The Armchair Politician

The MESSENGER probe successfully completed its flyby of Venus, and heads towards Mercury.

Seriously, these guys are incredible. We want probes to get where they’re going fast, but going fast in space has one nasty implication: slowing down requires just as much energy as it took to speed up. In order to shed some of that speed, NASA sent their MESSENGER probe past extremely low by Venus to pass excess energy into Venus’ atmosphere.

Now the probe is heading on to do a flyby of Mercury, which will point it straight at the Sun. The technical ability this kind of feat requires is nothing short of astounding. It’s the world’s largest billiards trick shot, with the balls spaced 25 million miles apart.

I’ve decided to spin off all my technical writings to another blog, and keep this one for my political and/or personal musings.

For those of you using my gemtracker plugin or otherwise pointing to my repositories, the location of my anonymous Subversion repository has changed. It’s now svn://devel.touset.org/, with no svn component of the path.

I’m building a new VPS to host my open source development and blog (WordPress is grating on me, and DreamHost sucks at running Typo), so this move is part of that.

In other news, keep your eyes peeled for version 1.5.0 of Pallet, my cross-distribution Ruby packaging library. It’s gone through a major rewrite of the Debian backend. I’ll (hopefully) soon add an RPM backend as well.