Common selflessness can organize, bring people together to invest themselves in a worthy cause. For myself, this is open source. For publishers of open source software, there is (quite often) little reward beyond ones own practice of craft and sharing.
Aren't we each really practicing the craft of life through our tools and interests, each artisans and artificers?
In these days of rare opportunity, it's more important than ever to align our senses to the truths life has to offer for creating opportunity.
Friday, January 29, 2010
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Google Lunar X Prize
In Team FREDNET, we've certainly got the world's first best response to the GLXP.
A friend recently asked, "Why go to the Moon? Why an X Prize? It's been done. What's the contribution?" My first response echoed the arguments heard in favor of the new space industry. However I then reverted to my own perspective that the first best reason would be for education and inspiration. A novel, open source experience of math, science and engineering on the internet.
Through an open source educational experience of space flight systems, one is able to dig down into every myriad detail and gain a fuller sense of the various domains of math, science and engineering involved. How they interact and how they exist with respect to one and the other in the real world example.
My friend reacted enthusiastically. That's a good reason. We need to do more for education. Not enough is being done in the private sector for education. And I agree. Mille grazie, Frank. Your opinion is very important to me, having dimensions my own experience does not.
In Team FREDNET we have a number of properties in our strategy that are naturally capable of producing precisely this result. They are, open source, open participation, reproducible results, accessibility and convenience. These objectives serve our purpose in realizing a GLXP success with a decentralized group, and with some complementary attention they serve the higher purpose of providing a working example of space flight systems for interested internet explorers.
This would not be a representation of a space flight mission, this would be the real thing. And our objective would not be to educate, per se, but simply to share and to make accessible and convenient the experience and exploration of it for anyone and everyone with interest.
It seems to me that this is precisely what I would want to see on the internet if I were young in this time. The representational, educational resources are being done, for example at the Challenger Center, Space Explorers, FIRST, For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, and at NASA.
A friend recently asked, "Why go to the Moon? Why an X Prize? It's been done. What's the contribution?" My first response echoed the arguments heard in favor of the new space industry. However I then reverted to my own perspective that the first best reason would be for education and inspiration. A novel, open source experience of math, science and engineering on the internet.
Through an open source educational experience of space flight systems, one is able to dig down into every myriad detail and gain a fuller sense of the various domains of math, science and engineering involved. How they interact and how they exist with respect to one and the other in the real world example.
My friend reacted enthusiastically. That's a good reason. We need to do more for education. Not enough is being done in the private sector for education. And I agree. Mille grazie, Frank. Your opinion is very important to me, having dimensions my own experience does not.
In Team FREDNET we have a number of properties in our strategy that are naturally capable of producing precisely this result. They are, open source, open participation, reproducible results, accessibility and convenience. These objectives serve our purpose in realizing a GLXP success with a decentralized group, and with some complementary attention they serve the higher purpose of providing a working example of space flight systems for interested internet explorers.
This would not be a representation of a space flight mission, this would be the real thing. And our objective would not be to educate, per se, but simply to share and to make accessible and convenient the experience and exploration of it for anyone and everyone with interest.
It seems to me that this is precisely what I would want to see on the internet if I were young in this time. The representational, educational resources are being done, for example at the Challenger Center, Space Explorers, FIRST, For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, and at NASA.
Monday, January 25, 2010
Information Economy
I've recently completed a review of the problem and solution set for a non profit, open source effort to win the Google Lunar X Prize. The GLXP is a competition for as much as $20M to the first registered team to put a rover on the moon and traverse 500m while returning HD video, to complete the mission requirements.
Not finding a gig lately, maybe I can help to create one.
For me, the GLXP mission is most interesting when the purpose extends beyond getting there and winning the prize. A deeper purpose, not that it's not a super cool project. My recent work on the subject reenforces the notion. For even with lots of free effort from capable minds and hands, it would take about $20M to do. The lion's share of that is the cost of launching up to LEO/TLI, which figures in at about $12M.
The GLXP itself has an interesting structure, when the reward is about the lowest possible cost of performance.
I've long thought it an ideal application of a non profit, open source approach. If $20M can be raised for the mission, then another $20M can be won and turned back into the enterprise. And if every bit permitted by law and contract is freely and openly published, then the purpose becomes far more than the performance, or even the experience of -- or ability to perform.
Then the purpose becomes educational, and perhaps inspirational. In the spirit of sharing, and giving young people the opportunity to experience an area of math and science and engineering that may interest and focus their own ambitions. After all, it is one of the hard parts in life for most people -- finding a direction, focusing the education, and then having a satisfactory adult career. The internet is good for that.
And then I thought, not sure how useful that will be if the jobs aren't there. Open source is great, and it has helped people and created jobs. But what more can open source do for jobs, I wondered.
Well, currently we face a need for innovation. And open source innovation is shared by everyone. But as the information economy raises the bar on innovation in each decade, what effect does this evolution have on the way we create jobs?
An increasingly decentralized or distributed information economy follows on telecommuting and crowd sourcing as value is created in digital production and services in commerce.
How can internet tools better enable these businesses to be developed?
And then it follows, although not specifically in information, how much higher will the economic bar of innovation be raised before space is a more expansive component of the world economy?
Not finding a gig lately, maybe I can help to create one.
For me, the GLXP mission is most interesting when the purpose extends beyond getting there and winning the prize. A deeper purpose, not that it's not a super cool project. My recent work on the subject reenforces the notion. For even with lots of free effort from capable minds and hands, it would take about $20M to do. The lion's share of that is the cost of launching up to LEO/TLI, which figures in at about $12M.
The GLXP itself has an interesting structure, when the reward is about the lowest possible cost of performance.
I've long thought it an ideal application of a non profit, open source approach. If $20M can be raised for the mission, then another $20M can be won and turned back into the enterprise. And if every bit permitted by law and contract is freely and openly published, then the purpose becomes far more than the performance, or even the experience of -- or ability to perform.
Then the purpose becomes educational, and perhaps inspirational. In the spirit of sharing, and giving young people the opportunity to experience an area of math and science and engineering that may interest and focus their own ambitions. After all, it is one of the hard parts in life for most people -- finding a direction, focusing the education, and then having a satisfactory adult career. The internet is good for that.
And then I thought, not sure how useful that will be if the jobs aren't there. Open source is great, and it has helped people and created jobs. But what more can open source do for jobs, I wondered.
Well, currently we face a need for innovation. And open source innovation is shared by everyone. But as the information economy raises the bar on innovation in each decade, what effect does this evolution have on the way we create jobs?
An increasingly decentralized or distributed information economy follows on telecommuting and crowd sourcing as value is created in digital production and services in commerce.
How can internet tools better enable these businesses to be developed?
And then it follows, although not specifically in information, how much higher will the economic bar of innovation be raised before space is a more expansive component of the world economy?
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
What is real?
Real math is real engineering. However in many domains of engineering, the math is the question.
One of the application objectives for Fv3 is spaceflight simulation. In the case of possible applications for Team FREDNET, simulation and navigation are very close siblings.
In these applications, fidelity is enhanced significantly when engineers and physicists are able to adapt the math in the software to the spacecraft design and performance. Significantly because errors grow substantially among the large numbers common to spaceflight computation, be it distance or velocity.
For example, when an engine fires a nonlinear and irregular acceleration is induced. This acceleration can be adequately described in a mathematical function of (time and) properties of the engine and spacecraft, and the use of the engine by the spacecraft. Without these enhancements, fidelity is affected.
In support of projects like these, the Lorv project is experimenting with the software structure of the Orekit astrodynamical mathematics library to better reveal its mathematics to users, and to better enable the adaptation of the math by users.
Another way of looking at this objective for Lorv is a classic example of one of the less critical but not less important strengths of the Java programming language.
As the Jela project experimented with, the Java programming language is interesting and powerful in a scripting role. Developing Orekit/Lorv for compatibility with scripting positions will empower with convenience and flexibility in tools designed for getting work done without reflection on the tool itself.
As a Software Engineer, I don't know the mathematics of many domains I encounter. I need only some essential familiarity with it in order to write code to implement someone else's math, or to ensure that transformations on code are doing the same math.
Working with people who do know the math is highly rewarding, as new vistas open before the mind's eye.
Those moments always remind me of the first time I saw the opening shot in George Lucas' most famous motion picture, when the atmospheric horizon of a planet looms into view -- filling the screen. I'd never seen such an image in such color and definition. It was 1977 and I was 11. I went back to see it seven times that summer, riding the two miles on my bike.
And of course if you're like me, the title of this essay echos with memories of another well known film. Far more recent. Kind of dark, but also a lot of fun.
One of the application objectives for Fv3 is spaceflight simulation. In the case of possible applications for Team FREDNET, simulation and navigation are very close siblings.
In these applications, fidelity is enhanced significantly when engineers and physicists are able to adapt the math in the software to the spacecraft design and performance. Significantly because errors grow substantially among the large numbers common to spaceflight computation, be it distance or velocity.
For example, when an engine fires a nonlinear and irregular acceleration is induced. This acceleration can be adequately described in a mathematical function of (time and) properties of the engine and spacecraft, and the use of the engine by the spacecraft. Without these enhancements, fidelity is affected.
In support of projects like these, the Lorv project is experimenting with the software structure of the Orekit astrodynamical mathematics library to better reveal its mathematics to users, and to better enable the adaptation of the math by users.
Another way of looking at this objective for Lorv is a classic example of one of the less critical but not less important strengths of the Java programming language.
As the Jela project experimented with, the Java programming language is interesting and powerful in a scripting role. Developing Orekit/Lorv for compatibility with scripting positions will empower with convenience and flexibility in tools designed for getting work done without reflection on the tool itself.
As a Software Engineer, I don't know the mathematics of many domains I encounter. I need only some essential familiarity with it in order to write code to implement someone else's math, or to ensure that transformations on code are doing the same math.
Working with people who do know the math is highly rewarding, as new vistas open before the mind's eye.
Those moments always remind me of the first time I saw the opening shot in George Lucas' most famous motion picture, when the atmospheric horizon of a planet looms into view -- filling the screen. I'd never seen such an image in such color and definition. It was 1977 and I was 11. I went back to see it seven times that summer, riding the two miles on my bike.
And of course if you're like me, the title of this essay echos with memories of another well known film. Far more recent. Kind of dark, but also a lot of fun.
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Fv3 needs fonts
My descent into fonts has traveled far and wide. Tim Taylor's compact mobile font format is nice, but in the end I chose a more rigorous route for a larger number of open avenues into future work. I chose to read the True Type / Open Font file format directly.
Font designers tend to release their work in the TTF/OTF file format -- for example on "dafont" or the "open font library". So reading this format directly in an efficient and effective way permits a wide open variety of applications for font glyph data -- as it should be.
This fits into the Fv3 model for a static & dynamic tool chain. It will be able to get fast font glyph data dynamically at runtime, or as part of a tool invocation at design time in the construction of relatively static products. Both options are fast enough to keep all doors open to possible routes into tool and application structure.
There's a reason why few venture into the TTF/OTF reading & writing territory. The specification is not as bad as SSL, but it's incomplete or just plain broken in all the most critical places. So I have depended heavily on George Williams' FontForge and David Turner, Robert Wilhelm, and Werner Lemberg's FreeType codebases to illuminate the dark corners.
And I'm fairly done. Whew. That was a long walk. Twelve days since Christmas according to Google's lovely updates feed.
The image above shows a Java2D display of the font data (from fv3-font inspector). Next comes 3D on JOGL.
Font designers tend to release their work in the TTF/OTF file format -- for example on "dafont" or the "open font library". So reading this format directly in an efficient and effective way permits a wide open variety of applications for font glyph data -- as it should be.
This fits into the Fv3 model for a static & dynamic tool chain. It will be able to get fast font glyph data dynamically at runtime, or as part of a tool invocation at design time in the construction of relatively static products. Both options are fast enough to keep all doors open to possible routes into tool and application structure.
There's a reason why few venture into the TTF/OTF reading & writing territory. The specification is not as bad as SSL, but it's incomplete or just plain broken in all the most critical places. So I have depended heavily on George Williams' FontForge and David Turner, Robert Wilhelm, and Werner Lemberg's FreeType codebases to illuminate the dark corners.
And I'm fairly done. Whew. That was a long walk. Twelve days since Christmas according to Google's lovely updates feed.
The image above shows a Java2D display of the font data (from fv3-font inspector). Next comes 3D on JOGL.
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