Wow.  If this is what a "Professional" is now expected to know, I'm sad for .Net.

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I've been taking a great Interplanetary Flight overview course at the Art Center in Pasadena.  The sessions are run by JPL alum Dave Doody and it's all been more than worth the tuition price.

The other week my class had a private visit to JPL.  Following a nice leasurely time in the Spacecraft Museum (so much nicer than being in the shuffle with thousands at the yearly open houses) we got a mega-big-screen (Windows OS on all demonstration 'puters, by the way) show of the new JPL online feature applet Eyes On the Solar System directly from project Technical Consultant Doug Ellison.

"Hi Smith! Remember the project that needed to allow entry of date values but the users couldn't be forced to any specific precision?  I have the same requirement and can't remember how you did the precision metadata, we're on SQL Server, not Oracle, was it a PLSQL ability?"

:)  Uh... you're thinkin' too hard, budd.  All I did was add a sibling column to the DATE field and packed it with the id/enumval of the desired datepart precision.  

I gotta laugh about my saying that you're thinking too hard, it's ironic...

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Still looking for MARIE and the public release of information on Space and Mars Radiation directly related to Humans higher than LEO. 

I've found something odd in the 2006-released NRC report "Space Radiation Hazards and the Vision for Space Exploration, Report of a Workshop".  

This 88 page book which you can buy from Amazon or download "free for Personal Use Only" from the National Academies Press is all that we (publically) knew of concerning Space Radiation up to the 2005 Wintergreen Workshop.  It is almost as tedious as other NRC reports but worth the read if only to find out that in decades of human "Space flight" our country really hasn't done a whole heck of a lot to figure out exactly what Hazards are out there or how to get around them. 

Even the writers seem astonished by this.

Plus... why not Windows7 in a spacecraft?

>>Update April 8th 2011:

After seeing a number of hits coming into this page from all around Huntville,  I checked and the Careers page at the Al-Razaq "Computing Services" site no longer returns an immediate PHP server error.  Now, that menu option is linked to the address "http://192.168.100.95/hrapplicant", which fails to load.  Is it me or does 192.168.... look a lot like in internal router address?  If so then the folks inside the Al-Razaq network think that they have fixed the issue while anyoone testing from the outside is still getting a failure.

<<

If we save billions in launch and space hardware costs thanks to COTS, does it add up to a real savings in total NASA costs?

I was about to toss my eWeek into the recycling and the pages flipped open and my eye caught a sentence in the review of the GalTab and Dreak:

"Unlike Apple's iOS with the company's comparatively easy access to FaceTime video conferencing, Android users will likely need to wait until 3rd party developers start exploiting the hardware for their own video apps"

It was a Jerry-Sees-GratefulDead-In-The-Dictionary moment.

Yeah, eWeek is another iLoveJobs rag and like them all it will ignore anything good unless it came from 'Tino but this one seemed way over the top.  But then I thought about it.. there really aren't that many apps out ther taking advantage of the video hardware and if that continues then Android FFCs will likely stop being part of the spec.

But is this because devs are stupid or that the platform is harder than iOS?  As to the former, sure ;-), but definitely not the latter...

Last month an alert went out from Microsoft about a severe vulnerability in ASP.Net.  A quick workaround was stepped through but the kernal of the issue remained.

I just got this email blast from the DotNetNuke folks (very very nice of them even as I am no longer a Nuke user) about the official patch now being available as direct download AND NOW Windows Update.

No matter your OS, if you run ASP.Net you should get the updates.  If money is on the line then of course you have to check the fine print and scan the comments of Scott Guthrie's blog post and do extra testing ASAP in case you are doing some off-kilter code that hits a boundary of the patch. 

"Hey Smith!  Got that country code table SQL?"

Yeah, right here.

Last fall my friend Kat told me that there was a WHCN alumni group on facebook that I just had to join.  I told her that  I'd coded against the fb api but never really saw the draw of being a user.

She called me an old fart and that was that.

Couple nights ago after mixing cold and hot sake I did a boogle for HCN and the group popped up.  I saw Kat's postings from last year, and Kim Alexander's and Dan Hayden's and Johnston Izzi's and got all nostalgic and joined and posted.

Just got an e about ELMAH.  Yes, I think its pretty fine.  Saves a lot of time, does fine with vs2010 asp.net4 for us so far... but let me tell you why we took the plunge.