The cars this year look really ugly. I guess you can’t have a rule that the cars must look good but something needs to be done Only the McLaren looks good and kudos to them for that. Nice to see them putting a premium on the aesthetics. Of the rest, I think the Sauber is the ugliest of all. Maybe it will be fastest.

It’s clear that Vettel took a step forward last year. I have a feeling he won’t be champion this year. It’s just hard to see him keeping it up for three years in a row and I expect all the teams to be closer making things a little harder for him.

The Button – Hamilton duel should be interesting. I think Hamilton is the faster driver and hopefully he can avoid Massa this year.

I’ll be going for Webber again this year. I hope he’s in the mix. At least his Swisse ad is less funereal this year.

Oh, also nice to know we’ll be getting the Brundle commentary here in Oz despite the BBC/Sky shuffling that went on.

Let’s see what develops …

It’s shaping up to be an interesting year. I’m hoping for most of the action to be on track this year. Maybe there will be some overtaking Of course, there is already controversy about the McLaren aerodynamics. Personally, I’m not sure I’d like to be plugging and unplugging holes with my knees for 2 hours. Still, for a speed advantage there is not much a F1 driver wouldn’t do. It will be interesting to see how Schumacher goes. I think he’ll be competitive. The new teams, on the other hand, look like they are all going to struggle. They will probably affect results in all the wrong ways. Let’s hope they’re looking for the blue flags.

I’m going for Webber again this year. With some wins last year, I think the pressure is off him a bit this year. Let’s see.

It was good to see Massa up there in practice. Hopefully we’ll have a safe year in 2010.

There’s something sublime about an English Professorial lecture.

After mucking around with float:left, auto margins and friends, I can’t help but wonder what really was the problem with using tables?

I’ll keep at it.

Since I last blogged, we’ve bought a house. It turns out that owning a house requires more that just “owning”, you have to maintain it too. So I’m giving this as my excuse for not blogging much.

As ever, tempus fugit …

Atlassian’s booth was really busy and consistently so for all the pavilion sessions.  Being on a booth is hard work although you get into a groove after a while. I thought the ball sorting demo of the Java Real-Time beside us would be annoying but it wasn’t so bad in the end.

I like the fact that the booth was mostly staffed by developers from all the Atlassian product teams. As a developer it’s nice to connect to customers directly.

Speaking at JavaOne was a bit of an adventure. Since our session was on Thursday, it did hang over me a little for the first few days. In the end, however, it was quite good fun. We had way more people come along that I had expected when we first thought about submitting a talk. Our talk was fairly light hearted but we had some messages to deliver. Hopefully the people who came along had some fun and took away a few ideas to make their builds better.

I’m old enough to vaguely remember the first moon landing on grainy black and white TV and, as a teenager, I was always deeply interested in all the space flight programs. Now, as a software and sometime hardware developer, I can only marvel at the achievements of all the pioneers in the space program with what now seems very basic equipment.

All the different recollections and viewpoints of the astronauts were very interesting and I found Michael Collins particularly impressive and humorous.

These days I think unmanned probes such as the Mars rovers are probably the best bang for the buck in terms of science but the manned mission to the moon was something special.

I recommend you give it a look if you have the chance. I found it quite uplifting.

I usually barrack for Webber in GPs but since his luck is so bad, I feel I need to have a reserve. This season, I’m going to go for Kovalainen, for no particular reason.

Anyway, one of the things he resolved to do was to read at least 40 books in the year. I don’t expect I can read that many books so I’m setting a more modest target of 12 books. The books can be of any sort or style but must be read completely. I’ll keep track here.

Actually, I set this goal privately last year but I’m pretty sure I didn’t make it. It’s funny because I read a tremendous amout but it is either online blogs and magazines or I tend to read just the bits and pieces I need from software reference books, etc. I’m hoping that making a public declaration will give me some additional motivation.

That means that I’m now an Atlassian employee and I’m really looking forward to working with all the Atlassian guys. The Cenqua and Atlassian websites are being updated right now and they’ll have all the details, FAQs, etc on the transition. I won’t duplicate that info here. It’s very much a case of steady as she goes, of course.

For me personally, there will be a few changes as I change from working at home to working in an office. It helps that the Atlassian office has got to be one of the nicest office environments I’ve experienced. A big-ass Mac Pro doesn’t hurt either.

There’s going to be lots of interesting development as we add new features to FishEye, Crucible and Clover. Truly exciting times.