The Old Frontpage Stuff

Some pictures

10/10/2004
I'm not going to put up anymore pictures unless someone really wants to seem them. Since no one is really looking at this page I don't see any danger of that happening. I do have a good link to some pictures. Alan's Mojave Weblog has some good pictures of both X1 and X2 launches, along with many other pictures at Mojave airport. Have fun.

Just noticed it is the 10th of October. It has been a long time and my life is drastically different. Drastically better. Ha! Take that! =-)

X2 Launch Was great

10/8/2004
I made it to the second launch, but but got sick. So I have not posted anything, I haven't even gotten the pictures off of the camera yet. I will, but I don't know when I'll get to posting them. Didn't take all that many anyway. If you really want them, email me.

So the launch was great! They won, they beat the 1963 X-15 record by 13,000 feet, and it was just plain cool. If you can watch "Black Sky" on The Science Channel (formerly The Discovery Channel in the US, still Discovery else where). It was a really cool show, and I hope I get it for Christmas. If no one gets it for me, I will buy it for myself after Christmas. The best part of the launch was that there were contrails this time. Meaning we could see where White Knight was all the way until SpaceShipOne was launched. No wondering where they were, no looking around. We knew exactly where they were, and when they launch we saw it immediatedly.

Anyway, the one person who ever looks at this page will notice that I have added a navigation bar. They might also noticed that there is a navigation bar at the top. This will change. I'm still fooling around with webmake]], and restructuring the site. I wont even be checking everything into cvs yet. It also looks like I will be making this space into a blog. So even though dates made change at the bottoms of pages, it may not mean any content changed. Just testing more stuff.

X2 Launch Date Set

10/1/2004
The required second launch has been set for Monday October 4th, 2004. Find more info at [X Prize]]. I'm planning to be there, and my Dad and his friend Mike are planningo n joining me. Should be a historic event. I'll again post a few pictures when I get back. We'll leave San Diego around 1:30AM, and drive up to the Mojave Airport to watch the launch.

Some Pictures of the X-Prize

9/29/2004
Here are a some quick x-prize pictures. I know they aren't terribly great. They were taken with a Canon PowerShot S230 (3.2 Mega Pixels). I may crop a few of them, and maybe even put of some video I took with the same camera. I would say a better zoon would have helped, but really I just need to learn how to take better pictures. Enjoy.

X-Prize launch today!

9/29/2004
I just got back from the X Prize]] launch by. It was REALLY cool. First a chase plane taxied past the viewing area. Then White Knight taxied out with SpaceShipOne slung beneath it. Then another chase plane. Finally White Knight starts down the runway and takes off with SpaceShipOne! We all watch them circle for awhile, finally losing sight. At 46,000 feet the anouncer says we're minutes away from SpaceShipOne separating, and igniting it's rocket. So Everyone begins trying to find where they are. Of course no one can see it. Finally someone says "there it is!" Off to the East I could see a contrail! Even though SpaceShipOne is several miles away, the end of the contrail is moving pretty fast. Over the loud speakers we hear comentary on how high it is. I lose track somewhere after 200,000 feet. I think the unofficial hight was 340,000 feet or so. When we left they thought that they had gone high enough, but there wasn't official word when we left. You best bet is to watch X Prize]] website to see the comfirmed results. Slept a little on the way home, was an early day today (left my apartment at 1:40AM PDT, it is 3:35PM now). I'll put some pictures up first.

More Random Comments

9/28/2004
I've started working on getting the format better. I'm now using http://webmake.taint.org. I did have to modify Text::EtText according to this message I found http://www.mail-archive.com/webmake-talk@taint.org/msg00051.html. It fixed some of the things, there are still a few issues, but it works much better. I haven't applied everything since that patch was against 2.3, and I only have 2.2 installed from CPAN. Still it was a big improvement, as my links now are created correctly.

The format is still pretty basic, but eventually I'll improve it. I still don't have a way to do a central glossary for links, but I think I can fix that. So far seems to be a pretty close to the type of environment I want, and I can always add features to the code if need be. It is all open source based on perl]]. It's late, time for bed.

Random comments

9/20/2004
I need to get this paged more reasonably formated. I have kept thinking about how to better manage my meager content, in an easier way. Right now I just use vim. Whatever I do I'll probably still use vim, but instead post process it with something else. Instead of typing and editting each page by hand in vim, I'll figure out a way to format it on each page in a standard way. Adding in any standard elements (headers, footers, body attributes, etc.). What I want is a solutions similar to what I had in college when I used. Of course now, they don't even seem to sell frontier script engine, which would make sense since it was an OSA Scripting language for Mac OS before they was even a twinkle of Mac OS X. OSA Languages seem to have gone a way in Mac OS X, of course even in classic they never really were big. Pretty much everyone just used AppleScript. It was a neat environment. I scripted up code to generate a header a footer dependent on the page being proccessed, so that it they had navigational links that would even indicate what page your were on (or section you were under). Had a way to automatically do links, check spelling, and add formatting. Problem was that it went from free, to 500 or $1000 per year (I forget what price exactly), and I could not justify it's cost for the four or five pages my webpage consisted of. They webpage generation was actually a very minor part, which really just showed the power of the scripting language and evironment. Maybe I'll take a look at what they have now, think it is called Radio. Or maybe I'll write my own system, or base it off of some existing post proccessing solutions.

Right now I need to figure out how the heck to get vim working better when I ssh into the box. Right now if I type the 'delete' key during insert mode, it works like a 'del' key. It was annoying to type this all in vim, over ssh on my linx server with the delete key not quite working.


Cool site

9-16-2004
http://www.magnatune.com Now that site is cool. Cool enough I added it to my links section, and my front page. Which is't much, other than I haven't updated any of my pages since Dec of 2003. It sells music online. No DRM. Full quality WAV and FLAC, ogg-vorbis, various mp3s for all music offered. From the little I listened to so far it's cool, and high quality. Favorite artist so far (out of about 3 listened to) is Brad Sucks. Anyway check it out (of course since no one reads this page, I'll probably only talking to myself).

Dec 20, 2003

There isn't much here, but the server is back up, as well as my pages. As I am lazy and don't want to put too much personal info on the web there isn't a whole lot here. Though I'll give a few tasty bits. I have my own domain name (www.virr.net of course). So if you really want to email me, all you have to do is figure out a working email address=-). I work as a computer progammer (imagine that). I have been online with at least an email address since 1994. I have had my own domain since May of 2002, and have been using the same online handle for at least 7 years (or is it 8 now?). Anyway it has been quite awhile. Until I wrote this page I hadn't really thought about how long I've been online. It has been over a third of my life! It seems like only last week when as a freshman in college I was first checking my email. Trying to figure out how to telnet to my acount. All we had then was lynx if we wanted to browse the net (Mosiac hadn't made it to our campus having only been released the year before) Not only that, but most servers were still just gopher servers and not http! The net has changed drasticly in under 10 years. When we first started getting graphical browsers we didn't even imagine that you could get maps, or even that you would be able to buy books online, ski reports, weather reports, or much of anything really useful! (the net connected coke machine was cool, but not terribly useful) When RealPlayer came out, boy did we think it was cool! In Iowa I could listen to a local radio station in San Diego! Anyway, have a great time and don't make a wrong turn and end up at a dead end.