03.15.08 - 08:37pm
The space shuttle is in orbit right now, delivering some more equipment to the International Space Station. One of the payload items is Dextre, a large robotic hand that will be attached to the end of the station’s robotic arm.
Mission Control’s daily upload of instructions to the shuttle crew included this note:
Good Morning Endeavour!
Optimus [...]
02.29.08 - 05:57pm
One aspect of software piracy that’s always interested me is the way protection schemes always seem to end up causing nothing but trouble for legitimate users — while pirates happily release 0-day cracks to use the software trouble-tree (albeit illegally). The issue’s been around since at least the early 1980s, and continues to spread into [...]
07.21.07 - 03:39pm
Opportunity and Spirt are still hanging in there, despite a major Martian dust storm causing the lowest power levels seen on the (solar-powered) rovers to date. Opportunity, in particular, has been having a tough time of it:
More details at Planetary.org’s fresh article: The 2007 Martian Dust Storm: Crisis for Some, Opportunity for Others.
I read a [...]
07.18.07 - 12:10pm
Yesterday at GUADEC, Nokia announced and released a Mozilla-based web browser for the N800. Combined with the Flash 9 update in the most recent firmware, this makes for a very capable handheld device. Yay!
Initial Impressions:
Considering that this is a pre-beta application built on the pre-beta Mozilla 1.9 trunk (where Firefox 3 work is also ongoing), [...]
07.02.07 - 11:51pm
Opportunity, one of the two Mars Exploration Rovers NASA is (still!) operating, has been in the news a bit this week as it prepares to move down into the biggest crater of its mission — Victoria Crater. I ran across this image, taken last week by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter as it passed overhead. The [...]
06.06.07 - 04:03pm
I read Gerv’s post from earlier today (”Choice considered harmful”), as well as the predictable replies to it. It’s a rich topic to debate, but one thought that particularly strikes me is that with computers running billions of instruction per seconds (and increasing), software (un?)naturally grows in size and complexity to keep those CPUs warm [...]
06.01.07 - 03:19pm
Allow me to hoist my suspenders and stroke my scruffy gray beard for a few moments…
I’ve been a Solaris user for a long time now. I started with SunOS 4.1.3 in college, hacked on a Solaris 2.5.1-based proxy firewall (ANS InterLock, w00t!) for a few years, helped get that product working on Solaris 7, and [...]
05.04.07 - 08:14pm
Erring on the side of security can sometimes be a little frustrating…
A few months ago I junked my aging paper shredder. I had purchased it for about $25 some years prior, but it had become rather cranky and instead of shredding paper it mostly just… mangled. When it wasn’t busy jamming itself. So, I appended [...]
04.21.07 - 02:30pm
[From SpaceflightNow...]
Frank Czopek, the GPS Block II and IIA project manager, recalled SVN-15’s rocky start before it got off the ground as well as its history once it became operational in 1990.
The satellite earned the nickname “Firebird,” as well as other nicknames such as “Old Smokey” and “Sparky II,” after the vehicle caught fire one [...]
