Gray Watson's Blog -- June 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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June 28, 2005

More digging out of my files at Lycos. Here's a great collection of some of the pain we had dealing with the "world renown" Digital Equipment Coporation (DEC) customer service. This was on the DEC Unix (DUX, OSF1, True64, ...). In general they gave ok service. Hardware service was excellent (aside from the batteries on the raid controllers) [thanks Dennis] but software support was marginal at best and sometimes terrible.
- In this call, I try to convince DEC that there is a problem in their sprintf call. Favorite section: after fighting with them for months on this issue I get this call which said that they had a meeting about it and acknowledged it was a bug. The way she said it made it seem like she had helped me instead of just finally agreed with something I'd been saying for months.
- Almost a year later I try to fix the same problem in their ladebug debugger. Favorite sections: Spoke to Ed Haletky. Very frustrating. He said that ladebug is assuming that it is null terminated because this is what the C language defines it as. [WRONG!] [And after providing more information on the problem] His comment is "That's Wonderful". Loaded with sarcasm.
- Here's another banner example of improper support when I called to report invalid frees in their thread library. Favorite quote: He argued with me that I should be using the libc mallocs and the program runs forever.

June 27, 2005

So I am departing Lycos where I have worked for the past 9.5 years for more stimulating pastures. In going through my files I found this interesting letter to our general manager of search regarding the evils of doing business with Gator. It was signed by 25 other engineers -- basically anyone who I ran into that morning. Typically and unfortunately, Lycos continued to pay the devil his due.
Although I understand the pressure on you to generate revenue, I think that making deals with this company will turn into a loss over the long run. Being associated with underhanded companies like Gator will hurt the public's view of Terra Lycos. Also, by supporting this business model we are legitimizing it's use and propagation that will hurt the entire advertising industry.

June 23, 2005

Here's a very depressing article about the US spent US$20 billion of Iraqi funds with a large amount handed out as cash to contractors in the days before transferring power to the Iraqis a year ago. This is in direct violation of the Geneva Convention as far as I can tell which states that the occupying force must pay for civilian humanitarian needs. But I guess the neo-cons would say it's the spoils of war. We fuck the country up and they've got to pay for it. We've already poored $300 billion into Iraq, which Wolfowitz said would pay for itself, and god knows how much more we're going to have to pay -- in lives and money.
Most of these funds came from frozen and seized assets and from the Development Fund for Iraq, which succeeded the U.N.'s oil-for-food program. After the U.S. invasion, the U.N. directed this money should be used by the CPA for the benefit of the Iraqi people.
Cash was loaded onto giant pallets for shipment by plane to Iraq, and paid out to contractors who carried it away in duffel bags.

June 22, 2005

Brian at work has been jokingly pressuring me for a RSS feed of my blog but I do need to do it. Here's some good links on the subject from threadwatch.org and rssgov.com.
Jack Kilby, the inventer of the integrated circuit, has died aged 81. Kilby was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2000 for his achievement in the summer of 1958 at Texas Instruments. Here's the TI memorial page and a description of the invention.
Kilby succeeded in integrating electronic components, including the still-new transistor, onto a single piece of silicon, which made possible low-cost high volume manufacturing of electronic circuits. It was Robert Noyce, then at Fairchild Semiconductor, who conceived the process for economical production of ICs.

June 21, 2005

Article extolling evolution not revolution in Arab lands.
The administration of U.S. President George W. Bush should back up its pro-democracy rhetoric in the Middle East with more action and consistency, according to new bipartisan report that also urges Washington to encourage ''evolutionary,'' rather than ''revolutionary'' change in Arab lands.
The 65-page report by an independent task force sponsored by the influential Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and chaired by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Vin Weber, a former Republican congressman, also urged Washington to support the full political participation of Islamist groups, so long as they renounced violence and were committed to the democratic process.
The junk food lobby has won again as a Connecticut Governor Jodi Rell vetoed a school-based nutrition law.
But Rell is not alone. All over the country, politicians deep in the pockets of the junk food lobby are using the excuse of "local control" to defend their indefensible positions on school nutrition. Trouble is that local school districts are lured by the much-needed cash generated by soda and junk food sales. Yet, as many parents are realizing, no amount of money can justify sacrificing children's health.
Wow, and Scaled Composites' Proteus aircraft has been modified to be a launch vehicle as well as White Knight. It did a drop test of a 23% scale model of the tSpace Crew Transfer Vehicle or CXV rocket. Man is the commercial space race taking off. NASA should really start scaling back on its programs and go more into a DARAP-style research grant manager and only do the really expensive tests.
TSpace's CXV will carry four people to orbit, and descend on parachutes to a water landing after re-entry. The craft will be reusable, and tSpace plans to make it available to private researchers, tourists or anyone else who can pay US$5 million per seat. That may seem like a lot of money, but it's a quarter of the cost to ride the only spacecraft flying paying passengers, Russia's Soyuz.
It's about time that some in Congress are talking about an agency responsible for tracking asteroids. If you've ever read Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke, or heard of the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event, or listened to the reports of asteroids that come at us with the sun at their backs making them impossible to track, you'd be as worried about this as I am. We are playing a dangerous game of Russian roulette right now and there certainly is one in the chamber. It is the #1 factor that scientists think could destroy the species. And it might happen tomorrow. We need to be working on some deep space radar stations. I'd make it a commercial venture.
Interesting article able Field Programmable Gate Array self-programming supercomputer. Sounds like they have a long way to go but the idea is to program the hardware of the computer instead of the software which should produce a much faster, cooler system of comparative size.
The Edinburgh system will be up to 100 times more energy efficient than a conventional supercomputer of equivalent computing power. The 64-node FPGA machine will also need only as much space as four conventional PCs, while a normal 1 teraflop supercomputer would fill a room.
But figuring out how to make the FPGA chips work together efficiently represents a challenge. "No one has ever tried to build a big supercomputer with these chips before," Parsons says. "The supercomputer weve come up with is an absolutely unique system."
I may have blogged this already. Scaled Composites' White Knight launch vehicle has been altered to carry the X-37 test spacecraft. The Boeing, DARPA, and NASA sponsored research craft has been under development for sometime.
Designed by Scaled Composites of Mojave, California, the White Knight was utilized to haul SpaceShipOne to altitude and then released the piloted rocketplane for its record-setting suborbital treks, including the snagging of the high-stakes $10 million Ansari X Prize last year.
In its new role, the White Knight is being readied to carry the Boeing, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), NASA-supported vehicle skyward. No official word yet on when the twosome will take to the air, or what is the timeframe for the first drop test of the X-37 using the White Knight.
Article describing how modern medicine has reduced the mortality amoung US troops. Significantly more soldiers are returning home alive -- however many are missing limbs or have other significant disabilities.
Speed, technology and advancements in armor have made the battlefield in Iraq one of the most survivable in the history of warfare: 1) A new blood-clotting powder for major bleeds has proved so effective that it's being issued for medical kits. 2) U.S. forces in the field are heavily populated with combat lifesavers, soldiers with training comparable to emergency paramedics back home. 3) A fleet of aircraft - including helicopters and cargo planes - is on call to rush casualties to medical care. ...
Solar sail craft Cosmos 1 is set to launch today from converted Russian ballistic missile launched from a submarine. It is a privately funded solar-sail experiment designed to test the effectiveness of using large milar sails to harness the sun's rays to drive a space ship. Here's an article describing the mission.
The eight ultra-thin solar sail blades are also now being packed into their deployment canisters for flight. Friedman said this process was put off as long as possible in the processing flow to minimize the amount of time the blades are kept folded before being unfurled in space.
Once in orbit these blades will be deployed from their small casings to span about 100 feet tip-to-tip and cover 2,000 square feet, about the area of an average house. They will then act as sails to utilize light pressure from the Sun as a means of propulsion. This theory is the one to be tested by this first-of-a-kind satellite.
Cool article about how a Detroit high school has moved to Linux and OpenOffice away from Microsoft. More institutions should be making this obvious leap. It requires some savy technology people but the short and long term benefits outweigh any negatives.
The cost analysis was compelling -- the Linux option could be implemented for around $21,000, more than $100,000 less than the Microsoft Windows alternative. The key to enabling the move to Linux, however, was the ability to provide an acceptable office application suite that would run on both Windows XP and Linux. It was impractical for the school to support more than one office application suite, nor was it cost-effective nor beneficial to remove Windows XP from the newer systems.

June 20, 2005

Cold Fusion is back but this time with carefully researched hard data.
The new cold fusion experiment went something like this: scientists inserted a small pyroelectric crystal (lithium tantalite) inside a chamber filled with hydrogen. Warming the crystal by about 100 degrees (from -30 F to 45F) produced a huge electrical field of about 100,000 volts across the small crystal.
The tip of a metal wire was inserted near the crystal, which concentrated the charge to a single, powerful point. Remember, hydrogen nuclei have a positive charge, so they feel the force of an electric field, and this one packed quite a wallop! The huge electric field sent the nuclei careening away, smacking into other hydrogen nuclei on their way out. Instead of using intense heat or pressure to get nuclei close enough together to fuse, this new experiment used a very powerful electric field to slam atoms together.
More articles about the Downing Street Memo. The mainstream media is starting to take about it. Here's another discussion about whether it is a smoking gun.
Two senior British government officials today acknowledged as authentic a series of 2002 pre-Iraq war memos stating that Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program was "effectively frozen" and that there was "no recent evidence" of Iraqi ties to international terrorism, private conclusions that contradicted two key pillars of the Bush administration's public case for the invasion in March 2003.
The news from the war in Iraq continues to be bleak. The Pentagon's Early Bird, a daily collection of ~50 news stories circulated around the U.S. security groups, paints a sad picture. In addition, war criticism and calls for a pullout have started from both sides (mostly Ds) of the floor of Congress.
Despite Vice President Dick Cheney's confident assertion two weeks ago that the insurgency was in its last throes, the story featured one particularly telling observation from a U.S. officer who works with the task force overseeing training of Iraqi troops, regarding how easy it was for the insurgency to replenish its forces. We can't kill them, he said. When I kill one, I create three.
Cool page which chronicles Burt Rutan and Scaled Composite's designs and planes. I didn't realize that they were involved with the Pegasus rocket.
Scaled Composites Model 281 Proteus (pictured at right) is a twin turbofan high altitude. multi-mission aircraft powered by Williams International FJ44-2E engines. It is designed to carry payloads in the 2000-pound class to altitudes above 60,000 feet and remain on station up to 14 hours.

June 17, 2005

Wow, this is scary. It's about the immunization coverup that they have been increasing the incident rates of speech delays, attention-deficit disorder, hyperactivity and autism. Since 1991 the estimated number of cases of autism have increased by 15 times, from one in 2,500 children to one in 166.
But instead of taking immediate steps to alert the public and rid the vaccine supply of thimerosal, the officials and executives at Simpsonwood spent most of the next two days discussing how to cover up the damaging data. According to transcripts obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, many at the meeting were concerned about how the damaging revelations about thimerosal would affect the vaccine industry's bottom line.
Interesting piece on the Snopes.com urban legend site about how John Kerry acts rude and entitled to those around him. I guess Dave Berry saw this first hand. A friend at work was a volunteer for the Make-a-Wish foundation and John Teresa Kerry were there and acted a bit rude. Another reason why he was not the right candidate. Sigh.
I will support whoever is, even if it is Sen. John Kerry, who once came, with his entourage, into a ski-rental shop in Ketchum, Idaho, where I was waiting patiently with my family to rent snowboards, and Sen. Kerry used one of his lackeys to flagrantly barge in line ahead of us and everybody else, as if he had some urgent senatorial need for a snowboard, like there was about to be an emergency meeting, out on the slopes, of the Joint Halfpipe Committee. I say it's time for us, as a nation, to put this unpleasant incident behind us. I know that I, for one, have forgotten all about it. That is how fair and balanced I am.

June 16, 2005

Tony Blair is trying to make a difference on global warming and the environment but has been consistently frustrated by the Bush administration. Here's a CNN report about Blair's struggle between the G8 and Bush.
"In another decade or so we could start to see irreversible change. For instance, the Amazon rainforest could collapse and become savannah, the oceans could become so acidic they can't absorb anymore carbon from the atmosphere. If that happens we are then on a runaway train." He added: "Every nation, including the US, has to make cuts to greenhouse gases if we are going to save the planet."
Scientists report that Hurricane Ivan generated a 91 foot (27m) high wave, the largest recorded by instruments. It also generated a 3 knot current on the sea floor.
But they did record that the sea currents generated by the hurricane broke another world record: the maximum current on the seafloor was 2.25 metres per second, compared with the Gulf Stream, which reaches top speeds of about 1.5 metres per second.
We didnt expect to measure hurricane waves, William Teague, of the oceanographic team, said. We were amazed at the strength of the currents and the size of the waves. It has changed our whole thinking of what could happen out at sea and what structures, like oil rigs, could get wiped out.
They had to reduce Lindsay's breasts digitally after parents complained after screening the movie Herbie: Fully Loaded. One of the guys at work commented that it was "like spraypainting the mona lisa". How true.
A team of experts airbrushed every scene from new movie 'Herbie: Fully Loaded' and dramatically reduce her boob size. Revealing necklines were also raised. Artists were told to pay extra special attention to scenes which showed the sexy star jumping up and down.
Another hilarious article by the Onion entitled Chinese Factory Worker Can't Believe the Shit He Makes for Americans.
"Often, when we're assigned a new order for, say, 'salad shooters,' I will say to myself, 'There's no way that anyone will ever buy these,'" Chen said during his lunch break in an open-air courtyard. "One month later, we will receive an order for the same product, but three times the quantity. How can anyone have a need for such useless shit?"

June 15, 2005

Here's a great example of politicians triumphing over science. Turns out that this guy resigned recently in a "long-planned departure". I know exactly what is going to happen. In 10 or 20 years (if not sooner) we're going to start seeing direct effects of the climate change -- changing agriculture yields, changing insect populations, coastline erosion, brownouts because of heat waves, etc.. These are going to start to have direct economic repercussions and people are going to figure out that what we do on this planet makes a difference. And, mark my words, the anti-environmental forces are going to avoid most of the blame. The corporations that have scorned conservation and pollution controls are going to say that it wasn't their fault. The "Conservative" anti-environment forces are going to shrug and point the blame somewhere else. By the way, doesn't "Conservative" imply conservation? Gosh no. Hahahaha. What was I thinking.
In handwritten notes on drafts of several reports issued in 2002 and 2003, the official, Philip A. Cooney, removed or adjusted descriptions of climate research that government scientists and their supervisors, including some senior Bush administration officials, had already approved. In many cases, the changes appeared in the final reports.
The dozens of changes, while sometimes as subtle as the insertion of the phrase "significant and fundamental" before the word "uncertainties," tend to produce an air of doubt about findings that most climate experts say are robust.
So here's a very funny site about the Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes thing. Extremely bizarre. They talk about the "infamous Oprah love conniption", the overly public displays of affection in front of the media, the bizarre Scientologists, etc, etc.. Ok, I'm completed weirded out now. Hollywood is so bizarre. There's the site out there trying to Free Katie from Tom's clutches.
More details about the Blue Origin rocket are starting to come out although few details are available on their home page. It looks like it is going to be a vertical take-off and landing craft like the DC-X (pictured right).
According to a document that's part of the Blue Origin web site, rocket launchings would take place from the groups facilities under development in Culberson County, Texas. The reusable launch vehicle (RLV) would haul paying passengers on suborbital jaunts. The groups rocket would be comprised of a propulsion module and a crew capsule. Hydrogen peroxide and kerosene are to be used as propellants.
There is starting to be more and more talk about nuclear power. Environmentalists are looking at it as a solution to our fossil fuel burning issues and energy power companies are seriously looking at building the next generating reactors in the US again. I don't see how we can't do this. Energy conservation, although still important, has failed to slow the growth of electricity demand. Unless we want to become even more reliant on foreign oil thru oil fired electricity generation, we're going to have to build new nuclear plants.
The new reactors basically use the same technology, but with fewer valves, pipes and pumps. In the case of Westinghouse and GE, these reactors also have passive safety systems that, if needed, can shut the reactor down automatically and pour in cooling water. Other modifications such as setting the radioactive fuel lower into the ground were added in response to post-Sept. 11 worries about terrorism.
More reporting from the UK about how the decision to go to war with Iraq was finalized in April of 2002 by Bush and Blair and that supporting evidence for the war was then fabricated. Man did/does the Bush administration have some balls on them. The scary part is that I'm not sure the Neo-cons have learned anything from this disaster. I think that they'd freely try this again in Iran or North Korea and damn the consequences. No patience. No vision. Warped, simplistic world view.
The briefing paper, for participants at a meeting of Blair's inner circle on July 23, 2002, said that since regime change was illegal it was necessary to create the conditions which would make it legal.
This was required because, even if ministers decided Britain should not take part in an invasion, the American military would be using British bases. This would automatically make Britain complicit in any illegal US action.

June 14, 2005

I've started playing around with the Basic Stamp 2 that I got the other day on a hardware hacking project. Very cool stuff. It is a little microprocessor which you program using serial interface. It can interface with LCDs, buttons, drive circuits, test inputs, etc.. Still getting the hang of it especially since I'm not a hardware hacker so I make stupid circuit mistakes and fiddle a lot more then properly design. I'm relying on very precise temperature measurements and I'm using a Basic Stamp timing function but the values really fluctuate all around which I can't determine is a function of the circuit, the resolution, the thermsistors, or what. I'm to a point were I can use the Basic Stamp to collect data to look for temperature patterns on my Unix box.
More news reports about the secret US prisons and interrogation facilities that we have around the world. So much for being the leader on human rites. How can we expect others to ack responsibly?
In the past three years, thousands of alleged militants have been transferred around the world by American, Arab and Far Eastern security services, often in secret operations that by-pass extradition laws. The astonishing traffic has seen many, including British citizens, sent from the West to countries where they can be tortured to extract information. Anything learnt is passed on to the US and, in some cases, reaches British intelligence.
Here's from the Post article.
The Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where a unit of U.S. soldiers abused prisoners, is just the largest and suddenly most notorious in a worldwide constellation of detention centers -- many of them secret and all off-limits to public scrutiny -- that the U.S. military and CIA have operated in the name of counterterrorism or counterinsurgency operations since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Very cool new engine design which involves 4 rotating cylinder pairs.
The round cylinder block containing the pistons, connecting discs and coaxial output shafts is free to continuously rotate in a counter clockwise direction. It is caused to revolve 90for every complete revolution of the rotating crankshaft. This action is accomplished by a four-to-one ratio gear reduction mechanism that couples these two components together.
IBM and and Switzerland University have begun a project to model the human brain using a large computing cluster. Here's the Swiss site. Here's an article about Blue Brain from New Scientist.
Over the next two years scientists from both organizations will work together using the huge computational capacity of IBMs eServer Blue Gene supercomputer to create a detailed model of the circuitry in the neocortex the largest and most complex part of the human brain. By expanding the project to model other areas of the brain, scientists hope to eventually build an accurate, computer-based model of the entire brain.
The Gigapxl project got a picture of the Space Shuttle Discovery when it was rolled out to the launch pad in April (before it was sent back in).
Return to Flight, Rollout of Space Shuttle Discovery, April 6, 2005. Taken with the Gigapxl camera (1-minute exposure) from approximately 80 meters, Discovery on its Crawler-Transporter is captured shortly after sunset during a pause in its 1-mph journey to the Launch Pad from the Vehicle Assembly Building. (The International Space Station captured another view of the rollout.) The Crawler itself measures 131 x 113 feet and weighs in at 5.5 million pounds; the shuttle with its load adds another 12 million pounds. Brian was strategically positioned so as to block a spot light which was pointed in the direction of the camera.

June 9, 2005

Here's another indicator that the size of the average American is getting out of control. This company makes oversized toilets for large people which can take up to 2,000 pounds. What a sad commentary of the health of our nation. I also hear that larger, stronger medical stretchers and coffins are having to be designed because of our swelling waistlines. I recently fought myself down from a 40" waist back to a 38". 220 is my drop-dead weight now. Next goal is to reset by to 210 although it really should be 200 which is the top of the "normal" body mass index for my height.

June 8, 2005

In a very unfortunate decision, the US Supreme Court has said that the federal government can arrest people for medican marijuana use even if the state has passed a low allowing it. It is interesting that the dissenters to the ruling were: Rehnquist, O'Connor, and Thomas. First it is a bizarre panel of left and rights but also it is the first instance that I can remember where Thomas and Scalia did not agree. Here's the MSNBC article about it. Here's another interesting article about a lawsuit charging that the feds are denying researchers access to marijuana so they are unable to test it's dangers.
Stevens said the question before the court was not whether it was wise to enforce the federal law in these circumstances, but only whether Congress has the power to adopt such a law. He said the democratic process might be more important than the legal challenges and added that supporters of medical marijuana "may one day be heard in the halls of Congress."
Bill Cosby is my new hero! He is taking the Black community to task for not taking responsibility for their own demise. The link is to an OnPoint radio program where he requested a policeman, social-worker, and teacher from a poor black community to join him.
I'm talking about these people who cry when their son is standing there in an orange suit. Where were you when he was 2? Where were you when he was 12? Where were you when he was 18 and how come you don't know he had a pistol.
Here is a CNN article talking about his challenging of the African-American community.
Cosby's ire is focused at the African-American community: its rates of juvenile delinquency, its parenting, the coarse language of its youth. You can do better, he exhorts his audiences. Don't let yourself be victims, and especially don't let the poorest in the community let themselves be victims.
Panamanians is starting to worry about their forests since the rainfall from them is the only thing that allows the Panama canal to operate.
The canal depends on the lake and its water, and they in turn depend on the health of the surrounding watershed forest. But in the last few decades, half of it has been lost to logging and slash-and-burn agriculture.
Panamanians know what will happen if they cannot maintain an adequate supply of water for the canal. In the drought winter of 1990-91, lack of water forced canal operators to curtail lockages to fewer than 30 a day, something no one here is eager to repeat.
BBC article on a report accusing the US of committing torture put out by Amnesty International. Here's the 2005 report on the Amnesty site.
In a 300-page annual report, the group accused the US government of damaging human rights with its attitude to torture and treatment of detainees. This granted "a licence to others to commit abuse with impunity", the human rights advocates said.
Interesting article about Situated Software as opposed to large web applications. Successful applications set in local context will often do much better than global web aps.
We've always had a tension between enterprise design practices and a "small pieces, loosely joined" way of making software, to use David Weinberger's felicitous phrase... Situated software is in the small pieces category, with the following additional characteristic -- it is designed for use by a specific social group, rather than for a generic set of "users".

The biggest difference this creates relative to classic web applications is that it becomes easy to build applications to be used by dozens of users, an absurd target population in current design practice.

June 6, 2005

The FBI has released documents which show that military personnel in Guantanamo Bay have been accused of flushing the Koran down the toilet.
ACLU lawyer Jameel Jaffer said: "Unfortunately, one thing we've learned over the last couple of years is that detainee statements about their treatment at Guantanamo and other detention centers sometimes have turned out to be more credible than US government statements." Other FBI documents released on Wednesday detailed further accusations, including one by a detainee who said a female interrogator wiped his face with her menstrual blood.
The military Generals on the ground in Iraq are giving a sobering outlook on the war in Iraq.
Gen. John P. Abizaid, the top American officer in the Middle East, said in a briefing in Washington that one problem was the disappointing progress in developing Iraqi police units cohesive enough to mount an effective challenge to insurgents and allow American forces to begin stepping back from the fighting. General Abizaid, who speaks with President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld regularly, was in Washington this week for a meeting of regional commanders.

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