The Boat That Rocked Soundtrack is awesome

I'm currently listening to The Boat That Rocked soundtrack and it's very great:

Let me also seize the opportunity for a shameless Spotify plug. I've gone premium for at least 6 months now and the service really lives up to its reputation. I can hardly remember how I could live with the constant ads, plus the mobile version is great. All this for under 10€ a month, it's really a bargain. It's so easy it would make one stop doing filesharing. I don't understand why the majors don't get it and give the service a boost, this thing is the future.

Speed matters

I've been experiencing speed issues with a web service I use daily in order to perform my work today. It made me experience acutely that speed is but the key factor of a smooth user experience. Whether the fault comes from the application or not, I've experienced the phenomenon described in this article on the Grat Firewall of China by Aza Raskin:

China’s great firewall carefully circumvents the want-what-you-can’t-have desire. When I last visited Beijing I tried to access the BBC expecting it to be blocked. Instead, the site came through slowly and erratically. If I waited long enough, refreshed often enough, the page just might come through. Because of the sporadic experience, I found my frustration was directed at the BBC and not at the firewall. Even with a conscious knowledge of what was going on, I had a visceral reaction that it was the BBC’s fault and not a country-wide censor.

Whereas annoyance is a good thing in the specific procrastination case described by Aza, in my case it's quite the opposite given I was trying to accomplish actual work. For the period when the speed issue took place, it made me loathe the software, regardless of where the issue came from (it could have been from my local network, I don't really know nor care).

Lesson learned: one really has to put speed and performance at the key of their software development effort. Great features are always trumped by speed given its huge impact of the joy of using a piece of software.

The National Ignition Facility - a story of vision and perseverance

The Big Picture has a great series of pictures of the US National ignition Facility:
"Creating a miniature star on Earth" is the goal of the National Ignition Facility (NIF), home to the world's largest and highest-energy laser in Livermore, California

What amazes me most about it is the sheer amount of time, effort, ambition and long-term planning required to put a project like this together. They started in 1997 and will hopefully reach the expected result (fusion!) in 2012. I guess that's typical of big projects (bridges, skyscrapers, cathedrals), but in addition to this there's the incredible precision with which everything needs to be done - a single misaligned laser can make the whole experiment fail!
From my experience looking at software development processes, I can't even to begin to realize the size of the quality control efforts that must have been instated at every step of the building process...

EDIT: some of the cool comments: 

#68: So this is how it ends ... "Scientists at NIF say they hope to achieve fusion by ***2012***."
#73: @64: This is expensive, but not THAT expensive in the context of modern government spending. Fusion energy cannot be developed without heavy public investment because the profits are decades away; no private company can possibly fund it. But getting it to work would be a game changer, providing an abundant, clean, non-radioactive source of energy.
#86: Can I mount this on a sharks head?
#93: Absolutely slack-jawed here at the scale of this endeavor. (this one captures my feelings well)
#128: X-men's Cerebro has been built, now where's Professor Xavier?