Penguins in Space!
Posted on 06/09/2003 3:01:29 PM PDT by RockyMtnMan
Eight people and a dozen laptops were crammed into a tiny windowless conference room at 5 p.m. last Monday. On the laptops: untested code. On the conference table: piles of silicon and metal. On the people's minds: escalating, deadline-induced panic.
But by 2:30 a.m., data was being transmitted wirelessly to what had become a laptop-based flight control center for a Linux-controlled rocket. The aircraft was a few steps closer to blasting off into the upper atmosphere.
Project leaders Andrew Greenberg and Brian O'Neel breathed a sigh of relief -- finally they had some assurance that they weren't, as Greenberg put it, "going to look like complete idiots" when they present the team's research this week at Usenix 2003, a major technical conference.
Greenberg and O'Neel head up the Portland State Aerospace Society, an amateur rocket group based at the College of Engineering and Computer Science at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon. Their team hopes to launch a 12-pound rocket this September that will travel at three times the speed of sound to 55,000 feet.
(Excerpt) Read more at wired.com ...
In other news offshoring IT workers on the rise...
It's easier than sending a tech support chimpanzee to press CTL-ALT-DEL.
I know because I used to work at Vandenberg AFB testing the software that would control the bird through eight discrete launch events: Core 0 Solid Rocket Motor Ignition, Core 1 Liquid ignition, SRM separation, Core, Shroud Spearation, Core 3, Final shutdown, and Payload separation. We could hit an accurate part of the sky at a determined velocity every time provided that various problems with the rocket did not force range safety to destroy the thing that we worker bees in beautiful Lompoc California had so lovingly contracted.
The USA went to the Moon six times using what today would be unbelievably primitive computers and software.
The USA has sent orbiters to Venus, flybys to Mercury and every outer planet except Pluto, Landed on mars, and launched most of our satellites using computers and software that would be laughed out of a computer junk dealers office. The space shuttle uses the UYK 20 for flight control and I believe that computer was obsoleted out by the UYK 44 which was called a $200,000 Comodore 64 back in 1989.
It will be no big deal for the Linux heads to launch a rocket and steer it to a crash landing somewhere in the ocean using Linux.
A similar even was done using relay logic on a Redstone rocket with Alan Sheppard aboard it sometime in the early 1960s
To: comp.os.linux
From: PenguinSpaceCadet@torvaldsopensourcespaceflight.org
Subj: SLIGHT PROBLEM
When I tried to get the nuclear reactor to boost itself to a higher orbit after the satellite's mission ended, the motors didn't fire properly due to the system being misconfigured. Could someone give me some pointers on recompiling the kernel?
And could you do it in the next thirty seconds? After that it's kinda academic, 'cause the reactor's going to land in downtown Wichita.
At first, Linux-based amateur rocketry will give geeks a nice hobby to occupy their time while out of work. What I would love to see happen next is for some Chinese entrepreneur contracting with one of these teams to put a taikonaut base (or Confucius knows what) on the moon. Good-bye, NASA!
When your code fails to work as expected do you blame the compiler and rush off to file a bug report, or do you try to figure out what's wrong with your code?
Maybe if you put a little effort into your desktop instead of rushing to the conclusion that Linux is "a frustrating piece of crap" you'd find out that it can be functional, stable and very pleasant to use.
Ha! Trust me, I've blamed gcc for plenty of things, some I was correct about, and some I wasn't.
Maybe if you put a little effort into your desktop instead of rushing to the conclusion that Linux is "a frustrating piece of crap" you'd find out that it can be functional, stable and very pleasant to use.
I didn't install the damn thing to spend all day trying to get simple things to work. The whole point of a windowing system is to make life simpler, not to mention, more enjoyable.
It's actually quite fun and interesting to get some things to work, and there are quite few aspects of X that I have come to appreciate over the years.
The truth of the matter is that my ideal set up is to access my Linux system with a terminal emulator (TeraTerm, for instance) and vi my source files, while leaving the mailing, surfing, CD burning, etc to the W2K system. This is a perfect example of what each system does best. I have been doing serious development on Linux machines for several years and the desktop apps crash too often to make using them in any way effecient.
If you know how to get Galeon to invoke Evolution then I would be happy to share this with entire newsgroups. Currently when I hit a mailto link or try to do File->Send To..., it tells me that no default mail handler has been set up. As if the entire concept of setting up a default is not an oxymoron!
and I should caveat this with the admission that I have never actually done any serious Windows development, so I can't even say for sure that I wouldn't really like its OS internals, development tools, compilers, etc...
While we are on the subject, my pride (not to mention the power of Google) keeps me from immediately running to the "community" for answers. Then, in true tech support fashion, they rarely answer the question with adequate precision.
If I'm looking for help with something that's been released for a significant length of time and a google search yields no posts from other users with the same problem I'm having, that's almost always a sign that I'm doing something silly and need to read the docs again. bugzilla servers are a good resource, too, especially if you're working with recent releases or development code where bugs are more likely.
This might help with galeon on Gnome2. For Gnome 1.x, you probably want to go to Gnome Control Center -> URL Handlers.
It figures that I would get the best help on FreeRepublic. For instance, you stressed something that no one on the newsgroups seems capable of spelling out: The reason I can't find GnomeControlCenter->URL Handlers is that it doesn't exist in Gnome2.
Good luck getting the average computer user to figure out all those File Associations, Services, etc. They would just be stuck with Konqueror, Kmail, and/or whatever.
Thanks, again!!!!
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