Don't Back Down

I'm currently watching a Real stream of video that covers the SpaceShipOne launch in the quest for the Ansari X Prize. Mostly it is a lot of fluff, but there is some pretty interesting background on flight in general and Burt Rutan specifically. Think of the history channel.

It just now cut to the "live" coverage from what appears to be the runway, presumably to cover the launch itself, which should be happening in about forty-five minutes. In any case, I wanted to let folks know that there is a webcast, and the quality is pretty decent. I was unable to find the link for the webcast at space.com, I couldn't get to xprize.org, but I did find a link at NASA that offers Real and Windows Media. You may want to check it out if you're interested in this sort of thing.

Update: White Knight is rolling out for takeoff, now is in the air. Release of SpaceShipOne should take place in about an hour.

Update: SpaceShipOne has released, burn is over - strange roll happening. 330,000 feet in the air - they made it to the barrier. If they can land, the first attempt is in the bag. High of 338,000 feet. On the way back down.

Update: The ship is "feathering" - guess we know where that term came from - on its way back down. Looks like it is diving, then flattening out, then diving, then flattening out. Very cool that something that heavy can act like a feather or a piece of paper. Dunno if it's actually happening that way, but that's what it looks like. Wings are back down, the ship is gliding. Just a matter of time now. Wheels are down. Here it comes.

Update: Back home! SpaceShipOne and the sky looked better in the CNN feed. I even saw White Knight fly overhead. Neat, though the extras on the NASA feed make it better overall. Later, the CNN feed even completely lost SpaceShipOne on more than one occasion. It was really an odd flight down - many times looked like SpaceShipOne went vertical, and at least once rolled over completely (horizontally, not vertically). Apparently it's not an official attempt just yet, but it sure looked like this is a successful first step. Congratulations to Burt Rutan and Scaled Composites regardless.

Lots of great news on space adventures this week. The biggest news to many, perhaps, may be the first of two launches of SpaceShipOne, as it strives to nab the Ansari X Prize. Frankly, I'm not sure. This is big news, to be sure, but Burt Rutan and his crew already did it. They haven't done it twice within the two week window after filing the necessary info with the X Prize committee, but they have already done it. It was months ago. It will be neat if they pull of the X Prize attempts, but what have they done for me lately?

Well, Richard Branson hooked up with the group in order to license their design for space tourism. That's pretty cool. Also interesting on the press release that the group is touted as "Paul G. Allen's Mojave Aerospace". Hmm. Wonder if that has anything to do with the nearness of the prize. I also wonder what will happen if something should prevent the group from getting the prize and one of the other contenders should pull it off.

But that's not all. Another name from an industry not normally associated with space, Robert Bigelow, owner of the Budget Suites of America hotels, has some truly spacey thoughts up his sleeve. First, his company Bigelow Aerospace plans on expandable habitats in space, with hopes to have them aloft as early as April of 2006. To jumpstart interest in the concept, he's offering a $50 million prize for companies who can create a 7-person vehicle capable of connecting with his orbital outposts. Sweet.

Finally, if space isn't really your bag, how about just experiencing zero gravity?

It seems when I rebuilt things after the installation of Movable Type 3.1, I didn't do it right. This may have something to do with MT, it may not. In the meantime, I've deleted and rebuilt the entire site. Hopefully the paths should now be correct, so your comments, trackbacks and the like should always go to the correct version of MT for posting on the site. If you actually post a comment or send a trackback, and the contents are reasonable, and don't see it within a couple of hours, please let me know, as perhaps I missed something.

Update: Okay, spam-boy is making me mad. Mostly because he was making me think that I had missed something else, since his comments were coming in from the old install. Fortunately cooler heads prevailed (eventually) and I figured out his scheme. This is probably no surprise to many of you, but it would appear to me that at least one spammer has figured out how to collect links, parse them for posting info (it's not hard), and then submit those links directly to a particular script. In this case mt-comments.cgi. But he or she was posting to the wrong script! So anyway, I finally did what I should have done a month ago and changed the permissions on the old mt-comments.cgi. So my little friend is going to have to do some more trawling to make things work again, at least on this site.

I signed up for an account at Experts Exchange to see if I could get this problem submitted. I figured the $10 was well worth it for all the aggravation I had (and was causing others). I submitted three questions on the topic in a handful of minutes, in different expert areas, to see if I could generate some discussion in different techniques, since none of the ones I had tried seemed to work. While I did receive two responses, neither was particularly useful.

Read "Exchanging Experts" »

I've been pulling my hair out on this, and I'm just about to throw in the towel. Before I did so, I figured I would see if anyone out there might know definitively if that's a good idea or not.

I'm working with a Cisco 2620. This router has address translation enabled on it, so that services on the internal network can be offered to the external network (the Internet). This is done through statements like this one:

ip nat inside source static 1.1.1.1 2.2.2.2

Where 1.1.1.1 is the internal address and 2.2.2.2 is the external address. This works fine, so long as someone from inside the network does not try to do something involving the address on the outside of the network while they are connected to the internal network. Lost yet?

Read "Address Translation Frustration" »

Every once in a while, I get an email or a comment about problems with the Bloglines Toolkit. Luckily, this really happens only every once in a while. I say luckily because my experience with JavaScript programming is pretty pathetic, and I'm really amazed that I don't get lots more requests for help.

Read "Troubleshooting the Toolkit" »

Okay, I realize that the congress really isn't non-stop. They take breaks like the rest of us. Heck, they probably take more breaks than the rest of us. But let's think about it for just a minute: Congress has existed, generally speaking, for nearly two-and-a-half centuries. Is the world so messed up that we really need full-time lawmaking, even after nearly two hundred and fifty years? Why not change things around and have congress actually work for a living?

Read "Non-Stop Lawmaking" »

With the advent of a new release of Firefox, a new release of the toolkit is also required. You can get it now. For the handful of you that tested this change for me, the 1.4.1 version is no different from the 1.4a version you received directly from me - the only difference is the version number.

Read "Bloglines Toolkit 1.4.1" »

I admit it. I like nature. But when it comes down to it, I'm not particularly hardcore about it. I think we ought to recognize it for its beauty and for its potential to go away if we don't pay it enough attention. I like the idea of power from things like the sun and windmills and water and used fryer oil, but I likely won't spend a signficant amount of money to use them instead of good old fossil fuels.

I'm certainly not what most people would call green. I'm not a tree hugger. I eat meat. I very likely will not ever vote for Ralph Nader for much of anything, and certainly not president. I know he's not running with the green party this time around. The point is the same.

I did, however, recently find a way that I could call myself green. I read this story, and I felt like I must be changing in my old age, because I could now identify - albeit slightly - with the green movement. It's not quite as cool as my original idea of a viking-esque (or jedi-esque) funeral pyre, but let's be realistic. I'm probably never going to get my wife to go along with that idea anyway. But being buried in a cheap(er) method, which allows my body to decay more quickly and means that perhaps my family won't be overburdened with costs of putting my body into the ground where it's going to decay eventually anyway? I can support that idea wholeheartedly.

A story posted in the Observer on Sunday is remarkably similar to one provided by Creative Loafing on Wednesday.

Yet neither credits the other. I'm not saying that either was copied verbatim - to be fair, I didn't read both verbatim in order to be able to tell. But it is odd when one news outlet publishes a story a few days after another, albeit less well regarded, news outlet, and doesn't even mention that they aren't the only one investigating or turning up interesting evidence.

It seems that everywhere people are talking about how bad things are these days. I'm not saying that I disagree, but generally I'm not quite ready to take Lemony Snicket's attitude either. Generally.

So today I read another story about the airline industry. In case you didn't know it, things aren't good in the airline industry (with a couple of exceptions). But the extent to which things are not good is surprisingly bad.

Read "A Small Consideration" »