JDPFu.com 2025

In a BBC article about the Space Shuttle Atlantis landing the author mentioned a few statistics.

A Few Statistics

*First flight: 3 October 1985
*Total number of flights: 32
*Distance traveled: 195 million km
*Total number of days in orbit: 294
*Total number of orbits: 4,648

Cost Estimates

So if we assume that each shuttle launch and mission costs NASA about $450M on average, that leads to a few other operational cost numbers.

• $14,400M for 32 flights
• $48.98M for each day in orbit
• $3.1M for each orbit

These are just the costs for Atlantis while on mission. These numbers make my next vacation plans seem tiny. ;)

Disclosure: I was employed by the space shuttle program for 5 yrs and by both the shuttle and space station programs for 3 years. I worked at NASA-JSC in Houston, Tx for both of those jobs.

We all know to keep our systems patched, but that isn’t always easy. Mozilla has come up with an easy way for everyone to check their browser for out of date plugins. This applies to Firefox browsers, but it also works for EI, Safari, Opera and perhaps other browsers.
So, open a new browser tab and go check your plugins http://www.mozilla.com/plugincheck/ now.

Lucid locked up on me today. The external disk array was really busy running multiple transcoding jobs at the time – love the quad core CPUs!. Those jobs filled up /raid, not any important file systems and locked up X/Windows. HOME is on a different FS too, BTW.

Installation of VirtualBox OSE (Open Source Edition) using the Ubuntu repositories should be easy. For me, there were a few issues that I figure other people may run into. I was able to solve them.

The Matroska container format for video has become popular over the last few years because it merges a number of good ideas and let’s a single file contain multiple video, audio and subtitle streams. No longer do you have to keep multiple .vob/.mpg/.avi.mp4, and multiple .sub/.srt/.idx files to have 3 different audio and subtitles. All of them can be placed into a single .mkv file. For me having the subtitles efficiently contained inside the same file is good, but the real, fantastic reason that MKV containers are brilliant is you can easily correct aspect ratio issues without re-encoding.

Here’s another article for why you should also use MKV if you’d like more specifics.

There’s another nice bonus. In my testing, the .mkv files are always smaller than the .avi files from which they are made.

Jumping into the How-To

$99 mini-netbook with an ARM processor

Buy It Today!

The device runs either WindowsCE or Android, but I imagine an Ubuntu-on-ARM or Maemo5 distro will work too. For $99, I’d buy one of these devices today, on a whim. If they were in Walmart or Target, then I’d buy 2 of them. Seriously, my neighbor could replace her $700 laptop with this for all the email and surfing she does AND be safer on the internet.

Add an 8GB class 6 SDHC and you’re ready for most home internet users.

Like many people, I recently updated my main desktop Ubuntu installation to 10.04, Lucid Lynx. As a long time Linux user, we’re used to some special keystrokes to force the system to do things. Keystrokes like:

• Reboot – {cntl}-{alt}-{del}
• Restart X/Windows – {cntl}-{alt}-{backspace}

The Solution

Many of us prefer to use Open Office, OO, for our productivity applications, but most of the people we deal with do not. OO does a good job of supporting MS-Office file formats, but it isn’t perfect. I’ve caused format issues with my team and clients because I chose to use OO instead of booting MS-Windows just to run MS-Office. They were not happy that my touching the files screwed up all the paragraph formating or worse.

If your team uses commenting or any other advanced feedback features in MS-Office, give up on OO and load MS-Office for those times when you must use MS-Office.

Enough was enough for me. I’ve already paid for the MS-Office license, so running it under Linux would be ideal for me. WINE to the rescue. Below I’ll talk through the easy installation process and let you know what to expect in each of the apps after you get MS-Office loaded.

If you follow me here, you know I’m in the market for a new laptop and that I’m fairly certain which features I need. VT-x support is mandatory for me.

Intel has a VT-x support list and it is nice, but it actually is not a list of processors with VT-x support at all. It is a list of processor families with DHTML hooks to see the sub-list intermixed with processors that have and don’t have VT-x features, not what I want. I’m seeking a single list of processors that have VT-x support, period. I don’t want to see any processors without vt-x in the list. Intel is missing the point.

If there was a table with a VT-x column, then I could filter it easily. Any pointers to the list I seek or should I just go with an AMD processor since it appears any of them made in the last 2 years includes AMD-V, their version of VT-x, support.

Ok, so Intel isn’t hiding their processors, but they certainly aren’t making it easy. At least Wikipedia is helpful

Xen as a Dom0 is not supported in Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) by Canonical. Both Canonical and Redhat have decided to get behind the KVM virtualization method instead. I think this was a choice driven by the required maintenance effort, since KVM hooks have been in the baseline Linux Kernel for about a year and Xen inclusion into the Linux kernel doesn’t seem likely at any point in the future. Supporting Xen kernels is just too tough.