Twitter in outer space

I have fallen in love with Twitter. Somehow it's interesting to know what people are doing. I find myself simply picking random Twitterers to find out what they are up to. I also found it very entertaining to follow Stephen Fry on his trip to Madagascar.

Is it voyeurism? Yes, probably, though not in a sexual way :-) I mean, watching the Delphi Twitters arouses only the geekiest of geeks ;-)

I also found that the astronauts on the Endeavour are twittering. That reminded me of a project of many moons ago that I did for Nasa.

I developed an application that used an Apple portable computer and a pen table of some sort. A Hypercard stack contained a lot of information (images, text, maps, et cetera). We developed a nice little application to browse that information. The table was used to draw something on top of the pages displayed.

Now, the fun thing was that there was one portable in the space shuttle and one on the ground. Whatever page was navigated to on either end, the others got to see too. And whatever was drawn on top of that page was shown on the other end too.

This helped communication between the astronauts and the ground people in explaining what to do at certain times. People on the ground would simply find a photo of the door to open and mark an X next to the lever to pull.

As someone that only failed to make a pilot due to a stupid motor cycle accident, you can understand that this little project (it wasn't that hard to do) is one of the dearest to me. I even got some memorabilia sent to me when that flight was over.

So, every time I see a little twitter from outer space, I think back to the time when I was still hacking my way through Hypercard. Sometimes it's fun being the older guy in the room :-)

Bye,

Bart