April 2010 Archives

All airline services have been cancelled over the most of the European airspace today due to an eruption of a volcano under the Eyjafjallajökull Glacier in Iceland.

As the molten lave goes through the ice of the glacier, it quickly cools down and forms small glass shards. These shards practically sandblast any aircraft through them and can cause anything from engine failures to windscreens becoming opaque.

A Wikipedia article regarding the British Airways Flight 9 on June 24th 1982 illustrates the dangers very clearly. Quoting the captain of that flight, as a perfect example of british understatement some 30000ft from the ground:

Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get them under control. I trust you are not in too much distress.

I just got my iPad thanks to I friend living in New York.

In general it is an interesting device but in my case it is severely limited by the fact that Apple does not allow customers with non-US iTunes accounts, for instance Germany in my case, to download and install iPad apps.

Other than that the keyboard is HUGE and needs some getting used to after the iPhone keyboard. Two-thumb typing is barely possible in the vertical orientation and impossible in the horizontal orientation, but the horizontal keyboard is large enough for 8-fingered typing.

And finally, I realized my new app for the iPad is very buggy on the actual hardware. A weekend of testing and debugging is ahead of me.

This is huge. iAds is definitely a game changer for free app developers. I can’t wait to take advantage of this.

Multitasking seems cool, too. I wonder how it’ll fare on an iPhone 3G, though, let alone an original iPhone. My iPhone 3G is slow as it is without multitasking.

Exciting times, we live in…