more of a life. less of a blog.

Movable Type grumbles

One of the sillier things I've managed to do in Movable Type is delete myself as a superuser while attempting to fix a typo in my email address; logging in as another user was something of a shock. Movable Type will let you do this; afterwards you're stuck trying to regain access from the ordinary user you created as well, and simply renaming the ordinary user to match the name of the superuser doesn't work. Other silly things include creating a login containing a space when setting up MT originally, where everything after the space gets ignored -- though creating users with spaces later works fine.

It looks like this Movable Type implementation is toast. Well, I need to upgrade MT to deal with comment spam anyway -- and it seems I'll be installing that in yet another directory.

I swear, I spend more time fiddling with reinstalling and upgrading blogging software than I do using it to actually blog. (A bit like how I spent more time ten years ago reinstalling and upgrading my Macintosh computer than actually using it to compute.)

Conversation by video.

ian van dahl featuring Marsha - Castles in the Sky. Do you ever question your life? Do you ever wonder why?
They Might Be Giants - Boss of Me. Yes. No. Maybe. I don't know... Can you repeat the question?
Sash! - Mysterious Times. We're counting the hours and days to the end of our time.
DJ Sammy and Yanou featuring Do - Heaven. Baby, you're all that I want.
Paul Van Dyk - Nothing But You. I have nothing, but I have everything when I have you.

There ain't no such thing as a free book.

Today I read a couple of online books by John Scalzi: Agent to the Stars and Old Man's War, which is rather like Starship Troopers with aspects of Rogue Trooper, and more enjoyable than John Varley's or Keith Brookes' more complex pastiches of Heinlein.

Little green men. Bug-eyed monsters. Bug on out.

There are no firsts.

Here's a partial and very incomplete history of the operation of Internet-connected computers in space.

In 1996, an experiment onboard the STRV-1b satellite, conducted by NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, gave the satellite an IP address and communicated with it.

In 2000, a TCP/IP stack was uploaded to the UoSAT-12 satellite, and some simple experiments were run by NASA Goddard. SSTL, who built UoSAT-12, went on to adopt TCP/IP for satellite control and telemetry in their Disaster Monitoring satellites. The first of these satellites, AlSAT-1, was launched in 2002.

In 2001, SoftPhone was used on a laptop PC onboard the space shuttle, talking VoIP the Internet way across a local Ethernet LAN that was connected to the shuttle's custom equipment that communicated with NASA Johnson Space Center. The laptop was orbiting, and commercial laptops had been used previously onboard the shuttle; the laptop was a node on the Internet.

The reason I mention all of this is that Jim Benson of SpaceDev is continually on record as saying that CHIPsat is the "first orbiting node on the Internet" -- yet CHIPsat was launched in January 2003. CHIPsat's launch delays aren't significant; all missions have launch delays.

And CHIPsat was built for NASA, an organisation that appears to have achieved the first orbiting node on the Internet a number of separate times. Still, those that do not know history are doomed to repeat it.

Video changed the AAC store.

The iPod Photo, combined with iTunes, can give you tiny colour pictures of the artist or album to look at while you listen to a song in AAC format that you've bought from Apple's online music store. That hardly seems worth it.

This iPod may not be suited to watching hours-long cinema, but if you do want to watch something for three minutes or so while listening to a song you've bought... iTunes should also sell pop videos for playing on the iPod Photo.

(Having said this, I don't like iTunes and I don't own an iPod. But I did get into the habit of buying CD singles also containing digital video, because that content is unrestricted by digital rights management.)

Evils of the age.

Last night I watched both The Corporation and Fahrenheit 9/11. After all, it was Hallowe'en, when monsters come out in the open.

Near the end of his film, Michael Moore quotes George Orwell. Fitting, and perhaps the film's intellectual peak.

Internet Veterans for Truth entirely trumps p2p-politics for finding related content, by the way.

You're my favourite waste of time.

First there was Bubbles. Then Squares. Horribly addictive.

In an age when even Lemmings can be redone in dynamic HTML, it's not suprising that early online games have evolved into something far, far better.

But the simplest ideas still seem to be the most fun.

Uncertain doom.

Murphy's Law describes how accelerometers were installed upside-down because they could be, dooming the Genesis mission.

Titan Calling describes how the Cassini-Huygens mission risks failure by reusing communications equipment developed for use in near-Earth orbit, without considering the effects of Doppler shift on the received signal. To work around the Doppler shift problem and ensure communication, they've had to alter the physical trajectories of the spacecraft -- a major mission change.

The author of both articles is James Oberg. He's on a roll.

My approach to project management tends towards paranoia; what can go wrong, will go wrong, and you have to constantly ask what-if questions about things that are ostensibly outside your areas of concern. However, in the long-term, that's stressful and perhaps ultimately unsustainable by most. These articles provide insight into a world where most people just happily presume that others have done their job correctly, without sanity checks providing system-level oversight, and without sufficient overlap of areas of responsibility.

Still, we're only human.

Ground control to mobile code.

I've spent the last eighteen months working on CLEO, the Cisco router in Low Earth Orbit.

I've previously mentioned the launch of the router into orbit.

I need a holiday.

Life, observed.

Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker articles are fascinating reading.

(Now I know why I prefer tomato ketchup on my pasta.)

Snickers, really.

I was encouraged to read Marathon Dan. I tried, but soon thought "I'd rather be reading MJ Hibbett."

So I did.

It just seemed a bit, well, "Ready! Set! Go... nowhere!"

(I was encouraged to promote Marathon Dan. Will this do?)

Consoling thought.

Advogato seems to be back up reliably, and I've moved computing thoughts over there.

Hidden depths evoke Wuthering Heights.

Vanessa Carlton. White Houses. The video was striking. As is the song. Autobiographical, perhaps.

(And where did I first discover the existence of this artist and song? Real Media, Brasil edition. Vanessa tem o auxílio luxuoso de uma dançarina muito boa. Mesmo! Globalisation comes with side-effects.)

Baby Cakes may be tuneful, amusing, and local, but this is... lyrical.

Imagine my imaging.

I've put up a selection of the best of my photos from over the past year.

Saying that this selection is the best really isn't saying much; these were mostly taken using two replacement Fuji Finepix 50i cameras, which eventually locked up entirely. (The first one that was replaced had faulty focus.) A poor camera, and a poor mp3 player. Still, I've been bitten by the bugs. I've been pondering what replacement camera and mp3 player to buy for months now.

Danny recommended Flickr, which seems quite easy to use and fill up.

I still owe a number of people copies of a number of photos -- and personal mails. I'm a poor photographer, and a poor correspondent.

Back on the blog.

Employees.org moved machines, and big-endian/little-endian architectures. Surprisingly, there's no way to port Berkeley databases between architectures -- so I wound up installing a new Movable Type implementation.