MarkMaunder dot com

Briefing Something Mission Critical When Failure Is Not An Option

I started my career in IT operations moving to London and working on initially Coca Cola’s infrastructure, and then moving into investment banking and working on trade floor infrastructure. This was after being based in South Africa and doing quite a lot of work for DeBeers on e.g. the most productive diamond mine in the […]

October 4, 2024 | Flying, NASA | No comments

What would a self-launching Space Shuttle look like?

This is the OK-GLI, part of the Soviet Shuttle Buran program, the largest and most expensive space program in the history of the Soviet Union. The OK-GLI completed 25 test flights between 1985 and 1988 before being retired. The OK-GLI was powered by four AL-31 jet engines with the fuel tank in the cargo bay. […]

May 28, 2011 | NASA, Space | No comments

NASA's little security oops

Last night I logged on to NASA’s Mauna Kea observatory live video feed to watch LCROSS slam into the moon. After LCROSS was finished pancaking into the moon and not producing the expected 6 mile plume, I noticed an IP address flash on the top right of the video display. So I hit it with […]

October 10, 2009 | NASA | No comments

My name is Mark Maunder. I've been blogging since around 2003 when I started on Movable Type and ended up on WordPress which is what I use to publish today. With my wife Kerry, I'm the co-founder of Wordfence which protects over 5 million WordPress sites from hackers and is run by a talented team of 36 people. I'm an instrument rated pilot and I fly a Cessna 206 along with a 1964 Cessna 172 in the Pacific Northwest and Colorado. I'm originally from Cape Town, South Africa but live in the US these days. I code in a bunch of languages and am quite excited about our emerging AI overlords and how they're going to be putting us to work for them.