WOW. a shoe-polishing gentleman's club?

http://www.cnngo.com/tokyo/shop/brift-h-shoe-shining-gentlemans-club-601003#

Communications company Intelsat said it lost control of the Galaxy 15 satellite on April 8, possibly because the satellite's systems were knocked out by a solar storm. Intelsat cannot remotely steer the satellite to remain in its orbit, so Galaxy 15 is creeping toward the adjacent path of another TV communications satellite that serves U.S. cable companies.

Galaxy 15 continues to receive and transmit satellite signals, and they will probably block or otherwise interfere with signals from the second satellite, known as AMC 11, if Galaxy 15 drifts into its orbit as expected around May 23, according to AMC 11's owner, SES World Skies.

AMC 11 receives digital programming from cable television channels and transmits it to all U.S. cable networks from its orbit 22,000 miles (36,000 kilometers) above the equator, SES World Skies said. It operates on the same frequencies as Galaxy 15.

"That fact means that there is likely to be some kind of interference," SES World Skies spokesman Yves Feltes told The Associated Press. "Our aim is to bring any interference down to zero."

He would not name any of the cable television channels or providers that could be affected or say how long the interference could last.

Galaxy 15 is floating over the Pacific Ocean slightly to the east of Hawaii, said Emmet Fletcher, space surveillance and tracking manager for the Space Situational Awareness Programme at the European Space Agency, an 18-nation consortium.

He said Galaxy 15 was highly unusual because it continued to send out television signals, unlike other malfunctioning satellites that automatically went into complete shutdown when their navigational systems malfunctioned. A spokesman for the satellite's manufacturer, Orbital Sciences Corp., did not return a phone call seeking comment.

The dead satellites still are a threat to other satellities, but less of one than Galaxy 15 poses, Fletcher said.

"They'll just cruise around the geobelt, drifting wherever they go, potentially causing havoc, when you lose control of them," he said.

The geobelt is the relatively narrow band of space where satellites can move in orbits that allow them to appear stationary in the sky in relation to specific points on earth.

Feltes, the SES spokesman, said one option to prevent interference with U.S. television would be using AMC 11's propulsion system to shift that satellite about 60 miles (100 kilometers) away to an orbit that's still within its carefully prescribed "orbital box" but as far away as possible from Galaxy 15.

He said SES had other strategies under consideration but declined to provide details.

"We have all of our technicians, all of our specialists on this case," he said.

Both companies said there was no risk of an actual collision between the two satellites in space.

Intelsat said it was analyzing signals from Galaxy 15 daily in order to predict its trajectory and was trying to figure out if it can shut down the satellite's transmission so it would not interfere with AMC 11.

The company declined to comment on the value of Galaxy 15 but such spacecraft can be worth about $400 million (euro315 million) and cost about the same to launch.

Feltes said the two companies, both based in Luxembourg, were cooperating closely.

"They have tried numerous things to regain control of the satellite or to have it finally shut down," he said. "It needs some collaboration to bring the impact of this failure to an absolute minimum."

Clip from "Meet the British", a BBC doc full of the most awful footage from the 1970s of all things British. The kids even use an acoustic coupler allowing them to login to the central computer. It's brill.

Decaf EC2 Client

Take your infrastracture wherever you go!

Decaf's Dashboard

Working in IT (you know, those nerdy server guys?!) is often a nighttime job. You have to be always alert, and always ready to replace that one critical piece of broken hardware. It is not strange many of those nerdy System Integrators are walking around with caffeine molecules on their t-shirt.

Would it be possible to just get rid of the hardware? If there is no hardware you can't go there to replace that broken part. Someone else can do that for you. That is exactly what 'they' promise with the 'Cloud'! One of the first to understand this idea is Amazon, they implemented Amazon EC2, or Elastic Compute Cloud. But hardware of someone else can fail as well, it only means there are infinitely more unused servers waiting for you.

 

You need Decaf!

It might be hardware, it might be software. But something is about to fail. We need to know what is going on. We need to keep an eye on those servers 24/7. We can't let them out of our sight. And if something fails we need to be able to act immediately, and have that app 'up and running' again. We just have to have the tools to do that anytime, anywhere.

Decaf! No need for allnighters anymore. Time to change your t-shirts, no need for caffeine anymore. You can have 1 or 2 servers, or hundreds, with Decaf you always know the health of your cloud. And if necessary you have all the tools to make repairs.

Keep an eye on your cloud.

Decaf's WidgetOn your home you will find your widget, you will use it to get directly notified when things out of the ordinary happen. For this, the widget is updated automatically because you only want to be notified of differences that occurred recently.

The charts give you information about trends and variations in average CPU performance, total disk reads and writes and total incoming/outgoing network traffic over, for example, the past 24 hours. The widget gives you the opportunity to continuously monitor the health of your infrastructure.

There are two other ways to monitor your cloud. You can watch individual instances, both the Amazon EC2 status and ports. Decaf will tell you when your instance is down. You can also receive SMS alerts that immediately take you to the troubled instance.