The two unstoppable Mars probes just keep going and going and as the planned three month mission now passes 45 months we can only praise those scientists and engineers that achieved this remarkable feat.

With next years activities already being considered for the two rovers they may even live long enough to bump into the next Mars mission - Mars Science Lab, a more adventurous probe scheduled for launch in 2009.

The original mission for the two probes was set to end in April 2004 and the primary objective was to find signs of past water on the surface with the reasoning - if water once flowed on the surface then life might have taken hold. Both Rovers found the evidence they were looking for and Opportunity found evidence of a past shallow body of salty water where life could well have got started. Even more exciting is the fact that the area is suitable for preserving a fossil record making this an obvious choice for a future manned mission.

Spirit has also had some unexpected successes; after one of its six wheels seized up, the rover had to continue by dragging it through the Martian soil and in a remarkable twist the deep track left by the dragging wheel has exposed some wonderful discoveries including evidence of a watery past inside Gusev Crater. After enduring dust storms much stronger than it was designed to handle, Spirit is currently examining a group of boulders known as the Colorado 14′ers.

The false colour image to the left of the walls of Victoria Crater was taken by Opportunity before descending into it during September this year. Opportunity is currently continuing its exploration of the crater and assessing dust levels on its instrumentation.

Even though the two rovers show signs of wear and tear let’s hope they continue to give us such brilliant and beautiful images of the Martian surface along with insights of past conditions on the red planet for a long time to come.

Images Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech.

I’ve thought to myself 800 billion times today, I must stop exaggerating, but what is all this kerfuffle about CSS and why are there 3 different ways to spell kerfuffle?

There seems to be some very big claims about CSS, I’ve heard people refer to it as a language and a replacement for HTML, I’ve heard others say that tables are dead and that CSS is the future of the internet. Let’s first of all deal with what it is and it isn’t and then maybe more people will embrace it and reap the benefits.

CSS is not a language nor is it a replacement for HTML; it’s merely a style sheet. Tables are unbeatable for displaying data in rows and columns but are poorly suited for designing the layout of a page and CSS is not the future - but it’s a good start.

The fundamentals: (not a pop band from the 60’s)

Many people resist CSS; - “what’s the point when I can make nice websites the way I always have?” - Well, here’s the deal; CSS helps you to create nice clean web designs where content is largely separate from the code. Why is that important? Well, pages load faster, things appear where you intended them to appear, development is much quicker and if you ever need to add something to your page you won’t spend 4 years scrolling through endless tr, td, th or font tags to find the place to put it.

The bits and bobs: (not a pop band from the 70’s)

How does it save you time you ask? It saves you time because you build a style sheet that can be used over and over again, change the odd colour here, the odd font size there and voilà, use it on your next project. I will write a short tutorial for beginners and when it’s done I’ll put a link HERE. (If that’s not a link it’s because I haven’t done it yet), (Also, if you read this in a months time and it’s still not a link it’s probably just that I forgot, so leave a comment to remind me), (if it is a link then ignore the last two bracketed comments and go directly to ‘Finally;’).

Finally;

I have no idea why there are 3 different ways to spell kerfuffle but I’m pretty sure I will soon be top of Google for the search term - ‘why are there 3 different ways to spell kerfuffle?’

better order some more bandwidth !