Gray Watson's Blog -- February 2005

Blogging is a useful way for me to record my thoughts and digital travels every so often. Hope you enjoy my digital stream of consciousness.

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February 27, 2005

Theo de Raadt was presented with the 2004 Free Software Award yesterday. He's the founder and project leader for OpenBSD and OpenSSH efforts. He has also made other contributions to GNU/Linux and other BSD distributions. Very cool. Previous winners of the Free Software Award Alan Cox (2003), Lawrence Lessig (2002), Guido van Rossum (2001), Brian Paul (2000), Miguel de Icaza (1999), Larry Wall (1998).

February 25, 2005

A tiger was seen wandering the hills of Southern California the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. Before it could be tranquilized, it had to be shot and killed by hunters because it had strayed too close to a soccer field and highway.
Authorities received a call Wednesday morning from a man who reported the tiger walking past his back fence. He said his children took pictures from inside their home. Ken Tucker, 45, told KCBS-TV the tiger walked to a nearby house and "was just staring down" the neighbor's dogs.
Astronomers have been talking for a while about "dark matter" and how it should be there given the gravity estimations and galaxy movements. Finally a team led by Cardiff University in the UK has discovered an object that appears to be an invisible galaxy. Here's the story from space.com.
Theorists also believe knots of dark matter were integral to the formation of the first stars and galaxies. In the early universe, dark matter condensed like water droplets on a spider web, the thinking goes. Regular matter -- mostly hydrogen gas -- was gravitationally attracted to a dark matter knot, and when the density became great enough, a star would form, marking the birth of a galaxy.
So Scaled Composites has a Computer Numeric Control (CNC) mill that can handle items that are 50x20x8 feet (sic). They can work with a variety of materials including: urethane foams, aluminum, composites (carbon fiber, fiberglass, etc.), Honeycomb core (Nomex, Kevlar, aluminum, etc.), and wood. The accuracy of the cutting head is better than 1/100th of an inch. Wonder what sort of cool stuff they make in there. The picture on the right looks like some sort of fuel tank nose cone.

February 24, 2005

Here's the Electronic Frontier Foundation's (EFF) page on the MGM v Grokster case being seen by the Supreme Court on March 29th, 2005.
Twenty-eight of the world's largest entertainment companies brought the lawsuit against the makers of the Morpheus, Grokster, and KaZaA software products, aiming to set a precedent to use against other technology companies (P2P and otherwise). As we noted in our arguments before the Ninth Circuit, the case raises a question of critical importance at the border between copyright and innovation: When should the distributor of a multi-purpose tool be held liable for the infringements that may be committed by end-users of the tool?

February 22, 2005

Check out this disgusting picture. This female runway model woman looks like she's 5' 10" and maybe 85 pounds. What sort of sick male is actually turned on by such a stick figure? It would be like making love to some doll made up of bones under parchment. [Shudder]. What sort of life does this girl live? There's got to be some serious finger-down-the-throat combined with cigarettes, drugs, and other chemicals to keep someone that thin on purpose. I just don't get it. It takes serious work to screw yourself up like this. I can only hope she's making the big bucks, putting it all away, and will be done and rich in a couple of years. Anything else and I just can't believe that it is in any way worth it.
Wow. A Hungarian woman and two Serbian men won 1.3 million pounds from the roulette wheel at the Ritz hotel casino in London. They used a laser pointer and computers to measure the speed of the ball and the wheel. A computer would calculate the rate of deceleration of the ball and the wheel and determine which 1/4 of the wheel was most likely to get the ball. This reduced the odds of winning fom 1-37 to 1-6. Impressive!
A question came up today about Serial ATA (SATA) and SCSI performance comparisons. After doing some research it looks like they are comparable with the high-end SATA RAID controllers winning. SATA is at least 40% cheaper than SCSI configurations, is easier to manage physically, and can provide similar if not better performance. Here are some links that I collected.
Cool article rating the Top 100 Gadgets of All Time. A bunch of these really took me back. The thing at the right is an AccuSplit which was the first digital stopwatch which I remember someone having. The top 5 gadgets are:
1. Apple Powerbook 100, 1991
2. Zenith Space Command TV Remote Control, 1956
3. Sony Walkman, 1979
4. Motorola Startac, 1996
5. CDI Mechanical Mouse Model 4-101, 1970

February 21, 2005

Page showing the different prices of gas from around the world. You pay $5.64 in the UK down to $0.15 in Venezuela. 2/3 of the countries have higher oil prices than the US.

February 18, 2005

Interesting discussion of the Safeway Card arson case. Washington firefighter, Philip Scott Lyons discovered and put out a fire under his kitchen window with his wife and kids in the house. He was charged with arson after his Safeway card indicated that firestarter had been purchased by someone in the house. Other evidence seemed to point his way as well including a police dog so the guy was dragged through the mud. But recently someone else came forward and confessed to the crime.
It reminds me a bit about Richard Jewel the poor bastard who discovered the pipe bomb at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. He was initially hailed as a hero for clearing the area but then FBI source told the media that Jewel was a loner and had explosives training. Even after he had been exonerated Letterman was still making fat jokes about him. What a shame. How many other innocents who were in the wrong place at the wrong time (and probably are the wrong color) are in prison or have been executed?

February 17, 2005

Interesting page comparing the penalties for stealing a CD versus the penalties for downloading it. Penalties for stealing go from US$0 to US$100,000. Penalties for downloading start at US$4,400 and go up to US$3,400,000. The title of the document is "Shoplifting Is Safer..." but I'd say that the chances of getting caught shoplifting are significantly larger than downloading.
Memo from Counterterrorism Chief Richard Clarke to National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice 1/25/2001 entitled Presidential Policy Initiative/Review -- The Al-Qida Network.
As we noted in our briefings for you, al Qida is not some narrow, little terrorist issue that needs to be included in broader regional policy. Rather, several of our regional policies need to address centrally the transnational challenge to the US and our interests posed by the al Qida network. By proceeding with separate policy reviews on Central Asia, the GCC, North Africa, etc. we would deal inadequately with the need for a comprehensive multi-regional policy on al Qida.
Just entered a quick page to the Wikipedia about TFIDF.
TFIDF (Term Frequency Inverse Document Frequency) is a statistical technique used to evaluate how important a word is to a document. The importance increases proportionally to the number of times a word appears in the document but is offset by how common the word is in all of the documents in a collection or corpus. TFIDF is often used by search engines to find the most relevant documents to a search query.
I was reminded the other day about Spirited Away (also Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi) the fabulous movie from Hayao Miyazaki. It's anime but don't let that stop you. A magical ride for most of the family. It is rated PG for some scary moments and I'd say that it is for kids 4 or older. Here's the Netflix page for it.

February 15, 2005

Excellent article from Popular Mechanics on Debunking The Myths of 9/11. They run through a whole series of conspiracy theories and provide contrary evidence. I've added some info in it to my 9/11 timeline.
After studying the high-resolution image and comparing it to photos of a Boeing 767-200ER's undercarriage, Greeley dismissed the notion that the Howard photo reveals a "pod." In fact, the photo reveals only the Boeing's right fairing, a pronounced bulge that contains the landing gear. He concludes that sunlight glinting off the fairing gave it an exaggerated look. "Such a glint causes a blossoming (enlargement) on film," he writes in an e-mail to PM, "which tends to be amplified in digital versions of images--the pixels are saturated and tend to 'spill over' to adjacent pixels."

February 14, 2005

Here's an article I wish everyone would read and understand. Thomas Friedman's op-ed piece in today's New York Times entitled No Mullah Left Behind (local copy) talks about how Iran does not need outside investment because of their oil profits. Oil regimes don't need to worry about the mediating force of world trade. They can be exclusionary as they want because people will still knock on their door. We are funding both sides of the Iraqi war -- the military side and the terrorism side. The Humvee and the roadside bomb.
By adamantly refusing to do anything to improve energy conservation in America, or to phase in a $1-a-gallon gasoline tax on American drivers, or to demand increased mileage from Detroit's automakers, or to develop a crash program for renewable sources of energy, the Bush team is - as others have noted - financing both sides of the war on terrorism. We are financing the U.S. armed forces with our tax dollars, and, through our profligate use of energy, we are generating huge windfall profits for Saudi Arabia, Iran and Sudan, where the cash is used to insulate the regimes from any pressure to open up their economies, liberate their women or modernize their schools, and where it ends up instead financing madrassas, mosques and militants fundamentally opposed to the progressive, pluralistic agenda America is trying to promote. Now how smart is that?
Very cool interactive baby name database. Gray doesn't make the cut-off. Couple things that I saw by playing around with it. It was hard to find names that had upward graphs in the past couple of years. It seems people are trying a lot harder to get "unique" names recently. Then again, maybe some preschool teacher could tell us exactly what is popular. Also, female names like Josephine made from their father's name have really disappeared.

February 13, 2005

So house bill HR.235 entitled Houses of Worship Free Speech Restoration Act. It will give clergy and religious groups the ability to talk politics and encourage donations from their constituents without losing their tax-free status. It certainly will give religious institutions more political power. I wonder if every PAC is going to start their own church because of this. Here's some great propaganda from the bill's sponsors.
HR 235 was introduced to liberate clergy from the muzzle imposed by the absolute ban on all speech that may be regarded as "political," and thereby enable them to speak out on all vital and moral and political questions of the day. It will free houses of worship from the fear and anxiety and uncertainty created by the threat that the IRS will impose financial penalties or revoke tax-exempt status altogether.
Today I was working around the house and:
1. Installed a T on my 1" gas line to my furnace to drive my natural-gas generator.
2. Cleaned my oven.
3. Used my explosive nail gun to frame out a box around my water meter.
Needless to say that house spells pretty weird this evening. But we are still alive and the house is still standing so everything is ok.

February 10, 2005

Interesting article entitled The Darwinian Interlude which reports on a piece by Carl Woese entitled A New Biology for a New Century. Dr. Woese talks about how right after life started in the microbial soup, there was no Darwinian competition between the species but direct sharing of genes. Now, Dr. Woese argues, we have reached the end of the Darwinian era as cultural evolution has replaced biological evolution. For the future:
And now, in the last 30 years, Homo sapiens has revived the ancient pre-Darwinian practice of horizontal gene transfer, moving genes easily from microbes to plants and animals, blurring the boundaries between species. We are moving rapidly into the post-Darwinian era, when species will no longer exist, and the evolution of life will again be communal.

February 8, 2005

Worrying article about domain name spoofing using international characters. There are huge problems these days with "phishing" where people create very realistic web pages to steal people's online back-account passwords and other financial data. This will allow them to do a better job so even if you are paying attention to the URL, it looks fine. Here's the author's proof of concept.
The NIH recently announced that its employees cannot own stock in biotech or pharmaceutical companies. The NIH folks are all angry about this but it makes good sense to me. These are people who can directly impact the bottom line of companies and so have some of the best inside information in the business. In addition, there is too great an incentive for companies to try to change research or findings and so distance between industry and science must be maintained. In talking to a friend at the FAA last night, it turns out that they have always had a list of "prohibited investments". That's the February 2004 list from their website.
New study published in Pediatrics magazine about the correlation between overweight preschool children and consumption of sweet drinks. It is important to note that they are not showing a causal relationship but say that "reducing sweet drink consumption might be one strategy to manage the weight of preschool children". They found no difference between soda and fruit juices in terms of the obesity correlation -- it's all about the calories.
The prevalence of overweight has increased dramatically among US children. Among 2- to 5-year-olds, overweight doubled from 5% in the early 1970s to >10% in 2000.1 Overweight children face serious health consequences, as studies have demonstrated a positive association between excess weight in childhood and increased blood pressure, increased cholesterol and triglyceride levels, diabetes, respiratory disease, and orthopedic, and psychosocial disorders. In addition, overweight children seem to be more likely to become overweight adults.

February 7, 2005

I guess that Brazilian government has announced that it will be moving to free software and divesting itself of Microsoft licensing fees. Right now Brazil spends more on proprietary licensing fees than it does on feeding its poor. Also there is a larger anti-corporate movement down in Brazil combined with a climate of freedom and democratic pressures instead of corporate control. Here's the story from NPR. The BBC has some older reports about Brazilians loving Linux.
Oh damn this is funny. It's a site with a number of pictures from some Star Wars fan convention. I've been laughing/crying over these pictures and the perfect captions for a couple of minutes. Favorite quote "Mormon newlyweds Jenny and Mike model the special underwear through which they will consummate their union..." or maybe "Queen Amidala heads back to the Royal Naboo Fork Buffet Table..."
A very restrained and very funny piece by the always good Onion entitled U.S. Children Still Tramatized One Year After Seeing Partially Exposed Breast On TV. It is humor at a perfect level and is right on.
"By the time CBS cut to an aerial view of the stadium, the damage was done," said Wasserbaum, who has also worked extensively with orphaned and amputee children in Third World war zones. "I've found that children can be amazingly resilient, but this event was too much for many of them to take. The horrible image of that breast is likely to haunt them for the rest of their lives."

February 4, 2005

Cool article from CNet about an organization called Computer Aid International. The fix up old computers and sell them at a nominal fee to non-profits to help people in developing worlds or in poor neighborhoods bridge the digital divide.
Since the cost associated with each PC is fixed--about $75 to refurbish and $20 to ship--Computer Aid is able to raise money in innovative ways, said Roberts. "If an organization like Oxfam or UNESCO wants a whole container full of computers, we can provide that at a fixed cost, and the fundraising is effectively done by that organization. Although it was not what we expected, most of our money comes from that source."

February 3, 2005

Finally added to MailNull accounts the ability to originate mail as one of your MailNull addresses. This is for people who need to send mail to a company about something or need to respond to a message sent to one of their addresses but don't want to expose their email address. I've been meaning to do this for some time.
Interesting piece about bot attacks on Google adwords.
Security researchers have discovered a way to shut down or seriously impair a Google Adwords advertising campaign by artificially inflating the number of times an ad is displayed. By running searches against particular keywords from compromised hosts, attackers can cause click-through percentage rates to fall through the floor.
Just ordered a bunch of these excellent ratchet, multi-bit screwdrivers make my Lutz. I got a bunch for people for xmas. I have a similar but older version of these is my favorite tool although it's starting to fail so I've been looking for a replacement. The ratchet combined with the different bits (philips, flathead, square, hex) makes any regular screwdriver pail in comparison. The only problem with this version is that often you are pressing on the end of it hard and the slots would make this not as comfortable. However, I still approve this screwdriver!

February 2, 2005

Article from the usually interesting Jim Lobe talking about the departure of Doug Feith one of the Bush administration Neocons. Good riddance. Unfortunately, it probably just means that he's got a high paying job with some defence company and still has as much power inside of the Pentagon.
Combined with several other personnel shifts, as well as a concerted effort to reassure the public and U.S. allies abroad that the recent messianic inaugural address did not portend any dramatic new foreign-policy departures, the resignation of Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith suggests that the administration is deliberately shedding its sharper and more-radical edges.

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