Tuesday, March 11, 2008

on board camera

We had a first successfully larch with an on-boarder CVS camera last week. After 4 tries we final got it right! Turned out the battery pack was the weak link. The G-forces on take off would compress the spring, resulting in power interruption. Solution custom battier pack.

From the ground it looked like this:

On the rocket it looked like this.

As you see it was wild ride. We are trying to think of ways to prevent the rocket from spinning so much.

Sunday, March 09, 2008

Ops: Windows XP sp3 and DayLight savings time

Doh, some one must be saying at Microsoft. If you know mw, you know I use allot of beta and alpha software that still in development stages. At any one given moment I'm testing about 10 or so application in it's primordial stage. I know and expect problems, butt his problem I have with Service Pack Three for Windows xp was unaccepted. By now you know that George Bush passed an act in an energy saving bill, moving daylight savings date. It was not to big of a deal, there were patches well planed for the changes for both OS and software. There a few hick-ups with some automatic clocks, but no big deal. This patch was a part of SP2, and you would think that in SP3 they also would included it, since it is just a roll-up of all the patches to date. But nope some one for got it. Well not really from what I read they decide to not include it and release it as an extra to SP3. Don't ask me why, but it stupid. What is even worse, that the patches that do fix it in Windows Xp don't work with SP3.

So this what you have to do.

A.) Modify some regs, good for several computers since a bat script could easily be made (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/914387)

B.) Download this GUI based time zone editor for windows.(http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/8/a/58a208b7-7dc7-4bc7-8357-28e29cdac52f/tzedit.exe)

 

I went with B since only one computer is bad, and I only live in one time zone.

timeZone

Little screen shot of what it looks like, and the changes that has to be made.

Friday, March 07, 2008

Rant :: Proprietary Software as a Standard

This one really bothers me. I'm slowly transferring from proprietary software to GPL and open source software. There for I dropped Microsoft Office for Open Office. Open office has just as much power as it counterpart, and the best part it is free. I'm so use to Ctrl+S to save, that I save every thing in the Open Document standard. This became a problem when I tried to e-mail a professor a paper, and she could not open it. I new the reason, she was using Microsoft Word, that does not fully support or even recognize the odt extension. Now with Open office I do have the power to open and save doc files, but that is not the point. Why should I save it as a doc? I'm using the open stander for documents! it is what should be used for passing files around.

The problem I see, What if Microsoft Office decides to secure and lock down their file format and use some type of encryption. I bet it would only take a few day to break, but that is not the point. In a way it force people to buy software, so they can share and communicate with others.

Sunday, March 02, 2008

More ROCKETS!

This I some what a old video mash up of our rocket launches. I forgot to share this, but here it is now.