Imablog

April 20, 2024April 20, 2024

Seeing the third Saturn V

There are only three Saturn V rockets left in the world. One is at the Apollo/Saturn V Center at the Kennedy Space Center. That one I’ve seen a few times. I never get tired of seeing the Saturn V there.

Another one is at Space Center Houston, which I got to visit a few years ago. There I learned that there were only three left in the world. Since this was the second Saturn V I’d seen, I thought to myself “Well, now I have to see all of them.”

The third, and final Saturn V I got to see is in the Saturn V Hall at the US Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, AL. Outside the Davidson Center where the Saturn V is located is an equally impressive but slightly smaller mockup of the Saturn V. Makes the building easy to find if you’re exploring the Space and Rocket Center.

Saturn V mockup outside the Davidson Center at the US Space and Rocket Center

After going inside the building and up the stairs, you’re greeted with the massive business end of the Saturn V rocket once you turn the corner to enter the exhibit hall.

The base of the Saturn V with the huge F1 rocket engines — The flamy end of the Saturn V rocket

In addition to the Saturn V overhead, there are lots of displays and exhibits telling the history of rocket development and the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs.

View from the tip of the Saturn V rocket — Pointy end of the Saturn V rocket

The Saturn V never ceases to amaze me. I don’t think I’d ever get tired of seeing one.

Saturn V rocket with a Mercury training capsule in the foreground — Mercury training module and Mercury capsule with the Saturn V first stage in the background

Between the first and second stages of the Saturn V rocket — Mercury training module and Mercury capsule with the Saturn V first stage in the background

The US Space and Rocket Center is a great place to visit. There’s lots to see and do there. The Rocket Park (like Kennedy’s Rocket Garden) was having a lot of work being done, but it’s still a fun area to wander around. Check out the Saturn IB and a mockup of part of Skylab (made from pieces that were used for training in the Neutral Bouyancy Simulator) on display in the Rocket Park. Walk around the Shuttle Park where you’ll find a mockup of a Space Shuttle with the external tank and boosters when we were there. Highly recommend going to the US Space and Rocket Center if you’re in the area (or even if you aren’t).

Saturn IB on display in the Rocket Park at the US Space and Rocket Center, Huntsville, AL — Saturn IB in the Rocket Park

Military rockets and vehicles in the Rocket Park at the US Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, AL — Saturn IB in the Rocket Park

Oh, and bring a banana to leave for Miss Baker and Big George.

A stone pillar memorial marker for Miss Baker. The marker reads "Miss Baker. Squirrel Monkey.. Born 1957. Died Nov 29 1984. First U.S. animal to fly in space and return alive. May 28 1959." Several bananas are on top of the pillar.

Memorial marker for Big George. The marker reads "Big George. Husband of Miss Baker". The bottom part of the marker is covered by a banana left as as offering

Next quest: See all the Space Shuttles. on display I’ve already seen the Shuttle Atlantis at KSC. Three more to go.

April 19, 2024April 19, 2024

Another year of roses

After about 7.5 years, the rose bushes are still going strong. Lots of rose buds to start the year off. These were the first three of the season that I spotted in full bloom.

Hopefully the Japanese beetles aren’t too bad this year. They always chew up the roses pretty badly.

March 29, 2024May 22, 2024

Recent Fedora installation issues

It seems like getting Fedora going on my trusty but old computer is getting harder these days.

Getting Fedora 39 installed turnedout to be a bit of a chore. After getting Fedora 40 installed in a VM after a bit of wrangling, I thought I’d try the F39-F40 upgrade on the computer. The upgrade worked fine on the laptop, so I thought maybe the desktop would handle it ok.

Nope, not so much. While the upgrade itself went smoothly, all I got when I rebooted was a blank screen with a flashing cursor in the corner. Fortunately Ctrl-Alt-F2 got me to a console login prompt, so the system was running to some extent.

Logging in to check things out showed a ton of

traps: drkonqi-coredum[1922] trap invalid opcode ip:7f9a6270ea9c sp:7ffc3e6b9dd8 error:0 in libQt6Core.so.6.6.2[7f9a626b0000+3e7000]

messages in the dmesg output. Looked like whatever was going on kept crashing, generating coredumps and restarting ad-nauseum.

In /var/log/messages, there were a bunch of

systemd-coredump[11667]: Process 11641 (drkonqi-coredum) of user 0 dumped core.
Module libcrypt.so.2 from rpm libxcrypt-4.4.36-5.fc40.x86_64
Module libblkid.so.1 from rpm util-linux-2.40-0.9.rc1.fc40.x86_64
Module libsasl2.so.3 from rpm cyrus-sasl-2.1.28-19.fc40.x86_64
Module libevent-2.1.so.7 from rpm libevent-2.1.12-12.fc40.x86_64
Module libunistring.so.5 from rpm libunistring-1.1-7.fc40.x86_64
Module libmount.so.1 from rpm util-linux-2.40-0.9.rc1.fc40.x86_64
Module libgmodule-2.0.so.0 from rpm glib2-2.80.0-1.fc40.x86_64
Module libssl.so.3 from rpm openssl-3.2.1-2.fc40.x86_64
Module libpsl.so.5 from rpm libpsl-0.21.5-3.fc40.x86_64
Module libssh.so.4 from rpm libssh-0.10.6-5.fc40.x86_64
Module libidn2.so.0 from rpm libidn2-2.3.7-1.fc40.x86_64
Module libnghttp2.so.14 from rpm nghttp2-1.59.0-2.fc40.x86_64
Module libffi.so.8 from rpm libffi-3.4.4-7.fc40.x86_64
Module libduktape.so.207 from rpm duktape-2.7.0-7.fc40.x86_64
Module libgio-2.0.so.0 from rpm glib2-2.80.0-1.fc40.x86_64
Module libcurl.so.4 from rpm curl-8.6.0-7.fc40.x86_64
Module libselinux.so.1 from rpm libselinux-3.6-4.fc40.x86_64
Module libpcre2-8.so.0 from rpm pcre2-10.42-2.fc40.2.x86_64
Module libicudata.so.74 from rpm icu-74.2-1.fc40.x86_64
Module libgobject-2.0.so.0 from rpm glib2-2.80.0-1.fc40.x86_64
Module libpxbackend-1.0.so from rpm libproxy-0.5.3-5.fc40.x86_64
Module libbrotlicommon.so.1 from rpm brotli-1.1.0-3.fc40.x86_64
Module libkeyutils.so.1 from rpm keyutils-1.6.3-3.fc40.x86_64
Module libkrb5support.so.0 from rpm krb5-1.21.2-5.fc40.x86_64
Module libcom_err.so.2 from rpm e2fsprogs-1.47.0-5.fc40.x86_64
Module libk5crypto.so.3 from rpm krb5-1.21.2-5.fc40.x86_64
Module libkrb5.so.3 from rpm krb5-1.21.2-5.fc40.x86_64
Module liblzma.so.5 from rpm xz-5.6.0-3.fc40.x86_64
Module liblz4.so.1 from rpm lz4-1.9.4-6.fc40.x86_64
Module libcap.so.2 from rpm libcap-2.69-3.fc40.x86_64
Module libpcre2-16.so.0 from rpm pcre2-10.42-2.fc40.2.x86_64
Module libb2.so.1 from rpm libb2-0.98.1-11.fc40.x86_64
Module libdouble-conversion.so.3 from rpm double-conversion-3.3.0-3.fc40.x86_64
Module libglib-2.0.so.0 from rpm glib2-2.80.0-1.fc40.x86_64
Module libicuuc.so.74 from rpm icu-74.2-1.fc40.x86_64
Module libicui18n.so.74 from rpm icu-74.2-1.fc40.x86_64
Module libcrypto.so.3 from rpm openssl-3.2.1-2.fc40.x86_64
Module libproxy.so.1 from rpm libproxy-0.5.3-5.fc40.x86_64
Module libz.so.1 from rpm zlib-ng-2.1.6-2.fc40.x86_64
Module libbrotlidec.so.1 from rpm brotli-1.1.0-3.fc40.x86_64
Module libgssapi_krb5.so.2 from rpm krb5-1.21.2-5.fc40.x86_64
Module libzstd.so.1 from rpm zstd-1.5.5-5.fc40.x86_64
Module libsystemd.so.0 from rpm systemd-255.4-1.fc40.x86_64
Module libQt6Core.so.6 from rpm qt6-qtbase-6.6.2-6.fc40.x86_64
Module libQt6Network.so.6 from rpm qt6-qtbase-6.6.2-6.fc40.x86_64
Module drkonqi-coredump-processor from rpm plasma-drkonqi-6.0.2-1.fc40.x86_64
Stack trace of thread 11641:
#0 0x00007f2dc4d0ea9c _ZL10aeshash128PKhmmm (libQt6Core.so.6 + 0x10ea9c)
#1 0x00007f2dc4f5e45b _ZN18QCommandLineParser9addOptionERK18QCommandLineOption (libQt6Core.so.6 + 0x35e45b)
#2 0x00007f2dc4f601f3 _ZN18QCommandLineParser13addHelpOptionEv (libQt6Core.so.6 + 0x3601f3)
#3 0x0000555ce386ea43 main (drkonqi-coredump-processor + 0x5a43)
#4 0x00007f2dc463d088 __libc_start_call_main (libc.so.6 + 0x2a088)
#5 0x00007f2dc463d14b __libc_start_main@@GLIBC_2.34 (libc.so.6 + 0x2a14b)
#6 0x0000555ce386fff5 _start (drkonqi-coredump-processor + 0x6ff5)
#ELF object binary architecture: AMD x86-64

messages being dumped there (carriage returns added for clarity) over and over.

There were also a lot of SELinux errors in the message log as well

setroubleshoot[2604]: SELinux is preventing abrt-dump-journ from write access on the sock_file io.systemd.DynamicUser.

*****  Plugin catchall (100. confidence) suggests   **************************

If you believe that abrt-dump-journ should be allowed write access on the io.systemd.DynamicUser sock_file by default.
Then you should report this as a bug.
You can generate a local policy module to allow this access.
Do
allow this access for now by executing:
# ausearch -c 'abrt-dump-journ' --raw | audit2allow -M my-abrtdumpjourn
# semodule -X 300 -i my-abrtdumpjourn.pp

Seems like there’s a lot going on here.

Since Fedora 40 is working fine on my laptop, I’m guessing that there’s something about my desktop that the Fedora binaries don’t like. I haven’t tried another distro yet so I don’t know if it’s just Fedora’s KDE Plasma, or just KDE Plasma in general that my desktop doesn’t like. I also haven’t tried Fedora Workstation yet, so I don’t know if the problem is with Fedora in general or Fedora KDE.

Still a lot of troubleshooting and digging I need to do. One of the problems I’ve run into is that the errors happen so frequently and generated coredumps get deleted so quickly that I can’t really generate useful dumps and bug reporting information.

March 24, 2024March 24, 2024

Squash sprouts

Some new leaves sprouted up in a few of the spots where I planted the butternut squash seeds a couple weeks ago.

Butternut squash seedlings growing in the raised beds

They look like pictures of butternut squash seedlings that I see online, which seems like a good sign.

No sign of any sprouting activity where I planted the jalapeno seeds in the raised beds yet. Those might be duds.

The rest of the garden seems to be doing pretty well so far. The potatoes have grown quite a bit in the last couple of weeks.

The blueberry plants have had lots of blossoms and lots of berries on them right now. Maybe we’ll even get to some of them before the birds do.

No blossoms on the raspberry or black berry plants yet, but they’re starting to spread out in their beds now with a few new sprouts popping up.

The olive tree is still looking a little spindly, but seems to be doing ok, putting out a bunch of new leaves over the last few weeks.

March 10, 2024March 10, 2024

Garden experiments

I suppose since it’s only the second year of the raised beds and us trying to grow anything, everything is an experiment.

This year, we decided no more eggplants. We just don’t like them enough to grow a bunch.

I had a few red potatoes from the grocery store that sat on the counter for a little too long, After a bit of reading and watching a few potato growing videos on YouTube, they went into one of the raised beds a couple weeks ago. Yesterday, they looked like this:

Four potato plants growing in a raised bed garden — Four potato plants planted in one of the raised beds

I was pretty surprised to see just how much green they grew in just a couple of weeks. I’m excited to see how things go with the tubers.

While I was out, I planted some jalapeno seeds harvested from last year’s jalapeno crop and some butternut squash seeds from a grocery store squash. No idea if they’ll grow, but I guess I’ll find out in a few weeks.

The rest of the plants seem to be doing well and seem to have survived the frosts we had during January and February.

Blueberry and blackberry bushes planted in raised bed gardens

Two leaves sprouting from a fig plant — Blueberry and blackberry bushes planted in raised bed gardens

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Another year of roses

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