Thursday, 01 July, 2004. 12:48:30 AMThe Cassini main engine burned for just over 90 minutes tonight to slow
the spacecraft enough to be captured into Saturn orbit. In 1998, the
main engine burned for about 90 minutes to set up a Venus fly by maneuver.
There is still about 90 minutes worth of fuel in the tanks, for further
maneuvering within the Saturn system. At launch there were 3132 kg of
propellant (nitrogen tetroxide and monomethyl hydrazine). The propulsion
module was built by Lockheed Martin, and contains two identical engines,
one of which is a backup. Each engine can produce 445 newtons of thrust,
which is about enough to lift 100 pounds of weight.
Thursday, 01 July, 2004. 12:12:30 AMThe Cassini main engine cut off on time, and it is now in Saturn orbit.
Wednesday, 30 June, 2004. 11:13:29 PMThe way JPL is doing the event timing is by Earth reception time. So the
orbital insertion burn was completed about 2 hours ago, and they are
receiving and reporting on the events at the time we receive radio signals
from the probe.
Wednesday, 30 June, 2004. 09:42:33 PMI'm watching the live coverage of the Cassini Saturn orbit insertion on the
web. The insertion burn starts at 9:36 CDT, and will last
an hour and a half. Light time to Saturn is about 3 hours, so we won't know
if everything is working until after midnight.
Wednesday, 30 June, 2004. 01:56:50 AMI dumped my homegrown backup solution that used afio in favor of flexbackup.
It also uses afio, but is a lot more polished. It doesn't chunk the output
into CD sized pieces, but I can do that in another step.
Monday, 28 June, 2004. 03:47:08 PMKristiana is on the verge of crawling. She figured out how to scoot backwards
last week, and now she's figuring out how to get up on all fours.
Friday, 25 June, 2004. 01:36:19 PMAbout 10 years ago in Hamburg Germany I was walking around and all over town there were little spray painted smiley faces. Just two dots for the eyes, and a curve for the mouth. On some of the smilies, someone else had used a different color paint to turn it into a frown. I imagined roving gangs of German youths marking their turf. The smiles and the frowns would be rival gangs. And whenever they met a symbol of the opposing side, they would be compelled to invert it, lest either the smilies or the frownies gain complete control of Hamburg.
Friday, 25 June, 2004. 01:10:52 PMIt looks like the total number of spams that I will receive in the month
of June will top 10,000. Last month, I received about 5700.
Friday, 25 June, 2004. 12:15:02 PMI never ate sardines until just recently. I bought a can of sardines packed
in mustard a couple months ago, but didn't eat them right away. They sat
on my shelf for weeks until one night I opened the can and tried them
out. They were much better than I expected, and now they are one of my
favorite things to eat for lunch.
Monday, 21 June, 2004. 11:38:39 AM"A supercomputer is a device for turning compute-bound problems into I/O-bound problems." -
Ken Batcher
Monday, 21 June, 2004. 11:30:02 AMSpaceship One has successfully made its first flight into space, with
one pilot aboard. It launched from a carrier aircraft, at an altitude of
50,000 feet. The burn of the rocket motor lasted only 80 seconds, but was
enough to reach an altitude of at least 62 miles.
Monday, 21 June, 2004. 10:41:23 AMThis weekend my friend Joe and his family came to visit us. Then on Sunday,
Alex, Kristiana, and I went to Pace Bend Park with some friends. I
took Kristiana into the water with me. The first time I put her in she
made a face like she was going to cry, so I pulled her right back out. The
second time she didn't cry, and after a minute she relaxed and started to
have a lot of fun. She spent about 20 minutes kicking her legs and spashing
water around.
Wednesday, 16 June, 2004. 10:39:44 PMAlex and I have a new niece. Alex's sister had her third daughter today at about
11 AM. Her name is Stephanie Rivait. Don't know the middle name yet.
Tuesday, 15 June, 2004. 01:45:00 PMNew photos of Kristiana are up in the June 2004 photo album.
Monday, 14 June, 2004. 02:35:24 PMI went to a music store during lunch and bought two plastic ocarinas, to
amuse Kristiana with.
Thursday, 10 June, 2004. 05:58:03 PMRonald Reagan should have his face on the 1 trillion dollar bill, because
he's the person who made that number relevant to the American economy.
Thursday, 10 June, 2004. 04:08:41 PMRay Charles died today, age 73.
Tuesday, 08 June, 2004. 01:29:48 PMIn 1885, the Astronomer Royal of Ireland, Robert Stawell Ball (1840-1913), published 'The Story of the Heavens' in which he wrote:
While steadily looking at the exquisitely beautiful sight of the gradual advance of the planet, I became aware that there were other objects besides Venus between me and the sun. They were the snowflakes, which again began to fall rapidly. I must admit the phenomenon was singularly beautiful. The telescopic effect of a snowstorm with the sun as a background I had never before seen. It reminded me of the golden rain which is sometimes seen falling from a flight of sky-rockets during pyrotechnic displays; but I would gladly have dispensed with the spectacle, for it necessarily followed that the sun and Venus again disappeared from view. Still, to have seen even a part of a transit of Venus is an event to remember for a lifetime, and we felt more delight than can be easily expressed at even this slight gleam of success. The clouds at length dispersed, and this time Venus had so completely entered on the sun that the distance from the edge of the planet to the edge of the sun was about twice the diameter of the planet.
We succeeded in obtaining sixteen measures altogether, but the sun was now getting low, the clouds again to interfere, and we saw the pursuit of the transit must be left to the thousands of astronomers in happier climes who had been eagerly awaiting it. But before the phenomenon had ceased, I spared a few minutes from the somewhat mechanical work at the micrometer to take a view of the transit in the more picturesque form which the large field of the finder presents. The sun was already beginning to put on the ruddy hues of sunset, and there, far in on its face, was the sharp, round, black disk of Venus. It was then easy to sympathize with the supreme joy of Horrocks, when, in 1639, he for the first time witnessed this spectacle. The intrinsic interest of the phenomenon, its rarity, the fulfillment of the prediction, the noble problem which the transit of Venus helps us to solve, are all present to our thoughts when we look at this pleasing picture, a repetition of which will not occur again until the flowers are blooming in the June of A. D. 2004.
Tuesday, 08 June, 2004. 01:19:43 PMThere was a transit of Venus across the face of the Sun today. Austin wasn't
a good place for it because of our position on the globe, and the heavy rain
we have today. This is a rare event, last seen in 1882. A note
written before the 1882 transit, reflecting on progress since the previous
transits of 1761 and 1769:
"We are now on the eve of the second transit of a pair, after which there will be no other till the twenty-first century of our era has dawned upon the earth, and the June flowers are blooming in 2004. When the last transit season occurred the intellectual world was awakening from the slumber of ages, and that wondrous scientific activity which has led to our present advanced knowledge was just beginning. What will be the state of science when the next transit season arrives God only knows. Not even our children's children will live to take part in the astronomy of that day. As for ourselves, we have to do with the present..." (American astronomer William Harkness in 1882).
Monday, 07 June, 2004. 03:34:40 PMMy spam filter continues to improve as the set of spams continues to grow.
Every month it has gotten better, and after the first week of June the accuracy
stands at just under 99.5%. That means for every 200 spam mails that I
receive, 199 of them are automatically sorted into the spam folder without
me ever seeing them. Spamprobe doesn't have a problem with false positives,
so I never see any good mails accidentally being classified as spam.
Monday, 07 June, 2004. 12:09:19 AMBeen a long time since I put a koan from the Tao of Programming into my log.
In the east there is a shark which is larger than all other fish. It changes into a bird whose wings are like clouds filling the sky. When this bird moves across the land, it brings a message from Corporate Headquarters. This message it drops into the midst of the programmers, like a seagull making its mark upon the beach. Then the bird mounts on the wind and, with the blue sky at its back, returns home.
The novice programmer stares in wonder at the bird, for he understands it not. The average programmer dreads the coming of the bird, for he fears its message. The master programmer continues to work at his terminal, for he does not know that the bird has come and gone.
Saturday, 05 June, 2004. 08:59:26 PMI arrived back from New York, and our friend Marie was over visiting. We went
out to dinner, and flags were at half-staff, but we didn't know why. Turns
out that Ronald Reagan died today.
Friday, 04 June, 2004. 08:45:24 AMScaled Composites has been test flying their "Spaceship One" spacecraft. They
are in competition for the X-Prize, and so far have become the first privately
built vehicle to fly supersonically (more than mach 2) and the first private
vehicle to fly above 200,000 feet in altitude. That's higher than every other
flight, except for a few X-15 flights and all space flights. Later this
month they will fly the vehicle into space, but this will not count as an
X-Prize flight. The X-Prize requires 3 passengers, or equivalent weight, but
this month they will fly with just one person aboard to an altitude greater
than 60 miles. The pilot will experience weightlessness for two minutes.
Thursday, 03 June, 2004. 03:56:31 PMIt is common to see code like this:
T *p = new T;
if (p == NULL) {
// do something to handle error
}
This is a problem because if the 'new' header is included (STL commonly
includes it) then the new operator will throw an exception on error, and
the return value is undefined. The code above will never catch an error,
even if the new fails. The std::bad_alloc exception needs to be caught
instead.
Thursday, 03 June, 2004. 03:53:37 PMMy network was down today because the DSL modem crashed. I need to get an
X10 switch for that thing too. If a reset of the Linksys device doesn't
fix the problem, the server should next try to reset the DSL modem. If
that doesn't work, then there must be something wrong with the DSL line
itself.
Wednesday, 02 June, 2004. 06:00:55 PMSomers is the cradle of the American Circus. I read that on a sign driving
in to the IBM facility this afternoon.
Wednesday, 02 June, 2004. 03:26:04 PMWe found him. Pepper's back.
Wednesday, 02 June, 2004. 03:01:32 PMAlex is home now, and there's absolutely no sign of Pepper. We're going to
have to rely on someone to find him, read his tags, and return him to
us. This is awful.
Wednesday, 02 June, 2004. 02:34:39 PMJust got a call from Alex. She was at work, and a babysitter is watching
Kristiana. Pepper has escaped and the babysitter has no idea where he is.
Alex is on her way home to find the dog.
Wednesday, 02 June, 2004. 07:18:50 AMI'm flying to New York until Friday. All that was available was First
Class, so that's where I am right now.