ZDE on OS X

.

The good news is that Zend Studio, an excellent Java-based PHP development environment, runs smooth and fast on MacOS X. The bad news is that it forgets your preferences and key bindings as soon as you exit, so that you have to set them again and remember not to Command-Q when you’re done working.

Columbia Down

.

Good God. We just lost another space shuttle.

NASA: STS-107 Mission Status Page.

Jim Flowers: “Shuttle Lost” metablog.

Time.com: Three Possibilities.

Scripting News: Lots of links.

Instapundit: The “Zipper” Effect.

Apparently Columbia broke up at an altitude of over 200,000 feet, while travelling at Mach 18. CNN is showing videos of the shuttle breaking up in a cloud of flaming debris, and pieces have been falling over the South, from TX to LA, right along the landing trajectory.

NASA says that a launch video shows a piece of insulated foam falling from the external tank and striking the wing during ascent, but saw no reason for concern. My initial piece of uninformed conjecture is that the extreme stresses of launch and landing, combined with the age of Columbia’s 22-year old frame, may have exacerbated the effects of the impact into massive structural failure at some sensitive spot, exposing combustible material to the exterior so that the ram-pressure heat of reentry sparked an explosion.

My prayers go out to the families of the crew, and even now I hope against all cosmic unlikelihood for a miraculous survival.

Update: Ron Dittemoor, NASA shuttle program manager, has just spoken on the news. I only hear these words: “Sudden loss of … indicator in left wing … left wing … tire pressure in left main gear … left inboard and outboard hydraulic systems … left wing …”

Fire at Mile Long Building

.

Mile Long Building on fire. That was where I had my first job, interning as a Media 100 editor for Scene Stealers Productions, which was on that same floor that just burned up. My mom’s dentist is there too. I certainly hope they’re all still intact after this.

The Architecture of Doom

.

Just one link to offer from Crisis Century class yesterday: The Architecture of Doom, a brilliant documentary of esoteric insight into the artistic roots of Adolf Hitler’s ideology. His fixation on the “cleanness” of dramatically representational Western art, alongside his obsession with romanticized visions of the cultures of antiquity; with a dash of Eugenics twisted by extreme Darwinist supposition — these were among the primary conceptual influences of the Nazi genocidal superiority complex.

This film should be an especially poignant eye-opener to kneejerk Godwinist anti-theists who are over-quick to dismiss Nazism as the fault of Anti-Semitic Christians’ religious belief. A detailed study of Hitler’s artistic fixations shows that religion had far less to do with it than his own preoccupation with the supposed “superiority” of classic Western art, as well as his dreams of reviving the perfect race, based on an erroneously overblown concept of the Roman Empire, the Greek city-states, and other civilizations of antiquity.

Oh, and Cowboys and Indians, too.

HTML Fun With Woody!

.

We had “vandaWeb” class today, with lessons in logging and capturing in Final Cut Pro, basic video compression in Quicktime, and beginners’ HTML. Our instructor, Woody, is a vibrant and jovial teacher, and I had great fun filming him in secret from the webcam in my lap.

(Actually, but for a few key differences, Woody and I share almost the same professional history in video editing and web design, and we’re just about the same age. It makes me wonder if I could teach in MICA… Naw. Hmmm…. Naw.)

Soon I’ll be shooting some amateur videos to stream.