QuantumG's Blog

…. and have been since 2004 when the Ansari X-Prize was won and nothing happened . 5.5 years and counting. It’d be nice if this supposed “race” would heat up a little. It really does seem that everyone assumes Virgin Galactic / Scaled Composites is so far ahead that they can never be caught.. despite all the evidence to the contrary . Did you happen to catch the Armadillo Aerospace yearly video: This is last year’s video: Did you think the same thing as me: “That’s it?” Rocket Racing League. Methane/LOX engines for NASA. Lunar Lander Challenge. So the only new thing is the low altitude hops. (Speaking of which, break the DC-X altitude record of 3.14km already!) At Space Access, after the grumblings about being trumped on the LLC, Carmack made the pledge that this year they’ll be doing something new. Here’s hoping it involves *people*. And while I’m being critical.. which, I know, I do too much.. What’s next for Masten? More hops? Can we count on you...

The gap is unfortunate, but its a product of the previous administration, not a choice of the current one. The retirement date for the shuttle? An overdue decision finally made in 2003. The continual redesign of Ares 1 and the Orion capsule? Thank you Mr Griffin. If the simple safe soon replacement vehicle for the shuttle had been funded back in 2003 when it was supposed to be, and not co-opted for Apollo On Foodstamps, then it would be flying by now.. on existing launch vehicles. Instead we got the Constellation train wreck. So what has this administration decided to do? Close the gap by engaging *multiple* commercial providers. So if one vehicle fails, or retires, NASA can keep flying on another. There will never be a gap again. Basically what they should have done back in 2003 but without the cost plus pork. In the mean time, NASA astronauts will continue flying to the ISS on the Soyuz.. as nearly every expedition crew member flies to the station now. Th...

Once again, SpaceX's launch schedule has slipped, this time to no earlier than May 8, 2010 .  The previous date was April 12, but it seems they were never going to hit that date.  Of course, this doesn't mean the date hasn't been widely circulated.  The upcoming "space summit", at which President Obama is reportedly going to rally the troops to get behind commercial crew, was planned for 3 days after the launch.  For those out there who would assign some intricate public relations oriented reasoning to SpaceX's latest schedule slip, I'd like to remind them that slippages are nothing new for SpaceX.  The simple fact is, SpaceX has no idea what they're doing when it comes to PR.  If they did, they would have *made it clear* that they were not going to take advantage of the April 12 launch date long before now.  They would issue press releases about what the public is interested in, not about contracts they've signed for missions that are contingent o...

"NASA will immediately begin to realign programs and organization, demonstrate new technical capabilities, and undertake new robotic precursor missions to the Moon and Mars before the end of the decade."   - President George W. Bush, Vision For Space Exploration, 2004. “What is needed is a carefully thought out plan to characterize and demonstrate ISRU on the lunar surface first with a series of robotic precursor missions, building up knowledge and capability with time, and ultimately supporting and provisioning human presence on the Moon. Such an architecture is possible within the proposed budget envelope.”   - Dr Paul Spudis, The Once And Future Moon, 2010.   (and you have no idea how much violent agreement went into getting that quote.) There's no question that robotic missions are valuable precursors to manned missions.  Without the results of the seven spectacular Surveyor landings the design of the Apollo missions would have been a lot different, and may ...

SpaceX: Falcon 9 engine test aborted before ignition This is to be expected.. It's about perception though.  Elon Musk is talking to the media, and that's a start, but he isn't saying enough to educate the public about what a test program is and what the purpose of it is.  For example:     Elon Musk on CNBC (YouTube) Interesting, but a wasted opportunity.  He needs to say something like:    "We're starting our test program now at Complex 40 at KSC.  Our goal is to figure out all the things that can go wrong and develop procedures to safely deal with them.  If everything works first time that'll be disappointing as we won't have the opportunity to learn anything.  So we're going to keep trying and trying until we get a problem, analyze that problem so we know how serious it is, then go again until we know where all the problems are.  That way, by the time we go for launch, we'll know how to work through any proble...

I recently rekindled an interest I have in fooling around with hardware. I bought myself a USB I/O device from Elexol , a local electronics supplier, and with a lot of junk from Dick Smith Electronics I've managed to control some LEDs from my Linux box - an awesome feat I'm sure you'll agree - all without doing any soldering. This makes my wife happy (did I mention I got married ?), who is somewhat afraid the soldering iron will burn down the house one day. It also means I can pull apart old projects to make new ones without making a big mess or having to buy new components. Went to Jaycar Electronics and bought a 10-pin connector and some ribbon cable. Here's a shot of my board looking a bit neater. While there I also bought some push button switches which I'm sure will come in handy.

As I happened to be in Orlando, Florida on my honeymoon, my lovely wife gave me permission to fly out to New Mexico attend the Wirefly X-Prize Cup. I arrived around 9am to discover that the first attempt by Armadillo Aerospace to win the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge was scrubbed due to a clogged fuel igniter. The second attempt was after lunch and everything went great for the first leg of the flight. Refueling appeared to be going fine when the announcers reported that there appeared to be another clog in a fuel line. This was reported to have been cleared, and the flight appeared to go fine. Due to a requirement of the prize the vehicle has to hover over the landing pad until 90 seconds of flight time is complete. During the last 7 seconds of this hover the vehicle fell. When the dust cleared the module was lying on its side. Space.com is reporting that the dust may have been the problem. We won't know until Carmack makes a report. Jason Silverman from Wired...

The never ending effort to recreate a game from 1993 continues. There's now nine developers in the project and none of us do much. Every now and then I get bored and fix something.. go to check it in and discover that, shock, someone else has checked something in too! Then I have to update and resolve conflicts. Take the good with the bad I guess. Anyway, in release 0.2 you will be happy to discover that we have done some work to get sound faithfully reproduced. For a while, we were focusing on music and trying to get the SDL midi synthesiser to play back this ancient XMIDI format. Believe it or not, this was actually acheived. Slight problem though, Syndicate used custom instruments. This was not uncommon at the time. The result was that the music just didn't sound good.. but it was good enough to ignore for a while. Having declared that I wasn't going to touch sound.. I got bored one day and changed my mind. I told myself that I really ment I wasn't going ...

I was recently asked what I would do differently if I was writing a decompiler from scratch today. Having worked on decompilers for the past 9 years myself and worked with others who have worked on decompilers for longer still, I like to think we now know enough about it to recognise some of the mistakes we've made and identify some areas of improvement. The primary difficulty of decompilation is that most analysis requires interprocedural information. Most everyone recognises this need early on so there's an assumption that you need to keep the intermediate representation for the entire program in memory at the same time. For many years we've had a hell of a lot of memory to play with (4 gig will be standard on desktop PCs next year) and with 64 bit architectures and virtual memory you can swap to disk for as much memory as you need. So it would appear that structuring a decompiler like a compiler, with intermediate disk formats for each compilation module is unnecessa...

What's the most annoying thing about trying to write a game engine? Ohh, I'm spoiled for choice, ok, I think the most annoying thing is getting together some half decent looking art so you don't go insane testing your engine with stick figures. Well, I recently came up with an interesting solution.. why not use some existing art from one of your most favourite games? You may note, I've done this before . This time, I picked a game that is a little more recent, but not too recent, GTA3. No, not Vice City, not San Andreas, but those two are the same engine, just updated some. As I've mentioned before, I have a liking of the OGRE graphics engine . So the first order of business was to get the models out of GTA3 and into OGRE's mesh format. The format used by GTA3 is the Renderman DFF file format . The individual dff files are concatenated together in the models\gta3.img file, which is indexed by the models\gta3.dir file. There's plenty of tools around t...

Recently, Greg K.H. made an offer to write free linux kernel drivers to any company that will provide him with docs to their hardware. Some BSD folks had a problem with Greg making this offer to people who would only give up their docs if the developer signed an NDA. Theo de Raadt chimed in declaring that "it is a fucking farce" , which is his usual way. As far as they are concerned, an open source driver without docs is not open at all. That may be so, but I still think having source code.. any source code.. which actually works, is better than having no docs or source code. It would be nice if companies would hand over docs without an NDA.. that is certainly preferable for everyone.. but some of them just won't, and getting them to hand over docs under an NDA with the ok for someone to write a free driver (be it GPL or BSD licensed) - that's something and it shouldn't be ignored. Now, if companies start doing this and drivers start showing up as GPL, but wi...

In the last few years we've seen the rise of the so called distributed revision control systems. These are, essentially, tool support for maintaining your own personal version of an open source project. Let's take, as an example, the WINE project . They use Git , the same version control system as the Linux kernel. Suppose I have a favourite application that I would like to run using WINE. There might be some things that my app requires which WINE doesn't yet support. I don't mind implementing these things, but I really couldn't be bothered going through the hassle of satisfying every whim of the WINE developers (how they like their patches submitted, how they like their changelog written, etc). What happens when WINE releases a new version which I want to upgrade to? Do I keep an entire source code tree around just to run my favorite app? What if I have more than one favorite app? Git lets me update my source code tree and merge any updates that conflict wi...

People that provide rpm files, but not tar.gz/tgz files, should be shot. Typically this isn't so much of a problem, as I can use alien on my debian based distro to convert an rpm into a deb, but I'm in the road right now and don't have access to a machine with that. So, after struggling to get the rpm utilities installed on a naked linux box, where I didn't have root, I've decided that enough is enough. I figure what I need is a web site where I can submit the rpm and it will create a tar.gz for me (ala ps2pdf.com ). And I figure that other people need this too. So I've sucked up the cost and done it. Here it is: www.rpm2tgz.com . Of course, I've put a lot of Google ads on the site. Hopefully this will give me enough income after a year to cover the renewal of the registration and the hosting. Otherwise I might just let it lapse.

Argh. It's 2006, and I still don't have a good decompiler. All is not lost. Thankfully, there are still interesting things to decompile that are both small and contain lots of stuff that makes decompilation easy (e.g., symbols, relocations). So, let's do it manually using some trustworthy old fashioned tools: a disassembler, a text editor and some string processing tools. Let's choose a target. I'm going to go with a linux kernel module because they are small, contain symbols and relocations and because there exist GPL ones that I won't get in trouble for reverse engineering publicly. Just choosing something at random from /lib/modules on my Ubuntu linux box I come across new_wlan_acl.ko from the madwifi-ng drivers. Right, now we need a disassembly. No problem. Just do objdump -d --adjust-vma=0x8000000 new_wlan_acl.ko > out.dis . That almost gives me the object as it would look mapped into the linux kernel. Slight problem though, none of the reloca...

I, like many people, own a robotic vacuum cleaner. It's crap. With all the advanced robotic technology it has on board, it's still lacking in vacuum cleaner technology . Although it is bagless, it's not the good kind of bagless. There's no double vortex mechanism here. In fact, there's very little suction on it at all. That's kind of important for a vacuum cleaner I think. Besides which, the robotic technology isn't all that "advanced" anyway. It still gets stuck in corners or on that same part of the rug. So when I feel the carpet needs a bit of a spruce, I pull out the trusty Vax and put my back into it. Where's my maidbot? It's been 40 years since the The Jetsons and I am still waiting for my flying car, err, I mean, maidbot. Now, of course, I realise that it would be a bit expensive to get together a crack team of Japanese scientists just to make me a maidbot (and yes, they have to be Japanese scientists) and that no amount o...

First of all, let's get the rant out of the way. Cygwin is a big pile of junk. It's like everyone who touches Cygwin gets the clue beaten out of them before they're allowed to hack on it. Here's a tip guys, if you're going to try to do something really hard (like build a POSIX compatible software layer on top of an operating system that holds many parts of the POSIX standard as the anti-thesis of its design) you have to put a lot of effort into it . Ok, done. I recently had this problem: Fatal server error: could not open default font 'fixed' for which I googled, lots and lots and lots and found no adequate solution. I found the Cygwin/X Frequently Asked Questions and it had two suggests as to what the problem could be: You don't actually have the xorg-x11-fnts package installed (duh, thanks guys, yeah, that wasn't the first thing I checked). The mount point for /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts was invalid at the time that Cygwin's setup.exe...

I'm a Ubuntu user but I also run a number of Windows machines for work purposes. I was actually shocked recently to discover that CUPS supports my Brother HL-5140 laser printer without me having to download any binary blobs from the Brother website. So that's good. What's not so great is that gnome-cups-ui has no concept of workgroups or domains for connecting via smb to a windows printer. When you go to "add new printer" or when you view the connection properties after adding the new printer, the fields you are presented with are: Host Printer Username Password After googling for a bit, I discovered that people have figured out that if you put the workgroup name in the Host field and then enter username:password@host/Printer into the Printer field and nothing into either the username or password fields, you can print! Curious about this obscurity, I did an apt-get source gnome-cups-ui and hunted around for a bit. Eventually, I found some code that looks basicall...

If you pop over to the NVIDIA web site and download the 3d card drivers for Linux, you'll note that there is a /usr/src/nv directory. In that directory is source code to the "thin layer" to the Linux kernel which NVIDIA links their binary blob. This, of course, makes no legal difference - NVIDIA are still extending the Linux kernel and therefore it is unlawful to distribute the Linux kernel along with the NVIDIA drivers, but NVIDIA doesn't do that, so it's not a problem - for them. Anyway, that's a side issue. I was thinking, recently, about the Linux kernel's "tainted" flag. Essentially, whenever you install a kernel module that isn't under some accepted open source license, the kernel sets a flag so that developers know there is a chance that any bugs you report might have been caused by code they can't fix. In general, this is not such a big deal as kernel modules are typically small and easy to isolate. The NVIDIA graphics driv...

Sometimes copyright law is just stoopid. Sometimes the rules just don't apply. Have you heard the story of Steve McDonald and White Stripes? Here's nice flash animation of what happened, or you can keep reading.. Steve McDonald is a veteran member of the band Redd Kross. He likes the White Stripes, but he thought they would sound better if they had a bass guitarist. So he appointed himself. He had the equipment, and the skill, so he made up some bass tracks and added them to his favourite White Stripes songs. He then posted those songs on the Redd Kross website - without permission. Of course, this could land him in hot water, but luckily he bumped into Jack White who gave his assurances that he wasn't going to sue. Before that happened I'm guessing Steve McDonald just didn't give a damn.. after all, he's a rocker, man. I'm not a rocker, but I am a rebel, ask anyone. I once posted the full c99 standard to my web site so people wouldn't have ...