Category Archives: Administrative

Frustration

I’ve never seen a night launch of the Shuttle (or any large launch vehicle–the biggest I’ve ever seen was a Delta II out of Vandenberg, from a motel in Lompoc). But there’s only a forty percent chance of flying tonight, due to concerns about low-level clouds with a front moving in. I have to decide by six or so if it’s worth the drive up to the Cape, or risk having to watch from a hundred fifty miles away on the beach down here. If it doesn’t go tonight, the next most likely success would be on Sunday night, due to forecast of high winds on Friday and Saturday. Of course, if it slips long enough (well into next week) the window will have slid backward enough that it’s no longer a night launch.

[Update at 2:30 PM EST]

Weather’s getting worse:

Kennedy Space Center already is overcast and getting worse by the hour. The satellite imagery indicates that the cloud cover that was feared as a potential launch show-stopper is going to intensify.

All three of the Transoceanic Abort Landing sites in Spain and France are experiencing unacceptable weather conditions in case an unprecedented emergency landing were attempted because of some problem during the early stages of flight.

There are low clouds and showers within 20 miles of the landing sites in Zaragosa and Moron in Spain. At the French emergency site in Istris, winds are forecast to be too strong to land.

No probability of launch update, though. I have to think it’s dropping below forty percent. This is the MMT’s bane–having to make a decision to send the crew out to lie on their backs for a couple hours, and hoping for the best against long odds. It’s looking less and less likely that we’ll make the drive up.

[3:15 PM Update]

They’re still saying a sixty percent chance of clouds preventing launch. But what’s the joint probability of having good weather at the Cape, and at all the abort landing sites? I have to think it’s a lot less than forty percent at this point. It’s going to be really hard to motivate myself to make the drive.

Still Busy

Patricia and I are kid sitting this weekend while their parents go to Key West for the weekend, for their first vacation alone since the kids were born. They’re six and eight (almost nine) and a lovable handful. Doesn’t leave much time for blogging.

I do have to say, though, that if USC beats Notre Dame tonight and then loses next week to UCLA, you can’t imagine how hard I’ll laugh…

[Watching game]

I should obligatorily add, that I really, really hate having to root for Notre Dame…

But it’s 21-10 now, favor USC.

Not Again

Or rather, still. I’ve noticed that my Internet connection has had leaky tubes lately. I tracked the problem down to DNS. I did quick search on “DNS problems Bellsouth,” and found that my old post on the subject was number two, but number one was a post at Tony Spencer’s place from over a year ago with several recent comments.

The weird thing is that the problem is primarily on my Windows box. My Fedora machine seems to be fine (it obviously has a different DNS setup, that I’ll have to dig into, to see what it’s doing right, and Windows is doing wrong. When I check my speed at C/Net, it tells me I’ve got a 1.5 Mbit connection, so it’s very frustating to have slow loads of pages because the machine can’t find the IP.

[Update about 7:30 EST]

In rereading my old post, I found this recent comment to it:

…did anyone notice that the DNS problems began about the same time they got to work for the NSA et al. Since I’m writing this in October 2006 and this thread started in December 2004, I assume they’ve had plenty of time and complaints to have long ago solved this issue if they had any intention of doing so.

Just so everyone knows, the DNS problem is still there. I live in southeast GA, and there is a minimum five full second (5.0s) responses to DNS queries. Contrast that with my Comcast DNS response times of (0.05s). So my 256KB/256KB Comcast connection is 100x faster at responding to DNS queries than my 6MB/384KB Bellsouth connection.

This thread is two years old, and this problem persists. Maybe everything is actually working but the NSA has to approve your DNS request first 🙂 There is no valid technical reason for this level of a problem for this length of time. And it doesn’t matter what time of day it is, so the DNS workload defense doesn’t hold up.

PS: Bellsouth did eventually deny participation, but as far as I know for certain, there were only two companies that actually refused the unconstitutional demands and bellsouth wasn’t one of them, but Google was !! Too bad google won’t just give us all free DNS, imagine the statistics they could derive from that. Oh well, PEACE netizens.

I don’t tend to be the paranoid type, but I’m wondering if there is indeed something to this.

[Update about 8:30 PM EST]

OK, Bellsouth DNS is officially fscked. I noted that my Linux machine was hardwired to use 4.2.2.2 as primary DNS, with the Bellsouth servers as secondary. I changed the Windows machines from “get DNS servers from the service” to primary 4.2.2.2 with a Bellsouth backup, and all is well. But I probably should set up my Linux box as a DNS server, to obviate these problems in the future, since I seem to have a good general Internet connection. For that matter, I need to get a better mail server than Bellsouth, which won’t allow me to access the SMTP server when I’m not on their network. Anyone have any suggestions?

BLogging, Light And Scattered

I’m busy with a final push to finish the house remodeling for a visit from my brother and his family for Thanksgiving. They came down from Michigan to do the Orlando thing, and will be coming down midweek. Meanwhile, lots of other good blogs, most better than this one, over on the left there.

Back to painting…

Busy

I’m in Longmont, Colorado, looking at a cloud-shrouded Long’s Peak behind the front range. Checking out, and heading up to Boulder for a few hours, then back to Florida this afternoon.

As Dale Amon notes, we’ve been getting a new company off the ground, named Wyoming Space and Information Systems. More anon, but probably not today.

Computer Emergency

I’ve got an old laptop that has some data on it that I need (or at least desire) for my trip. I haven’t used it in a year or so. I just tried to boot it up, and it seems to load Windows, but when I hit ctrl-alt-del to log in to W2K, as it prompts me, nothing happens.

The shift lock key lights up the light, so at least that part of the keyboard is working. Does anyone know what the problem might be, or if there’s some way around the three-finger salute to boot into Windows? My only other option (assuming that I don’t have a serious keyboard problem) is to boot into Linux, and then try to mount the Windows drive. If I have to do that, I’ll have to give up, because I have too many other things to do tonight. Though I guess I could throw the machine in the suitcase and try to figure it out when I get there.

[Update on Wednesday night, in Laramie]

OK, booted into Linux. Or rather, attempted to boot into Linux. When I type “root,” it comes out “rt.” No “o.” No lots of keys. Probably bad contacts from lack of use. I might try hooking up a USB keyboard tomorrow, at least to get the data off it. I suspect that if I wanted to invest the effort, I could open it up and get things good again with some contact cleaner.

No Mas

I like Mexican food (if it’s good–too often, alas, it is not), but after all the catering I’ve had this week–at the Symposium, at the AIAA thingie last night, and in the press tent (e.g., bacon, cheese and egg burritos this morning, and now they’re serving carnitos y arroz for lunch), I’ve had enough Mexicano food this week to last me a while. Which is good, since I’m going back to south Florida, the land of steak houses and Italian restaurants.

No Pings Allowed

At least until I get home and have some time to go in and do a script rename, I’ve had to disable trackback. I’d gotten several hundred of them over the last couple days, and don’t have reliable enough connectivity to stay on top of them.

We have to come up with a general solution to comment and trackback spam. The blogosphere thrives on feedback and crosstalk, and will lose much of its value if we can’t allow this due to vandals.