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First off it's spelled "interstellar". Secondly, it's pretty obvious that it's celebrating human accomplishments and innovation.

Thirdly, it was actually rendered on a laptop in space thanks to a certain Mark Shuttleworth, most recently known for his Ubuntu Linux distribution.

He may be a multi-zillionaire, but I have to admit he spends it on some pretty cool stuff. :-)

http://www.markshuttleworth.com/bounty.html

Our local observatory (with live night-sky camera) is Gummint-funded. This leads to some interesting effects.

Much of their computing equipment has been scrounged - and doesn't appear on any equipment manifests - because there was no budget for it. They have a Pentium-90 driving (pointing) their main 'scope with a backup P-90 literally sitting on the next shelf in case it dies.

The few pieces of gear that they do get grants for are typically extremely fancy. On the rare occasions when ThePowersThatBe say "yes, you can have a computer to process the incoming images," then the cost of that actual computer system and absolutely nothing else is almost immaterial as long as it fits certain criteria.

So... in the room to the left of the one housing the P-90 sits a you-beauty glow-in-the-dark (well, not literally, it would cause backscatter) state-of-the-art box with double overhead ThermalTakes and all the trimmings. Just one. And I bet they crammed memory and disks into that baby's purchasing spec until the chassis groaned under the weight.

When Mark Shuttleworth gave his amazing talk at LCA2005, one of the things he mentioned was that the Yanks didn't want their astronauts (also going up in the Soyuz with Mark) flying to Baikonur in a rattly old Tupelov transport lest it unexpectedly drop out of the sky en route, but rather than come out and say so directly they came over all clever and simply pointed out that NASA regs forbade their astronauts to travel without seatbelts, which they knew the Tupelov wasn't fitted with. This was a mistake. On the day, the astronauts were marched out to the Tupelov, and aboard - and into a minibus in the cargo bay, where they sat and wore the minibus's seatbelts for the duration of the trip.

BTW, when the video DVD from LCA2005 gets published, bend heaven and earth to get yourself a copy. It's well worth-while for Mark's presentation alone ("Welcome to Khazakstan!"), and there are many other excellent presentations on it (Keith Packard explaining the sport of Window Hurling, for example, or E'dale demonstrating how to collapse a penguin's skull).

The point in that story which I wanted to use as an illustration here was that the minibus wasn't put aboard the transport for the astronauts' benefit. There was a budget for flying the Tupelov - pilots, fuel, landing fees and so on - but no budget for getting from the airport to where they were staying. So the van (which fell under the base's budget, so was financially covered) was fuelled up and driven aboard the Tupelov for use as a taxi while the transport 'plane was prepped for the return flight. In terms of working around bizarre regulations, NASA or not, the Americans really were amateurs playing in a professional field. (-:

The guy behind this (I forget his name) has invested a small fortune

You're thinking of Mark Shuttleworth. Check him out on wikipedia or his own site.

Schoolbell has a calendar component (schoolbell is a subset of the code for Schooltool, a school administration server being developed with $$ from Mark Shuttleworth). It could be the free-server end of what you want (you said you didn't want a server that cost anything; I assume a free one is okay).

SchoolBell allows users to manage their personal calendars, group calendars and calendars for resources, e.g., rooms, projectors, etc, via a web interface, or using an iCalendar compliant client such as Mozilla calendar or iCal.

You can:

1. create users, groups and resources through web forms or bulk import (in CSV format);
2. view and edit calendars for each user, group or resource using an ICal client;
3. use the web interface to manage user and group calendars;

Once you've got your calendars in ICal format, there are a number of other tools that can help you manage them, such as evolution for users, or pcal to output calendars as postscript.

I'm a South African myself, and Mark Shuttleworth is truly an inspiration to us all. I can't speak too much for what kind of impact he has had on open-source adoption in terms of raw numbers and so forth, but the government has started making serious noises about taking it up, some of which can probably be attributed to our Afronaut's efforts.

He also supports Go Open Source a South African website devoted to promoting OSS. Lots of info is available here about the spread of OSS in SA, if you're interested.

His Shuttleworth foundation also supports other OSS and related projects, such as Digital Coast and various others. Plenty of information can be found at The Shuttleworth Foundation.

Furthermore, he also supports Hip2b2 which aims to encourage schoolkids to take an interest in and study science, and provides tools to allow more of our youth to study science (and indeed to study in general). So many of our schoolkids face crippling poverty and bleak prospects that Hip2b2 might well be some of the most important stuff he is doing. He actually did a roadshow around the country some time ago to try and personally promote the study of science and was very well received. Next to Nelson Mandela, he may well be the most popular and recognisable person in SA today (well, maybe not quite, but I'd like to think he's up there.)

I seem to have written way more than I planned to, but there is so much good stuff you can write about this man. We in SA are very fortunate to have him.

P.S. - did you you know he is also a Slashdot user? He is user markshuttle, with a personal website here.

It may be obvious from this post that I have the utmost respect for this man.

Please don't waste your questions on things you can find out already.

> Do you have any pet projects you are funding or want to fund that might provide a living for a software engineer?

http://www.markshuttleworth.com/bounty.html

> And on a related note, do the core Ubuntu developers get paid?

Canonical employees do indeed get paid.

I emailed your program manager about one of your bounties a couple months ago, as the page says to do. I've gotten no response of any sort.

Are these bounties for real?

Or do you guys only check your email every 6 months?

The distribution (including it's being freely distributed) is being backed by Mark Shuttleworth and I think it is likely to last a while. I have no association with Mark or Ubuntu, but there was a lot of discussion around this release at Debconf4.

Since there is no option to buy the CDs I think it will very likely last for more than a few releases.

I've ordered a bunch of CDs myself, and plan on giving them out all over, including burning some more from the ones I receive.

Ubuntu Linux will vanish when Mark Shuttleworth runs out of money...

... since he's backing it.

Isn't it great to see people like Mark Shuttleworth (second space tourist, and the First African in Space) investing in these kinds of worthy programmes?
Now if only someone can convince the SA government that cheap internet is VERY important to the economy. At the moment communication in South Africa is controlled by Telkom, a monopoly. They charge more than R800 (about US$120) per month for ADSL, and they cap your bandwidth to 3 gig a MONTH. There's a good reason for the so called "digital divide" in South Africa, it's the prohibitive cost. There's a great site highlighting the grievances against Telkom, called Hellkom.

And, all the pretty desktops that run on Linux don't mean squat if the bean counters and other non-techie PHBs never considers evaluating them. I think this has to be done on both fronts, PR to people that control the purse strings at larger companies, and investment in developers that produce commercial class applications.

Yes, and you are so right. But... do yourself a massive favour and have a gander at Mark Shuttleworth's Home page.

On the right hand side you'll see quite a couple of projects he's involved in and funding, including:

• The Shuttleworth Foundation to fund innovative projects in education,
• The SchoolTool Project to produce a common global platform for school administration,
• It's Hip2BSquare! pro-education campaign,
• The ultra-cool UpStarts, an entrepreneurial incubator, and
• Of import to OSS developers, some bounties!

As per ususal, in my own Quixotic way, I'm planning on helping as far I can...

Even if it is just mouthing off on /. <grin>

And, all the pretty desktops that run on Linux don't mean squat if the bean counters and other non-techie PHBs never considers evaluating them. I think this has to be done on both fronts, PR to people that control the purse strings at larger companies, and investment in developers that produce commercial class applications.

Yes, and you are so right. But... do yourself a massive favour and have a gander at Mark Shuttleworth's Home page.

On the right hand side you'll see quite a couple of projects he's involved in and funding, including:

• The Shuttleworth Foundation to fund innovative projects in education,
• The SchoolTool Project to produce a common global platform for school administration,
• It's Hip2BSquare! pro-education campaign,
• The ultra-cool UpStarts, an entrepreneurial incubator, and
• Of import to OSS developers, some bounties!

As per ususal, in my own Quixotic way, I'm planning on helping as far I can...

Even if it is just mouthing off on /. <grin>

http://www.markshuttleworth.com/

In his Bio he lists Slashdot as one of his likes.

He sold Thwate for $575M. Damn, outside of the guy who founded Hotmail and actually walked away from a Microsoft $300M offer, holding out until he got something like $500M, this is the 2nd most impressive dot-com startup guy I've heard about. That's amazing.

I have found mixed results with other users: Slashdot recently linked [slashdot.org] Shuttleworth's Software Development Bounties [markshuttleworth.com] where he says "Bayesian filtering of junk mail has worked really well for me in Mozilla." This is, of course, after a long time of training. Binary Bonsai has similar things to say.

At least, as eWeek concludes, it's better than Outlook 2003. I switched over at 0.3, and 0.4's been running smoothly for me so far. *crosses fingers*

From his homepage: "Likes: spring, cesaria evora, slashdot, chelsea[...]"

Hey, Mark! That's karma whoring! ;)

Anyhow, GREAT JOB!