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International Space Station

Until recently I had a toy-model of Russian space station Mir hanged in our living room settled nicely between two more common house decorations. It was small in size, no bigger than five cubic inches with two teeny tiny Soyuz spacecrafts docked at their designated locks and numerous solar panels all over the place. The plastic toy is long gone now but still from time to time it raises some nice memories, especially those moments when couple of our guests after close inspection from all directions asked questions like "What the heck is this?" or "Is this art?". Not many of them recognized the most challenging technological endeavor of the last two decades of previous century at first glance. On March 23, 2001, all the biggest Mir's fragments after surviving hellish re-entry through the atmosphere hit the Pacific ocean and ended 15 years of various scientific experiments performed by 28 long duration multinational crews with total of 104 people from 12

GPS eXchange files vs Tracking apps

In the past, as a software developer, I was participating in a couple of projects regarding GPS tracking. One was a big project for two companies in Denmark who wanted to have installed "vehicle tracking" system in their cars and trucks along with commercial features, loading, communicating, invoicing etc. One was courier with small handheld GPS capable PDA devices and the other transportation company with large trucks equipped with big PC based cockpit computers. These two projects were very exciting for me, lots of good times with, at the time, new technologies, real time testing, listening people in the field for their wishes, complains and new requests. Anyway, GPS tracking software is now regular part of smartphones and kind of new entertainment for their users. This weekend we wanted to have small breakfast-picnic at the local waterflow resort and I turned it on when Viktor and I stepped out of the house. We were walking about two kilometers on foot and then waited f