"We had no choice but we got to cut it off...and then come down on rockets"

This really is some of the greatest advertising for a government agency I’ve ever seen. NASA recently released a video about the “seven minutes of terror,” referring to the 7 minutes between the time the Curiosity rover, set to land on Mars this upcoming August 5th, hits the top of the planet’s atmosphere, and the time in which the rover has successfully (or not) landed on the surface  – all before its engineers on Earth know what has happened to it. As opposed to the previous rovers, Opportunity, Spirit, and Sojourner, which were no larger than the size of an oversized RC toy, Curiosity is the size of a small SUV and weighs 1,654 pounds. This weight and size means that it’s too large to land on the surface using the traditional “airbag” approach, and so the engineers were required to reinvent the approach. The following video released from NASA shows the descent they plan on taking to the planet’s surface, first relying on the heat shield to keep the rover safe. Next, they plan on using a supersonic parachute in order to slow the rover down to just 100m/s. After using the parachute, a sky crane will be deployed at approximately 7.5 meters above the surface; the sky crane system will slow to a halt, and the rover will be gently lowered to the surface of the planet. The descent stage then flies away to a crash landing site, and the rover is theoretically ready to begin exploring the surface of the planet.

Check the following video for some of the engineers talking about the Entry, Descent, and Landing stages, and prepare to be amazed.

Sorry MSNBC, you can't outsmart death (yet)

An article earlier today was posted on the MSNBC website claiming that “coffee lovers less likely to die." Last I checked, every single person on the planet that has lived is subject to the scepter of death and not even coffee drinkers are immune. What they want to say is that drinking coffee is associated with lowering the risks that can lead to death, which is completely different. Sorry guys, try again next time!

FFmpeg Invalid Option directpred

While attempting to use ffmpeg to convert mp4 video, it appears that there's a fun little bug when attempting to use the preset files in /usr/local/share/ffmpeg in order to determine the encoding speed. However, when passing -vpre normal (or any of the other presets in the folder, this error occurs:

Unrecognized option 'directpred'
/usr/local/share/ffmpeg/libx264-normal.ffpreset: Invalid option or argument: 'directpred=3', parsed as 'directpred' = '3'

There doesn't appear to be much online, but this mentions it's been a problem with the git repository for just over a month now. Time to figure this thing out!

EDIT 01-07-2012 - I didn't find a direct solution to this error, but I believe I found a workaround. Specifying -preset instead of -vpre seems to have fixed the issue. I haven't been working on it for about a month now though, so I may be mistaken. Take with a grain of salt, but I hope it helps.

March 1

Well, it's the end of the winter quarter and I've had a tiny bit of time to read some articles. The three below are a couple that I've had in my browser for a short while, but are really pretty good.

• True Innovation [nytimes.com]
• How Red Hat killed its core product—and became a billion-dollar business [arstechnica.com]
• No Pulse: How Doctors Reinvented The Human Heart [popsci.com]

Good Technology Articles (and others)

It’s been quite a little while since I did this, but the number of links I have open in Opera is starting to get large enough I think there’s something wrong with me. So, with that, have some more interesting links relating in some way to technology!

• Meet Bill Gates, the Man Who Changed Open Source Software [wired.com]
• Video Tutorials of Everything [networkingprogramming.com]
• After ‘The Wire’ ended, actress Sonja Sohn couldn’t leave Baltimore’s troubled streets behind [washingtonpost.com]
• The Great Disk Drive in the Sky: How Web giants store big—and we mean big—data [arstechnica.com]
• Remembering the "long distance warrior" who took down Ma Bell [arstechnica.com]
• As Anonymous protests, Internet drowns in inaccurate anti-ACTA arguments [arstechnica.com]

And with 2012, we have the end of the world!

Ok, maybe not. Actually, definitely not; the odds of anything ending the world sometime this year are slimmer than the chances you’ll see a cow wearing roller skates while taking a plane flight across the Atlantic.

But don’t forget Iran!

Anyway, I had a really good break. We had a total of three weeks this year instead of the regular two, so that was a nice little change (I think; I’m at the point where the extra week gave me worse sleeping habits that will stick around for longer than I’d like). We got back here the second week of January, and started classes that Monday. It was interesting getting back to class since we’d been off for the three weeks, so people either didn’t want to work or just forgot most of the things from before the break. It was a week partially wasted, but not completely since it still served a decent use for catching up.

2011…what a year. I won’t bore you with all the details, so I’ll just list some of the highlights I get from looking at my calendar (ok maybe there are a few boring details in here, so you can skip to whatever you’d like):

January – I continued working at ITS Desktop Support, and was in the beginning ballroom dancing class, which I didn’t completely mind (fancy that!). I was enrolled as well in Systems Administration I which was certainly a challenge, but well worth it with the professor.

February – I officially left ITS Desktop Support after an extended review process, and started working at RIT Research Computing. I’ve been working there ever since, and have learned a ton about Linux video streaming, creation, and distribution.

March – The new quarter started, and I took Computer Crime, Information Security Policies, as well as a couple others. RIT Players put on Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog which was fantastic and which I went to see twice.

April – I performed updates for the TJ Sun systems over the week of the 15th-22nd, which was one of my last major functions as a TJ Sysadmin. I’ve continued to “consult” since then, but nothing of that size (reinstalling about 10 servers and essentially recreating the entire lab’s filesystem structure, as well as Sun Ray servers). O.A.R. came to RIT, and I went to go see that with Shawn. One of the first concerts I’ve ever been to, I  remember having a pretty good time.

May – I was involved in my first Imagine RIT with the RC department. It was certainly an experience, one that I hope to help improve my public speaking skills with next year. I started working at IOMAXIS for my first official RIT co-op and met fantastic people and learned a ton.

June – I went to the wedding of two awesome friends, and traveled to St. Louis to my cousin’s wedding as well! It was a good month :) After the weddings I went off for a week to the Arlington Diocese WorkCamp, where ~400 high school teens worked on houses to help rebuild and give residents more safe and secure accommodations.

July – I went to the DC fireworks for the 4th of July; as usual, they were pretty spectacular. I had a slight bit of mouth surgery later in the month to get rid of a slight nagging problem, and that was July.

August – Starting off the month at the beach is great! I went down to North Carolina again with Youth Apostles to enjoy the sand/sun and had a fun time. I finished up at work for the summer, and started preparing to go back to school

September – Started my third year of college back up here at RIT. I continued working at RC, and took Network Services (one heck of a class). I started going to some SPARSA meetings, and started semi-regularly going to RIT events like evening movies, various student activities, etc. Also on my agenda was getting more involved in the Newman parish up here.

October – I managed to get out of the RIT area and headed off to Letchworth with people from Newman.  Other than continuing to actually become social and go to various events and BarCamp, It was a pretty uninteresting month.

November – I saw the 13th Animation Show of Shows when it was at RIT – this was a *fantastic* event of videos from large and small animators. After that I started getting more involved in Mrow.org services, so now I’ve pretty much rebuilt many of the services run  under the domain on two servers in my apartment. For Thanksgiving break I stopped in Baltimore for a couple of days to visit friends and had a good time exploring the city and having Faidleys crab cakes!

December – We started winter quarter and I took SysAdmin II, Advanced Routing/Switching, Perl for SysAdmins, and Human Resource Management. The course load is pretty intense, but the knowledge gain is worth it. In about the third week of classes I was given the offer to join a fraternity, which was something I never intended on or even planned for when starting college. Over break I met up with a bunch of TJ kids and helped organize the 2nd SAAA meet-up.


Over the course of the year, I had the chance to partake in activities and things that have helped me to become a bit of a more social person while still maintaining my personal ideals, beliefs, and work ethics. This definitely helped to increase the closeness of some of my friendships, which have been great to me and are wonderful things that I certainly couldn’t live without.

The year definitely ended on a high note, and I hope that 2012 increases in awesomeness and continues to deliver unexpected results for the better. Here’s to a fun school, interesting ideas, and absolutely awesome friends! 2012, here we come.

Week 9!

Well it’s Thursday of week 9…we have the rest of this week and next, and then get into our finals (what fun). I figured I’d take a quick break to post some sort of update on here.

One of the few activities outside of school/homework I’ve done lately was attend the PostSecret presentation last Wednesday. I had never heard of it before, but it’s “an ongoing community mail art project, created by Frank Warren, in which people mail their secrets anonymously on a homemade postcard.” People send things in on all kinds of things to him, including bananas and a whole host of other items, and reveal some sort of secret on the card that they’ve never told anybody else. At the end of his presentation the floor was opened up to people in the audience brave enough to get up to the microphone and tell everyone about something they were willing to share.

Reflecting upon what people were saying got me thinking about some of my own personal secrets and internal feelings. I mulled things over in the back of my mind as I went about life and classes, and eventually just started writing everything I was thinking down. The act of taking partial thoughts and forcing myself to be able to form full ideas on paper from them was certainly an interesting task, especially when I’ve sometimes only half thought about the idea. I started with the original intent of making myself a list of secrets that I have, but it really evolved more into general feelings and thoughts that I have, some that are fairly recent and others that have been evolving and changing shape for a while. At the end of it, I ended up with about three pages of random thoughts in no particular order, but all of which influence the way I act, feel, and generally go about life.

One thing that ended up coming out of the “brainstorming” activity and some thinking since then was the sentiment of the saying “you don’t realize what you have until it’s gone.” My mind may be thinking 1,000 steps ahead and predicting some sort of worst-case scenarios of how that relates to me, but it certainly puts the joys and privileges of life into perspective. Life is definitely not something to speed through. Get out and do things, have fun, sad, angry, fantastic, exceptional experiences, and enjoy everything that other people and things have to offer :)

And your (my) slightly-regular randomly interesting Internet links!

• The end of an era: Internet Explorer drops below 50% of Web usage [arstechnica.com]
• CNET details the death of Microsoft's Courier and Bill Gates' 'allergic reaction' [engadget.com]
• Chart: One Year of Prison Costs More Than One Year at Princeton [theatlantic.com]
• John McCarthy — Father of AI and Lisp — Dies at 84 [wired.com]
• Ten years of Windows XP: how longevity became a curse [arstechnica.com]
• When passwords attack: the problem with aggressive password policies [arstechnica.com]
• Japan Pushes World’s Fastest Computer Past 10 Petaflop Barrier