At least the program part. There will be partying into the night. Then I drive back over to LA tomorrow.
Category Archives: Administrative
Off To Phoenix
I’m driving over from LA this morning, and hope to arrive in time for conference start. I’ll blog from there as possible.
Oh, and the title of my talk will be “Lies, Damned Lies, and Launch Costs.”
OK, I’m at the conference, listening to Henry Spencer describe the technical route from suborbit to orbit.
[Bumped]
In CA
I got into LA about 5 PM, and American managed to not lose my luggage this time. Henry Vanderbilt called me while I was grabbing some stuff at Trader Joe’s for dinner, and apparently I’m now scheduled to be a speaker tomorrow, if I can drive over to Phoenix in the morning sans incident. And think of something non-useless to say.
Actually, if Henry is reading this and wants to update the program, I’m going to talk about one of the most misunderstood and ignored (at least by the main aerospace establishment) topics that have kept us stuck on the planet — marginal costs.
Light Posting
I’m getting ready to head out to LA, and then Phoenix for Space Access, so I may not be posting much today. Or tomorrow, when I’ll actually be traveling.
Just To Be Safe
There are only two days left before the Conficker worm does whatever it’s going to do. Go check out your Windows system.
So Close
…and yet so far.
I’ve been slowly bringing my Fedora Core 9 box up to full utility, and had a major breakthrough today, in that I finally got flash/shockwave running in Firefox. The problem now? No sound.
When I go System/Preference/Hardware/Volume Control, I get the message: “No volume control GStreamer plugins and/or devices found.”
I’ve checked, and Gstreamer and Gstreamer-plugins-good are installed. I tried G*-plugins-bad and ugly, but they weren’t to be found in the repository (is this a 64-bit problem?). Anyway, anyone have any idea what the problem might be? Is there some command line to detect the sound card (it’s built into the board)?
A Breakthrough
One of my consulting clients is very Windows centric, and I thought it was going to be a problem when my Windows desktop died a few weeks ago. Though, actually, I could never access either their Sharepoint or Exchange servers even when it was up, because there was some software on it that was incompatible with Juniper, so the only way I could get in was with my Vista laptop. Well, just for the hell of it, I tried to access both sites today using Firefox in Fedora, and it seems to be fully functional, so it gets along better with my client’s server than my Windows 2000 machine did.
This is interesting on two levels: first, that the security system didn’t complain, and second, that Linux Firefox seems to play well with Microsoft sites. It’s come a long way, baby.
Back From Orlando
…but recombobulating from being gone for a couple days. Still have to upload some Shuttle pics, and finish going over the “Space Cadets” piece.
Off To The Cape
It looks like pretty good chances that the launch is on, and I don’t know how many more night launches there will be. We have to be in Orlando in the morning anyway, so we’re going up to Titusville tonight to see it. Probably no posting until tomorrow.
[Late evening update]
Most spectacular launch I’ve ever seen. Maybe pics tomorrow.
Unfortunately, the forty-five mile trip to Orlando was hell on wheels, taking three hours. Next time I’ll either stay in Titusville, or take the long way around (up toward Daytona and then back down) which would have been much quicker.
Linux Bleg
So I’ve been living with Fedora for over six weeks now, since my Windows 2000 machine died from a bad patch. One of the things that was good about Windows was that WinSCP allows one to securely edit a remote file without manually downloading and reuploading. It has an editor actually built in for this purpose, and when you do a save, it saves it to the remote directory.
Is there any software with a similar capability in Linux? I can use Nautilus to browse remote files, and I can even launch them with a local text editor (gedit), but it doesn’t seem to allow me to save for some reason. Or do I have to go back to an ssh session and vi or emacs to do remote editing?
[Update]
Thanks to smart commenters, problem solved, in a way beyond my wildest dreams. My web server is now functionally a (relatively slow) local file system, liberating me forever from ssh and scp (since that was the only remote server that I deal with regularly). Life in the 21st century…