Does anyone know a source for US combat deaths by year for World War II? I can find numbers overall, but not broken out by year.

I’m at the Fort Lauderdale Airport, waiting for a flight to Dallas that’s delayed half an hour (or at least I hope that it’s only half an hour). Going to a family wedding this weekend, so probably not a lot of posts until Monday.

Well, OK, just this one. Here’s a scholarly treatise over at Cracked on five potential and even semi-plausible zombie apocalypse scenarios. I know it’s a little late for Halloween, but heck, these holiday preps are moving earlier and earlier, so think of it as the first Halloween 2008 story.

I was out at the press conference today, but I couldn’t get into the wireless network. My wireless widget in XP wanted a five or a thirteen-character code for the WEP, and the X-Prize folks issued a ten-character one. It steadfastly refused to accept it, or light up the second confirmation window, until I complied, which I couldn’t. Such is technology. Tomorrow, I’ll hook up my Linksys USB wireless dongle, which may have software for the twenty-first century.

Anyway, Clark Lindsey (with whom I carpooled out there today, after which we went to the space history museum in Alamagordo and then to White Sands Monument) has a lot of posts on the news conference (warning, not a permalink–there were too many links–just scroll, or in the future, use the Wayback Machine), and Alan Boyle has a story specifically on the teachers-in-space announcement.

My thoughts, before bed?

The new Rocketplane design looks good, but it seems to me now that the real barrier is financial. Though they didn’t say at the press conference, the rumor is that they need a lot of money to complete it, and they don’t have it. The time constant for first flight test of a suborbital vehicle seems to remain two years. Leonard David has more details.

Rocket Racing League seems much more encouraging. They now have the minimum six teams required, and they have a vehicle which flew three times yesterday in Mojave. I suspect that it will be flown publicly before the end of the year. I think that sponsorships will appear more quickly now.

I had one question of Granger–how long will this be a race purely of pilot skill? When will we see a competition of hardware? His answer: at least three years. In my follow up, he said that eventually he would be going to a formula, but that we needed to get some experience and understand the nature of the sport better. I hope that this will happen sooner rather than later, because I think that the technology will advance much more rapidly from this activity when we have not just competing pilots, but competing designs.

I was out at the press conference today, but I couldn’t get into the wireless network. My wireless widget in XP wanted a five or a thirteen-character code for the WEP, and the X-Prize folks issued a ten-character one. It steadfastly refused to accept it, or light up the second confirmation window, until I complied, which I couldn’t. Such is technology. Tomorrow, I’ll hook up my Linksys USB wireless dongle, which may have software for the twenty-first century.

Anyway, Clark Lindsey (with whom I carpooled out there today, after which we went to the space history museum in Alamagordo and then to White Sands Monument) has a lot of posts on the news conference (warning, not a permalink–there were too many links–just scroll, or in the future, use the Wayback Machine), and Alan Boyle has a story specifically on the teachers-in-space announcement.

My thoughts, before bed?

The new Rocketplane design looks good, but it seems to me now that the real barrier is financial. Though they didn’t say at the press conference, the rumor is that they need a lot of money to complete it, and they don’t have it. The time constant for first flight test of a suborbital vehicle seems to remain two years. Leonard David has more details.

Rocket Racing League seems much more encouraging. They now have the minimum six teams required, and they have a vehicle which flew three times yesterday in Mojave. I suspect that it will be flown publicly before the end of the year. I think that sponsorships will appear more quickly now.

I had one question of Granger–how long will this be a race purely of pilot skill? When will we see a competition of hardware? His answer: at least three years. In my follow up, he said that eventually he would be going to a formula, but that we needed to get some experience and understand the nature of the sport better. I hope that this will happen sooner rather than later, because I think that the technology will advance much more rapidly from this activity when we have not just competing pilots, but competing designs.

I was out at the press conference today, but I couldn’t get into the wireless network. My wireless widget in XP wanted a five or a thirteen-character code for the WEP, and the X-Prize folks issued a ten-character one. It steadfastly refused to accept it, or light up the second confirmation window, until I complied, which I couldn’t. Such is technology. Tomorrow, I’ll hook up my Linksys USB wireless dongle, which may have software for the twenty-first century.

Anyway, Clark Lindsey (with whom I carpooled out there today, after which we went to the space history museum in Alamagordo and then to White Sands Monument) has a lot of posts on the news conference (warning, not a permalink–there were too many links–just scroll, or in the future, use the Wayback Machine), and Alan Boyle has a story specifically on the teachers-in-space announcement.

My thoughts, before bed?

The new Rocketplane design looks good, but it seems to me now that the real barrier is financial. Though they didn’t say at the press conference, the rumor is that they need a lot of money to complete it, and they don’t have it. The time constant for first flight test of a suborbital vehicle seems to remain two years. Leonard David has more details.

Rocket Racing League seems much more encouraging. They now have the minimum six teams required, and they have a vehicle which flew three times yesterday in Mojave. I suspect that it will be flown publicly before the end of the year. I think that sponsorships will appear more quickly now.

I had one question of Granger–how long will this be a race purely of pilot skill? When will we see a competition of hardware? His answer: at least three years. In my follow up, he said that eventually he would be going to a formula, but that we needed to get some experience and understand the nature of the sport better. I hope that this will happen sooner rather than later, because I think that the technology will advance much more rapidly from this activity when we have not just competing pilots, but competing designs.

I got in last night, but the advertised wireless in my hotel didn’t work. I did manage to get a late dinner at the Frontier Restaurant on Central. Not a bad Mexican combo.

I had a meeting out at Kirtland this morning, and I’m heading down to Las Cruces soon. I hope that the wireless at my hotel down there isn’t falsely advertised.

[Evening update]

I arrived without incident. I actually did consider taking the scenic drive recommended in comments, just based on how it looked on the map, but I decided that I’d be doing half of it in the dark. Maybe some other time.

And thankfully (again per comments) my Albuquerque visit was carjacking free.

We’ll see how the wireless is this year out at the symposium, which starts at 8 AM tomorrow.

Probably no posting until tomorrow morning. I’m in Albuquerque tonight, then down to Las Cruces tomorrow afternoon for the Persona Spaceflight Symposium and X-Prize Cup.

I’m working on a proposal that’s due on Sunday. Probably light blogging this week.

What would cause computer A to be able to ping Computers B and C, but B and C be unable to ping A (though they can ping each other)? FWIW, A is on a wireless connection. B and C are ethernet.

[Update a few minutes later]

In answer to the question in comments, I’m pinging by IP. The router is running in DHCP mode.

[going off to try something]

That was it. Zone Alarm was blocking the pings. I shut it down, and it works now. Guess I need to add the local network to its trusted zone.

OK, so I took Pete’s advice, and did an ftp install of Core 7 from download.fedora.redhat.com. It seemed to work all right, until it started to actually install, at which point I got an error message that the package libxml2-devel-2.6.28-2.i386.rpm couldn’t be found, or was corrupt. Now what? If Fedora’s own server doesn’t have the file right, who does?

[Update at 12:30 PM EDT]

OK, I switched to the University of South Florida, and it’s installing packages now. There may be some light at the end of this tunnel.

[Update mid afternoon]

Well, I’m the father of a bouncing baby Fedora Core 7 system. Now to see if I can mount my old drive and get the data off it…