http://fogie.us/blog Fogie's Personal and Colony Blog Sat, 14 Mar 2009 06:04:44 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en We saw a hockey game and our team beat the hated rivals 5-2 and Biscuit got an autograph on her jersey from the awesome star goalie! http://fogie.us/blog/?p=99 So. Our last update was well before the New Year, and since then I regret that circumstances have kept me away from this project. We've slowly started to get a first iteration going using XNA, consisting of a simple 2D grid. From there we'll begin glomming on additional features until ... http://fogie.us/blog/?p=96 Lunar dust is nasty, sharp and arid. Apollo astronauts had their equipment quickly covered in electrostatically-charged dust and it irritated their lungs. A whole suite of solutions will have to be implemented to keep the dust under control, lest colonists be cut down early in life with cases of lung ... http://fogie.us/blog/?p=93 Any colony on the Moon (outside the rare "mountains of eternal light" on the poles) will have to address the long 14-day lunar night. In addition, the lack of an atmosphere means that temperatures swing widely from a bubbling 200C in the glare of the Sun to a -100C deep-freeze ... http://fogie.us/blog/?p=91 3+ feet on the ground and counting, next storm on Sunday... http://fogie.us/blog/?p=87 There is a fantastic set of tutorials I've been fiddling around with for the last week or two, available at http://www.riemers.net/eng/Tutorials/xnacsharp.php Last night I started more intensive testing and so far I've managed to shoehorn some Mars content into the tutorial program. This week we begin work on the first rudimentary ... http://fogie.us/blog/?p=81 Today I've been watching a documentary mini-series all about humanity's first mission to Mars, called Mars Rising. It's narrated by William Shatner, and has decent production values and explores a lot of different facets in six 1-hour episodes. Shielding humans from radiation in space is one of our greatest challenges, and ... http://fogie.us/blog/?p=76 Lunar probes in the last decade have revealed a great deal of new information about the Moon's polar regions, and what might be found inside the deeper craters where sunlight hasn't shone for millions of years. Ice crystals left behind by cometary impacts may have accumulated inside these pitch-black polar ... http://fogie.us/blog/?p=73 I've been investigating some of the tools available through the Virtual Terrain Project and they have a lot of valuable tutorials and information. Here's 15 minutes with one of their utilities, it's the Tharis region of Mars using a 4096x2048 TIFF of global elevation data. I had to do an ... http://fogie.us/blog/?p=58 Hockey night in Spokane! Chiefs are already up 1 goal and it's Teddy Bear Night so the fans threw enough bears on the ice to fill 3 trucks http://fogie.us/blog/?p=56