Derecho Hits the DMV area

A Story about WWII that China Would Like You to Know

Characters from The Muppets banter while cameras are tested – hilarity ensues

Pennsylvania Avenue from 1903 has items that look both oddly similar and different than it does today

The Affordable Care Act appears to be a tax, not a mandate, and will expand health coverage of Americans

Apparently disabling user accounts in Active Directory doesn’t disable their access to Exchange mail accounts. Who knew?

A giant derecho hits the DC/Maryland/Virginia area during record-breaking heat, leaving approximately 2M without power and some without clean water. Restoration could take days, according to Dominion, Pepco, and others. It also causes problems with the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud.

A Commentary on Public Education (and more)

Bill Gates talks candidly about the state of the US economic system and gives his thoughts

Atari celebrates its 40th year as a company

For the second time, the Internet falls for a hoax; the “Destination Time” in the first Back to the Future movie on the DeLorean’s display panel was modified to show a different date, and the picture quickly went viral

How Winamp fell from being arguably the greatest MP3 player to just another in the pack of music programs

The rise and fall of the France-wide web – another victim of the Internet revolution

A new Army data network starts to be deployed, sadly too late to catch most of the current wars

Poor ol’ RIM loses $518 million in Q1 2013 and starts cutting 5,000 jobs; they’re on my bankruptcy/death watchlist, are they on yours?

"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]