boring is beautiful

	Orion heat shield	Shuttle thermal protection system
tile configuration	pleasantly boring	are you kidding me?
launch configuration	shrouded	exposed
moving parts	no door needed	single point of failure landing gear doors
relative size (1)	small footprint	large, irregular surface
overall	solid foundation for the future	high pucker factor

(1) – Image adapted from daviddarling.info.

There’s unavoidable beauty in Orion’s new simplicity.

some good stuff I missed

Software I explored today:

• OGRE 3D – an open-source graphics rendering engine (with physics intentionally omitted)
• Mercurial & Git/Cogito – distributed source control management tools (yes, I did watch this whole hour with Linus – he had no kind words for SVN)
• Test soon – a unit testing framework for C++, not of the xUnit family
• QEMU w/ KQEMU – an open-source PC emulator, with flexible host/guest options, with “near native” performance
• Valgrind – an open-source profiling tool
• open-source physics engines – further study needed to narrow down list
• EGM96 – Earth Gravitational Model, Fortran
• Capistrano – a tool for automating tasks on one or more remote servers, Ruby-based

Finally, I’ll probably make Ubuntu my distro of choice, (at least partially) since a space guy created it.