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Space Age

On October 4, 2007

I have to admit that my personal space age started in 1981 when the Space Shuttle launched successfully launched for the first time – the Shuttle was after all the first major development in space exploration I was old enough to appreciate. But for the world at large the space age started fifty years ago, at October 4th 1957 when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the very first artificial satellite into Earth orbit.

Instead of singing Sputniks praise myself I will leave that to the experts:

Dr. Philip Plait at badastronomy.com blogs about Sputnik and the many benefits the development of satellites brought forth (a minor quibble would be that communications really depend much more on submarine cables, satellites don’t provide that much bandwidth).
Space.com provides a nice timeline chronicling 50 years of spaceflight.
In Newsweek Sharon Begley discusses if there has really been a “Sputnik Shock” in the USA or if the news has just been used by President Eisenhower to push through an political agenda (as they say with this kind of article, “go judge yourself”).
NASA has an article online : Sputnik and the Origins of the Space Age.

I’m pretty sure that there is something about Sputniks on the pages of the Russian Federal Space Agency, but I haven’t been unable to find it on the english pages (apparently there is something in russian, alas I can’t read that).

Today is also the third anniversary for the launch that helped Space Ship One, the first privatly owned manned Spacecraft, win the Ansari X-Price. More Info on the Scaled Composites website.

Gay civil righs activist gets own asteroid

By Eike Pierstorff

On October 3, 2007

In Science Fiction, Space

Ha, did I cleverly deceive you with that headline – because, if course, said civil rights activist is propably better known for impersonating the character of Hikaru Sulu, Captain of the USS Excelsior and former Helmsman of the USS Enterprise under Captain what-was-his-name-again. And of course it should read: .. gets Asteroid named after him.

If the name ‘Sulu’ doesn’t ring any bells (which would mean that you are either quite young, have no access to a TV set or, more propably, that you are dead), I’m talking about actor and community activist George Takei (read his bio on his website). The IAU approved the re-naming of former 994 GT9 to 7307 Takei (which is about as official as it can get). Astronomy Professor Tom Burbine said he “suggested Takei’s name in part out of appreciation for his work with the Japanese American Citizens League and with the gay rights group Human Rights Campaign”.

I don’t think I’ll be able to see Takei in the sky due to the light pollution here in Berlin, so I rather look out for him in the SciFi series “Heroes” which is scheduled to start on October 10th in Germany.

The most beautiful thing ever

By Eike Pierstorff

On October 2, 2007

In Space

I’m usually somewhat focused on the achievements of the US-American and Russian space agencys – a habit from back then (forgivable I hope – I am, after all, a cold war kid) so I often forget what excellent work other countries do. Emilia Lakdawallas blog at the planetay society website reminded me of the japanese Kaguya mission that has launched about two weeks ago. Read about the Kaguya mission at the JAXA website, but before you do this click the preview photo below. Kaguya is the first spacecraft that carries a HDTV camera beyond near earth orbit, and the probe took this stunning picture of our home planet (click for the impressive version):

This is earth. Looks kinda small, doesn’t it ? Perhaps we should handle it with care, and try not to break it.

Q and A for the Content Item Module

By Eike Pierstorff

On October 2, 2007

In Joomla, Programming

I received two nearly identical questions about the content item module, one of which I quote here:

Im using the module on the front page in joomla 1. When I press the read more… link it opens the article, but it stays on the front page. So things I have displaying only on the front page are still there, and the breadcrumb system doesnt work.

Since I haven’t had time to look thoroughly into it I haven’t submitted this to the FAQ, but it’s most likely a problem with the changes as per Joomla 1.0.12 in the way itemids are handled. I think Joomla 1.0.13 has a compatibilty backward setting for itemids, so you should try that first if you have the same problem.

UPDATE: My guess was correct and this has been submitted to the FAQ. Alas that means there’s no easy solution for 1.0.12 (which lacks the compatibilty setting), anybody who cannot update from 1.0.12 to 1.0.13 should contact me (I won’t bother to think of a fix unless I’m asked to).

Science breakfast

By Eike Pierstorff

On October 2, 2007

In Science, Space

A couple of days ago I visited a friend to see her and my – what would be the secular equivalent to a godson? My “Darwin-Son”? or “Dawkins-Son”? – well, to see her and her son (of whom I’m obivously quite fond, he’s two and a half and a very bright and lovable child). After some hours of playing ‘Make the Funny Noises’ and ‘Help me Catch the Red Balloon” the child was laid to sleep and we perused my friends library of science fiction series on DVD. I finally fell asleep to an episode of Regenesis (which is acutally quite good, only you shouldn’t try to watch all of it at once).

The next morning my friend invited her new neighbour for breakfast, which was even more fun than I’d initially thought, because said neighbour turned out to be an astrophysicist from Brazil – she does work on black holes and currently stays in Potsdam for some fellowship thing or something. So we talked about black holes during breakfast (actually I asked some naive or maybe genuinly stupid questions and got some clever answers, but that still counts as talking, right?) before she anncouned that she really wasn’t working on black holes at all – instead she said “I’m working on something really weird”.

That really cracked me up, because a star collapsing into a singularity is already pretty high on the list of weird things and it was funny that she could easily top that (is it too late for me to become an astrophysicist? The weirdest thing I see in my job is the CSS rendering of IE 6, and that’s rather more annoying than interesting).

The “really weird” thing is Gravastar Theory. I tried to read up a little on the theory – I read the original paper by Mazur and Mottola and naturally I didn’t understand a word (at least none with more than three letters), so I read another paper I’d found on the internet by two guys names Visser and Wiltshire, which (I think) discussed the merits and faults of the theory and which I didn’t really understand either, so I resorted to the Wikipedia entry which I mostly did understand but which is not particularly exhaustive and obviously lacking even by Wikipedias standards.

It may be weird, but it’ still interesting (and frankly so was my lecturer) . I should try and get another invitaton for breakfast.

Dawn of the pronounced dead

By Eike Pierstorff

On September 28, 2007

In Space

Okay, so this is the worst pun ever, but the good news is that as of yesterday NASAs Dawn Mission is on it’s way. Dawn is a mission to the asteroid belt and more specifically to Vesta and Ceres, two really, really huge rocks in space ( 500 km / 1000 km across) that feature in many science fiction novels as the most likely place for human habitats in the asteroid belt. Oh, and I guess they are of some scientific interest, too. Dawn had been effectivly canceled, was reinstated, then delayed – NASA has a problem with its science budget (I don’t follow american fiscal politics that closely but it would seem that the overall budget woes are due to governmental pressure while the unwise distribution of the remaining funds is a self inflicted problem, but what do I know) – so it’s some relief that things finally got going.

So on the following pages you will find the really interesting stuff about the dawn mission:

The offical mission pages at nasa.gov
An article about the dawn mission by Astronomer Amara Graps
Emily Lakdawalla and Guest bloggers covered the launch in Emilys blog at the planetary society
Philipp Plait mentions the launch at his badastronomy.com website, and if your at all interested in astronomy and space exploration you should check out the rest of his site
The same goes for Fraser Cains’ Universe Today Website. This is not safe for work, not because there’s anything naughty on the site but because you can spent hours or days exploring the stuff there, and your boss probably won’t like that

My heart really belongs to manned space exploration, but I have to admit that at the moment unmanned probes provide better bang for the buck. And I’m really looking forward to learn more about the asteroid belt and Ceres and Vesta.

A Problem with Javascript libraries

By Eike Pierstorff

On September 14, 2007

In Javascript, Programming

A couple of days ago thelist – the mailing list of the evolt web developer community – had a short discussion about javascript libs (like e.g. jquery). Do they help with coding or not – i.e. do they help you to become an actual programmer or are they a simple way to do nifty stuff that you don’t actually understand?

I couldn’t contribute to the discussion, but still I’d like to mention here one of my problems with libraries. I often take over maintenance for sites that have been deserted by their original programmers, and usually when one of these web geniuses spontaneously combusts he burns with him all documentation. One of the sure signs of a web prodigy is that comments in the frontend code usually fail to tell anything useful. Instead I find little essays on why “Javascript sucks”, which is why they have used this amazing library (usually nebulous 0.1 or the promiscuous 0.0.5 pre-alpha) that allows for otherwise unsurmountable tasks like adding a rollover to an image or toggle display of a named element (and even if they used one of the better known scripting frameworks there are still at least a ten or twelve to choose from). So instead of programming in the one language javascript, which I by and by get the hang of (mostly due to Christian Heilmanns excellent book and web site) I suddenly have to look up documentation for a dozen or so libraries. And sometimes I wonder why my predecessors bothered at all to include a couple of hundred kb worth of Javascript when they then decided to rather use some method they’d concocted themself.

This is of course not an argument against libraries – I think by now it would be somewhat insane to built a Rich Interface Application without a javascript framework – but I still have to say that the purpose of libraries is often defeated at my end, when simple Javascript would be much easier to understand and maintain.

My suggestion would be not to use libs for the more mundane tasks but rather small, well documented scripts, never to include a library (or worse, multiple libraries) just because it has one effect that you particularly like and, if you can’t help to use a library then to actually use it and not replace parts of it with your own functions.

And if you are interested in Javascript your really should visit Chris Heilmanns web page wait-till-i.com (it feels a bit strange to advertise for him, since he’s some kind of web guru and I’m a goofball from Berlin, but still). While many people still look at JS as something that is slapped on top of a web page he sees it as a regular programming task, which means that the task at hand gets analyzed step by step before he starts writing code. I tried it and was amazed how much time you can save by taking the long way round.

Need a bit of feedback for the 1.5 module

By Eike Pierstorff

On September 11, 2007

In Joomla

I received a report about a strange bug in the alpha for the content item module for 1.5. The bug description is as follows:

1. I have created a module (contentitem item type) which is displaying one specific article and “Read more” link. It works fine.
2. I have linked that same article to a menu item. And then link in your module changes. And I get 404 error.

I have so far been unable to reproduce this, but experience teaches that you can test only so many configurations yourself. So I’m curios, has anybody else observed this kind of behaviour?

My famous (well, sort of) friends

By Eike Pierstorff

On September 7, 2007

In Books, Science Fiction

I’m almost cured, and will resume work soon. In the meantime I might as well do a bit of advertising for two friends who managed to get some of their stuff published:

Jakob has a short story in an anthology published by the german Wurdack Verlag. And Nadja Sennewald – already an established writer – has a new book out, Alien Gender, an Analysis of depiction of gender in TV Science Ficion Series. If you read german and are interested in SciFi and gender politics this might be for you.

Happy Birthday Voyager

By Eike Pierstorff

On September 5, 2007

In Space

Voyager 1 was launched Sept. 5, 1977 atop a Titan rocket with a Centaur-6 upper stage. Still operational for 30 years, Voyager 1 is more than 103.2 astronomical units away from the Sun.

Info at Wired: http://www.wired.com/science/space/multimedia/2007/09/gallery_voyager_30

A mission that was supposed to last just five years is celebrating its 30th anniversary this fall. Scientists continue to receive data from the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft as they approach interstellar space.

Info at NASA: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/voyager/voyagerf-20070905.html