Craig Mayhew’s Blog

Yeaa! NASA has put together a mission to fly a space probe into the atmosphere of the sun in 2022. Well, it will actually be orbiting the sun and so won’t just go hurtling into it. It will orbit at over 200km/s at a distance of 7 million km from the sun. It’s protection will be in the form of a heat shield that will prevent the 2000 degree heat from damaging the prob.

Time dilation over a 100 year period at 200km/s, you gain:

702 seconds.

You may also have noticed this is twice as close as I thought possible in my previous post on time dilation.

Sources:
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2010/02sep_spp/
http://solarprobe.jhuapl.edu/funFacts.php

I have a keen interest in virtual worlds, they can allow you to design anything you want providing you have the time and the knowledge. This is what originally pulled me towards second life. Unfortunately when I started to use second life I didn’t really understand how second life was used or how I could go about creating my items, objects, content etc. The learning curve was fairly long. I now understand how to do many of these things and intend to share it as much as possible with all of you (in a future blog post).

Learn by example and all that so let’s look at what second life is used for by looking at locations near my virtual house.

Second life is about communication, education and expression. It’s about designing things for others to use or for you to use with others. It’ about collaboration and meeting like minded people. Within 2 minutes of my house in second life I found the following places:

House of the wolf http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Orions%20Vale/244/221/98 This is a huge cathedral, it’s not short on detail with spiraling staircases, vast pillars and tall towers. I’m not sure it was built with a particular purpose, but it’s fun to explore. Hide and seek maybe?

Circuit la Corse http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Valis/67/6/122 This is very long race track for people that love driving in second life. It’s built by the Linden Department of Public Works http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/02/08/the-linden-department-of-public-works/ who are working to make second life a better place (More on this later).

1930’s Tokyo http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Mordreds%20Crossing/121/7/161 This is a simulation of a section of 1930’s era Tokyo. Cars and trams are driving around their scripted routes. The area must consist of 100’s of buildings many of which you can enter. This was designed by a group called “Swing Era Japan”.

If you like exploring, your onto a winner. As usual the problem is finding the diamonds in the rough, as there is an unimaginable ammount of content is second life and most of it is of poor quality.

Second life is also starting to suffer many of the same issues as the real world. They are trying to build roads that interconnect densely populated areas, but they are having trouble finding a route without uprooting people from their land. Linden labs are also trying to create areas of beauty such as parks, forests and other simulations so that people have quality locations to meet in and to promote a positive image of second life.

Another major issue that has come about is the Intellectual Property rights of in world items. Programmers are able to easily copy items that may have taken someone else a very long time to create with use of a modified viewer. Some people are then selling these items at knock down prices, creating a black market. These issues sometimes spill over from the real world with people using textures they have found by searching Google and reselling them as part of an object within second life. Music is also suffering IP issues as it can be easily played on any parcel of land by the land owner. All they need as an exernal URL to stream it from. Most land owners do not pay royalties for the music they play and as far as I am aware, this is completely un-policed.

Second life has given me lot but it was just a stepping stone to something better. For me, second life didn’t allow me to design without limits. Mostly because it has an economy, an economy is built on rules and therefore limitations. I wanted a virtual environment that can extend and supplement my reality. I needed my own virtual space where rules are none existent unless I impose them. I needed my own simulation. Enter openSim. openSim is a complete virtual environment much the same as second life where essentially, I can run my own private second life server. I can use as much space as I like, build as big as I like in any way I want to. I’m not limited to a very small quantity of computer resources, I’m only limited by my hardware and how efficiently I use it. Slowly I have begun merging this with other applications that I use in the real world. I intend to blog about these uses I find for the tiny universe I have created and experiments I will run.

Watch this space.

Simon Holywell sent me a link to this clevor way of displaying 3d images. Now if only we could shrink this to a portable size…

Had to post this, as it’s an awesome idea. Also it appears that the plastic may have been printed out on a reprap.

Had a bit of a nightmare with this as you can’t even get into safe mode to fix the problem. Running a start up repair from the windows CD does nothing. This leaves us with two options for fixing or working around the issue.

Option 1:
– Revert to a previous restore point using the windows CD to boot into recovery/repair mode. Obviously this only works if you have restore points.

Option 2:
1. Insert your Vista CD/DVD into your drive and boot from it.
2. Select “Repair your Computer” from the list.
3. Select “Command Prompt” from the recovery choices.
4. At the command prompt type C:
5. Type cd WindowsWinSxS
6. Type rename pending.xml pending.xml.bak
7. Exit and reboot

Please remember that option 2 will cause problems if you need to update in future. If and when I solve that, I’ll write a blog and post a link to it.

I upgraded the VMWare server to Ubuntu Lucid Lynx. You need to reinstall the VMWare server again. Here’s the guide which is the same as for the previous upgrade to Karmic:

Download VMware Server (2.0.1 or 2.0.2) – in gz format. You will also need a license key.

If you have tried to install vmware server already and something went wrong during the install, then do these two steps first:

first, delete the vmware modules

rm -rf /usr/lib/vmware/modules/

if needed (you’ll know if you need to do this one and you need to changethe version “2.6.31-13″ to the one your running.):

rm -rf /lib/modules/2.6.31-13-server/misc/vm*

Install:

Run vmware-install.pl. Somewhere in the installation process you should be asked:
Do you want this program to invoke the command for you now? [yes]
you should answer: no

Then run the patch vmware-server.2.0.1_x64-modules-2.6.30.4-fix.sh.

sudo ./vmware-server.2.0.1_x64-modules-2.6.30.4-fix.sh

After this, run

/usr/bin/vmware-config.pl

If the vmware-config.pl aborts, because it couldn’t shut down all vmware services then kill them manually and then rerun vmware-config.pl:

kill -9 $( grep -i vm | awk '{ print $2 }' )

And hopefully that should work!

It’s my last day in Germany today and before coming home I wanted to write about a few things they do (in my opinion) better here than we do in the UK.

Prepay Fuel Stations
On the way into Germany we filled up at a “prepay fuel station” (This was actually in the netherlands and not in Germany) where you have to pay for fuel before you put it into your car. In the UK alot of people are stealing fuel by driving off without paying. The solution most companies have come up with in the UK was to have a number plate recognition computer that black lists a cars number plate if it drives off without paying. This prevents people from stealing twice but doesn’t prevent them from stealing in the first place. Proffesional fuel thieves of course would have a fake number plate and would probably have a barrel in the back of the car so they can steal hundreds of litres of fuel in one go. In any case the prepay would fix all these issues and prevention is better than cure.

Autobahn
The autobahn in many parts doesn’t have a speed limit. It also doesn’t have average speed check cameras in sections that do have speed limits. Despite the ability to drive as fast as you like there are relatively few fatalities on the autobahn. Some environmental groups have said that the higher speeds cause less efficient fuel usage and larger carbon footprints. However introducing a speed limit such as in the UK would mean journey times are longer and therfore cars are on the road for longer which increases congestion. Introducing a speed limit also means it needs to be inforced at additional cost. I personally always see people braking at speed cameras (even the average speed check cameras) we have in the UK which causes a larger carbon foot print. There are some stretches of road in the UK which would benefit from higher or complete removal of the speed limit and it would be good if we could put this to a public vote.

Double decker trains
Trains with two floors! Many parts of the German rail network are designed to have higher trains which are capable of having two floors. This doubles the per carriage capacity. Unfortunately in the UK this would be very expensive to introduce as we have so many bridges and tunnels in our rail network.

The trains are also open plan you can easily walk from one end of a train to other with no doors seperating the carriages. This makes policing a train much easier and increases overall capacity.

Indoor cash machines
Card fruad is a major concern in the UK and this is due to many cash machines being outside. This is convenient as it prevents huge queues with the bank. However from what I have seen many German banks only have cash machines on the inside of the bank. To get into the secure area out of hours you have to swipe a credit or debit card that they accept and it will allow you in. This also means they can easily track who comes in and when.

Recently the meme of the coming intelligence singularity is becoming more and more prevalent. Futurists are making accurate predictions based on patterns/rules in increased computing power and increased computing capacity. They are finding that the speed of improvement is increasing which may ultimately lead to a technological singularity where knowledge is being acquired and discovered at an ever increasing pace.

This has pushed my mind into a philosophical thought pattern. Is the advancement of technology predictably the same for all intelligent civilisations? If we had two tribes on either side of the planet 100 thousand years ago, would they have both have developed clubs, sharp flint, fire, language etc in roughly the same order? Would the discovery of fire predictably lead to cooked food in both tribes? On a larger scale, if we had a second Earth like planet somewhere in the universe would they be making (or have made) the same general discoveries? Once you get stuck into a loop of ever increasing technological discovery can you ever escape and does it always lead to a predictable end?

Perhaps the predictable end is the answer to the question “Where are they?” with one of several answers.

1) They are gone/dead.
2) They are not interested in such an infant civilisation.
3) They don’t know we are here.

I’m mostly worried about option 1.

I’ve setup a Freelancer server for anyone to use. Here’s how to use it:

For the moment we are running Freelancer without any mods, so feel free to skip steps 2 and 3.

1. Install freelancer
2. Install mod manager (1.31)
3. Install Discovery Mod (4.85) (http://www.moddb.com/mods/discovery-freelancer/downloads)
4. Run “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Freelancer\EXE\fldirect.exe” and when asked enter the IP 93.97.160.59 and leave the port as 2302.
5. At the bottom it asks if you want to boot freelancer… you do!
6. DO NOT UPDATE.
7. Once freelancer is booted, go into multiplayer and then LAN.
8. Select our server “Liberty”.
9. Play!

If you get tired of the low resolution here is an article on how to increase freelancer’s resolution.