Space geek at work

If anyone ever tries to tell you that NASA isn’t worth the tax dollars we spend on it, you just look that person straight in the eye and say, “Oh YEAH??  Well, did you know that NASA has a program you can use to view accumulated imagery and data on our planet?”

This thing isn’t the marvel of programming that Google Earth is — it’s slow and occasionally tripped up by graphical errors, at least on my system — but I’m pretty sure there’s at least as much, if different, information available.  Standard satellite pics are augmented by LandSat data, up-to-date imagery of natural phenomena, wider availability of high-res data (I can see my house!)…  Data on agriculture and climate indicators, Galileo imagery, weather maps, animated satellite views of the aurora borealis and other stuff of interest.

That this alone is easily worth $16.3B annually in our federal budget of seventy hundred hojillion kabillion dollars should be more self-evident than salsa on tortilla chips.  It even comes with a built-in wigital diga-whatchamaha.

NB:  The current version is .Net and DirectX dependent, so it’s twitchy on WinXP and Vista, and doesn’t run at all on other operating systems, but the next version, est. beta April 07, is scheduled to be Java/OpenGL.

Envision monitor with Voodoo video in Linux

Anybody out there faced, as I was this evening, with the problem of hooking an Envision G19LWk up to a Linux box with an ancient Voodoo3 video card, may find that X steadfastly refuses to adopt a resolution of 1440×900, and the logfile will claim that “no mode with this name exists.”

Add the following modeline to the Monitor section of your xorg.conf file that describes the Envision:

Modeline “1440×900″ 106.47 1440 1520 1627 1904 900 901 904 932

Make sure that you didn’t list “1280×1024″ in your screen modes (to avoid creating a 1440×1024 virtual screen) and things should work fine.  A number of other 1440×900 modelines are out there if you Google, but this is the only one I could get to work for me.

Plugging the leaks

While trying to track down an annoying memory leak with Visual C++’s debugger, I ran into an issue under which the _CRTDBG_MAP_ALLOC preprocessor flag will make it appear as though the leaky allocations all take place in crtdbg.h (where overloaded, locale-recording versions of the new operator reside).

The fix outlined in this article almost worked (using allocation breakpoints didn’t work at all), but my compiler had a hissy fit about the redefinition of the “new” operator in the supplied function. Perhaps I could have tracked that down, but my inherent laziness prompted me to a different route — collapsing the function and the #define into one. This worked fine and got me the actual location, in my program code, of the offending chunk of dynamic memory:

#ifdef _DEBUG
#define new new(1, __FILE__,__LINE__)
#endif

Don’t know whether my problems with the previous fixes stemmed from compiler settings, project differences, or versioning differences, but the above may be handy for anyone else who needs to track down a leak in VC++ 2005 Express.

Do I need to learn maniacal laughter?

Dude.  I want the statue that goes with the Casey and Andy mad science award.

I tried to learn maniacal laughter for kung fu once (no, seriously) and I was no good at it.

Things you learn by attending choral performances

The Christmas carol known as The Coventry Carol is actually about Herod’s slaughter of the male infants in Bethlehem.  Nobody ever performs it with the lyrics, so I had no idea.  Am I the last person on Earth to learn this?

In related news, I need a recording of Here We Come A-Wassailing.  Then I need some wassail.

Session Management Returns to Firefox

Previous posts will be restored as soon as I get around to it; yes, they disappeared about a week ago in what I am choosing to refer to as a “brain malfunction.”

Those of you who, like me, upgraded to Firefox 2.0 and promptly found yourself without full session-management support owing to the incomplete integration of those features into the browser — the only complaint I have about the upgrade so far — may be relieved to know that the Tab Mix Plus extension includes all the features you fondly remember, since active development of Session Manager seems to have ceased with the new browser release. Saving and completely restoring multiple sessions and windows was one point I particularly missed. Tab Mix Plus also integrates features from Focus Last Selected Tab and Tabbrowser Preferences, if you’re using those, and adds a few others; however, if you’re using FF2.0, it does, as one commenter notes, seem to destroy the drop-down list of tabs.