configuration management for spreadsheets

OpenDocument Spreadsheet (Flat XML) (.fods) format in OpenOffice 3.0 is a great source format for spreadsheets. It’s human-readable XML, it’s good for “Save As…” into Microsoft Excel 97/2000/XP (.xls) format.

Best of all, it allows you to easily configuration manage your spreadsheets (along with meaningful textual diffs) using Mercurial, git, etc.

rendezvous maneuvers inside the ISS

Here’s an ingenious use of the ISS as a navigational software testbed in the small.

SPHERES for guidance, nav, and control R&D

cross-platform build alternative

There’s evidence that CMake may be overtaking Autotools as the cross-platform build tool of choice in the open source community.

Google Trends indicates that CMake has recently overtaken Automake in search volume, and here’s an insightful article about why KDE switched to CMake during the KDE 4.0 development cycle.

installed Redmine tonight

Redmine is a snazzy web-based issue tracking tool that sits on top of Ruby on Rails and MySQL (one of its supported DB server options). I got it installed on Kubuntu 8.04.

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.