Month: July 2017

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Dream Chaser now another ISS supply option

The Russian Progress has always been a prime ISS cargo option. Europe for a time provided the ATV (Automated Transfer Vehicle) which flew 5 cargo missions to the ISS, the last being in July 2014.  Japan also has the H-II Transfer Vehicle, but this flies at the most maybe once per year.

Much more recent, and more frequent, are SpaceX’s Dragon and Orbital Science’s Cygnus cargo vehicles, which takes the load off the Progress.

Sierra Nevada, which once was a consideration for manned transport to the ISS with their Dream Chaser, now has a NASA contract for a cargo version of their Dream Chaser. The first two flights will be lofted by ULA in 2020 and 2021.

While Boeing and SpaceX won the nods from NASA for manned transport, Sierra Nevada continued on their own with Dream Chaser. Naturally, Sierra Nevada must now concentrate on the Dream Chaser Cargo System, I, for one,  am hoping the manned Dream Chaser stays alive and becomes a reality at some point in the future.

Face it… Dream Chaser is a beautiful craft, and the concept of gliding in for a landing at an airport near home is an improvement over a splashdown far out in the ocean or thumping down in some remote grassland.

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Future considerations for Sphider (but not guarantees)

I’ve been giving thought to just what should come next for Sphider.

Integrating the Sphider Image Indexing functions with the main Sphider, thus making content and image indexing a single operation is a rather obvious improvement.

The ability to index and search RSS feeds would also be a nice addition. I actually have an alpha of this running on both Linux and Windows machines. Since the spidering operations can be done from a command prompt, a simple cron is keeping the feeds updated on the Linux box. The Windows task scheduler is being a bit more stubborn, mainly because of a pesky PHP error I haven’t solved yet. PHP is fine in a browser, but the command prompt is giving trouble. It works, but I keep getting an error that DEMANDS a response! I’ll figure it out.

Since searching for content is different from searching for images, which in turn is different than searching for RSS feeds, three different sets of search and results pages are needed. To a user, the only obvious difference is the search page, as the results portion is integrated. So I am giving thought to a possible “unified” search page with tabs so that the appropriate search form (and corresponding results) can be present to the user. This is not definite yet, just a thought.

These are all ideas for the future. For now, version 1.6 remains the latest. If the need arises, minor release improvements/fixes are not out of the question.

Anything you would like to see in the Spider of the future? Give me your ideas and … well, who knows? It might be a very good, very doable idea!

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Sphider 1.6.0 Released

Sphider 1.6.0 and Sphider 1.6.0 PDO version have been released.

Also released is the Sphider Image Indexer, a companion add-on to Sphider allowing the user to index and search images from a website.

And finally, there is also a conversion kit which will allow the PDO version of Sphider to work with SQLite databases in place of MySQL.

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Sphider 1.6 Release Status

The regular version of Sphider 1.6.0 and the associated Sphider Image Indexer are completed, tested, and ready to go. Since I want to release the PDO version in tandem, that is the only hold up.

The PDO version and associated Image Indexer are also essentially completed, but undergoing further testing due to some last minute code changes. These changes involve code portability between database types. The release, as usual, targets MySQL (and presumably, MariaDB). There will also be a small set of four replacement modules (install.php, database.php, db_main.php, and db_backup.php)  available targeting SQLite users! It is anticipated that a similar set will soon be introduced for PostgreSQL users. The power of PDO will finally come to be realized.

As soon as everything has been more thoroughly tested, the appropriate zips will be posted in the Downloads section.