The space explored by America

A concise summary of the space race and how we won it.

By Dr. D. Dalton Rump, fifth degree phD in Astropsychics from Belmoine Univeristy.

    The opposite problem was explosion by decompression, called "complosive deprosession" by scientists. This could happen to any astronaut unlucky enough to be pranked by his co-travelers and placed in the airlock while he slept. If the other astronauts didn't like the guy in the airlock, they would swivel the airlock's air cocks and out the astronaut would go to become one with the cosmos. At that point, they would also explode into a fine paste. If severe hunger later afflicted the surviving astronauts, they could "space scrape" the remains of former annoying astronauts off of the ship and make a fine tasting gruel.

    All astronauts are male of course, since the spacesuit was designed for people with penises. Do not send me angry letters; penis is the appropriate word for referring to a man's genitalia. This fact is so fundamental to space travel that women have long designed their own spaceships and suits in preparation for space travel, but they know that if men keep leaving the planet for space, soon women will have the planet to themselves and this has halted their scientific efforts mostly. It is important that not every man go to space in trying to fulfill his patriotic duty; otherwise the planet would become devoid of our penises and our brains, which share much of the same very importent functionality.

    A lot of computation and calculation and figuring went into the excellent American space program. It was some of our greatest and best thought at the time. Unfortunately there were many errors too, and these needed to be corrected a lot on the day of the space launch. Vectors and thrusts and other scientific concepts might not have been computed correctly by lazy pre-launch scientists, and the political leaders often had to step in and correct their numbers on whiteboards or blackboards, depending on the race of the scientists. This was called "just in time space exploration" and is a technique still used today in many software compilers in computers.

    Further, many of the computers we have today would not have been invented without the space race. This is because going any kind of distance, in any medium (such as water or space) requires very many, nearly infinite numbers of precise calculations. Today we do this with a GPS device, but back then they had only hand calculators and a few really smart people that could add quickly enough. This just wasn't good enough.

    For one thing, smart people like to argue, and when decisions have to be made really quickly in space, we need decisiveness. The kind of decisiveness that can see three alternatives, and come up with a better correct version of reality to explain what should be done next in astrogation. That's how our amazing astronauts of Pollo 19 were able to find the chicken nebula in heaven and known the way back to earth without totally evaporating in space.

    Also the space race gave us many new terms for our American language. For example, nobody knew what space food sticks were before we traveled to the moon and the sun. Now this delicious breakfast treat is enjoyed by all technical people along with their eggs and orange juice. It's part of a full flavored space breakfast!

    Science is a journey of continual discovery and many new rules of motion and collision had to be determined before we could ever jump into space. Early pioneers used many types of equipment to get into space, from trampoline to trebuchet to cannon, and these were largely failures as far as we know. Initially there was a lot of positive thought that many early travelers actually made it into space, since they were never heard from again after their launches. This was especially true for those using cannon to escape earth's pull, which caused cannon-fired space travel to continue developing for quite a long time. Eventually people decided that maybe space travelers should come back and tell us what they found. This inspired the development of ROCKETS! But at least all that development work in cannons could be put to use during wartime, such as the Napoleonic age that prospered after the first early space flights.

    The real trick which we figured out was how to get back down to Earth. The answer was simple, stupid -- gravity. Things thrown up tend to fall back down (unless you throw them really hard, see earlier point about cannon-fired space explorers). The only way you can counteract gravity is with thrust, so we rapidly figured out how to thrust just the right way to fall off the planet. It's important not to fall too far, because at some point the conservation of gravity comes into play, which means you do not get any more of it. At this point, you may become a satellite or a meteor because you are no longer tethered to earth's gravity effectively enough.

    Rockets are the best possible way to deploy thrusting for getting into space and always have been, even before we knew how to make them. A little known fact: since there's no air in space, you cannot hear rocket thrusters firing, which one could scarcely know from all our movies about space flight. Space movies rightly favor the pleasure of the audience in hearing loud noises over stark realism. Luckily, the ultra-quiet vacuum of space also means you cannot hear annoying astronauts scream when you send them out the airlock, which makes the whole process a lot less stressful.

    Whew, those last couple of paragraphs were highly technical. Let's bring the focus back to things that really matter: how we feel about space. Space is just cool and it was begging us to explore it. Almost like the undersides of dresses beg to be lifted up, assuming the lifter is well endowed enough, with cash, to pay off any lawsuits from lame women who don't like their dresses lifted up. So, we brave men finally said, let's lift that dress off of space and go explore under there, and damn the lawsuits from God. If he didn't want us exploring space's knickers, he shouldn't have put it all around us. It's a biological imperative after all.

    So here we were feeling all cool about starting to explore space, when the Russians saw that and were like "we want that too!". They inhumanely started putting dogs up into space, just to really piss us off. We humanely tossed monkeys up into space instead, because who gives a damn about them, but dogs are our best friends.

    This space exploration by animals lasted until humans got jealous and wanted to see it for ourselves. Also we had killed all those space animals rather than figuring out how to get them back, so we could not hear their own accounts about space. This started development on even more new technologies, such as making spacesuits that were not equipped with kill switches. We want to be humane to humans after all!

    Then we really kicked those Russkies but good. They were still all pumped about sending dogs and robots up into space, but we got real American men into space instead. That showed them. Then they started up their propaganda machines trying to claim they got a person up there first. Ha, if that's true, where are the pictures? We have much better pictures of our best people who got into space first, such as Buzz Armstrong and Neil Diamond.

    But after getting into space first, we thought, what would really show those stuffy communists the true glory and power of the capitalist system. And some clever people were like, hey, if we went up and stomped around on the Moon, that would really torque those Russians something fierce. They could look up there and know we were stealing all their cosmic stores of green cheese, and if they ever made it up there, there wouldn't be any left.  And just knowing that we got up there and put our boots all over the moon (which were henceforth called "moon boots") would mean we had secured our place in history once and for all, and could finally stop trying.

    So we got right to that task of landing on the moon, and, after a lot of whiny complaints about wanting to know what it's like, even got astronauts back again to tell the tale. And tell that tale we did, even to this day. And we have the pictures to prove it. QED.

(originally published on medium.com on December 8 2016)

obscurity divers

exploring the trackless depths of the net where the wild hidden things are

By Chris Koeritz

i've been using a search engine a lot these days.  i think we all have.  and i've noticed an odd thing; some questions are harder to get good answers for than others.  perhaps that seems really obvious, since some topics are harder to comprehend than others, and search engines don't have flawless language parsing skills yet, and so on.  but the weaknesses i'm seeing in the search results don't quite seem grounded in how difficult the question was, or in the knowledge base assumed by the question.  it seems instead that there are occasionally topics that are just harder to answer by automated means.

if that were true, why would it be so? 

using a search engine can still be a frustrating experience for some questions, for potentially numerous reasons...  the information may simply not be visible to the search engine, but still exist hidden away in the dark parts of the net.  or the search could be blocked by mundane issues, such as when terms in the query are way more popular in other usages, so that one's search is hijacked by pages and pages of trivia before the result that might usefully answer the search.  or maybe the answer is not even there, anywhere on the internet, despite the subject matter still being known to humans, some of whom even know the answer (that is, the internet doesn't know everything yet, and never will).

of course there are topics still unknowable to us tiny humans, like "where did the first atom come from and how do i get there on a map?", or "how many intelligent species have existed in the universe so far?".  and of course some questions cannot be answered because they really don't make a lot of sense, such as "how blue is my turnip brain tomorrow yesterday?".  but i posit that there are whole classes of questions that are totally sensible but still don't yield good search results; i think everyone has seen an example of this.

so, i thought to myself, i thought, why not try to take more notes when this breakdown in a search happens, and write down what i'm looking for and how it's missing (what came up instead, what i actually needed to see, etc)...  and then what if i post this information in some kind of spooling "couldn't find it" blog.  it also seems really important to update this record if i do find the information later, via whatever means, even if i needed to consult the "real" world.  if one posts this "missing data" record up on a blog or website, and the record is indexed by search engines, then my "hard to search for" question is also documented.

if people really did this, the process wouldn't necessarily create useful reading material, nor even usable search results.  i probably wouldn't want to read someone else's failed search terms... not unless they were into some freaky stuff, anyway.  but this process is one method for filling in between the cracks in our knowledge with some electronic spackle, and
it's a way expand our understanding to cover more topics, reaching everywhere the mind traces.  if we keep a record of the blank places in our online knowledge, maybe we can eventually fill them in.

there, that's my silly obscurity divers meme.  thank you very much for being willing to rummage around in my old notes.  come back any time.
and yes, i admit the title of this article made it seem more exciting than it really was.  that's marketing!
--fred

* maybe a special tag for this spooling page could provide the semantic information needed to keep these things (spooled failure blogs) from showing up as the results of searches.  we don't after all want the search engine to substitute someone's failed search for an answer to the search.  the spooled failures are initially an absence of results, and then maybe eventually a sign-post to the results (when people actually go back and fill in the things they found out.  also unicorns!).  so the semantic tag embedded in a spooled failure page would indicate that the information there is purely connectivity, not a result in itself.  search engines could avoid showing any of these search failure pages as actual search results, but the engine could still build a neural network of associations from the topics listed on the page, in effect using the page as a hint about understanding more specifics of the question or even what an expected result would be from such a query.  and then the usual problems of accurately weighting the informational value of these pages would ensue.  perhaps community-ranked afficionados would jump into their meta search engine managers and rate the value of these interstitial pages, thus providing some feedback about the search failure page's "quality".

** hmmm, a lot of this work could be done by the search engines themselves, if they offered a very flexible rating system for how well they answered the search.  if the search engine itself were to take the comments about what was really sought and how it was missing, it could chew on these things and come back at a later time with other proposals for the search, and ask the user if these are any better.  if the users would put up with it, and rate their searches somewhat honestly, then the search engine could actually get smarter all the time, or at least get to know the tricksy humans a lot better.  so, google, where's the "rate this search" button on your search interface, which feeds human responses to a giant AI who tries to figure out what results are missing from the overall goog database, eh?

Installshield Intro -- Bring the Pain

By Chris Koeritz

Design

    I am co-opting this section for talking about the "design" of Installshield installations, if there can be said to be one.  Obviously, there is a lot of structure buried under the Installshield program, the design of most of which Microsoft can be held responsible for when they produced the Windows Installer (or MSI--MicroSoft Installer).  MSI is a complex system that often works, but in the end has some very annoying complications that the Setup Developer is left holding the bag on.  The remainder of the section will mostly be opinion-free, but I can only liken my role in introducing you to Installshield to that of Cerberus introducing souls to hell.

    Forget what you know about Install programs as dynamic, goal-directed programs with flashy interfaces.  Microsoft has boiled down some of the essential nuggets of an installation into the MSI format, which is essentially interfaceless.  It's up to vendors like Wise and Installshield to add glitz back in, if desired.  Installshield supports extending the Basic MSI type of installer with a User Interface front-end, such as that used by LightLink.

    The main product of an MSI installation package building tool is the MSI file itself.  This file is crafted differently according to the Windows Installer version that it supports, but it is in essence just a database.  The MSI file is a set of tables with content for the different phases of an Installation.  So, anything that an MSI installer does (or can do) must be something that can be represented as a row in a database table.

    There are many activities that Microsoft has envisioned an installation program may need to perform, and a lot of operations are provided for these tasks.  These include things like registering services, copying files into place, deleting files, etc.  Each of these types of tasks lives as a line in a table somewhere.  Hopefully you will never need to know more detail about the MSI tables than that, except for one important table which has the installation properties stored in it.  The properties are the set of values used by the Installation for directory locations and so forth.  These can be reconfigured by a knowledgeable system admin to make the installation perform differently.

    It is important to have a basic understanding of the installation process, because it helps fit the random pieces of the Installshield interface together into a somewhat sensible scheme.  Each installation follows a sequence of activities.  In general, the majority of actions in a sequence are handed to you when you create the basic framework of the install with a wizard.  At some point in the sequence, choices are made about which features to install.  This can either be automatic, based on parameters passed to the MSI, or it can be user driven, via a set of dialogs.  Each feature is a collection of components that will be installed, but that does not mean each component is merely a collection of files.  A component can also be one of the provided types of actions, such as writing a registry entry.

    Since even Microsoft realizes that they cannot think of everything, there is a special type of action called a custom action.  These are actions that the setup developer creates to perform more general tasks than might be provided in the default toolkit.  For example, LightLink has a custom action that performs a large number of configuration steps by running some script files.  Custom actions are still just lines in a database somewhere, but they provide a way to arbitrarily link to other programs rather than being limited to features directly provided by MSI.

    The actions listed in a sequence will not always necessarily be operated on.  Each action is dependent on a set of conditions that dictate whether it can fire or not.  Some conditions are simple, such as those based on the choices of components made in the UI.  Others are more complex and may themselves even need to be set via a custom action, especially if the condition is needed for a UI decision.

    At the time the MSI package is being installed, Windows passes the package over to the msiexec process.  This is a system process that runs as a service (under the LocalSystem, aka SYSTEM, account).  The msiexec application simply iterates across the tables in the MSI in a pre-defined way until it hits an error or concludes the installation.

    For some unknown reason, an MSI package is not allowed to invoke another MSI package while the installation is running.  This leads to numerous hilarious problems and is the reason that merge modules are created.  The merge module allows what is basically an entire, separate installation program to be stuffed into your own installer such that the MSI constraints against running two MSIs are not violated.  The LightLink installer uses a wide variety of merge modules to plug in third-party features we depend on, or even "first-party" features like extensions to Windows written by Microsoft but not shipped in their default OS.  The above is a really rough overview of Windows Installer and Installshield, but hopefully it provided some guidance on how things flow inside an MSI file when it is running on the target system.

Glossary

Action: The fundamental unit of processing in an installation.

Component: A quantum of installable material.  This can be a file, multiple files, or even an action provided by the Windows Installer support.

Condition: A boolean statement involving properties which is used to guide whether actions are taken or not.

Custom Action: An action created by the setup developer for a purpose which is either not available through MSI or which could be better implemented outside MSI.

Dialog: A user interface component that displays or gathers info (or both) for the user.

Execute Sequence: The set of actions taken once the UI is put away and the installation is given the go ahead.

Feature: A major division of the installation's deliverables.  Features can be made visible to the user as choices they are given about the installation payload and installed configuration.  During the UI sequence, users select which features will be installed.

Key File: A component can have a key file that represents the presence or absence of the component.  If the key is absent or out of date, the component must be installed.

Property: A string or numeric value with a name that can be used to store locations, settings, and other facts about the installation.

Sequence: The ordered stream of activities that make up the install process from initial execution to completion.

UI Sequence: The set of actions taken to interact with a user.  Generally involves dialogs and fact checking.

Comparisons

    Other operating systems had actually already created general installation packaging formats that perform really well.  Many of these existed long before Windows Installer was released into the wild.  Most Linux distributions religiously use a packaging format to deliver their OS itself as well as updates to the OS.  In Redhat Linux, there is the RPM format, and in Debian Linux, there is the DEB format.

    Each of these formats is widely used by other distributions also.  I'm afraid that if you expect MSI to live up to either of these types of packaging methods, then you will be disappointed.  For example, where a Debian Linux install can be said to be completely determined by the set of DEB packages that are installed, there is no such promise for Windows.  A Windows user may not even know of some MSI packages that got installed, whereas others will be visible in Add/Remove.

    Unlike Debian, a Windows user can easily break a program by uninstalling something it depends on; the Windows user is not always warned about interdependencies between packages.  And Windows itself is definitely not packaged into discrete, installable MSI chunks that can be switched out for better versions at any time.  Debian Linux suffers from none of those disadvantages; the set of installed packages and their interdependencies are clear, and installing a new kernel is nothing more than getting the package and installing it like any other package.

    Further, each of the distributions will generally have a huge number of free packages available for a variety of purposes, and only a small number of these are installed by default.  Microsoft provides no centralized repository of MSIs for customer's needs, nor would those packages be free (as in beer) if there was such a repository.

[posted August 20 2010]