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Chapter One
Previously

Pirates
        Nothing happened in the last week that I didn't log in the ship's log. At least not what you want to hear, I get it. You don't need to know every time I take a shit or what I had for breakfast, right? Anyway, the whores pretty much behaved themselves. Like the log says, robots were trying to fix the busted generator but I knew they couldn't. They do what they're programmed to do no matter how impossible.
        Anyway, after a week there were some more little rocks in our way, but these were mapped; we could just go around them. The computers would do the actual steering but I have to sit in the pilot seat in case the four of them disagree about something and I have to make a decision. I've never seen that happen, though.
        While we were driving around the rocks, Wild Bill called over the MASER link. "John, Bill here. I'm about a light minute ahead of you and I'm standing still again, but this time it's on purpose. There's pirates ahead, and I can't outrun them on batteries. If your systems are all in good shape, run like hell. If you're having problems you should stop."
        Shit. I could out run them on one generator but what if the other one went out? Hell, I could just detour around them. Too bad Bill didn't have that advantage, batteries just didn't hold enough energy.
        I answered him back. "Pirates? This far out? Are you sure they're pirates?"
        It would be a couple of minutes before I heard back. I put the course correction into the computers' input console while I waited, then addressed the folks on board. "Passengers and cargo, attention. Prepare for unexpected gravity changes. That is all."
        Bill answered. "It's a fleet and they're not listed in the computer. Hell if I know what they're doing out here."
        Damn. Bill was a damned good friend who had helped me out of jams more than once. And he was hauling tons of different metals, a valuable cargo inside a valuable ship. His short circuit could have been sabotage; pirates have been known to infiltrate the company before. The company wouldn't too much mind pirates killing Bill but they'd hate to lose the ship and cargo, so maybe I wouldn't get in too much trouble for what I planned. I picked up the phone and addressed the ship's P.A. System. You can probably get a lot more detail from the computers, but anyway I got on the P.A. "Attention, ladies, this is the captain," I said. "Strap down, we're going to have some crazy gravity in a few minutes. That is all."
        I strapped myself into the pilot's chair myself. I turned the boat around and decelerated, shut down half the engines, made one look like it was sputtering, and informed Bill to get ready. Then I went toward the pirates while the computers figured out the trajectory for what I'd planned. I'm glad I have those computers, I could never do the math myself.
        They saw me, and I pretended I'd just noticed them and changed course. I wasn't kidding when I told the women gravity was going to be weird.
        They took chase. I went just slow enough to keep them the right distance and get where I was headed when I was headed there. From the radar it looked like they were steering those things by hand. Good, that raised my chances. Actually there wasn't any danger to me since I could outrun 'em easy and they can't shoot at me or anything that might damage the boat and cargo, which is what their goal is. But it raised my chances of saving Bill's ship.
        You know how the pirate fleets work, with a lead ship carrying an EMP. They don't know we designed these ships with pirates in mind and their EMP wouldn't stop us. And I didn't want them to know so I sent them a nice little present, fired from the rail.
        I hear the pirates still use gunpowder.
        The bastard's ship exploded and we were almost there –
        When I reached the right spot we took off like a bat out of hell. Ten seconds later the poor pirates got caught in the rain, as we say. They probably all died. I sure hope so, murderous bastards after my friend!
        I set the course back to Mars and addressed the ladies. "You can unstrap now."
        Time for inspection, since I'd pushed her hard on one generator.
        Like it says in the log, it was fine but a little warm. The engines were in good shape, too, but I shut down the one I made stutter for twenty four hours, just like the book says.
        This called for a beer. Hell, this called for champagne but I didn't have any. I started back to my quarters for a beer.

To be continued.

This morning I was thumbing through my copy of "The Writer's Guide to Building a Science Fiction Universe" and I happened upon the star system building chapter. As I read through the chapter they described the nearest binary star system, Alpha Centauri. It struck me as odd [after having played around with star system generation programs [based on Stephen Dole's Accrete] for something like 20 years that binary's with different types of stars exist. I'm not an astronomer just a curious generalist.

Take Alpha Centauri for example a G2V [something like our Sol] and a K2V is much smaller than Sol but will live 1.5 to 3.0 times longer than Sol. I thought this odd. so I did some Google search... and found that there is no good reasonable explanation that I can find for two different classes of stars being in the same system.

Apparently how binary star formation occurs is debatable. The most favored explanation seems to be that binaries systems form from a common stellar nebula.

So I got to thinking about the Alpha Centauri System as an example of the curious nature of binaries.

Alpha Centauri A is much larger than Alpha Centauri B.
Alpha Centauri B has a much longer life time than Alpha Centauri A since K2V stars burn much slower than G2V.
Orbital separation varies from 11 AU to 36 AU
The assumption is that they both formed at the same time and are ~6B years old.

And yet...

Some how it just does not seem right that you would have separate two stars of different masses that would form from a single stellar nebula. How can can their formation have occurred? One would think the larger of the two, A, would have sucked up, B. How can the relative motion of B around A occurred? How could the orbital mechanics of a gaseous cloud allow for one part to eventually orbit another?

A study from the NRAO VLA Antena at Pie Town, NM suggests that the formation of binaries occurs because the main stellar nebula fragments.... but no mention is made as to how this might occur.

In a "Matrix Moment" it occurs to me that the simplest answer is that we live in a simulation with a subprogram that randomly cranks out stellar systems with random features and elements much like a chart in a table top RPG...

One wonders if there is a rabbit hole with the stuff of arguments here or just a curiosity...

Day 7 has disappeared in a fog. Not sure if fog is real, or due to too much Grog.

Day 8 - the rain has penetrated through our skins and soaked every last crewmember. some have even taken additional time in the bilge to get away from the relentless downpour. the winds have slacked off, but without the stars to navigate by it is hopeless to maintain a heading.

I discovered this morning that we are missing moderation options that I think we should have: Mod points should be available for Journal posts. Why? because some of you write some good stuff but don't really get the credit or recognition you deserve.

There is a downside in that it might be used by some to suppress some views... the easy way to deal with this is only allow "up mods". Goodliness should be rewarded. Take a visit to Ethanol-Fueled's Journal and read about his Arduino Code or Fliptop's Journal for his five part series on Perl and IP cameras.

The best I can do is post this journal entry and hopw you go and give these fellows your comments.

As the title says. An injury two days ago apparently requires surgery. I will be on hiatus for as long as I need to be.

Mattie_p

EDIT: surgery is complete, she is in recovery right now. She and I are both pretty tired right now. I'm home to care for my son and my wife took over at the hospital. I'll try to keep everyone posted but there is a lot I don't know at this point.

https://github.com/crutchy-/test/blob/master/karma_published.php

bacon+
(only single +/- to differentiate from bender)

~karma bacon

~rainbow pretty text

etc

todo: quotes

After some of the comment exchanges this morning on topics such as Pollard and SCOTUS deciding money == speech, I think I'm going to swear off commenting on "political talk".

It does nothing to make the needed legal changes and does nothing to expand social discourse. Instead it becomes clear there is willful misunderstanding and a unwillingness to compromise by those who support the politics of selfishness and moral corruption. I don't have a problem with people if they want to live in hell and do despicable acts... that's their choice... but when they want to drag everybody else along that's a whole 'nother story.

It only makes me sad that people can be so gullible and believe in things which are not in their own best interest... but as I have learned from my mistakes I can only hope they learn before it is too late.

So go ahead and party boys while the country's morality burns to the ground, and the U.S. becomes just another corrupt rapacious Evil Empire... and our standing as a beacon to the rest of the world becomes the light of the on-coming train of our destruction... we all know how that story line ends.

No I'm not talking "religious morals"-- I'm talking humanist values and obligations to be kind to your family and community. To build and give rather than to destroy and take. I'm sorry but I do not find Libertarian or Tea Party philosophy has any moral value nor any grounds to stand on. It is selfish, destructive, short sighted, and anarchistic pack of twaddle which is being sold to the gullible as a real viable thing... except it ain't...

But I can't teach the willfully ignorant... and the only way they will learn is by letting themselves become an example of what not to do when trying to live a good life. Alas... some smart people can be really, really stupid.

So I'm swearing off political commentary... it serves me no good purpose and I'm sure those with whom I have disagreed will be grateful.

You're welcome... ;)

Creating a "movie" from a bunch of stills is pretty simple when you have ffmpeg handy. As before, code below is in chunks and the full script can be found here.

Since we're storing all a day's images in a particular directory, all we need to do is glob them up and pipe a concatenate to ffmpeg.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use File::Glob ':glob';
use Date::Calc qw{ Today Add_Delta_Days };
use Data::Dumper;

use constant DEBUG => 1;
use constant BASE_DIR => '/home/fliptop/tv-ip551wi/';

We'll use File::Glob to gather all the image filenames into a list. We'll also need the Add_Delta_Days method to figure out yesterday's date so we know which files to glob (this code gets run sometime after midnight and operates on the previous day's pictures).

Please note that this script is designed to work on images from just one camera. It could easily be modified to handle multiple directories for more than one camera by setting the BASE_DIR constant to an array of directories then looping over them with the ffmpeg code below.

open LOG, '>>/tmp/ffmpeg_tv-ip551wi.log' or die "can't open log file: $!";

my @Yesterday = Add_Delta_Days(Today, -1);

# does the dir exist?
my ($year, $month, $day) = @Yesterday;
my $dir = sprintf "%s%s/%02d/%02d", BASE_DIR, @Yesterday;
my $movie_dir = sprintf "%s%s/%02d", BASE_DIR, $year, $month;

unless (-e $dir) {
  printf LOG "base directory %s does not exist!\n", $dir if DEBUG;
  die;
}

As always, open a log file for debugging purposes. After we figure out yesterday's date, make sure it exists and die if it doesn't.

my $files = sprintf "%s/*.jpg", $dir;
my @list = bsd_glob($files);

printf LOG "found %s images in directory %s\n", scalar(@list), $dir if DEBUG;
my $mpg = sprintf "%s/%s%02d%02d.mpg", $movie_dir, @Yesterday;

If the directory exists, we use the bsd_glob method to put all the filenames into the @list array. We'll give the final movie a name that corresponds to yesterday's date as well.

print LOG "creating mpg from images...\n" if DEBUG;
my $resp = qx{ /bin/cat $files |
               /usr/bin/ffmpeg -f image2pipe -sameq -vcodec mjpeg -i - -y $mpg };
print LOG "finished creating mpg\n" if DEBUG;

if ($resp) {
  printf LOG "unable to create mpeg: $resp\n" if DEBUG;
}

close LOG;

exit();

Here we use the cat command and pipe the output to ffmpeg, which will create a mjpeg movie. If you take one picture every 10 seconds over a 24-hour period, the final movie will be about 5 minutes long. See the ffmpeg man page for more information.

Coming next, invoking it all with cron.

I've been a little busy this week, too busy to spend much time soylenting. I've only written about three more paragraphs of Mars, Ho!; I've been working on Nobots and The Paxil Diaries. The Paxil Diaries was waiting on my porch when I got home from Patty's Tuesday evening, and boy was it a mess. I've mostly been working on it. It's funny how much easier it is for me to notice mistakes on paper I miss on screen.

I finished editing it again last night and am waiting for another copy, which they haven't shipped yet. When it comes I'll go over it again, upload the revisions and buy another copy. It may be green outside before you can get a copy after all.

Nobots needed more sales outlets, so I worked on that, too. You should be able to get it at bookstores in a few weeks. If you bought a copy last year, you may own a rare book. If my name is on the bottom right of the front cover instead of right under the title, you have one of fewer than two dozen copies. It should be worth something in a decade or so.

I may work on the Mars book today, but then again I might just take the day off, take the computer to Felber's and watch Cosmos on Hulu since channel 55 was off the air last night; their web site said there was equipment failure. And drink beer in the beer garden and listen to music and enjoy the 65 degrees they're forecasting.

Or maybe sweep the floor... nah.