Kurt's Weblog

I still have my fingers crossed for Beagle 2 to still be working. Hopefully we'll here from it 4 Jan.

Just got my first fink package into the cvs tree: proj. That's the usgs cartigraphic tools. The Open Inventor / Coin stuff looks really good now. Still some dependency issues and such, but getting closer.

Arg. Got nailed by the cold that is going around everywhere. Almost over it. Bought a USB-TO-PS2 adaptor at Radio Shack after the great products one from Fry's. I can't believe that Fry's didn't have any USB split keyboards. Too many damn wireless keyboards. They are nice and all, but I got over the excitement when I had an IBM PCjr back in the days. The most important keyboard feature is not causing me pain followed by my typing rate. Apple has pretty pathetic keyboards. Too small for my hands and hard on the wrists.

The family all went to the Quail Gardens light show the night before Christmas. Now we can say that we did it. They need a better designer. Could have been awesome, but too many white lights just thrown on things. The waterfall was off. For $5 a head, it's not really worth it.

Now to get ready for the 3rd when we land on Mars. My sympathies for the Beagle 2 team. I hope it does wake up. I sat through the waiting with the Mars Polar Lander. I know what that is like.

Getting close to Christmas and very close to landing. Things are looking good. Got a first draft of fink info packages for Open Inventor/Coin3D this weekend. Gotta start testing. .iv is the current output of the MIPL pipeline! Yeah!

ACD got me started on Net::AIM. Looks pretty cool! Now I need to get good instructions out for how to get Coin3D working on the MS Win PC's!

Things are going at light speed. I'm get the swing of things. Great news from the Beagle II, it has now separated. slashdot for more info and the usual crazy slashdot comments.

I'm feeling a bit like an Apple advertisement lately. I've got my G4 15 inch titanium, my ipod (with irock), my G5 dual cpu box. Wow is the G5 fast. Just wish fink command would notice the dual G5s and add -j 2 to the make options when I build from source.

On my todo list now is learning Canvas 9. I've never really used Canvas before, but a lot of the mission ops folks use it. Also, time to see if Adobe CS Photoshop is different from Photoshop 5, 5.5, 6, 7... how many versions in just a couple years.

I am now all setup for being on the MER team. Getting a tour of the facilities and talking to everybody has me totally fired up for this mission. It's going to be rockin! The ops center is enough to knock your socks off. Looks like many of the lessons learned from Pathfinder and Mars Polar Lander have been applied to setup. One major change from last time is a major shift in the OSes uses for the heavy lifting during operations. The dominant OSes in use are Linux and Mac OS X. I'll have my home base on a shiny new G5! There are a few Solaris file servers around plus the occasional MS Windows and SGI boxes around, but they don't get that much use. The ops center is much more prepared for laptops this time around, so using my G4 15 inch titanium laptop will be a breeze. Now I just have to learn me a couple hundred acronyms and I'll be ready to go. Woohoo!

I'm heading over to JPL today. I have to turn on my acronym brain again. I tried to talk to a couple MER mission guys at AGU. Wow. I sort of followed what they were talking about, but just barely.

How to (not) write a good systems paper

AGU is going pretty well. Lots going on. Many people came and talked to me at my poster. Thanks to all for some good discussions and offers of advice, data, oppinions, etc.

Mozilla Chrome

I'm getting ready for AGU next week. Come by my poster on Tuesday at 13:30 in MCC Level 2. sessions - abstract