JDPFu.com 2010

In a BBC article about the Space Shuttle Atlantis landing the author mentioned a few statistics.

A Few Statistics

*First flight: 3 October 1985
*Total number of flights: 32
*Distance traveled: 195 million km
*Total number of days in orbit: 294
*Total number of orbits: 4,648

Cost Estimates

So if we assume that each shuttle launch and mission costs NASA about $450M on average, that leads to a few other operational cost numbers.

• $14,400M for 32 flights
• $48.98M for each day in orbit
• $3.1M for each orbit

These are just the costs for Atlantis while on mission. These numbers make my next vacation plans seem tiny. ;)

Disclosure: I was employed by the space shuttle program for 5 yrs and by both the shuttle and space station programs for 3 years. I worked at NASA-JSC in Houston, Tx for both of those jobs.

We all know to keep our systems patched, but that isn’t always easy. Mozilla has come up with an easy way for everyone to check their browser for out of date plugins. This applies to Firefox browsers, but it also works for EI, Safari, Opera and perhaps other browsers.
So, open a new browser tab and go check your plugins http://www.mozilla.com/plugincheck/ now.

Lucid locked up on me today. The external disk array was really busy running multiple transcoding jobs at the time – love the quad core CPUs!. Those jobs filled up /raid, not any important file systems and locked up X/Windows. HOME is on a different FS too, BTW.

Installation of VirtualBox OSE (Open Source Edition) using the Ubuntu repositories should be easy. For me, there were a few issues that I figure other people may run into. I was able to solve them.

The Matroska container format for video has become popular over the last few years because it merges a number of good ideas and let’s a single file contain multiple video, audio and subtitle streams. No longer do you have to keep multiple .vob/.mpg/.avi.mp4, and multiple .sub/.srt/.idx files to have 3 different audio and subtitles. All of them can be placed into a single .mkv file. For me having the subtitles efficiently contained inside the same file is good, but the real, fantastic reason that MKV containers are brilliant is you can easily correct aspect ratio issues without re-encoding.

Here’s another article for why you should also use MKV if you’d like more specifics.

There’s another nice bonus. In my testing, the .mkv files are always smaller than the .avi files from which they are made.

Jumping into the How-To