Bought the 1st series of the remade Battlestar Galactica yesterday. Much darker and edgier than the original. None of the characters appear to be all-bad or all-good, and most of them have ‘issues’ of some kind.

One of the characters was working on a Cylon detector (Cylons are the bad guys, robots that look like people and want to wipe out humanity, although some are programmed to think they’re human), and there’s a scene where we see the UI for the first time: red bar / green bar!

Introducing CyUnit. Red bar, failing test, you’re a Cylon. Green bar, you’re human. Made me laugh, geek that I am.

The combination of DHTML, Javascript and XMLHttpRequest has been making weblog headlines recently. My experience with it predated the hype by about 6 months (we were porting a rich client system to the web and hit upon using XMLHttpRequest specifically as a solution to some of the responsiveness issues). I was a little slow to realise just how unknown the technology was in the wider world, but I don’t mind that, so much as the appalling name its come to be known by.

Ajax? It sounds like a brand of detergent. Oh wait. It is.