I finally got around to purchasing Radiohead's new album In Rainbows (for the curious, I chose to pay 5£ for it). I've been listening to it fairly consistently over the past week, and I'm thinking that this is quite possibly my favourite Radiohead album to date. The first song that really struck out at me was Reckoner: Reckoner You can't take it with you Disavow the pleasure You were not to blame for Bittersweet distractors Dare not speak his name Dedicated to ...More »

I think that's going to be my slogan for the rest of the term. I missed two very important events today due to Spacesystems Design: the Slashdot party at Einstein's, and the release of Gutsy Gibbon. Let me put it this way: I'm ready for this course to end. On a totally unrelated note, I still have to decide what I want to buy. For roughly the same price, I can get a Lenovo ThinkPad with ...More »

For many years I have scoffed at the idea of backing up my hard drives. Why should I need to do that? Hard drives don't lose data anymore, they are fine-tuned machines! While this is true, there are a lot of reasons to implement a good backup policy. The most obvious of course is hard-drive failure; I've seen my brother go through two hard-drives worth of important files because he didn't have good backups (note that ...More »

Holy crap.. I've been busy for so long that my own login cookie expired! Suffice to say that between Spacesystems Design, Advanced Mechanics of Structures, and Spacecraft Dynamics its been a brutal few weeks at Skule. I'm now in somewhat of a brief respite, you could say a lull before the storm of Midterms. Once Midterms start, I don't lift my head from the books until I get home at Christmas time. I am currently looking at ...More »

No, I'm not getting my GM models mixed up. Malibu Boats has been selected to produce the next model of the Corvette Limited Edition Sport-V towboat. Malibu Boats has produced two previous models of the Corvette boat, one based on each of the C4 of C5 generations of Corvette. As some of you know, my family are proud owners of a 1998 Malibu Response LX. Malibu makes a great boat; they look gorgeous, they perform well, ...More »

We have a course this year called AER407 - Space Systems Design. Here's the course description from the Engineering calendar: The course covers the conceptual and preliminary design phases for a space system currently of interest in the Aerospace industry. A team of visiting engineers provide material on the various subsystems and share their experiences working on current space initiatives through workshops and subsystem reviews. The class is divided into project teams to design a space ...More »

I found this short essay by Orson Scott Card (author of the ver popular Ender's Game series) floating around the intertubes. I thought it was a fairly good read, and its also pretty short. So here, take a look: How Software Companies Die by Orson Scott Card The environment that nutures creative programmers kills management and marketing types - and vice versa. Programming is the Great Game. It consumes you, body and soul. When you're caught up ...More »

Note: I am running Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) LTS I recently set up my desktop computer in Toronto to accept SSH connections, and opened the port (22) on my router so that I could remotely manage my computer whenever I go back to Peterborough. I played around with port tunneling too, which basically tunnels any TCP connection through the SSH connection (meaning it is encrypted, protecting it from snooping). But the really fun part was forwarding ...More »

I don't like to dwell on articles that I have read on Matt Good's blog, but I felt this particular entry deserved a little bit of attention. I'd like to thank Matt for being so open with his fan base; many of us have grown with him these past few years, and I'm sure I speak for all of us when I say that his commitment to honesty and integrity with his fans has greatly ...More »

Its September and I'm settling back into the groove of Skule for one more year. Of course you all know what that means, right? Television shows are returning to bathe us in their electronic glow! I'm finding that I have a lot of shows that I want to watch this year, like Battlestar Galactica, Scrubs, Heroes, House, Lost, and SGA (among others). With such a high number of different shows to watch, I'm concerned that ...More »