Space & Tech newsdump

Busy with uni work and yes, projects! =P
[need to finish an Android app in two 1-week sprints that allows year 10 students to learn functional programming by doing it!]
So as pointed out already, I'll abandon the idea of posting news items as blog articles regularly. This doesn't mean I'll stop posting all news type articles though!

Because I don't want to spend the time regurgitating news articles in nice English, here's a link dump of noteworthy articles in the past few weeks: (it also serves as a personal favourite/bookmarker =P) =D

http://www.sciencealert.com/australian-researchers-have-converted-sunlight-into-electricity-with-more-than-40-efficiency

http://garethhayes.net/hackrf-blue/

http://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/2014/11/22/private-cubesat-start-ups-join-the-space-race/14165748001263

www.space.com/27588-nasa-asteroid-capture-mission-mars.html

http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/factory-upgrade

Why CSIRO is important:
http://csironewsblog.com/2014/11/20/megans-seven-reasons/

gmailblog.blogspot.com.au/2014/11/going-under-hood-of-inbox.html

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/01/penniless_and_desperate_wikipedia_sits_on_60m_cash/

http://lunar.xprize.org/news/blog/lunar-mission-one-takes-crowd-funded-route-moon

www.space.com/27936-nasa-orion-spaceship-survives-test-flight.html

http://www.space.com/27833-nasa-orion-capsule-first-test-flight-infographic.html

https://www.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/wiki/faq

www.space.com/27944-nasa-orion-spaceship-textbook-spaceflight.html

http://www.csoonline.com/article/2853027/malware-cybercrime/report-hacker-group-fin4-stealing-insider-info-to-exploit-significant-changes-in-stock-prices.html

http://www.citylab.com/cityfixer/2014/09/when-adding-bike-lanes-actually-reduces-traffic-delays/379623/

http://www.parabolicarc.com/2014/12/08/jaxa-testing-deep-space-microsat-with-asteroid-flyby/

http://www.livescience.com/49028-farthest-quantum-teleportation.html

www.space.com/27955-spacex-rocket-ocean-landing-platform.html

http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-tesla-plugs-into-australia-20141209-story.html
Tesla finally updates their website to show superchargers on the Hume Hwy in 2015! YESS!! Can't wait to drive a Tesla from MEL-CBR! =)

UAV OutBack Challenge update & Bonus Space Pic

As expected, CanberraUAV - who almost completed the UAV Outback Challenge last time - won the challenge, taking home $50k in prize money. 2 years ago they failed only because their bottle deployed unintentionally during flight. This year, they got the bottle within 3 metres (2.6) of Outback Joe (who they're trying to find and rescue with a bottle, in this S&R competition scenario).

Here's a great write-up debrief by them:   (obligatory iframe)

Make sure to check out the really cool software they put up on github! And also that documentation repo. One of the coolest things about CanberraUAV is how open they are (as in open-source), and how much they share with other teams!

Unfortunately, while the Monash UAS team's (which I joined recently) plane flew very well, they couldn't find Joe. I'll be going to the internal debrief on Tuesday and hopefully learn more, as well as try and locate Joe using (augmentations of) our software from our data gathered.


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Space pretties incoming! Check this photo! (link to NASA APOD page)
Much wow. So mind-bend - how?!. Also check out a lot of the guy's other really cool photos. I obviously really like the aurora photos in his gallery.

Oh how wonderful blogs and forum posts that solve your problems/issues

Here is a post dedicated to all the wonderful blogs and forum posts that solve your problems/issues. That feeling you get solving the issue after the frustration of the problem is quite invigorating.
... Until the next problem appears.

Today it was a quick google search and I found the solution and solved my simple problem of a cached sources list getting corrupted. That Skype one plagued me for months (also mostly because I worked around the problem and my initial search didn't yield the solution)!

Pidgin - my favourite IM, and Skype crashing my X Session

Pidgin - Because all the protocols are in one place =)
Skype, MSN, FB, Steam, etc.
Unfortunately Skype's a nuisance and needs to be running for pidgin to incorporate it.

Pidgin works cross-platform so I can have my logs (at ~/.purple/logs) symlinked to my window's partition logs so cross-partitions they're all the same logs =)
I could also symlink some of the files as shown in the config file link below. 

Good cheatsheet for config files:
https://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/ConfigurationFiles

Learnt that account.xml contained saved passwords in plain text.
https://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/PlainTextPasswords

And that Pidgin 3.0 will support a keyring feature (Like KWallet, Secret Service)
https://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/KeyringSupport

Help Pidgin get there! https://developer.pidgin.im/roadmap

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Speaking of Skype being a nuisance, for some reason when I logged into Skype my X session would crash, and the KDE log-in splash would display (logging back in). Since my KDE saves the previous session and restores it on login/boot, Skype would run and auto-login, and crash the session again, so I had to spam killall skype to stop the loop. 

Here is how I went about researching the bug trail to the fix:

[OK, so I wrote the intro above this line a couple of months ago and kind of forgot the whole process of how I got to the problem but here is a summary:]

While searching for a solution to the problem, I found this:
community.skype.com/t5/Linux/Skype-forces-reboot-on-Ubuntu-11-10/m-p/2844027
I may have used the search term I got while running skype in the terminal or something (still not too sure where Skype stores its logs)

Xlib: extension "RANDR" missing on display ":0.0".
skype: Fatal IO error 11 (Resource temporarily unavailable) on X server :0.0.

So my suspicions that it was related to the X server were confirmed, but I still didn't know the cause.
Then I found this:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2183029
And the work-around actually worked so now I hypothesise Skype loads some font loaded by X in "unix/:7100" and that supposedly caused it to crash.

The bug is in launchpad:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg-server/+bug/738526

I opted to comment out the part in my xorg.conf instead of going to the extreme of uninstalling XFS:

# Apparently comment the below out to stop Skype crashing X Session
# Or sudo apt-get remove xfs (X Font Server)
#Section "Files"
#    FontPath        "unix/:7100"
#EndSection

Edit: Skype dumps massive (read GBs) of log files. If you delete the folder ~/.Skype/Logs as per this link from Arch forums, it won't create logs any more. It's probably some nefarious NSA reporting method.

EVs and Coding upstream/downstream

Prime example of using data/paper references to deliberately misconstrue understanding:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/currency/2013/10/why-electric-vehicles-have-stalled.html
Sure petrol releases half as much CO2 than the electric grid, (direct energy - e.g. burning petrol or coal) not including the LCA stuff for mining, obtaining and transporting the fuels or energy (transmission grids).
But petrol engines are around 20% efficient but with electric transmission and electric motors like Tesla's car, they have an efficiency of about 90% - that's around 4* as much, meaning even with coal-burning electricity generation, you're only releasing half as much CO2 per energy to the wheels with electricity than petrol. And with green power or nuclear, you can drastically reduce CO2 output, so transferring the fuel into energy is best done en-masse, instead of inside everyone's individual car 'generators' =P

Also nice link about dependencies, which relates to last post's project release: Ubuntu chapter 8 on dependences! =)
http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2013/10/how-code-flows-about-upstream-and-downstream/

Inclusive Hackathon - attracting larger audiences for STEM, hacker/maker/geek events

Here's an interesting post about attracting larger audience for a hackathon

Kid's can't use computers

http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/

Interesting article about how kids or the younger generation these days aren't really computer literate. They're just proficient users of browsers and web-apps.

Without reference to Wikipedia, can you tell me what the difference is between The Internet, The World Wide Web, a web-browser and a search engine?

Had to wikipedia what WWW was.

Can't wait for COMP3300 and COMP3310 xP. Also need to be proficient in at least one language =/

OpenShot video editor v 2

So I realise I've been blogging about games (most on Linux) lately, especially with my yearning for Star Citizen to hurry up and get made.
This post, I won't use the 'games' tag. =)

So I was casually browsing kickstarter as you do, and found THIS. Evoking memories of trying hard to find a proper video editing software, finding the most feature filled one on Linux being a readily crashable OpenShot video editor ;P It also kind of reminds me of getting blender and being completely stumped at how to use it. (Along with Maya).
This was back in 2010, and we were able to put together a simple video:


Now, I'm happy to see more work being done, OpenShot getting a new framework, fixing apparently 99% of previous bugs, and cross-platform support.
Oh, and they're switching to Qt from GTK. I liked GTK back on Ubuntu10.04 with GNOME, because Qt would usually look ugly or fail, but now that I'm on Kubuntu12.04, both work pretty well from an end-user point of view. Here's a funny port GIMP to Qt thread that descends into mini-flamewar from the middle till near the end.
Anyway, obligatory iframe of latest blog post (which includes a restrained comment on Operating Systems for devs which I can understand/agree upon):


P.S. Yes, I'm running out of holidays to finish two arty projects in the works, one which was intended to be released a while ago =S; Also, may be starting a eng/tech project (finally!)

It's (almost) Fully Official!!! -CryEngine on Linux

Steam for linux just reported that Crytek are hiring Linux Devs to maintain their Linux support for CryEngine. 
Yep, this means more quality games on Linux and Star Citizen for Linux almost 100% confirmed. 

Hmm interesting to note they prefer C++ as the OO language ..

Is this the announcement that Chris Roberts was wanting to make but couldn't make just yet that would happily surprise Linux and Mac gamers?

Phoronix's article here. Apparently the source Phoronix had for the early CryEngine Linux rumour was recommended to Valve by Phoronix!
Previous CryEngine Linux rumour post here.

I read Phoronix's article on the CryEngine port before, but although I do have more than 50% confidence in Phoronix, it was still the only source I could find on the net before I got excited at the Wii U getting support.
To me, I think Phoronix is like the Parabolic Arc of the computing world (and Parabolic Arc the Phoronix of the space world). Great early fan-news blogs!

Linux is totally picking up pace =3

Google Chrome and them devs =P

http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/w00t.html in an iframe:

Lol. Deving for google MUST be fun =P

Found this while wanted a fast browser for Firefox-not-compatible things and fed up with Chromium as it often crashes now.

Scrolling Shooter

Just a tutorial with added features.
'Programmed' from easy to use game maker.
Download here:
http://www.box.net/shared/ckkh5cfqm8
GameMaker files here:
http://www.box.net/shared/f0qv23xr63

TanX

Year 9 Software Development project.
Done in the easy Visual Basic .NET
Quite a few bugs remaining including stopping of time/movement when the bullet is fired.
Have to warn, not very entertaining as only one level and would be better with more development (unlikely now). 

Download game:
http://www.box.net/shared/ccxqkasx6b
Download VB files (folder):
http://www.box.net/shared/cp6ujnvkqm
Please acknowledge me and my partner's work when using elsewhere and leave the credits.

A more entertaining game would be the addictive scroll shooter located here.