Today is BugDay and so I'm not sure I'll be able to break away from the Mozilla bug hunting and squashing activities, but if I can, I'll see what I can do to cover the "big news" that's expected out of NASA this afternoon.
If I'm not blogging the press conference live at 11 am PST, then check back later in the evening for "rough transcripts" because I'll certainly be recording the NASA feed.
update: My sources close to the science team are suggesting that this will be a significant briefing.
prediction: My predictions for this press briefing are that they'll announce they've got a pretty good idea about the local geology at Opportunity's crator in Meridiani Planum and that they are fairly confident they know which rocks at the site contain the coarse gray hematite they came looking for and that it (or its precursor, goethite) most likely formed in large bodies of standing liquid water. If we're really lucky, they'll also have news about the liquid water (in brine) near the surface of the rover (possibly both). I think the chances that they'll have anything to say about life, other than that water was or is there in abundance, are pretty slim.
Posted by asa at March 2, 2004 12:10 AMBug day sounds like a great idea - thankfully Firefox seems to be the least buggy version of the standalone browser so far (at least in my experience). the only problems I've noticed is not being able to get past the front page on soccernet.com (damn that crazy javascript form - though it worked in 0.7) and sometimes after the browser has been up a while, middle-click stops working. You guys do a great job! - keep it up!:)
Posted by: Nik-W on March 2, 2004 03:04 AMThey found Elvis. That's what my sources say.
Posted by: Fred Kiesche on March 2, 2004 09:07 AMAsa, what utility do u use to record Real video streams?
Posted by: tekumse on March 2, 2004 09:35 AMTekumse, in most places you can get NASATV through your cable company.
Posted by: Clint Ecker on March 2, 2004 09:43 AMFossils.
Posted by: Evan on March 2, 2004 09:51 AMtekumse, I use a windows app called Real7ime Converter.
Clint, in some places you can get NASA TV through your cable company. I wouldn't say "most places".
thanks - it works like a charm though it creates monstrous files since I'm not sure what codec to use for compression but I'll try some and see.
I used to get NASA TV but then Comcast did something and poof.
Posted by: tekumse on March 2, 2004 11:07 AMBows... thank you, thank you
Concretions!
Crystals!
Jarocite!
Evaporites!
tekumse, you can tell it to save as WMP rather than full-frame (whatever that massive format is). I get about 1 hour per GB in WMP, I think.
Posted by: Asa Dotzler on March 2, 2004 12:37 PMDuncan, you're a winner :-)
Posted by: Asa Dotzler on March 2, 2004 12:38 PMI left it at no compression because I had 80GB space on the drive and quick check showed me it was about 7.5GB an hour. Unfortunatelly the program ran in some 4GB max file size limit and crashed on stop so I got nothing :-(
Posted by: tekumse on March 2, 2004 12:56 PMtekumse, yeah, it seems to crash for me writing out the audio component after I finish a recording. I think when it gets into low-memory (RAM) situations, it crashes. I've taken to doing two overlapping 35 minute recordings to capture the 1hr press briefings. That seems to prevent the crashes.
Posted by: Asa Dotzler on March 2, 2004 01:56 PM