Contact lost with India’s Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter August 30, 2009
Posted by Emir in Science and Technology, Space.Tags: chandrayaan-1, india, isro, moon, space, spacecraft
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Artist's concept of Chandrayaan-1 in lunar orbit
The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has lost contact with its Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter. Chandrayaan-1 was launched in October 2008 as India’s first lunar probe, carrying aboard it eleven (11) scientific instruments from partners in the United States and Europe.
As part of its mission, the probe carried out mapping of the lunar topography in 3D and identification of its chemical characteristics. Data beamed back to Bangalore has provided information on the formation of the moon and the possible presence of water frozen in the lunar regolith. The presence of water has serious implications for a manned presence as it will reduce any outpost’s reliance on raw material from Earth.
Contact was lost on the night of Saturday 29th August 2009. As of yet no reason has been given for the loss of contact, but it may be noted that other problems have been had with the spacecraft before. Any space mission carries with it considerable risk. The important part is that even though its mission may have been cut short, Chandrayaan-1 has been an enormous success.
In 2012, the ISRO intends to launch the Chandrayaan-2 mission which will include both an orbiter and a lunar rover. Both missions will provide invaluable science and should aid NASA’s eventual return to the lunar surface via the Constellation programme circa 2020. Constellation will involve a series of landings at the south pole’s Shackleton Crater culminating in a permanent moon base at that location.
Restore XP bootloader after trying Windows 7 July 23, 2009
Posted by Emir in Information Technology, Science and Technology.Tags: bootloader, dual boot, easybcd, fixmbr, vista, windows 7, xp
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If you have installed the Windows 7 Release Candidate in dual boot alongside Windows XP, you may eventually for whatever reason wish to remove Windows 7. Today that is exactly what I had to do. First I will tell you what did not work:
What did not work was what may be considered the “usual” way to get rid of the second OS. I began by deleting my Windows 7 partition. The Windows XP install CD is capable of this, but I used a GParted Live CD. GParted is a free Linux based utility that allows not only adding and removing partitions, but resizing as well. I opted to expand the Windows XP partition to fill the entire hard drive.
With Windows 7 gone, I rebooted the machine off the Windows XP CD. When prompted, selected “R” to enter the Recovery Console and ran the fixmbr command to rewrite the boot sector.
Now here’s what happened…I rebooted and found myself facing the Windows 7 bootloader despite the fact that Windows 7 no longer resided on that system. I ran a search on Google and found that I was not alone in XP failing to restore its bootloader after a Windows 7 – and apparently sometimes Windows Vista – removal. I could still boot into XP by selecting “Earlier version of Windows” from the boot menu, but who wants to do that?
I would strongly recommend a small, free Windows utility called EasyBCD from NeoSmart Technologies. Once installed all you need to do is click on “Manage Bootloader”, select “Uninstall the Vista Bootloader” and click on “WriteMBR”. That’s it! The Windows 7 (or Vista) bootloader will be removed and you will be operating exactly as you were before dual booting.
Voyager: Surviving our time July 19, 2009
Posted by Emir in Science and Technology, Space, Thoughts.Tags: carter, golden record, nasa, space, termination shock, voyager
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In 1977 NASA launched the Voyager spacecraft. On concluding their respective missions to the outer planets, the probes were cast off into interstellar space where it will be on the scale of tens and hundreds of thousands of years before either pass even close to another star system.
The probes flew with the Golden Records; discs containing sounds of the Earth, greetings from mankind, the origins of the probes and instructions on how to play the records. In addition, they carried a statement by U.S. President Jimmy Carter. The statement read:
“We cast this message into the cosmos… Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some — perhaps many — may have inhabited planets and space faring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message: We are trying to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope some day, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of Galactic Civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination and our goodwill in a vast and awesome universe.”
When you think about it, this is a truly profound message. The likelihood that these probes would ever be recovered by another civilization is next to nothing. Perhaps by sheer statistics, it could happen one day but how far into the future would that be? What is truly amazing is that these machines will certainly outlive the society that created them.
Today both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are on the periphery of the solar system, passing through the Termination Shock where the influence of the Sun meets the galactic winds of the Milky Way. Long after their power runs out these vessels will still carry that message; a statement to the cosmos that once upon a time, mankind existed on the third planet from Sol.
To the Moon and back again July 19, 2009
Posted by Emir in Science and Technology, Space.Tags: apollo, moon, nasa, orion, shuttle, space
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“The Eagle has landed” – Forty years ago the first human beings touched down on the surface of the Moon. You know; forty years is a lifetime.
No human being has set foot on the Moon since 1972. Since the retirement of Apollo we have not had a manned vehicle capable of making the trip. The Space Shuttle was a marvel of engineering; it is reusable, can carry huge loads into orbit and glide down to a conventional runway landing. The Shuttle retires next year after almost 30 years of service and only two vehicle losses.
Starting in 2015, for the first time in decades a space agency will once again fly a manned, Moon capable spacecraft. NASA returns to the capsule design with Orion and has planned a series of lunar landings with the aim of establishing a manned outpost on the Moon’s south pole. Eventually, the findings of that project are hoped to be put to use in finally landing a man on Mars.
This is great news of course, but it is shameful that t has taken us this long to get back there. In the 1960s pioneers envisioned a permanent human presence on Mars and manned trips to the asteroid belt and Jupiter’s moons. Ideas for advanced autonomous probes exploring neighboring star systems were on the table: see Project Daedalus and Project Longshot.
This is all just NASA. Over the years, the European and Russian space agencies have not fared much better. Only recently has China entered the fray but has only managed to send people into orbit. The visionaries of decades gone by are probably turning in their graves.
The one saving grace of this whole mess is that technology has come a very long way since the Apollo era. We know a great deal more today and in many ways the technologies are far more accessible. A few years ago the first privately funded spacecraft entered suborbital space and soon Virgin Galactic will be flying a fleet of SpaceShipTwo suborbital spaceplanes to paying customers. Initiatives are under way to encourage private advancements beyond suborbital trips: look up the Bigelow Prize and the Google Lunar X-Prize.
We may yet have a shot at that future of a spacefaring society. There are still the detractors of course; that we should fix all our problems here on Earth before venturing elsewhere. I find the proposition naive. There will always be problems to be fixed, but that has never stopped anyone from exploring and venturing into the unknown. Why should we stop that now? That apart, I wonder if the detractors of space exploration have ever looked up all the advancements in everything from kitchenware to medicine that developed out of the space programme?
The benefits of private enterprise getting involved in space are simple: There will always be an effort to get better for cheaper, it becomes available to the general public, and there are no political detractors for all that matters is that there is a market to sell it to.
Some thoughts on Windows 7 July 6, 2009
Posted by Emir in Information Technology.Tags: family pack, license, microsoft, preview pane, touchpad, windows, windows 7
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I have been playing around a bit with the Windows 7 Release Candidate, particularly at work where it resides on a Dell Latitude E5500 laptop in a dual boot configuration with Windows XP Professional. Lately I have been using that laptop a bit and I must say that I am loving this OS.
Working in a live environment
As a member of a Windows 2003 domain, Windows 7 sometimes displays a little exclamation mark on the system tray’s network icon, and the Network and Sharing Center indicates that there is no internet connection despite being able to connect to the web using both IE8 and Firefox 3.5. For the most part this remains little more than a bug that does not really impact any functionality and I suspect to be due to our proxy settings. That said, it’s a Microsoft network through and through, so as far as I am concerned this should not be happening at all.
Windows 7 is of course able to access the file server without issue, and Symantec Endpoint installed over the network just as well as with a Vista or XP client. All software thus far has worked flawlessly including a legacy 16-bit application. The laptop suspends upon snapping the lid about as fast as the XP installation on the same system and resumes to the welcome screen instantly upon re-opening the lid.
One feature that I liked is the fact that the screen dims after a period of inactivity while on battery power. I have seen this feature before on Ubuntu Linux but it is a newcomer to the Windows world, at least as a native feature of the OS. This is a good way to conserve battery charge before enough time has elapsed to shut off the display entirely.
Laptop Touchpad
The most significant annoyance I had with the laptop installation of Windows 7 RC was the loss of the touchpad’s scrolling functionality. Windows 7 detected the touchpad as simply a PS/2 mouse. My advice is to forget the websites that suggest downloading the drivers from Synaptics’ website. You won’t break your touchpad but getting back your scrolling capabilities is strictly hit or miss. I suggest installing the Vista touchpad drivers for your laptop – it worked perfectly for me.
Preview Pane
One feature I am especially impressed with is the preview pane. At first I didn’t like the new right-side orientation of the preview pane, but once I got accustomed to scrolling through photos up/down instead of left/right it was like second nature. What excited me though is the ability to preview many different types of documents simply by selecting the icon in explorer. I have used this to preview not only images but text files, PDF documents, Excel spreadsheets and even a C source file. I have included a screenshot of an Excel spreadsheet being previewed in this manner.
Windows 7 Preview Pane - Excel spreadsheet
Family Pack
I have encountered in my readings that Microsoft may be offering “Family Pack” for Windows 7. It turns out there is some wording in the Microsoft Software License Terms for Windows 7 that suggests Microsoft may be offering a Windows 7 package that permits installation on up to three (3) computers in the same household. I wonder what the pricing may be like on an offer such as that? It does make sense for Microsoft to pursue this sort of arrangement as there are now a great deal of households with multiple personal computers. I ran across this at CNET News’ Beyond Binary by Ina Fried which in turn referenced Kristian Kenny’s Digital Life.
Conclusion
The more I use Windows 7 is the more I am finding it to be everything Vista should have been. It is just as sleek as Vista, but it is faster, just as stable as 2000, XP and Vista were before it and well thought out. It is not flawless, but it is still quite good especially considering that while the Release Candidate is close to the finished product, it is not the final build.
Id10t errors June 29, 2009
Posted by Emir in Humour, Information Technology.Tags: funny, id10t, technology, user error
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Working in the field of IT, or even just as someone who knows something about how to flip a switch, you are going to be dealing with those who are not as well versed in “technology”.
I am sure many of us such “tech savy” people can relate to being the go-to guy/gal for anything that plugs into an electrical socket. Sometimes however, the problems people run into have nothing to do with some complicated thigamabob.
I remember for example once being called by a rather nervous sounding lady who said her computer had suddenly tripped off and was not coming back on. Truth be told, she had somehow stretched out and had her high-heel make contact with the little switch on the power strip from which her “personal confuser” had been feeding.
Problems with forgetting about the power button and expecting everything to work while various cables such as power and video are disconnected are common. These occurrences are often accompanied by rants and raves followed by awkward silence once the situation is addressed.
When I get these sorts of user errors I of course have to be nice about it, and professional especially at work, but deep down inside I feel like Roy from episode one of the British sitcom, The IT Crowd. I just want to yell out, “I’m sorry, are you from the past???”
You may be wondering what inspired this entry so I’ll be nice and tell you. Besides; I’d probably spontaneously combust and burn to a cinder if I didn’t. It goes like this: Tonight a certain family figure called me because the keyboard of the computer being used was not working. I hit some keys, looked for a Num Lock or Caps Lock light and truly, it was dead. I then took a gander at the back of the system and immediately saw the problem. To miss it would be like ignoring a large elephant dance about in a pink tutu and earrings on the hood of my car. In an effort to connect another device, the keyboard’s USB connector had been pulled out and then pushed back in. The only thing was that the keyboard plug didn’t go back into a USB port. It was instead jabbed into the pins of the serial port.
Oh boy.
Windows 7 RC June 28, 2009
Posted by Emir in Information Technology.Tags: microsoft, os, windows, windows 7
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Microsoft Windows 7
Those of you who follow the IT industry would probably know by now that Microsoft is set to release Windows 7 later this year; October 22nd to be exact. For those not in the know, Windows 7 is the followup to the heavily criticized Windows Vista. Now while I am going to be speaking fairly well of 7, do not think of it as a major overhaul of Windows. As far as version numbers go, Vista is Windows 6.0 while 7 is in fact Windows 6.1. What this means is it is a considerable update of the 6.0 (Vista) Operating System but not a full overhaul in the way Vista was to XP. In one sense though, it is fitting to name the OS Windows 7 after the stigma associated with Vista following its performance issues on older hardware.
Now, the really exciting news here is that a while back Microsoft made the Windows 7 Beta publicly available, and now more recently they have also made the Release Candidate available to the public. I downloaded it as soon as it became available on Microsoft’s website but it was not until this week that I had a chance to install. If you are interested, the Release Candidate is available at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/download.aspx complete with activation for up to three (3) computers valid till June 10, 2009.
Test Systems
I installed Windows 7 RC on two different machines; one at home and one at work. At home I installed it on my older PC; a home brewed AMD Athlon 64 system with 1 GB RAM and NVIDIA GeForce 6200 video card. At work I installed it to a brand new Dell Latitude E5500 laptop with Core 2 Duo, 4 GB RAM and Intel GMA 4500MHD integrated graphics. Both systems were set up in a dual boot configuration with Windows XP and Windows 7 on the same hard drive.
First impressions: The good
As with Vista, Windows 7 uses an image based installer. That is, you select (or create) the partitition you intend to install to, enter a few bits of information and in just a few minutes the entire operating system is installed. On both systems most drivers had been installed with the Windows setup.
The new boot screen is animated with four lights coming together to form the Windows logo. The welcome screen looks similar to Vista’s with new artwork, and the system picked up that I could use Aero on both computers right out the box with full transparency enabled. I must say that while I am a little more used to Vista’s version of Aero, 7 has a pretty nice feel to it as well. By default the taskbar is a bit thicker than before with larger icons, no labels for open applications and both the date and time displayed. I quickly adjusted these settings to provide smaller icons, labels and the thinner taskbar with just the time displayed as in XP and Vista.
Windows 7 desktop with Aero
The interface runs significantly faster than Vista with no performance tweaks required. In fact I will go so far as to say that in terms of the the general feel Windows 7 does not appear to be much slower than XP with SP3 on the same system. It appears at the moment to have about the same level of stability as 2000, XP and Vista, which is to say that as long as one is not reckless with computer usage then it should run quite smoothly and reliably. There are the usual annoying messages asking if to run programs and change settings but that is easily disabled with a User Account Control that has four different settings.
I will say that it is a significant improvement to Vista in terms of its ease of use and its performance but it is not perfect. Let me tell you a bit about the hiccups I encountered thus far.
First impressions: The bad
The welcome screen, just as with Vista, provides no option to revert to the classic XP login screen. For home users this is just fine but in a domain environment this makes it a chore if one switches frequently between local and domain accounts. I simply do not see it as an improvement to have to enter domain\user or user@domain instead of selecting the domain from a drop-down box.
One big problem that Windows 7 suffers is lack of driver support. Many vendors simply have not made Windows 7 drivers available and this is a particular problem if you have older hardware. At home for instance, my older Logitech Quickcam Messenger webcam is unable to be installed at all while my Realtek AC’97 audio is installed with what appears to be a ported Vista driver. They work, but I am asked after each reboot if to run soundman.exe. This is with User Access Control turned off. I also have a “Base System Device” at the office which I cannot seem to locate a driver for but that has not impeded any functionality. I suspect it might be part of the Intel AMT mechanism and will check further into that during the week.
soundman.exe prompt
I cannot hold Microsoft fully accountable for vendors not releasing drivers, however, I would have thought that they (Microsoft) would have created built-in drivers for common legacy hardware such as AC’97 audio.
I also had a peculiar problem that baffled me for a little while until the Internet Bible (Google) pointed me in the right direction. A little while after installing my applications at home I lost internet connectivity. Not network connectivity; just internet. I for some reason had two gateways detected on my network adapter, the first set to 0.0.0.0 and the other the correct one. Running ipconfig /release and /renew did not help, nor did a restart. It turns out that Apple’s Bonjour service was responsible, which is installed with Safari as an option (which I opted out of), iTunes (which I did not install) and Adobe CS3 and CS4 (I did install CS3).
The solution was to go to the Windows Services, stop and disable the service in question and then restart. The service as installed under CS3 was not called Bonjour but rather an obscure name starting with ##Id_String. For those unfamiliar with the Windows Services snap-in, it is easiest accessed by using the run command (Windows key + R) and running services.msc. It is also available in Computer Management (right-click Computer and select Manage).
Speaking of network problems, there does seem to be a minor bug at the office. There, Windows 7 is part of a Windows 2003 domain with internet access via an ISA proxy server. In short, a fairly common configuration for an office. While able to browse the internet and connect to Microsoft for Windows Activation, the system tray network icon and the Network and Sharing Center insist that there is domain access but no internet access. This does not impede the functionality of the system but it is a bit of an annoyance.
Summary
So far, Windows 7 RC seems quite promising and I while mentioning the above bugs I must also make note that this is the Release Candidate and as such will have several bugfixes before the final product is released to market. Vista, while running fairly well following the releases of Service Packs 1 and 2 has suffered from a very bad image after its initial launch and how slowly it ran on fairly modern computers. Windows 7 on the other hand is both significantly faster on the same hardware than its predecessor while the market in turn now has heftier hardware installed.
Windows 7 at first glance is not a major overhaul of the Windows OS but it is certainly what Vista should have been in the first place.
TSTT cannot be serious August 12, 2008
Posted by Emir in Science and Technology, Trinidad and Tobago.Tags: adsl, blink, bmobile, broadband, internet, phone, trinidad, Trinidad and Tobago, tstt
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TSTT is probably one of the worst companies I have ever had to deal with. Fortunately, I live in a country where I enjoy freedom of speech and as such can speak about my experiences when a company has failed in the provision of its services.
To those who do not know, TSTT is the Telecommunications Services of Trinidad and Tobago. It is 51 % owned by the Government of Trinidad and Tobago and 49% by Cable & Wireless. I might add that until fairly recently, TSTT held a monopoly over the telecommunications market, a monopoly I personally believe the Government of T&T only relinquished due to the increasing economic partnerships (such as CSME and the now-stalled FTAA) in which the country has become involved that call for liberalized markets. I will split this blog entry into Cellular and Internet segments.
Cellular
I am sure most of us who live in the western hemisphere have seen the Verizon Wireless advertisements on American cable channels where a guy roams the United States calling into his phone, “Can you hear me now?” This was the sour reality of cellular service in T&T for many, many years. Imagine at one point (while we were using TDMA technology but most of the world had long gone GSM) we had to pay not only for calls we made, but calls we received! My phone remains prepaid to this day because I have heard too many people complain of finding massive postpaid bills for calls they never made.
Fortunately, Digicel has entered the market, forcing TSTT to slash its cellular prices, increase its feature set and rebrand the service to “bmobile”. You know what’s really quite funny though? TSTT was there for so many years, yet Digicel managed to arrive and in record time provided more reliable service, more coverage area, more features and a clean slate. TSTT did make a great comeback with its improved service, prices and advertising campaign but…they turned a massive loss in doing that. For the first time ever, I might add.
Internet
How about internet services? Broadband took a very long time to arrive in T&T. But when it did, we got a whopping 128k ADSL connction for TT$460 a month – that’s US$72 and includes tax. WOW. Did I mention its North American competitors were already offering 2 and 3MB connections by then for half the cost? Eventually we got a boost to 256k. Yey. Wave flag.
Recently, Columbus Communications bought over our halfway excuse for a cable company and converted the system to digital. One of the benefits was cable internet (the old cable company tried it before but it was an abysmal failure). TSTT saw this coming and decided to upgrade their network. They have changed the service name to “Blink Broadband”, and I now get a 2MB connection. I can get “up to” 10MB but only if I pay TT$700 a month which even a geek like myself is uncomfortable with.
Now here’s the kicker. They tell me the speeds before were so slow because they have only just upgraded the system to ADSL2+. Are they serious? Do I look like a complete moron? Old school ADSL would have provided up to around 9MB. The ADSL2+ they have now rolled out can offer 24MB!
That aside, they did choose an appropriate name for the service. My connection really does tend to BLINK. Every evening at a little after 6pm, my DSL signal will drop, and require a modem reboot to resume the connection. It then happens again at a little before 7pm. It tends to be more troublesome than that on weekends. Their tech support told me that it’s my phone line. Now I don’t believe my physical phone line likes to malfunction only at specific times of the day, but they have now promised me three times to investigate it but never did.
I should not expect less. Usually when I call their tech support I get put through to a call center somewhere in India where a guy will make me look over every single modem setting by the book unless I point blank ask if there is a problem with the service. At my workplace, we requested our internet package be upgraded to a higher speed. We never got it, but a technician did come in to switch our modem for another of the exact same model (while letting us know the lady we spoke to on the phone did not know what she was talking about!). A week later another technician randomly and without request delivered a third modem, also of the exact same model.
Sigh. You may be wondering why I’m still with TSTT. It was only because I was waiting to see how FLOW, which has just recently been installed in my area has been working out for others. I’m going to switch as soon as I get the chance. FLOW has 3x the speed for the same price anyway and excellent reviews. If it works out at home, I’m also going to recommend my workplace migrates with immediate effect.
In closing
TSTT, you are a downright shame on all local business enterprises. Trinidadians and Tobagonians are always being told to support our local business, but how can we do so when the service is as abysmal as it is?
Orion spacecraft not to fly before 2014 August 11, 2008
Posted by Emir in Science and Technology.Tags: constellation, orion, science, space, technology
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NASA’s next-generation spacecraft, the Orion crew capsule will not be in service before 2014, a SPACE.com article revealed today (link). While NASA was pushing for a 2013 operational date, available funding appears to have put that idea to rest.
Even though the programme is still well within the 2015 deadline, this means NASA will be without its own manned vehicle for a period of four years. Remember that the Space Shuttle will make its final flight in 2010, retiring upon completion of the International Space Station. Inevitably, this is going to result in massive layoffs and deterioration of NASA’s launching and training facilities. It happened when Apollo ended years before the Shuttle flew, and it’s going to happen again when the Shuttle retires with Orion still in development.
There are certainly going to be those who disagree with me but if the US government can spend such wanton resources on military might then it can pump the extra dollars into its scientific ventures. Thus far, space technology has provided us with so much we take for granted in our daily lives, from medical care to communications to kitchen frying pans. More than that, space technology and exploration provides inspiration to many and in the long term addresses the age-old proverbial problem of having all our eggs in one basket.
Not many people know it, but in a very real sense we are not that far off from setting foot on other worlds and exploring beyond the solar system. Now is not the time to skimp. Give NASA what they need to do their job.
