Software

The computer cheated.

The company I work for makes a 100% deterministic operating system. You want that when the computer is flying the airplane. (Have you traveled on a 787?)

In the previous sections, we eavesdropped on a live conversation between two ham stations, one in Windsor Ontario and the other in Venezuela on the northern coast of South America. And I mentioned that while you’ll find hams of all ages working the bands at all hours of day or night, it’s also true that the majority of them tend to be older gentlemen.

In the first part of this post, we had a quick look at a conversation taking place between ham radio stations in Ontario Canada and Venezuela where I just happened to be in the right place, Phoenix Arizona, to “hear” both of them.

I’m running my ham radio that uses the computer to do a lot of the work.

But after frolicking around the file system at a shell prompt for these past several weeks, freedom – with the baying of the hounds of Cupertino ever present – is not what I dreamt.

For the nerds:

struct  FltSoftwareEngineer
{
        double  salary;
        long    lunches;
        float   jobs;
        char    unstable;
        void    work;
} ;

Source: Introductory (humorous) introduction to “Streamlined Flight Software Design” by Steven A. Stolper, Senior Flight Software Engineer, December 10, 2010. (Click “OK” to ignore multiple errors and click the play button to advance to slide #3 here.

Curiosity, the biggest, heaviest and most complex rover, landed successfully on Mars this evening.

Curiosity experiences its Seven Minutes of Terror tonight, or becomes loose parts scattered across Mars.

The 12V light bulbs on the underside of our kitchen cabinets drop (go dark) like a nest of wasps hit with Raid Wasp and Hornet spray – bunches of them drop all at once.

While there are several ASCII to Morse code translators out there, I haven’t seen the encoding used herein. It is slightly denser than most and should work nicely in machines with a tight memory constraint.