel digital camera? The CCD is just 1,000x1,000 pixels. When you compare this to the 6 megapixel cameras readily available in high street camera shops, just how does Spirit get such good pics? The answer is in the lens. In any digital camera the lens is one of the major determinants of picture quality. Most consumer digital cameras have relatively cheap lenses. Stick on a top notch lens and even the most modest of cameras can take better pics. True, Spirit also uses a CCD with a higher spec than those used in your average Sony Cybershot but it's still way below the maximum resolution of consumer cameras. The secret of Spirit's success are its lenses. If you're buying yourself a digital camera in the January sales then go for one that accepts replacement lenses. You might not be able to afford the kinds of hardware NASA uses but you can still improve the quality of your pictures by carefully selecting the lenses you can afford.

Europe shows that it's not just the USA that can wow us with stunning images (and serious science) as the European Space Agency's Mars Express satellite beams back its first full colour close-up of the surface of the red planet. The picture is of Valles Marineris, the Grand Canyon of Mars, a region of the planet thought to have been carved out by flowing water. You can keep track of the latest images from Mars Express by visiting the ESA's image gallery. So right now we have both NASA and ESA exploring Mars, reinforcing the need for a manned mission to Mars to be a collaboration rather than a race.

Above is the first ever picture of the surface of Mars taken by the NASA Viking 1 lander on July 20, 1976. I don't mind telling you that I'm really excited about all the space news we've been having lately, in particular of course the exciting NASA Spirit Rover exploration of Mars. I was 12 years old when Viking 1 landed on Mars in 1976. It was the most incredible thing to see the first images taken on the surface of another planet being beaming back into our homes. I still have a copy of National Geographic magazine from that time. Back then of course there's wasn't anything like the instant access to online libraries of pictures streamed to us via the Internet only minutes or hours after they were taken.

Now my son is 12 years old and the Spirit rover is starting to make its way across the surface of Mars. Scores of images are available almost instantly. The Spirit rover image gallery is a daily must-visit web site for me though I detect, not least in my own family and sadly with my son, a certain impassivity towards all of this Mars news. Maybe it's all the Space Shuttle generation (oh no, not another Shuttle launch) or maybe it's just because people today are bombarded with images and events that just wash over them in a mass of information that many people just give up noticing. To think the rover is out there trundling away across the Mars is for me mind blowing. A tremendous achievement for science and engineering.

Hot on the heels of NASA's success, and coincidentally just as the next US presidential elections get under way, George Bush has announced plans to send man back to the moon and ultimately on to Mars. Cynical electioneering aside this is great news and as many think, long overdue. Over the past two decades all of NASA's manned space programmes have been concerned with Shuttle missions which, while bringing us some way towards building a long-term space station (also long overdue), establishing countless satellites doubtlessly spawning the new era in mass communications and of course many unknown military missions, have done little to advance humankind's pioneering spirit and desire for exploration. Now we're getting back on track, though there are many hurdles to overcome before Bush junior's vision is realised (Bush senior's Mars mission got scrapped soon after it was announced).

Sending men and women to Mars won't be cheap. There are risks of course as two Space Shuttle disasters show but think how many lives were lost during the exploration of the world in the 15th & 16th centuries, or any of the other countless periods of exploration in human history. It's part of our nature to explore and the rewards are considerable. The rewards for sending a crew of humans to Mars are potentially incalculable. If live is discovered on Mars, even the most primitive life, it's be the single most important discovery in the history of human exploration. And even if life isn't found, discovering how Mars became the seemingly dry, desert-planet we see today could be essential for the future of this planet. But these are just a couple of the obvious big wins. There will be a great many other discoveries and breakthroughs along the way while developing a mission such as this, in science, engineering, communications, human physiology, not to mention international relations as a manned Mars mission will likely be a collaborative effort.

Gia's posted a long and thoughtful piece on the politics and economics of Bush's Mars plans. Should we pay for a Mars mission when there are people starving to death in the world? Gia says yes and I agree because I don't see it as an either/or choice. People are not starving anywhere in the world because the US is planning another space mission. We are not short of a cure for AIDS because the US spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the Spirit rover. And we don't have global warming because the US chose to go to the moon. Most of us in the developed world have a choice in how we live our lives and what we choose to do, collectively as nations and as individual citizens. We allow 3rd world starvation when we over consume and demand lower prices to fuel our excessive consumption. We allow massive corporations to divert investment into drugs that treat our illnesses brought on by our consumptive lifestyles rather than finding cures for illnesses that kill millions of people who are too poor to pay for their medicines therefore aren't paying customers. We allow global warming because of the wasteful way we choose to live. We have a choice. We can make this world a better place to live while at the same time exploring other worlds.

Well Apple sneaked this one in when we weren't looking. The latest version of Mac OS X (Panther or 10.3 to you) has built-in ability to manipulate images using Applescript. You can flip, rotate, pad, crop, scale and convert images all using simple Applescript commands. Now here's the fun part, both Userland Frontier and Radio can speak native Applescript. Anything you can do with Applescript you can do with Frontier or Radio.

So by way of a test my assetManager tool can now create thumbnails for moblog posts. I've built-in an Applescript routine into my Radio Userland tool and I'll release an update during Sunday for anyone who wants to give this a whirl. If you can't wait and if you are using Mac OS 10.3 click on this link to get a standalone Applescript file that scales images. As an aside, another cool feature of OS 10.3 is the ability to create Applescripts on-the-fly from an applescript:// URL action (try clicking the previous link)!

Well done Apple and well done Userland for supporting Applescript.

The assetManager now does thumbnails! This is a test post from my P900. The thumbnails feature is only available to Mac OS X users. It'll be out as an update to the tool tomorrow.

Congratulations to Gia who's made it onto prime-time TV. The new Channel 4 series Demolition Day started last Sunday night. My son Matthew loves it. Catch the next episode next Sunday, Channel 4 at 6:30pm.

New year's resolution #1, give up cycling in the woods! From left to right, Rob, Prem & me.

This site is so funny, anonymous picture posts with anonymous comments. Catch it now before it implodes! I think it might have started out as a serious moblogging experiment but not any more, it's more of a free for all!