Space Shuttle Columbia  breaks up on descent after atmosphere reentry

Terrible, terrible news. (check Google News)

Transcribing from TV news: All 7 astronauts aboard space shuttle Columbia (OV-102) [mirrored here] on mission STS-107 were killed when the shuttle apparently broke up on descent after earth atmosphere reentry. Contact was lost at 1500CET, 0800CST over Texas, scheduled landing time was 0916EST at Kennedy Space Center. The space shuttle is presumed to have disintegrated at 200000 feet and at 12500mph, some 100 miles south-east of Dallas. People in Texas are advised to report any findings of debris to local authorities and not to go near them due to the toxic propellant used in the shuttle.

The videos seem to indicate the the descent was mostly nominal until the shuttle suddenly breaks up into two and shortly afterwards into multiple pieces after a large flash as shown on the second picture above.

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NASA statement:

STS-107
Entry Flight Director Leroy Cain declared a contingency for the shuttle Columbia at around 8:14 central time this morning (1414 GMT) as the shuttle and its seven astronauts headed for a landing at the Kennedy Space Center.

Columbia fired its braking rockets at 7:16 this morning (1316 GMT) and entered the Earth’s atmosphere with all of its systems functioning normally for a landing at the Florida spaceport at 8:16 a.m.(1416 GMT).

But communications were lost with Columbia around 8 o‘clock (1400 GMT) as the orbiter streaked over Texas.

NASA began to use all of its tracking facilities to look for Columbia, but communications were not restored by the time the shuttle had been scheduled to land.

Contingency procedures remain in effect and landing support officials are currently being dispatched near the Dallas-Forth Worth area to search for possible debris.

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Witnesses in Palestine, TX report loud explosion sounds that shook their buildings. [16:30CET] Police in Nacogdoches reports finding debris.

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CNN, MSNBC, FoxNews

STS-107 mission information at NASA: Crew, Timeline, Cargo, Press Kit (11MB PDF)
Better reachable: European Space Agency STS-107 information.

Commander	Rick Husband
Pilot	William McCool
Mission Specialist	Kalpana Chawla
Mission Specialist	David Brown
Mission Specialist	Michael Anderson
Mission Specialist	Laurel Clark
Payload Specialist	Ilan Ramon

[16:17 CET] Meanwhile, http://www.spaceflight.nasa.gov/shuttle is swamped and virtually unreachable

Huh! Someone really likes my utility set for Enterprise Services and correctly points out that they are in "preview" state, but very useful. The good news is: there's no timebomb. And, yes, there's going to be an update once Windows Server 2003 is "official". And, yes, there's going to be an option to get at the source code for all of it. These classes and a lot more code that only few folks have seen yet will be at the center of my developer-topics talks this year.

Fighting Windmills. Yesterday, Brussels was another stop of the ongoing Microsoft EMEA Architect's tour. Going through the customer feedback on my "Service Oriented Architectures" talk I once again realized that there's a lot more work to do in terms of educating people about the significance of XML. One of the core messages of my talk is that the XML InfoSet is the focus of integration.

The comment that caught my attention was stating that I were completely missing the point about interoperability because "XML is just a data format". 

Excuse me, Sir, but it's not. XML is a very broad and deep infrastructure for data that has moved very much beyond being a "data format". The "data format" perception of XML may have been accurate in 1998, but by now, the focus has entirely shifted towards the XML Information Set (Infoset).

Focusing on the Infoset and not on angle brackets allows you to serialize to and import from virtually any binary or text format (including XML 1.0 with angle brackets) and always have a central anchor point that is indeed independent of your choice of serialization format. If you look (just to name one example) at Microsoft's BizTalk Server, you will see that it's common practice to have a parser that reads EDIFACT and produces an Infoset, performs various operations on the Infoset and serializes the result back out as EDIFACT (or X.12 or some custom text format) again. The fact that BizTalk will indeed serialize that Infoset as XML 1.0 as it is passes through its internal pipeline stages is an internal implementation detail of BizTalk.

I am sorry to say that, but if today you still believe and insist that XML is just another data format, the train may already have left the station for you.

Patch Your SQL Servers!. As John has already reminded people, don't forget to patch your SQL Servers, paricuraly on laptops! As long as programmers still create buffer overruns, its important to apply all patches (well, its important to keep current with all OS patches). The security fix is rolled up in the SQL Server 2000 SP3, which you should install if you have SQL Server 2000. Otherwise, read about and install these patches. [Sam Gentile's Weblog]

Very funny ;) Is This a Joke?. [Matt Croydon::postneo]

A morning for reliable messaging. I got online this morning and close to nothing worked. I don't know whether today is "international router config day" It's "unpatched SQL Server exploit fest" or something, but and there's suspiciously many IP destinations I can't reach from where I am and tracert shows loops or broken routes at random places outside the Deutsche Telekom network (that's where my DSL is hooked up to). So, at first sight, it doesn't seem to be an immediate problem of my carrier. Sometimes a route comes back and then it breaks again. Very bad. So, whatever the problem is, time and hordes of technicians will eventually, hopefully solve it.

I am very happy that I don't have to make any business critical Web service calls via plain HTTP and without a reliable messaging protocol layer today. I'd be screwed. On mornings like these, "HTTP is the one and only protocol" purism makes handsome gunwounds in both of your feet. 

(snapshot as of 2001-01-25T10:00:00+1, click for current status)

Microsoft's (!) Services for UNIX 3.0 raked in the "Open Source Product Excellence Award" in the "Best System Integration Software" category at LinuxWorld. Ok, again: Microsoft wins an award at LinuxWorld!

Radio discipline! I am in a "heavy coding" phase with about 5 projects (some serious, some play) going on concurrently. So, reminder to self, I shouldn't blog. My favorite "play" project is a pretty radical extension for Enterprise Services and COM+ - it's actually more a "new feature set" than a tool or wrapper. The last time I've written code based on analyzing hex-dumps was about 8 years ago; and now again. The only reason that I state this here is to force myself to actually get it done and make a binary drop available so that people can play with it - once there is a solution found for why it breaks Everett's GC.

Master Key Copying Revealed

A security researcher has revealed a little-known vulnerability in many locks that lets a person create a copy of the master key for an entire building by starting with any key from that building. [...] After testing the technique repeatedly against the hardware from major lock companies, Mr. Blaze wrote, "it required only a few minutes to carry out, even when using a file to cut the keys." [nytimes.com -- free sign-up required]

Here comes the most expensive security vulnerability patch, ever.

Update: Slashdotted.

Welcome Christian!

Germany has a new Microsoft Regional Director. Christian Weyer is by far the #1 speaker on Web services in Germany -- he speaks a lot more about the topic in Germany than I do and does so in a very entertaining way (and lacks political correctness just as much as I do) -- and we, the other German RDs, Bernd Marquardt, Ralf Westphal, Marcellus Buchheit and myself are very happy that he is joining our small group. Next step: Convince him to start a weblog ;)

Transactions. I spent a good deal of the weekend reading two dozen research papers (CiteSeer is a great launch pad to dig into that space) on agreements, consensus, trust, and various forms of blocking and non-blocking atomic commitment models. All that of course motivated by the desperate search for a solution for the Web services space that preserves the simplicity of the programming model for 2-phase commit. Making stuff compensation-based is just a small step for a technology framework person, but it's a giant leap for someone who has to design compensation into the application logic.

Some special problems for Web services as we see them developing:

• How to establish trust between parties? Think about the implications for dynamic service discovery and invocation using UDDI. Think about the fact that ACID transactions, unlike other services, have a direct impact on the behavior of an entire system due to isolation rules and therefore locking requirements. Think about the potential for creating damage by simply spoofing votes on transaction outcome and think about the potential for DDoS attacks by deliberate blocking.
• How does proximity affect trust in this context? Is a transaction participant from my own company and for which I have full control of all implementation aspects, but which is running halfway around the planet as trustworthy as the machine next door? After all, a man-in-the-middle attack that targets blocking will only need to intercept and simply block all further traffic between participants.
• How to deal with connectionless, multi-hop, asynchronous messages? Think about the fact that even these types of message exchanges may require ACID rules to be fully enforced, even of the message exchange isn't synchronous (in the sense of RPC). For optimization reasons, a transactional message conversation may go from Düsseldorf to Dubai, from Dubai to Signapore, from Signapore to Los Angeles and from Los Angeles back to Düsseldorf - so, rather routed once around the planet instead of being communicated in a star-shaped form -- in order to beat the limits of E=mc^2. (One of the reasons why I like things like WS-Routing and WS-Security's capability to variably encrypt select portions of messages).

That's a lot of problems already and just the tip of the iceberg.  I've got some scribbles that address a couple of these issues and one of the key workarounds is the introduction of rules around deadlines for when transactions expire even if participants are in a "prepared" state. However, to efficiently limit blocking, this brings up another hard problem: trustworthy and precise (<50ms) time-synchronization between all parties. Tough stuff.

It's a LinuxWorld, after all. Linux advocates will convene at a trade show in New York this week to promote their wares, tout customers, swap business cards and make their case that the operating system is growing up. [CNET News.com]

So, I am thinking how much the word "trade show" is indeed applicable for LinuxWorld?

To my complete surprise, I am the #1 Clemens on Google.