Mike's Ramblings...
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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "Mike Whitaker" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
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07:33 pm
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10.. 9... ignition sequence start... 7 .. 6....
5...4...3...2...1.... zero... all engine[1] running...
LIFT OFF!
At 13:32 GMT on June 16th 1969, Apollo 11, atop the sixth Saturn V booster rocket ever launched[2], lifted off into the pages of history.
In a way, the Saturn V/Apollo CSM stack is a microcosm of the whole space program. Three stages, 363 feet tall, weighing 3000 tones, developing seven and a half million pounds of thrust at liftoff, all to return an 11 ft tall, 5 ton capsule back to Earth again. In the same way, thousands of people's individual contributions took three men to the moon and back.
Most of the stock footage you see of the Saturn V isn't actually of any of the manned flights, but of Apollo 4 and 6 - in particular, the top-of-the-launch-tower liftoff angle, and that glorious shot of the stage 1 interstage ring falling away high above the earth (in fact, if you find a clip that lasts long enough, you can see the camera drop off to be parachuted down after stage separation). Any launch pictures with a Service Module that's white rather than silver are of Apollo 4, as well :D
One thing you notice, comparing Apollo to the Shuttle, is how slow the initial lift-off is. For all it's (still) the biggest and most powerful rocket in the world, it has a heck of a lot of weight to shift.
Over a million people watched that launch from the Florida shores, and estimates of over 700 million worldwide. Here's Leslie Fish's evocative 'Witnesses Waltz', again sung by Kristoph Klover off the "To Touch The Stars" album:
[1] Not a typo. NASA Public Affairs Officer Jack King really did say that.
[2] Apollo 7 only had to reach Earth orbit, so launched atop the less powerful Saturn IB, as did the unmanned Apollo 5, and AS201 and AS202 (pre-Apollo 1 test flights).
Tags: apollo11
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09:11 am
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Follow the mission 'as live'.
http://wechoosethemoon.org/ - you will need Flash 10.
Also, if you're a Twitter user follow @AP11_CAPCOM, @AP11_SPACECRAFT & @AP11_EAGLE.
Tags: apollo11
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08:12 am
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Reflections on launch....
Last night, as I quite often do, I watched the Shuttle launch in the virtual company of a number of good friends on #filkhaven. It is, when you think about it, quite the achievement just to get to that state: never mind the weather, the sheer number of individual small parts that have to work, each built by a a different handful of people...
And we know, from bitter past experience, that just one of those parts going wrong can be fatal. NASA gets slated sometimes (largely by people who don't understand) for being too cautious, but after Apollo 1, Challenger and Columbia? Can you blame them? Sunday's launch was scrubbed because the weather on the RTLS Abort strip was too bad: the Return To Launch Site Abort is the one NASA have never tested because it's way too scary - it involves turning the Shuttle round and using its main engines to slow it down and fly back to Kennedy...
And last night, Endeavour came roaring off the pad, peaking at 17,000 mph on her way to Earth orbit, on a mission to that dot I saw streaking across the sky last night. I'm sure I'm not the only one who holds my breath on every launch when I hear the words 'Go for throttle up', remembering what happened to Challenger. And I'm equally sure that during their hold on the pad forty years ago, Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins thought back to their three colleagues on Apollo 1 who never made it into space. And I kind of bet they were watching last night, too, as Endeavour headed for orbit on a pillar of fire.
"They said she's just a truck, but she's a truck that's aimin' high..."
To celebrate that achievment, and salute the folks who made it and the ones who gave their lives trying, not just in the American space program, I give you Jordin Kare's 'Fire In The Sky', as performed by Kristoph Klover.
I can't watch this video without tearing up. And I don't care.
In memory:
- Soyuz 1:
- Vladimir Komarov
- Apollo 1:
- Gus Grisson, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee
- Soyuz 11:
- Georgi Dobrovolski, Viktor Patsayev and Vladislav Volkov
- Challenger:
- Greg Jarvis, Christa McAuliffe, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Judith Resnik, Michael J. Smith, and Dick Scobee
- Columbia:
- Rick D. Husband, William McCool, Michael P. Anderson, David M. Brown, Kalpana Chawla, Laurel B. Clark, and Ilan Ramon
Tags: apollo11
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10:15 pm
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ISS
Just been outside (thanks to a reminder from ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) hrrunka) to catch a beautifully clear transit of the ISS from west to east, almost directly overhead.
Science. Isn't it frodding awesome?
EDIT: saw the second transit at 23.40 too. There's supposed to be a really bright one around 9.50pm UK time on Saturday - check http://www.heavens-above.com/ for local times.
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09:13 pm
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Forty years ago tomorrow...
...Apollo 11 lifted off from pad 39A at Cape Kennedy, carrrying Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins on man's first journey to land on the moon.
I was nearly six. My memories of the space program start just before then - I'm positive I can remember building a Lego Apollo 8 on the kitchen table at my grandparents' house in Harrogate, and for some reason the name 'Jim Lovell' just stuck in my memory - my childhood hero: in fact, still to this day.
This will be the first of a series of posts on the moon landing anniversary: I've spent a fair bit of the past few days reading through a book on the space race with James, because I believe that the story of man's achievement in getting there is one of the greatest, most humbling and inspiring triumphs of engineering, science and raw courage ever. It saddens me that we haven't been back, and it saddens me even more that a sizable percentage of people know so little about it. I don't intend James to be one of them.
President John F Kennedy challenged NASA to go from the single sub-orbital hop made by Alan Shepherd in Freedom 7, the first Mercury spacecraft, to land a man on the moon inside a decade, and thousands upon thousands of people worked together and rose to the challenge. I wish I could have been even the smallest part of it.
I have absolutely no doubt we landed on the moon. I find the idiotic attempts to deny it all as a hoax to be ignorant, obsessive, mind-numbingly stupid and above all insulting to the courage of the men who risked their lives to get there, as well as the skills and dedication of the thousands who helped put them there. If you're one of them, and you're reading this, please, do yourself a favour and go away and study the available information objectively. Apply some common sense and scientific rigour.
Tags: apollo11
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06:27 pm
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The Green Vanalishi....
...is now sold. Apologies to anyone wanting to borrow it :D
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06:14 am
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Top Gear spoilers
If you missed the new Top Gear yestereve and you don't want to be spoiled:
a) avoid the BBC News homepage
b) go watch it on BBC iPlayer via my future employers :D
( c) Don't click here.... )
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08:18 am
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Five dinner guests...
For some reason this one's been intriguing me for a while, so...
Feel free to copy to your own LJ and answer: which five (currently living) famous people would you have to a dinner party and why?
My five - chosen as much as anything for the likely quality of conversation:
- Formula 1 driver and commentator Martin Brundle. Intelligent, articulate, a dry yet funny wit, an ability to explain complex things in simple terms.
- Apollo astronaut Jim Lovell. Pure self indulgence - he's one of my personal heroes, and I'd love to have a chance to meet him.
- Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey. In the absence of Professor Tolkien himself, Tom Shippey's the next best thing: the clarity and insightfulness of his contributions to the LOTR DVDs are second to none.
- Steely Dan guitarist and technophile Jeff "Skunk" Baxter. Not only articulate about the guitar, but a US defence consultant with a gift for lateral thinking. Funny as heck, too.
- US President Barack Obama. How could I not? He comes over as articulate, smart and witty, and the chance to talk to him would be too good to pass up.
Y'know, it's no good. I have to add a sixth:
- Fast bowler and cricket's 'Analyst' Simon Hughes. Again, a man who has that gift of explaining things, and his autobiography reveals him as an insightful observer of the game.
How about you?
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08:21 am
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Time to make it official, then...
For sale:
'02 reg MWB crew cab Mercedes Sprinter 208CDI van. 6 seats (all with seatbelts), green with blue/red go faster[!] stripe. Radio CD (with AUX input), reversing camera. Excellent nick, back big enough to hold a double bed or a sofa, or all of a fairly decently equipped band's kit. MOT till August.
Photos + mileage etc to follow this evening.
Offers around £3200.
If you know anyone who might be interested, please pass this on.
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12:07 pm
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Has anyone else noticed....
3 months ago: diesel, 100.9/litre, petrol 91.9/litre
Today: diesel STILL 100.9/l, petrol 98.9/l
It's been stealthily creeping up a penny at a time over the last few weeks.
I wouldn't care, but my clapped out old wreck of a Vectra's a petrol-engined model.
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11:24 am
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Or, graphically...
( image behind cut )
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10:55 pm
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Euro Elections and the BNP
After the two Twitters earlier (see previous post), I've been kinda pondering... Something about the whole hysteria around the BNP getting seats on the EP makes me uneasy, and I need to think aloud....
Proportional Representation exists to ensure that the broad spectrum of the will of the people gets represented: in short, you get the-electorate-in-microcosm elected to be MEPs. If you believe that's better than first-past-the-post, you have to accept that this means you're going to disagree with the views that some of your elected representatives espouse. In some cases quite vehemently.
The process is not broken just because it elected the BNP. I've not yet heard anyone saying that, I don't think, but just in case, I thought i'd make the point. As it stands, it's not currently illegal for them to exist (otherwise, one assumes, they wouldn't be on the ballot paper), so therefore if they get enough votes to merit a share in the seats that are available, they get elected.
And a small part of me says 'good'.
No, I'm not endorsing them. Far from it. And no, I really don't want a couple of self-confessed white supremacist racists representing my country in Europe for the next five years.
But it means three things:
It means the PR system works. It means your vote counts. It means that a relatively small number of committed people can have a quite startling effect on politics.
Secondly, it also means that with this level of publicity, no-one should go into the next election under any illusions about who the BNP are and what they actually stand for, OR that their own vote makes no difference.
Thirdly, it means that the mainstream parties had damn well better figure out how to get their houses in order and regain the respect of the electorate, or next time it'll be worse.
6% of a 35% turnout was enough to get BNP a seat in at least one constituency: effectively that's 1 in 50 people. Given the average size of a group that a person knows as individuals? Each of us probably knows 2 or 3. We also probably know well over fifty people who didn't vote, if we but knew it, for whatever reason.
And you wonder why I say it EVERY DAMN ELECTION. Yes, I know the Parliamentary elections are first-past-the-post, and it's a lot harder to effect major change that way. But it does happen.
And before you ask... both Anne and I voted. For different parties, neither of which was the BNP.
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01:55 pm
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LJfreecycle offer
We have here two sofas, one 3 seater one 2 seater, that we want rid of - for those who've been here, they're the blue ones that were in the living room.
Any takers? We can probably arrange to deliver.
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05:37 pm
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For those in the UK eligible to vote tomorrow...
...the usual reminder.
With the extra warning that however much you might think that the major political parties are all a bunch of greedy money-grubbing twats with their fingers in the till, the extremist minority parties (not (B) naming (N) any (P) names) have well-organized support who /will/ be bothered....
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09:14 am
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For those wondering about 'the freezer trick' with hard drives
For some categories of (heat-related) hard-drive fault, this is a life saver.
Classic symptoms: drive starts throwing random errors, and won't spin up on reboot. Often, this is because it's got so hot the mechanism has expanded and is sticking, and on reboot the motor hasn't enough oomph to overcome the stick.... micktim and stevieannie can tell you exactly how this happens (48 hour mixdown session, hottest day of 2008, machine under a duvet to muffle noise....) :D Having said that, age will do it. As will accumulated detritus in air vents for case fans....
So...
Double-bag the drive tightly in a couple of plastic bags, and stick in the freezer overnight.
Not the fridge, note, the freezer. You want the drive to contract.
While it's cooling down, prepare yourself: acquire another BIGGER drive to copy data onto (don't even THINK of re-using this one, OK? It's only going to die again), reinstall your OS or find another machine that'll read the drive, and (if needed) a USB drive cage to hold the drive (quite often I just hook it up to a spare IDE or SATA header in the appropriate machine if I can). Also start thinking about what's on the drive, and what priority order you want to grab things off on, and a divide and conquer strategy, just in case it's more screwed than you think.
Put your feet up, and consider how you're going to adopt a backup strategy so you don't have to do this again. Enough firms do dirt cheap RAID1 NAS (network attached storage) that you can spend a couple of hundred quid or so on that and not have to worry again. Fire up a web browser (if you have a machine to do it on) and place that order now.
And now? sleep on it. Chill, and leave your drive doing the same.
The following day, hook up your drive to your rescue machine. If it mounts (manually, if your OS doesn't mount new drives automagically), you're in business. Start copying the data you care about first. Do it in smallish chunks, so the drive doesn't get too hot. Once you have the stuff you can't live without, you can consider grabbing the whole drive.
When you're done, label the dead drive clearly, put it somewhere safe (just in case you missed something and need to repeat the process). Wait for your backup server (the one you ordered last night) to arrive and start implementing a backup regimen.
Me? I have a backup server. I took backups. I just need to fix my backup schedule so I can find the bloody config dump next time!
Disclaimer:
1) I accept no responsibility if you fail to recover any data by this process.
2) If your drive makes horrible clicking noises when you try and spin it up, you're probably screwed. Creative use of ddrescue on a Linux box MAY rescue some of your data, or (if it's that valuable to you) you need to consider paying a professional to get your data back. I do know people who've disassembled a drive and put the platters in an identical one, but frankly that smacks of insanity!
3) This and any other disk recovery process is still no substitute for the peace of mind taking backups confers.
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07:45 pm
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From the land of broken hardware
Good news: freezer trick worked, busy rebuilding configs. Bad news: adsl router died in power cut. Unlikely to be back before Friday.
Current Location: United Kingdom, England, County of Cambridgeshire
Tags: computers
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10:44 pm
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dorian.altrion.org
is... slowly, recovering after its boot disk threw a spectacular strop. (Be nice, it's 5 years old)
If you have an account, a domain, e-mail or a website on there, none of your personal/web data is compromised, as home dirs, mail and web content are on the two RAID1'd data drives AS WELL as backed up on the local NAS (no, RAID != backup).
However, while I'm absolutely certain I backed up the server configs somewhere, I can't bloody well find the tarball! Which means currently you can't log in, among other things.
I have the old boot drive in the freezer overnight, in the hope that I can get it up long enough to pull all of /etc out and copy the necessary bits of it across to the new boot drive (which is now Ubuntu Server 9.04). In the meantime, however, I'm leaving mail/etc turned off on the new server so that the fact that it's forgotten how to handle mail will result in a host unreachable, not a bounce. This does mean you're going to be dorian-less until later tomorrow - if I wake up early enough I /may/ try and get it in a USB cage first thing, otherwise it'll be tomorrow evening.
I will be taking advantage of the downtime to clean up a few things (not the least of which is better greylist handling for email), but in the meantime please bear with: I'm waiting on the freezer and a rescue act, before I have to regen a whole pile of configs.
Many thanks to djbp for the first replacement boot drive (even if it was dead!) and bardling for crawling behind the rack to unplug stuff.
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09:22 pm
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Selling Ads on High-Traffic Internet sites For Dummies
 I've done this: at least indirectly. I WROTE CricInfo.com's banner ad server, for a site that did a quarter of a billion pageviews a month in 2000, and probably does more now. I do actually know what I'm talking about.
Managing ad inventory for a site THAT large was hell. Managing one for LJ, or Yahoo!, or a site of similar size (orders of magnitude more pageviews, potentially), is a complete mugs game if you want to micromanage every last ad. It costs you a fortune in manpower to close every deal and track every ad, and it costs you a fortune to reinvent some form of targetting so that ads get to people who might possibly be interested in them (because the good ones are, unsurprisingly, patented). Unless you have some miraculous business model that means that the infrastructure for your high traffic site pays for itself, you have to sell ads or enough subscriptions to cover costs. And if you want anyone to actually pay you decent money for your advertising space, you have to provide some means of giving them /qualified/ ad targetting, where there's at least SOME matchup between ad and viewer, otherwise your ad impressions are worthless.
So you don't, if you have any sense, sell your own adspace, or spend ages fixing your targetting code (CricInfo's was still not perfect after me tweaking it for half a decade, and all it had to worry about was making sure that everyone who paid for x amount of ads on various subsets of the site got what they paid for, no keyword targetting as such at all: Yahoo are on their third search-ad targetting system and it still sucks). You delegate that to the likes of Google AdWords, or Doubleclick, or Yahoo! display advertising, or any of a number of other companies that you /have/ to trust to use what qualifying data you can feed them to target your viewers. In short, you say "here's some ad space, here's some targetting data, you have ad inventory, please match the two and we'll take a cut."
And sometimes, they fuck up. Big time. Alcohol adverts to Pakistan was CricInfo's big one. Keyword-based targetting is not an exact science, even now, and it still requires human beings to describe the target areas when the ad's set up, and for them to understand all the implications of some quite scarily dense code that borders on natural language/AI at times.
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09:19 am
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The Green Vanalishi
As my crappy beat up Vectra is pretty likely to fail its MoT this month, I need a new one, since the Vanalishi won't fit in the station carpark :D
As a result, we're going to be selling the big green beastie, since we don't gig often enough at present for it to be worth the investment in tax, insurance etc, and we are largely keeping it around as a big removal van for everyone (us included). Various folks with a need for it have kindly donated to re taxing it from March, but as far as I'm aware they've for the most part made their use of it. So...
I know that aunty_marion needs it one weekend soon for un-storaging the big stuff.
I believe the_magician is due another run with it.
Is there anyone else I've forgotten who's expressed a desire to borrow it, or would like to, before the end of May?
If so, speak now! It's covered for any driver over 25, seats 6 and will fit a three piece suite or a double bed and to spare. Our usual deal is you return it with as much fuel as you took it, and an optional small token of your gratitude (emphasis on the small and the not-necessarily-financial. Rittersport, fancy Jap, brownies are always welcome!)
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07:33 am
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Song request
I have a memory at Concertino 06 of someone (orawnzva???) with a cracking setting of Sam's Troll Song from LOTR ("Troll sat alone on his seat of stone...")
Really love a recording of it to learn, if anyone can track it down.
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