So how did Steven Colbert get this picture of me kiteboarding?  I don’t even remember that day (though it looks like I should have.)

Administration changes are always times of upheaval at NASA.  A panel, led by former Lockheed-Martin CEO Norm Augustine, is currently (5/09) reviewing the state of NASA for president Obama.

Mr. Augustine led a very similar review in 1990, and their report is interesting to read in light of the last 19 years of NASA history.  (It appears that many, if not all of their recommendations were followed.)  I particularly liked the conclusion, which puts risk and blame in perspective:

“We believe that the legacy our generation should leave to the future is that we pioneered the exploration of space, and thereby made important discoveries that will prove of benefit to all mankind.  However, space activity is inherently difficult — involving advanced technology and taking place over great distances.  It demands reliance upon machines, often very complex machines, which are designed, tested and operated by mortals.  It involves rewards which may be intangible.

As we labor under such challenges, we should insist upon excellence.  We should strive for perfection.  We should demand the utmost of those to whom we entrust our space endeavor.  But we should be prepared for the occasional failure.  If we as a nation are to place a greater premium on letting nothing go wrong, on not making errors, and on ridiculing those who strive but occasionally fail, than we place upon seeking potentially great accomplishments, then we have no business in space.”

Report of the Advisory Committee On the Future of the U.S. Space Program  (December 1990)

A surprisingly accurate assessment, found hidden at the end of an article about new gem-quality artificial diamonds and allegedly from an old Encyclopedia Britannica:

“Of all domestic animals the cat is the most equivocal and suspicious. He is kept, not for any amiable qualities but purely with a view to banish rats, mice, and other noxious vermin from our houses, granaries, etc. Although cats, when young, are playful and gay, they possess at the same time an innate malice and perverse disposition, which increases as they grow up, and which education teaches them to conceal, but never to subdue. Constantly bent upon theft and rapine, though in a domestic state, they conceal all their designs; seize every opportunity of doing mischief, and then fly from punishment. “They easily take on the habits of society, but never its manners, for they have only the appearance of friendship and attachment. This disingenuity of character is betrayed by the obliquity of their movements and the ambiguity of their looks. In a word, the cat is totally destitute of friendship; he thinks and acts for himself alone. … Their sleep is light; and they often assume the appearance of sleeping when in reality they are meditating mischief.”

SFGate: Deuce of Diamonds, by Jon Carrol

Went to a memorial dinner for a friend tonight, Bill Nedell. I’ve only met a handful of people like him, a certified genius who wanted to change the world and had the talent and energy to do it. He loved flying, and loved life, and dove headfirst into everything he did.

Bill worked for NASA back when they took the Aeronautics in their name seriously. He revolutionized air-traffic control software, and then left to pursue his dream of making an airplane for everyone, one that used advanced software to make it easy enough for anyone to fly. (His initial project towards this goal was to make a box that could be installed in an aircraft that had just one big red button on it. If you hit the button the box would immediately take over and safely land the plane at the nearest airport.) He and his wife Susan (just as brilliant, just as nice, not quite as intense) owned a small company in Boulder which did this and other work. I worked with them the summer of 2001 on a tiny unmanned airplane that they’d use to gather weather data, but was also unofficially testing out the core software that would eventually run Bill’s dream. The first time I met Bill, I dressed up nicely for a formal meeting. He came jogging in in a runner’s tank top and shorts, drenched with sweat. He sat down, toweled off, and started right in on the technical details he needed help on. I was very impressed by his philosophy of what was really important, and his refusal to do what wasn’t. I also remember Susan asking me how much money I wanted to make. I threw out a number. She said that’s not enough, and threw out a bigger number. This is the kind of people they were.

Immediately after 9/11 most of their weather contracts were canceled as government money moved to homeland defense. They could have bought into that but refused to on karmic principles. They hung on for a bit but eventually had to sell the company. Bill was devastated by having to let his friends go, and said he’d never work for the government again. They moved to Florida (I was very sorry to see them leave Boulder), and they eventually lived on a 50′ catamaran. Bill made the catamaran into a technological wonder, even putting in a home theater because Susan loved movies. This year they decided to move back onto dry land so their daughter could go to a real high school. Susan got an executive position at a biofuels company in Boston, and Bill was working on a new aviation startup in Kansas (he liked the boat but really missed flying). He was an avid runner and biker, and sadly a few months ago he was killed by a drunk driver while riding his bike.

Bill touched a lot of people’s lives.  The memorial dinner was about 20 people, most from the old company, many of which I had met but hadn’t seen since 2001.  I was honored to be invited since I had only known Bill a little while, but Susan once said he and I were simpatico. (Aside from consulting for the company, I also helped Bill with his annual high-tech Halloween show in his front yard. It was the year 2001, so the theme was 2001 A Space Odyssey.)  Heard lots of great stories tonight, and feel for Susan and her two children’s enormous loss.  I wish I had been able to spend more time with him, Bill’s the kind of person I want to be when I grow up.

Since we’re all storytellers at some level, I liked this list of Kurt Vonnegut’s (1922 - 2007) rules for short stories:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things - reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’ ”

Via

I’ve had the honor this year of helping out Fairview High School with their entry in the FIRST Robotics Challenge, the Colbertron.  Every year the FIRST organization (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) announces a challenging new contest, and give teams of students just six weeks to build, program and test their entry. This year’s contest, “Rack and Roll”, required the robots to pick up inflated tubes and place them on a rack for points. Extra points could be gained by raising robots up to 12″ off the ground at the end of the match.

The six weeks went by quickly (with all the drama of any good engineering project), and on March 29th the regional competition began at the University of Denver’s Magnus Arena. The rookie Fairview team did an outstanding job in both robot construction and driving, even being called out by the announcers for helping push another robot up a ramp at the end of a match.

After a day and a half of competitions, the top 32 robots went on to elimination matches. Unfortunately, Fairview was ranked 33rd! The team was a little bummed out that they had come so close to continuing. But then a higher-ranked team chose Fairview to be on their team (due to their excellent driving skills and teamwork), so they got to continue.

In the elimination matches (which were best-of-three), Fairview lost the first match, won the second (and got to continue!), but lost the third 140 to zero (ouch). But it was a heck of a ride. This was Fairview’s first FIRST competition, and the students are already planning for next season.

Final standings (Fairview is team #2036)
Lots of pictures in the Flying Circuits Gallery

Summary: New Thinkpad comes with a minor factory defect, but getting it fixed escalates into a surprising amount of trouble. All turns out well in the end, though. The whole story after the jump.

(There is more where this came from … )

Tanenbaum outlines his vision for a grandma-proof OS (Computerworld Australia)

From the title of this article I thought computer science legend Andrew Tanenbaum would be discussing one of my interests; user interfaces and software design for non-computer literates (see the remarkable design of the OLPC). However, he was actually speaking about another of my interests; the sorry state of what passes for consumer operating systems today.

Tanenbaum, who developed a small teaching OS called Minix which was a precursor to Linux, recently spoke at a Linux conference about a fundamental and escalating problem with modern operating systems: the fact that they’re big and getting bigger automatically means that they’ll be increasingly buggy. He supports a return to the fundamentals: small modules of code which can be kept reasonably bug-free, and isolating these modules from each other so a failure in one doesn’t cascade to others. Hopefully the Linux developers he spoke to take this advice to heart; Linux isn’t immune from this effect.

I’ve been more and more inclined to get away from Windows, for reasons I won’t go into here (that’s a post for another time). To this end, and spurred on by the need to replace my trusty but failing Toshiba laptop, I purchased my next laptop with Linux in mind.

I can’t totally chuck Windows; I own too much expensive software that requires it. But I would like to start using Linux for my day-to-day chores and try to migrate my larger tasks as I can. I was also seriously considering an Apple laptop (nice hardware and software), but eventually decided to vote for neither Windows nor OS-X and put my faith in the teeming (hopefully not ‘unwashed’) masses of open-source programmers. I always did like the underdog.

The machine: a Lenovo Thinkpad T60p. The good: almost everything, particularly the workstation-class graphics card, built-in DVD burner, and great screen. I would have liked to have gone with a smaller model, but those have been stripped down in the name of minimum size and power consumption, and I would have had to give up all of the above.

The bad: The keyboard feels great, which is nothing to sneeze at. But the layout is, in my opinion, nonoptimal. In my world, the Toshiba keyboard layout is about as perfect a thing as you’ll find, particularly the “home pgup pgdn end” column on the right side. The Thinkpad sadly doesn’t have that column, but what’s worse is that the delete key has been exiled to a small editing bank at the top right, way out of home-finger range. This is a key which I use nearly as much as the backspace, and Toshiba wisely put it next to the arrow quad where you can hit it in a millisecond. I knew the Thinkpad had this layout going in, and decided to adapt to it because the rest of the machine is so tight, but the lack of ergonomics is a little annoying. (I’ll have to look into remapping some of the keys…)

Also bad: the current state of desktop Linux. Nobody would like Linux to take off more than I, but frankly right now it’s a mess. I chose Ubuntu Linux, based on its reputation as an extremely user-friendly distribution. However I found out firsthand that the current version has many irritating problems such as broken laptop features like suspend/resume (some of which were working properly in older versions). Not to mention that the community documentation is highly fragmented, with lots of people advising lots of different ways to get it all working. I eventually patched things together enough to get most (not all) of the laptop features running, and the desktop with Beryl is flat-out gorgeous.  But I can’t imagine a “normal” person attempting this, nor can I imagine what will happen when they release the next version (do you upgrade on top of your patches and hope the patches don’t break the new software, or erase everything and start over with the new version, followed by another round of broken features and manual patches?)

I do appreciate the work the Ubuntu folks have put into making the desktop environment gorgeous and useful right out of the box - something sorely lacking from some other distributions I’ve used. But I may still chuck it and try loading Gentoo, which I’ve used before for server projects but never for a desktop. I do know that Gentoo has top-notch centralized documentation, and that the package system is extremely robust. I’m just not looking forward to the usual fiddling trying to get it looking and running well.  I’m getting too old for that nonsense.
The structure of Linux and Xorg still seem a bit fragile for mass consumption, but I think that’s a local architecture problem and not a symptom of open-source development. Architecturewise, I think Amiga and BeOS were on the right track (tight kernels and APIs based on the KISS principle); it’s too bad they were steamrolled by Microsoft and their own poor business decisions. But as I said, that’s another post.

I’ll write again as things progress. Happy 2007!

When I was growing up in suburban southern California, I had to go see Santa at the local mall every year. I remember dreading that event, trying to get out of it, and the mounting horror as you got closer and closer to the front of the line, hearing the shrieks of terror from the children before you…

Which is why I was delighted to find this collection of photos people had sent in of the same situation. It’s fun to laugh at now, but it does make me wonder - do parents really not get how scary this is for a kid? Or worse, do they realize it all too well?

Happy holidays everyone, and best wishes for 2007!