Gray Watson's Blog -- March 2005

I've found that blogging is a useful way for me to record my thoughts and digital travels every so often.

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March 31, 2005   

• More people are buying into solar installations as financing companies start getting smarter.

  The new photovoltaic systems, according to Marks, are extremely reliable. Unlike solar-thermal technology, solar energy systems have few moving parts, require little maintenance and will last for decades. Nevertheless, past experience with residential solar power made banks wary about financing new installations. All that has changed recently as new lenders have stepped into the solar electric power business. GE Consumer Finance's Retail Sales Finance unit began offering credit to homeowners last year for PV systems. Marks said his company has built or retrofitted almost 500 homes with the technology.

• Spring is officially here because I wore shorts to work!! Beautiful day. Our solar panels loved it with a 50 kilowatt-hour (kwh) output. Looks like we get 40kwh on a decent day with the high of 70. 0 is very possible if it is overcast. December and January were terrible this year.
• The Bush adminstration is producing a number of fake news stories in an attempt to influence through propaganda. Here's another story about it which says that the White House has spent $254 million on these fake segments and other public relations ploys.

  Under the Bush administration, the federal government has aggressively used a well-established tool of public relations: the prepackaged, ready-to-serve news report that major corporations have long distributed to TV stations to pitch everything from headache remedies to auto insurance. In all, at least 20 federal agencies, including the Defense Department and the Census Bureau, have made and distributed hundreds of television news segments in the past four years, records and interviews show. Many were subsequently broadcast on local stations across the country without any acknowledgement of the government's role in their production.

• A friend just got one of the SOYO VOIP internet phones. Their voip phones are ~US$80 or a voip router for ~US$129. [ I tried it out for a couple of weeks and then found some better alternatives. The sound quality was good but the latency sucked. I am probably going to get some sort of VoIP service if only for cheap long distance outgoing calls. ] Maybe we'll encourage the grandparents and siblings to get them. You can call other voip phones on the same service directly free of charge. They'd pay for themselves in a hurry.
• Very cool piece about Scaled Composites' Globalflyer aircraft from a test pilot's perspective.

  The Williams FJ44 engine is started by turning on the electric starter then turning on the ignition, advancing the power lever to idle and monitoring engine speed and temperature. There is an electronic fuel control on the engine and the pilot may select either ground or flight idle. One of the characteristics of the aircraft is that it glides well. It glides so well that with the gear up and at light weights with the engine at idle, it cannot descend. Switching to ground idle helps reduce the idle thrust, but to descend at a normal 3-degree glide angle, the gear must be extended and the drag chutes deployed.

March 29, 2005   

• Just read a story about how Jesse Jackson has now joined the circus outside of Terri Schiavo's hospice. Man this really pissed me off. I sat down and wrote a letter to him and mailed it to each of his 7 Rainbox Coalition addresses.

  Michael Schiavo seems to be the only one thinking about his wife Terri and her wants and desires. Would you really want your loved one tied to a machine the rest of their lives? Can you blame him for wanting this to be over for Terri? The powers-that-be made up their minds about her 15 years ago. Keeping her alive only makes us feel better. It keeps us from morning her and letting her go when in reality she left this world years ago.

• 

  Just reading the Wikipedia about the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event when scientists think a 100km wide asteroid impacted the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico.

  The resulting blast would have been hundreds of millions of times more devastating than the most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated, may have created a hurricane of unimaginable fury, and certainly would have thrown massive amounts of dust and vapor into the upper atmosphere and even into space. A global firestorm may have resulted as the incendiary fragments from the blast fell back to Earth.

  One of my all-time favorite SciFi books is Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke (buy it). In it set in 2130 after a large meteor has hit and the world has a network of deep space satellites watching for inbounds. I wonder when the next extinction event will come. We can only hope that we get a warning shot "across the bow" which only kills 200k people somewhere to shock the world into action.

• Interesting. Biologists are now formally considering the current destruction of our biosphere extinction event. It has been named the Holocene epoch and may be more a "natural" global temperature change that could be extended or altered by Global Warming. The book Future of Life by E. O. Wilson (buy) estimates that at current rates of human destruction of the biosphere one-half of all species of life will be extinct in 100 years.
• Awesome article from Paul Krugman about the Terri Schiavo and religous extremism. Very well written and compelling.

  Democratic societies have a hard time dealing with extremists in their midst. The desire to show respect for other people's beliefs all too easily turns into denial: nobody wants to talk about the threat posed by those whose beliefs include contempt for democracy itself.

• Here's another article in the Krugman theme about the New Dark Age. How can Kerry have lost? What a disaster. Stupid #(@$#@! democrats.

  We are in dark times. Five years of economic bloodshed and three of brutal warmongering and the worst environmental president in American history and you simply cannot deny that as the ruthless American agenda goes, so goes the populace, so goes the collective attitude, the shared vibration, the health of the planet and the feeling that this particular karmic sinkhole has no known bottom.

March 28, 2005   

• Here's an interesting study comparing keyboard and mouse command equivalents. Users feel that the keyboard is faster then the mouse for simple operations although the mouse is faster during timings because keyboard operations take higher cognitive function to complete while mouse activities are boring to the brain. Although I can see this being true I am still skeptical.

  People new to the mouse find the process of acquiring it every time they want to do anything other than type to be incredibly time-wasting. And therein lies the very advantage of the mouse: it is boring to find it because the two-second search does not require high-level cognitive engagement. It takes two seconds to decide upon which special-function key to press. Deciding among abstract symbols is a high-level cognitive function. Not only is this decision not boring, the user actually experiences amnesia! Real amnesia! The time-slice spent making the decision simply ceases to exist.

March 24, 2005   

• Very funny site where people take an unfortunate image of a woman dancing and gimp it into other images. Here's my submission of the famous Vinatieri field goal during the snow bowl.

March 23, 2005   

• Just reading a number of articles about 302 Googlejacking where people can hijack content by setting up a redirect from their site to another to get the hijacked sites pagerank and then remove the redirect once they are indexed. Here's a discussion about the 301 versus 302 redirect. Here's some more discussion about how to fix the 302 hijacks and some personal stories.
• Cool article from Spaceflight Now about the problems with the Boeing Delta 4-Heavy rocket during its December test launch. Here's another cool description of the Delta 4-Heavy. Here's the Boeing launch page about it. The Air Force stepped up and financed this test launch after no commercial customers wanted to take the risk with this new rocket. This rocket looks very futuristic and sci-fi to me for some reason.

  But the engines shut down 8 seconds early after sensors temporarily indicated "dry" fuel conditions despite the stages having plenty of propellant remaining to accomplish the scheduled firing time. The sensors returned to "wet" readings after the shutdown sequence was already activated.

March 22, 2005   

• I've been looking for some old images of the Wright Brothers and the first flight. I needed some hi-res images because I wanted to zoom and pan across them using the Ken Burns effect inside of iMovie. Took me a while to track them down. Here's a nice collection of old aeronautics images from an Air Force site of all things.

March 21, 2005   

• Very funny review of the Swanson Hungry Man "All Day" breakfast meal. It's got 1030 calories, 64g of fat, 2090mg of sodium, and 231% of your daily allowance of cholesterol. Yikes!! That's more than enough for "all day".

  The 'justification' is that you're supposed to eat shitty food in the morning, as it supplies you with a suitable amount of energy to get through the day. Unfortunately, Swanson's supplying you with enough 'energy' to get through a week...

• Unbelievable. The Bush administration is famous for putting corporate hacks in positions of power but they've gone too far now. The Department of Homeland Security has named a Gator executive to a federal privacy advisory board. I just wrote a quick letter of complaint to the DHS for this. If you don't know about Gator then you can't start to imagine how much this is letting the fox guard the henhouse. Gator (now Claria) makes spyware and adware software which takes over people's computers, monitors their behavior, and displays popup ads on unsuspecting computer users.

  In an e-mail message to CNET News.com, Kelly defended the inclusion of a Claria representative on the committee. "I am proud of, supportive of and grateful for those individuals in the public and private sector who are willing to take on the hard tasks, fight the good fight, and who surprise us with creative, fresh and unconventional thinking, and who make change where change is needed through their hard work and personal dedication," Kelly said.

• Wow! Bertrand Piccard and his team is trying to fly around with world using a solar powered airplane. Piccard was the first person to go around the world in a balloon with Brian Jones in 1999.

  This time, the challenge is to influence the history of air transport by exploiting new technologies that satisfy the demands of our era for sustainable development: to use only renewable forms of energy and remain airborne without generating any polluting emissions.

March 18, 2005   

• Microsoft is suing a college student for selling unopened software titles on Ebay. Microsoft screwed up and all this guy is asking for is an apology but noooooooo.

  I filed a countersuit against Microsoft for unfair and deceptive consumer sales, amongst other things (Civil RICO, Uniform Commercial Code violations, Conversion, negligent misrepresentation , etc) because since I never opened the software or installed it, I never agreed, or even became aware of, the license agreement that is apparently present on the software, in digital form only. I specifically filed a settlement notice asking for an apology and absolutely no money for me dropping all of the counterclaims...

• Good article from Wired.com about manipulation of search ranking.

  "I could create a blank page without a keyword anywhere present, or a 404 error message, and if I can get enough sites to link to it, I could get it to place first on Google," Boser said. But it's not just quantity, it's quality. Theoretically, Boser could have five inbound links and end up as the No. 1 result -- provided they originated from mega sites like Yahoo and MSN. Barring that, 5,000 links from cheesy guest books, online diaries, blogs, zany products, porn sites and anyone who honors link exchanges might do the trick.

March 16, 2005   

• Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos has purchased 165,000 acres of desolate ranch land in Texas to build a commercial launch facility named Blue Origin.

  Bezos said Blue Origin would first build basic structures at the Texas site, such as an engine test stand, fuel and water tanks and an office building, then begin flight tests in six to seven years, Simpson said. He said most of its initial research and development would be done in Seattle, where Bezos and his companies are based.

• Interesting page about how the Incas may have had a system of writing after all. This guys has been trying to decode the symbols and at the same time trying to convince people that he is not making this up. Here's some research about the khipu knot "language" used by the Incas and a piece about the possible decoding of khipu.

  William Burns Glynn used to stay up until three oclock in the morning staring at symbols in line drawings depicting the height of the Inca empire. In July of 1978, the researcher (who commonly goes by William Burns) noticed similar symbols on the clothing of Inca leaders. Quickly, he began to compare them to the symbols in other drawings and textiles. Eventually, he came to believe that he had decoded the entire Inca writing system: a system of communication lost to humankind for nearly half a millennium.

March 15, 2005   

• They are coming out with 5 amd 6gb 1" micro hard disks these days pushed by the introduction of the iPod and other micro music players. These disks have 1" platters with little tiny heads and drive controllers. The one on the right is a USB2 portable drive that fits in your pocket.
  • thousands of business files
  • 74 hours of digital music
  • 1250 digital photos
  • 4.5 hours of digital video
  • dimensions: 0.71" height x 3.03" diameter
  • weight: 2.2 oz.
• Paper about remote physical device fingerprinting. You can use these mechanisms to do computer forensics, track physical device connected to the Net at different points, counting the devices behind a NAT, probing an address block to find to virtual hosts, and unanonymizing network traces.

  Our techniques do not require any modification to the fingerprinted devices. Our techniques report consistent measurements when the measurer is thousands of miles, multiple hops, and tens of milliseconds away from the fingerprinted device, and when the fingerprinted device is connected to the Internet from different locations and via different access technologies. Further, one can apply our passive and semi-passive techniques when the fingerprinted device is behind a NAT or firewall, and also when the device's system time is maintained via NTP or SNTP.

• Nice page with a number of examples on how to convert sound files using some Unix utilities.
• Cool! Scientists think that some sort of whirlwind has cleaned off the solar panels of the Spirit Mars rover returning the panels to efficiency levels close to when it landed. Spirit had been tracking dust devils in the area and onboard cameras had shown that it's tire tracks were being erased by local winds.

  "The noon solar output from the panels went from a 40 percent loss to just 7 percent," said rover science team member, Larry Crumpler, a research curator in volcanology and space sciences at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science in Albuquerque.

• Here are a pair of interesting articles about the DNA testing done in the BTK case. The police took DNA samples from Dennis Rader's daughter's medical file without her authorization (use username dirk2@... and password b00gie to read that one).

  "The DNA that was taken from the daughter in Michigan was taken after the arrest of Mr. Rader," [District Attorney Nola] Foulston said, " ... and did not affect the original arrest of Mr. Rader." Federal privacy law restricts access to medical records. Among the exceptions is when law enforcement needs medical records for investigations that would be harmed if the access was disclosed, said Wichita lawyer Chuck Millsap.

  A number of people in the Wichita area are worried about the 4,000 DNA samples taken by police during the BTK case investigation.

  One of the people whose DNA was taken is Roger Valadez, who was mistakenly arrested in connection with the BTK case. Valadez filed a motion Tuesday (3/1/2005) at Sedgwick County District Court seeking the return of his DNA sample. What makes his case different than most is that his DNA was collected while he was in police custody. It was not voluntarily given.

March 14, 2005   

• 

  I like this article entitled the squirt-gun offense. It talks about small crimes that are unpunishable because it would take too long: stealing donuts at a hotel or cutting in line. When we could punish someone by squirting them with water or some equally innocuous response, it would train these people who think they can get away with anything.

  I actually think that this should be expanded to true criminal behavior. There are so many crimes which are not prosecuted because the state concentrates on more criminal or violent behavior. I've often felt that alternative modes of punishment are often in order: publishing their name, address, and crime in the paper, or even the modern equivalent of the stocks which could be a stage in front of the court house where you'd have to stand there with your crime posted above you in large letters for 15 minutes at lunchtime or something.

  For corporate polluters, how about publishing a list of the offenders with the products that they sell, the businesses they sell to, and lists of their management staff names and addresses? Forget about fines which can be seen as business expenses. We are so concerned with privacy these days that public humiliation would be a good deterrent to most crime.

• I was looking for a site for some IE plugin code today and found the Unix Daemon site. Has a nice little collection of plugins and source code.
• I'm pretty sure that one of the signs of the apocalypse is that kids less than 9 years of age are carrying cellphones. What a thought.

  Mattel, partnering with Single Touch, plans to introduce a Barbie cellphone this summer for girls 8 to 14. Parents will be able to control the phone through a website. The $50 phone comes with 30 minutes of talk time. And Hasbro is introducing a walkie-talkie system for kids called ChatNow, which looks and feels like a cellphone and allows children to chat within a 2-mile radius.

• Cool site similar to CafePress but for car stickers. You can make your own.
• Oh my god did this make me crack up. The Onion has a piece in it's recent issue entitled Bush Announces Iraq Exit Strategy: 'We'll Go Through Iran'.

  Bush said the U.S. Army, which deposed Iran's longtime enemy Saddam Hussein, should be welcomed with open arms by the Islamic-fundamentalist state. "And Iran's so nearby," Bush said. "It's only a hop, skip, and a jump to the east."

• Someone just asked about 45s and why the hole was big versus the small album hole. We had an online race to find the answer and the Strait Dope delivered as usual.

  In presenting the 45, RCA unloaded some drivel about how 45 RPM was the optimum speed for sound reproduction. But it was revealed that in fact RCA had told its engineers to come up with any old speed so long as it wasn't compatible with Columbia's system. The big hole was apparently supposed to make the two types of records even more incompatible. Thus began the so-called "war of the speeds."

March 11, 2005   

• Cool page from Cisco about Wifi standards.

  The level of RF energy that crosses between these channels determines interference. Radios do not have an exact edge to their channel, and energy spreads beyond the edges of the channel boundaries. However, the overall energy level drops as the signal spreads farther from the center of the channel. The 802.11b standard defines the required limits for the energy outside the channel boundaries (+/- 11 MHz), also known as the spectral mask.

• Excellent article detailing the various browser agent strings. It talks about each version of the software and the various differences and changes.

  Phoenix is dead - long live Firebird. Firebird is dead - long live Firefox. Firebird/Phoenix has morph'd into the new Firefox. The Mozilla roadmap shows Firefox as the browser for the next generation of Mozilla. Essentially (if we can paraphrase a very big page) the mozilla design team are saying that they will develop a set of components (browser, mail client, editor (composer) and others) which will work well together but will have their own development priorities and timeframes, rather than the monolithic current Mozilla structure. The historic Phoenix and Firebird strings are still here. We don't care about the name but we would like them to fix our bug! (since 1.4 no less).

• Interesting article about How to Start a Startup. The author talks about the idea, the people, what customers want, raising money, and not spending it.

  For programmers we had three additional tests. Was the person genuinely smart? If so, could they actually get things done? And finally, since a few good hackers have unbearable personalities, could we stand to have them around?

• Funny article from a professor entitled Teaching a Class in Pornography is Strange.

  At this stage, it appears clear that a not insubstantial number of the students are going to fail the course, despite some generous curves on the exams. I dont know that some brief titillation is worth having to admit to failing your porn course.

March 10, 2005   

• A new cellphone by Samsung includes a 3gb hard drive for storage and runs the Windows Mobile operating system. Can't you just see your phone crashing with the BSOD?

  Putting a hard drive into a cell phone hadn't been possible until recently when a new generation of compact, 1-inch drives with low power consumption came onto the market. The drives in the Samsung phones are similar to those used in some portable digital music players, such as Apple Computer's IPod Mini, and the phone maker is employing them so that it can offer similar music player functions on the handsets.

March 8, 2005   

• Cool Unix job posting.

  Trouble with Unix is that nobody really knows what it's all about. Oh, sure, you've got your poindextrose types who type in things like bash and grep, but really, what does any of that mean? Well I'll tell you. bash actually stands for Bourne Again Shell and what it is is an interface. It's fairly unlikely that you'll see many people typing bash in on a Unix machine. It's like, with Windows, would you type windows? Of course you wouldn't. You'd type exit and then format c:.

• We were wondering about Telex machines over lunch and, of course, Wikipedia gave us a good answer.

  A global teleprinter network, called the Telex network, was established in the 1920s, and was used through most of the 20th century for business communications. The main difference from a standard teleprinter is that telex includes a switched routing network, originally based on pulse-telephone dialing. ATT developed a competing network it called TWX. Telex is still in use for certain applications such as shipping, news, weather reporting and military command.

• So they are doing a lot more implanting of brain computer interfaces (BCI). The Cyberkinetics lab at Brown university is doing a lot of this work.

  A bundle of wires as thick as a coaxial cable runs from a connector in Nagle's scalp to a refrigerator-sized cart of electronic gear. Inside his brain, a tiny array of microelectrodes picks up the cacophony of his neural activity; processors recognize the patterns associated with arm motions and translate them into signals that control the Pong paddle, draw with a cursor, operate a TV, and open email.

• President Bush has nominated John Bolton to be ambassador to the United Nations. This guy sounds about as far from a diplomat as you can get. Complete ring-wing hawk.

  In a breathtaking victory for right-wing hawks, U.S. President George W. Bush has nominated Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton to become his next ambassador to the United Nations. Bolton, widely considered the most unilateralist and least diplomatic of senior U.S. officials during Bush's first term, will have to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate where some Democrats, a few of whom were said to be stunned by the nomination, are expected to put up a fight.

• Here's a fun page where you can buy miniature versions of a guillotine, trebuchets, etc.. They would be very suitable for an office desk or a coffee table.

  I build antiques from...er...somewhere else. A parallel universe where Leonardo Da Vinci, John Cleese and Jimmy Neutron spend every Tuesday night playing poker with Sherlock Holmes, and the Victorian era 'gentleman inventor' still toils diligently in his potting shed laboratory.

March 2, 2005   

• Fun article about writing software for the space shuttle. Some good wisdom in this piece about general state of software engineering.

  Software may power the post-industrial world, but the creation of software remains a pre-industrial trade. According to SEI's studies, nearly 70% of software organizations are stuck in the first two levels of SEI's scale of sophistication: chaos, and slightly better than chaos. The situation is so severe, a few software pioneers from companies such as Microsoft have broken away to teach the art of software creation (see Drop and Code me Twenty!)

• Scientists in Toronto have implanted a "brain pacemaker" into 6 patients with untreatable clinical depression to stimulate brain areas involved with mood control. Here's another article about the procedure and results.

  Each underwent local anesthetic before doctors drilled two small holes in their skulls. Then, using magnetic resonance imaging to guide them, doctors inserted two thin electrode wires into the brain area. The other ends of the wires were threaded under the scalp down to the lower neck area. Next, the patients underwent a general anesthetic to have a pulse generator implant, the "pacemaker", sewn in under the skin of their chest. The wires were hooked up to this to provide constant brain stimulation.

• So the hackers have ported some flavor of Linux to the iPod. It was only a matter of time of course. The bootloader can boot into Linux or the MacOS side so your iPod can be both. Sounds pretty cool. Here are the iPod Linux pages where you can download the software.

  I downloaded the shiny, easy-to-use installer, and iPod Linux was installed within seconds. You see, the iPod Linux uses some sort of modified firmware (too complex for my 14-year-old head) that'll run only when you tell it to. After it's installed, you reset the iPod (by holding menu + play for a few seconds, most people already know that), and then while it's resetting, press and hold the rewind button. A funny little picture of Tux holding an iPod comes up, and then something that scared the bejezes outta me.

March 1, 2005   

• Steve Fossett is currently at 45,000 ft over Morocco flying the Virgin Atlantic Global Flyer in an attempt to be the first person to fly solo around the world without refueling. He is flying a Burt Rutan plane made by Scaled Composites specifically for the attempt. It will take him 80 hours and I guess he either sleeps at the controls or doesn't sleep at all. Wonder what drugs he is taking. [ He made it after 67 hours landing on March 4th at 13:48 localtime back in Salina, Kansas. ]
• It's official. SpaceShipOne is headed for the Air and Space Museum in Washington DC. Can't wait to take Tim there to see it.

  The rocket plane will be in good company. It joins the Wright Brothers Wright 1903 Flyer, the Spirit of St. Louis, as well as the Apollo 11 Command Module Columbia that carried the first men to walk on the Moon. By winning the X Prize it clearly represents a next generation of space travel, possibly one that opens the doors to your average person making it into space, as opposed to trained astronauts and cosmonauts, NASMs Golkin told SPACE.com.

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