SS1 Launch

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Spaceship One is in the air right now, riding on its carrier plane, White Knight, for its second suborbital flight, the first flight of its X-Prize attempt. Best of luck to them on this historic launch.

More links: SpaceflightNow SS1 Status Center here, for live text updates, and NASA TV has a live webcast. Discussion on Slashdot.

Update, 11:30am: Launched, lofted, and landed. There was a scary stability problem at the start: the craft entered a wicked roll for several seconds after its rocket fired. The rest of the flight seems to have gone smoothly, but that roll is an issue they’ll have to address before the next prize attempt on Monday.

Some tiny low-res screenshots from SS1’s own onboard videocam during the flight:

Tobacco on Trial on WordPress

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We have a new weblog project up at work: Tobacco on Trial, tracking the progress of the government lawsuit against the tobacco industry.

The blog runs on WordPress, with a variation of Binarybonsai’s Kubrick for layout. I had a bit of a struggle modifying Kubrick’s stylesheet: simplifying the design, removing the need for extra background images, trimming redundant CSS declarations — Michael Heilemann’s method of CSS organization is different from mine. (Not that my stylesheets are any paragon of virtue.) The final design needs only one graphic for the title (which I bring into <#header h1> with FIR), and uses a couple of colored boxes and white background for everything else. When I have time I’ll put the template up somewhere.

This was my first serious WordPress project. It’s an excellent CMS, easy to install and run, with lots of practical, useful features where they’re needed — easily hide-able where they’re not. The admin interface is a refreshing break from the crufty, kludgy wasteland of open-source CMS interfaces. (Much more on that some other time.) “Official” support is fairly patchy compared to MovableType, as this is open-source, after all, but the forum is friendly and responsive, and the wiki is a perfect tool to gradually accrete collaborative knowledge in the absence of a paid support staff.

Probably my only complaint about WordPress is templating: you need to know PHP (or have a keen eye for find-replace) to do any mucking about with template code. Having everything in a single file means lots of large, nested if-else structures, which gets confusing. Additionally, certain template “tags” (actually just various functions called inside <? PHP tags ?>) are not particularly customizable (the_excerpt(), I’m looking at you). Gladly, WP coders know what they’re doing, and have been quite intelligent about indentation and commenting, both in the index.php template and in the WP code itself.

(I was also going to complain about WordPress making the common open-source CMS mistake of cluttering the home directory with all its files and dependencies, rather than “sanctifying” the CMS into a separate location like MT does, but, happily, that issue has been covered in the wiki.)

Conclusion: I like WordPress a lot, and I’ll certainly be using it for future blog-based projects. But we’re just friends.

MovableTabulaRasa

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I’ve determined that in order to completely wipe all your Movable Type entries, comments, categorizations, trackbacks, and sent pings, while leaving configuration and templates intact, you need to truncate only the following tables in your Movable Type MySQL db:

  • mt_category
  • mt_comment
  • mt_entry
  • mt_placement
  • mt_tbping
  • mt_trackback

When that’s done, you have a virtual tabula rasa, into which entries, comments, and pings can be re-imported — assuming you remembered to export them from MT before embarking on this foolish endeavor of renumbering archived entries chronologically, under one category.

(Also, when importing entries into Movable Type from a text file, don’t hit Stop. It keeps going even if you try to interrupt the process, and if you try to do an import again while that’s going on, you end up with duplicates of everything. A long, slow process when you have 2,420 entries and over 3,300 comments.)

Soon: thoughts on WordPress.

Outside the NMAI

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I walked down to the new National Museum of the American Indian this afternoon, hoping to catch a short line in its last open hour, but no luck: while the museum remains popular, entry requires a timed pass, and it will probably be so for a long time, as with the Holocaust Museum and the Washington Monument. I took some pictures instead, then walked around the First Americans Festival to get some native corn soup with pork (slightly gamy) and iced mint tea (minty!).

The NMAI is a lovely structure, yellow stone and sweeping curves evoking native dwellings and the natural world, while simultaneously complementing the the neighboring Capitol Dome and the gravelly paths of the Mall. A fitting tribute to America’s native heritage, I think.

(Photos taken with an Aiptek Mini Pencam 1.3MP SD.)

False Alarm Again

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Fire alarms normally have that long, steady machine-gun ring which brings you right back to high school: persistent, alarming, as they are meant to be. The alarm I heard at 2:00 AM this morning was different: claaannnngggg, pause, claaannnngggg, pause, claaannnngggg, like a high-pitched church bell.

Not an uncommon occurrence in this apartment building; I had often heard the alarms ringing away on other floors in the past — but school-style, not this slow, steady tolling — and I simply assumed it was my floor’s turn tonight. I picked up the phone, dialed up building management (not in the building, unfortunately), and told the late-night emergency line operator that the alarms were going off again.

Pandora was not too happy about this.

About ten minutes later, the bells were still going, and there were agitated voices in the hallway. I opened my door (quite forgetting that in a real fire, one is supposed to feel the doorknob for heat and crouch first) and leaned out in time to see a neighbor fleeing down the stairs. From what I could hear, the bells were going off on all the floors now, and I gathered that I should probably err on the side of caution and get out as well.

After herding my iBook, power adapter, wallet, and other pocketable items into a backpack, I grabbed a protesting Pandora, stuffed her into her as-yet unused carrier, and headed down the stairs. There were neither flames nor smoke, but by the time I reached the front door, about thirty of my neighbors were milling on the sidewalk outside, and a fire engine had pulled up.

As expected, it turned out to be a false alarm. To everyone’s annoyance, the key to the alarm controls was with the landlady, who lived off-site. It was another hour before someone came to switch off the clanging bells so everyone in the building could get back to sleep.

This was not the first time. Nonetheless, the night served as a suitable drill, so now I know just how fast I can get me and the cat out of the building.

Jebus

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Lileks on Swaggart and atheists. “But I have no time for atheists who look at the good works of churches, and nevertheless feel superior because they don’t believe in a Magic Book.”

My gauge for an atheist’s intellect is the word “Jebus.” The moment someone uses that tired Simpsons gag, I regard him about as credible as those sophomoric types who equate God with the tooth fairy, call Microsoft “Micro$haft,” and spell “America” with a triple K. (Apologies to anyone who’s joked around me with “Jebus” and got a snippy remark.)

The real Jebus, of course, was an old name for Jerusalem, and the Jebusites were a Canaanite tribe who persisted in the area until King David sacked the city.

(Aside: that Simpsons episode was most notable to me for the PBS jokes at the start. “You’re a thief! A common thief!”)

That Burning Sensation

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Amy gifted me with a pot of fresh basil over the summer, and tonight I took the first leaf cuttings to a pan of chili basil chicken on rice. Instead of fresh chili, however, I picked up a jar of Thai chili-garlic paste at Da Hua Market in Chinatown, and unsure of what quantity of paste equalled a teaspoon of chopped chili, I went with three teaspoons. That turned out to be three times too much. It burns, (yum) it burns!

Rovers, Awake

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The Mars Rovers are back in contact with Earth after a two week comm blackout caused by Mars passing behind the sun. With lots of power and some extended funding from NASA, it looks like we’ll be getting much more science — and cool photos — from Mars for a while longer. For me, that means more photos to wiggle.

JPL has put out two graphics mapping the rovers’ routes through orbital imagery: Spirit and Opportunity. I’m wondering how long it’ll be before some woowoo starts raving about the New Face in the upper right corner of the Spirit travel map:

A New Face on Mars So who do you think that looks like?

Update: Hey, I know who that new Mars face looks like!

The New Mars Face looks like John Kerry!

I also posted this to the Bad Astronomy Message Board.

Photoshopped Future of the Past

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So, it turns out that the 1954 vision of the 2004 computer which Presurfer linked was a skillfully done Photoshop job of a nuclear submarine manuevering room console, posted to a Fark Photoshop thread. I got taken in, but it should have been obvious on a closer look, with the ragged feathering on the left edge of that pasted-in teletype machine, and the too-sharp RCA television box floating there like a Photoshop layer with a drop shadow under it. Still, brilliant graphic work, and equally brilliant spotting from these Metafilterites.