Due to intense fog at the launch site, we weren’t able to launch as planned. After a lot of consideration, we decided to do a tethered launch to test everything out. This was a huge success, and proved very valuable. The balloon got to around 250 feet and took lots of pictures. All of our systems worked including the MoLoGoGo phone and APRS radio. You can view this data using Google Earth.

The foam payload enclosure suffered some structural damage from the rope, and one of our cameras became disconnected. We can guarantee that AHAB Version 2.0 will fix these problems and more, and everyone is extremely optimistic about trying again. We won’t rest until we set it free!

The weekend as a whole was an amazing experience, and I absolutely cannot wait to do it again. As someone coming from a big city, seeing small town america is something that’s hard to describe. It’s really a different world in some of these places.

The team was amazing, everyone got along great, and had a ton of fun the entire way. The value of this really cannot be overlooked. Big thanks to everyone involved.

We’re hoping to go back early next month, and bring some sun with us this time.

Photos here, more coming soon, along with video!

See also: Bre’s post on the MAKE blog. A podcast episode may be coming soon as well.

Best weekend ever!

There’s a video podcast on MAKE about the project, I’m the poorly prepared guy talking about the hacked CVS camera:

More information:
http://www.imakethings.com/2007/03/03/diy-space-make-video-podcast/

I’ll let you know how everything goes tomorrow, wish us luck and good weather!

BillMonk is a free service that makes it easy to track expenses between friends, and to settle them up instantly online. Particularly popular with roommates, young professionals, and college students, it has been used for splitting bills like rent, utilities, meals, and beers. BillMonk also allows users to keep track of books, DVDs, or other items that they have lent to or borrowed from their friends.

In addition to working on the website, everyone kept busy this past month setting up our new office on beautiful Lake Union. It’s been a bit chaotic, but also a lot of fun.

Last night, we announced that Billmonk was acquired by Obopay, Inc.!

We are delighted to announce that BillMonk has been acquired by Obopay, Inc.

Obopay built the first comprehensive mobile person-to-person payments service in the US that lets you instantly send money to anyone using your mobile phone (SMS, WAP, or a downloadable app), or a web browser.

When we first talked to the Obopay team it was clear to us that they care deeply about making it easier to deal with money. Given that BillMonk’s goal is to make money painless between friends, the match couldn’t have been better.

As a first step of integration, BillMonk now lets you settle up your debts online via Obopay! Simply login and click on the new ‘Settle up with Obopay‘ action. Today’s beta release makes it easy to send money to a phone number; we will soon follow up with the ability to send money to an email address.

Now that the dust has just about settled, we are looking forward to devoting all of our time into delivering some exciting new features, so stay tuned to both the BillMonk blog, and Obopay.com!

More information about the acquisition:

• BillMonk blog post
• Obopay Press Release

We are still looking to hire a few more people, so if you are in the Seattle area, check out our Jobs page!

Is the time approaching when Linux has standards for fonts, color management, printing, etc.?

What’s all this then?

• Fonts: Freetype
• Color Manaegment: OpenIcc
• Printing: CUPS

Is the time approaching when Linux has standard APIs beyond POSIX? (in other words: Linux is just the kernel, it’s all the other stuff that makes it useful. But all that other stuff varies from distribution to distribution.)

Hm, I count over 30 at Freedesktop.org, and don’t forget the work that is coming out of the Portland Project.

Is the time approaching when Linux has standards for a GUI? (anything based on X WIndows does not qualify… Been there, bought the T-shirt, still got the books, but ain’t goin back)

Sorry guys! You won’t see photoshop on linux until the Y Window System hits 1.0!

A few years ago there was this big movement started by a lot of people people who didn’t know what the hell they were talking about (me included, I admit) spreading the word that X windows had to go. Projects like Y and PicoGUI showed up and quickly faded away into vaporware.

Fortunately, some people stayed on course and forked the horribly mislead XFree86 project creating Xorg, which quickly reduced XFree86 into nothing more than a terrible repressed memory. Since then, the code has been refactored, and it is now much easier for the Xorg project to release updates (an updated driver doesn’t require you to rebuild the entire tree), and (they claim) easier for new developers to get involved.

More important to most users is of course all the eye-candy that X now supports thanks to the Xgl and AIGLX projects. Developers were able to implement effects that make both OSX and Vista feel old-fashioned — without major architectural changes. Remember that Vista has a completely new driver model.

And I have to throw this in .. X provides network transparency, meaning that an application can execute on one system but be displayed on another. This is very useful when combined with SSH (look up the “X11 Forwarding” section in the ssh man page), and has made projects like LTSP possible – something that has proved to be extremely valuable in the third world, where many new computers for a school is not financially feasible.

Like everything, X it has it’s downsides. But I think it’s future is bright, and there’s no reason to start over now.

Is the time approaching when Linux has real desktop applications and not just command line apps, one-off ports and server products?

Wow, nobody is going to take offense to this…

Some of my favorites:

• OpenOffice
• Firefox
• F-Spot
• Tomboy
• Liferea
• Azureus

And don’t forget…

• The 1500+ applications at GnomeFiles.org
• Adobe’s own Reader, which had an “overwhelming response from customers” when the version 7 beta for linux was launched

And most importantly: is the time approaching when Linux desktop users are willing to pay for commercial software?

Yes, here are a few examples:

• From a novell press release:
  “During the third fiscal quarter 2006, Novell reported $12 million of revenue from Linux* Platform Products, up 30% year-over-year.”
• I wasn’t able to find any numbers, but I know that many people have puchased VMware Workstation for linux
• Both CodeWeavers and Transgaming sell products that make it possible for users to run commercial windows software on Linux. C’mon guys, it’s not all piracy. People are buying stuff here.

Sure, there are people will will only use software that is both free as in beer and freedom, but there is a growing number of people who are just fed up with windows, and want something else, wither it be completely “free” or not.

Let me know when you have a serious answer.

Will do.

Certainly not all of the standards/specifications listed above at completely mature as of yet, but I think that seeing this reaction from someone at Adobe very clearly outlines the difference between traditional proprietary software companies and open-source friendly companies.

This developer claims that until they feel that the linux platform meets 101% of their requirements, they wont even consider porting Photoshop to linux. End of story. Forget what the market might say in a few years (I personally think the linux desktop will continue to gain marketshare at a faster rate than ever before), it still wont be ready!

In contrast, companies that develop open-source software are willing to contribute to the platform, and help get it ready for their application, and at the same time, improving it for everyone.

A few examples:

• Google contracted CodeWeavers to get Picasa running under WINE. This doesn’t mean that CodeWeavers hacked Picasa to death so it would work, but rather they fixed 255 bugs in WINE, all of which clearly benefit the community at large, as well as any other companies that might want to use WINE to bring their windows software to linux.
• Fluendo has contributed a lot of work to the Gstreamer project – which is very bleeding edge – and based several commercial products around it
• Imendio (GTK on OSX) and VMware (libview) contribute to the GTK and GNOME projects.

A friend of mine said “it’s like this guy is living 5-10 years ago”. So, in conclusion, Chris, I have to ask you….

I’m borrowing someone else’s wordpress theme right now until I have time to put my own thing together, and to those of you that have been complaining, I promise that I’ll actually start blogging about things soon.

Assuming you have it installed, just click the link at the bottom of the map.

Thank you Google (Keyhole) for providing documentation on how to create feeds.

Fitzgibbons [the defending lawyer] said in July that plea negotiations had broken off because prosecutors insisted on prison time, which he said would be too dangerous for someone as attractive as Lafave.

I really hope that didn’t have anything to do with the judge’s desicion… would be a very sad day for the judicial system.

And you’ve really gotta wonder about some of these cases… I know the kid is 14 and all… but did anyone actually ask his opinion on what happened? Did this incedent actually do more pshycological harm to anyone other than ruining an (already broken) marrage and make someone look like a pervert?Does this even effect the sentance? I’m not condoning having an affair with someone who is possibly young enough to be your son (although not in this case…25-14=11…you get the point)… I think anyone who does have one is a pretty fucked up person…but I do wonder if some of these sex-related laws (such as strip club restrictions) are in place to serve as an example to the rest of society of what the lawmakers think is “right” or “moral” rather than actually keep people safe.

Announcing: http://docs.gotmono.net/ !

Thanks to the AJAX.net library, you will never see the entire page reload, yet the contents tree will always stay in sync with what you are looking at. I have also implemented a live index search making it extremely quick and easy to find what you are looking for.

I find it amusing that my very first javascript project is several magnitudes better than what Microsoft managed to scrap together, which only works properly when used with Internet Explorer.

I have tested the site in Firefox, Opera, and Internet Explorer, and other than IE’s usual CSS problems (and it looks like some of which might already be fixed in IE7), it works almost perfectly in every one.

Please let me know if you find any bugs or have any suggestions…or even if you just find it useful! If there is an open-source mono library you would like to see added to the site let me know about that as well.

UPDATE: It looks like the site was erroring a bit… its working now.