Category Archives: Technology

Quote of the day–hunter006

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Breaking shit sounds easy, but it’s not. It’s actually pretty hard. The reason being because there are people just as smart as me, if not smarter, designing this specifically so it doesn’t break.


hunter006
March 27, 2009
My job as a SDET
[hunter006 is a co-worker of mine. We are, in a sense, on opposite teams. It’s an interesting relationship. I give the other team full access to every detail of the design and implementation. All the documents, all the source code, all the threat models then at any time completely and honestly answer any questions they might have about the system including things like, “Where do you think the greatest weakness are?” And “How would you go about breaking this?” Any success they have means more work and possibly poor performance reviews for me.


On the other hand, if I do my job right they will work their butts off, not find anything worse than typos in the documentation, and have their boss constantly screaming at them because they haven’t found any bugs. If they haven’t found any bugs then they aren’t doing their job, right?


Large bug counts, if found by you, are good on performance reviews. Large numbers of bugs assigned to you are bad. Currently I have one bug assigned to me. It’s about a year old and I’m pretty sure someone else fixed it a long time ago when they were working on something related. I just haven’t gotten around to verifying and closing it out or assigning it to him. Son James recently told me in his group the average is about 70 bugs assigned to each developer. He has about half that.


I just got new tester assigned to my portion of my current project. She’s a sweet young thing and I had a meeting with her earlier this week to explain the design and suggest ways to test it. I didn’t show her the proof I have been writing software since before she was born. I’ll save that for later when she is putting in long hours and still not finding enough bugs to keep her boss off her back.–Joe]

School Shooting Science

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I took my daughter to her middle school (6th, 7th & 8th grade) science fair last night.  She did an experiment to determine whether dog saliva has more or fewer germs than human saliva.  You guessed it– humans’ mouths carry more germs.


There were the usual baking soda volcanoes, rotting food experiments, egg-in-the-bottle demonstrations and such.  I also counted four terminal ballistics demonstrations.  Kids took several calibers out to the field and tested them on bricks, cinder blocks, fir timbers, drywall, phonebooks, and one even used a pistol-rated Kevlar vest.  All had the results anyone familiar with guns would expect– common centerfire rifle rounds pretty much overwhelm any of these targets, while some pistol rounds can be stopped by some of them.


One kid had assumed that a .30-30 would penetrate a hard target better than a .25-06, simply because of the bigger, heavier bullet.  He of course found out otherwise.


While there were no firearms brought into the school, there were several spend bullets, targets showing depth of penetration, and several cartridges were displayed including .50 BMG tracer and a training (inert) round for a 3-inch naval (ship’s) gun.


Nice work, kids!


Sorry– no pictures (has anyone seen a rather nice, new pocket Olympus camera lying on the ground between Moscow, ID and Garfield, WA?).

Do you know what this is?

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Last month at Tam’s place people were commenting things we had which were old. It was sort of “back when I was a young’n…” story telling time.


I visited my parents last Saturday and picked up my contribution to the discussion:



I brought it in to work today and asked my office mate if she knew what it was.


Her eyes got big and she said, “Oh my! Is this a punched card? I have never seen one of these before!”


I told her that it was more than that. “This”, I told her, “Is proof I was writing software before you were born.”


I took Engr 131 fall semester 1973 at the University of Idaho. Punched cards is a tough way to program a computer. There is no back space or delete and retype. There is no “white out”. If you make a mistake on a card you get to type a new one (there were rare exceptions but that is beyond the scope of this discussion).


We would leave our card deck on a table in the hall and come back three DAYS later to read the print-out result of the submission to the IBM 360. Usually it was something like ten pages of paper that boiled down to something like “Syntax error on card five, column 17.” Or “Program error. Core dump follows.”


The next year using a line editor on a teletype that looked like an IBM Selectric typewriter with a box of paper in back was such a thrill. You could get the compile and run results in a minute or two instead of days. And “editing” was just AWESOME compared to punching cards.


In the early 80’s I started programming on a CRT. It was still a line editor but listing lines 120-140 only took a couple of silent seconds instead of 30 seconds of clattering with the teletype. I started hearing rumors of something called a “visual editor” about the time son James was born in ’84. I couldn’t imagine what the fuss was about. “Visual editor?” What is that about? How much better than Edline could an editor be? I didn’t bother to check it out for several months.


Even then I would tell people about programming the microprocessor system I had build on a plug-board. I had typed in hand assembled hex codes into a PROM programmer. Then I plugging the PROM into a socket and powered up the system trying to debug it from the deciphering the way the LEDs blinked. Now that was a tough way to program.

Boomershoot site in the snow.

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Ry and I visited the Boomershoot site on Saturday. I checked the power supply and verified the batteries were fully charged and the inverters were working. The Wi-Fi was working just fine too but the last time I was there it wasn’t working so I plan to replace some of the components the next time I go out there.


Ry and I both took pictures of the snow. I had not tried a Photosythn before and I thought this would be kinda neat to try. So I took hundreds of pictures. The first attempt failed and the second attempt is here. I learned quite a bit from the effort and will try some more later on but the result is still pretty interesting.


Ry has his take on the snow.


I think it’s still a little early to tell. We are seven weeks from the event. I needed snow shoes to make it out the Taj Mahal but the deepest snow I could find at the shooting line near the berm was only about 17 inches deep.


We have more snow now at seven week out that last year at six weeks and five weeks out. We also had snow on the ground for the actual event too. After I visit next time we will have a better comparison to previous years.

Technology and the ATF

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The ATF explosives examiner for Idaho said I could just email the scans of the copies I kept. But after two days of getting neither confirmation or bounced email messages about the “Employee Possessor Questionnaires” (background check paperwork for handling explosives) I was about to call him when he emailed me. He said he hadn’t received any emails from me after the first one. I had actually sent him two emails in that time frame. The first had bounced and I presumed it was because the attachment was too large. So I put the 9 Mbyte .ZIP file on the boomershoot.org website (the .ZIP file has now been deleted and my logs indicate only I had attempted to download it) and sent him a link to that. That email did not bounce.


But I noticed something, the email address he used was different than the one I had originally used to contact him. I originally used @atf.gov and the one he responded with was @usdoj.gov. So I sent the same two emails again. One with the attachment and one with the link. Then a couple hours ago I called him. He hadn’t received anything.


We verified the email addresses. The first one (which, on Tuesday, made it through to him) was wrong. The other, which I had done a “reply to” from his email was the correct one. He would not download a file from a website (“We don’t do that”). Okay, so I’ll try sending a plain text test message from a different email account to his preferred email address. That worked. Okay, now the 9 Mbyte .ZIP file. He’s not sure what a .ZIP file is. He knows about .PDF files. .JPG files? Yeah, kinda.


The 9 Mbyte .ZIP bounced. The message:



The original message was received at Thu, 05 Mar 2009 12:15:40 -0800


—– The following addresses had permanent fatal errors —– “somethingelse@usdoj.gov”


—– Transcript of session follows —– .. while talking to mailsc20.usdoj.gov


>>> DATA <<< 550 5.7.0 Maximum Attachment Size (12M) Violation


Yeah, my 9 Mbyte .ZIP file exceeded their maximum attachment size restriction of 12 M.


Maybe this is a test to see if I’m calm enough to be trusted with explosives.


I broke the 9 Mbyte file into five .ZIP files the largest being 1.95 Mbytes and sent them as attachments to five plain text emails from my alternate email address to his second email address.


About 15 minutes later he called back. He had received them but it was going to “take a while” to get them from “picture viewer” to the printer. He would start work on that the first thing in the morning.


Apparently I passed the test.


I’m going out to the Boomershoot site this weekend. I think I need to blow something up.

Welcome to the other side

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I’ve finally dumped my old hosting provider (Servergrid who was really flaky) for all but the most trivial of sites to port. This blog was the biggest obstacle and is finally functional. There are still bugs from the admin side but as near as I can tell, so far, the user experience is working correctly. Let me know if you have problems.


Do you like the new theme?

More AP ammo testing

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As planned Caleb and I did some more tests with Ry’s test target. Video and commentary by Caleb.


We went to the Boomershoot site expecting to find little or no snow. We should have called ahead. There was about two feet of snow and we were unable to make it to the Taj Mahal with all our gear. We made do at the first berm. We used a paper target to zero the gun for this range (25 yards) then took a single shot with each caliber at the stack of steel plates at the base of the stump. The bullets at the steel plate went over the chronograph.


This was our setup.



In the following video you see the result of SS-109 and 30.06 blacktip ammo shot at the stack of steel plates each 0.25 inches thick. There is a gap of about 0.75 inches between each plate. Estimated velocity of the .223 bullet at the target is 2600 fps. Estimated velocity of the 30.06 bullet at the target is 2360 fps.


The .223 went through one and almost penetrated the second plate. The 30.06 went through three plates and partially into the fourth.



The .300 Win Mag pushing hand-loaded 162 grain military surplus black tip bullets was able to hit the target with a velocity of about 3315 fps. It went through all six plates:



Update: See also this paper on AP ammo. It’s just the first page (you have to pay for the rest of it) but it’s interesting reading.

Geometric progressions are fun

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Ry sent me an email telling me about $99 1 TByte hard drives:



Don’t know if you’re in the market to upgrade (I’m not), but NewEgg is selling 1tb sata drives for $99 with free shipping.


this is the item:


 


use discount code: EMCABCKFC


Interesting. My first hard drive was a 10 MByte which I purchased in 1984. And the 1 TByte drives have been out for two years now.


Assuming the rate of data density increases at a constant rate we can compute when we will have drives of even more more mind boggling capacity.


10 TByte drives should be available in 4.6 years.
100 TByte drives should be available in 9.2 years.
1 PByte drives should be available in 13.8 years.
1 EByte drives should be available in 27.8 years.
1 ZByte drives should be available in 41.4 years.
1 YByte drives should be available in 55.2 years.


Of course using all the data is going to take a lot of computing horsepower. Like maybe a supercomputer.


I have just the thing for you…


Sign up NOW (the deadline is January 31st) to have a chance at receiving:



  • A Cray CX1 desk-side supercomputer

  • One of 10 Premium MSDN Visual Studio Professional subscriptions

  • One of 10 Xbox 360 consoles

Internet Exploror 8 is available

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Yeah, it’s old news. But I’m liking it on my computer at work so I’m about to install it at home. Get it here.

Terminator talk

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At a meeting this morning we were discussing a possible name for a new product. It was suggested that since we already have SkyDrive and SkyMarket (with rumors of SkyLine and SkyBox), maybe we should name the project SkyNet. The consensus was there were probably names less threatening to the warm and fuzzies.

Big brother wants to read your mind

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This is actually old news but I just ran across it reading an old Bruce Schneier post. Here is the story from last September in New Scientist:



Last year, New Scientist revealed that the US Department of Homeland Security is developing a system designed to detect “hostile thoughts” in people walking through border posts, airports and public places. The DHS says recent tests prove it works.

Project Hostile Intent as it was called aimed to help security staff choose who to pull over for a gently probing interview – or more.

Commentators slated the idea that sensors could spot people up to no good from their pulse rate, breathing, skin temperature, or fleeting facial expressions. One likened it to the “pre-crime” units that predict criminal behaviour in the movie Minority Report.


FOXNews has more.


Basically they are doing remote lie detector type measurement without the subject being aware they are being scanned and implying intent from these measurements. Given that lie detectors aren’t particularly reliable I don’t think this will be very effective either. But still, one has to ask, “At what point does it become an unwarranted search and will the courts care?”

Quote of the day–Asa Dotzler

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In a functioning market, vendors producing superior products would take share from vendors producing inferior products. Today that’s simply not possible because the cost of the most effective channel for distribution, shipping as the default browser with new computers, for everyone except the OS vendor is prohibitively high.


Asa Dotzler
Mozilla’s director of community development
January 17, 2009
competition is good (see also EU: Microsoft ‘shields’ IE from competition — Web too important to let one company dominate browser market, says Opera CEO)
[Taking this quote out of context is a bit unfair and he does address some of the issues I have concerns about. But the bottom line is there is much more to the story. “Superior products”, in his mind, is defined differently than the market has defined it. And unless there is government inference (or other application of force in the market place) then the “superior product” has, in fact, dominated the marketplace. The (relatively) free market has defined “superior product” in such a way that ease of distribution has played a major factor. In order words Microsoft is competing in the distribution channel and the market has spoken and said, “The Microsoft distribution channel is better.”


That Microsoft exploited their superior distribution channel and the customers responded favorably to this offering is not justification for some government thugs (the EU) to declare MS a law breaker and demand fines or that they offer free access of that distribution channel to their competition. Those competitors need to build their own distribution channel and compete in that market. Until they successfully do that they have a big hole in their offering because the distribution channel is part of the feature set.


Microsoft management will, almost for certain, be more “responsible to the stockholders” than I would. If it were up to me I would be strongly inclined to tell the EU they can write their own damn software. MS would refuse to allow any of their software be used in any EU country until the EU thugs making these decisions are all in prison or selling pencils and apples on the street corners to see what the free market is really all about.


Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft but I am not in a position of management and my opinion in no way reflects that of my employer.–Joe]

Peter vs. Paul– Politics of the Nags

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When it comes to turning off lights around the house, my wife is a nag (not as a member of the National Association of Gals, but one who incessantly nitpicks on her own).  “You’re wasting electricity” she will say, approximately thirty eight thousand times per day (give or take).  Similarly, the political nags (not NAGs) are ordering us to use CF lights instead of the tungsten filament jobs, saying we’re destroying the very planet with our light bulbs.


If we cast aside all arguments about rights and liberty (and if we have a chance to toy with other people as a means of boosting our self esteem, why wouldn’t we?) there is the issue of home heating during the cooler months.  I gathered my family together, and explained this to them in terms anyone can understand;


If you have a 100 Watt light going full time inside a heated living space, that’s 100 fewer Watts, on average, that the home heating system has to put out. You have shifted 100 Watts of your energy use from the heater to the light bulb.  Your total usage is exactly the same.  Same goes if you leave the refrigerator open a little longer, or the television on all night.  If you’re heating that space anyway, it makes no significant difference.


Say I have a 10 KW electric furnace.  I could hook up 100 light bulbs, each rated at 100 Watts, through a relay to my thermostat (assuming I had the proper wiring) thereby taking all the heating load off the furnace and placing it on the light bulbs.  Will my heating bill change?  Maybe, and maybe not.  It would depend on the distribution of the lights within the house, the quality of the insulation on my furnace duct work in the cold space under the house, and a few other minor variables.  Maybe I’d save a few pennies, and maybe I’d loose a few pennies.  If you have a gas furnace the situation is still the same– you’re just trading back and forth between gas and electricity, but your total energy usage is going to be about the same.


The situation is completely different in the summer of course.  The waste heat from your TV, fridge, etc., is of no use to you.  If you’re running an air conditioner, anything else in your house that produces heat is causing the AC to work harder.


In both cases, insulation, windows, door seals, and the structure’s orientation and exposure to the sun will overwhelm the other issues.


So we can stop nitpicking each other.

Make porn not war

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I have to wonder if we started dropping these devices from airplanes by the millions into certain mid-Eastern countries if we couldn’t eradicate radical Islam within a generation:



One end of the canister-type devices sized to fit easily in one’s lap is made of soft ‘Haptic’ synthetic material akin to that used for nipples of baby bottles.

The faux-flesh wall is slotted to allow the insertion of a body part of a man’s choosing.

RealTouch devices connect to computers with USB cables and synchronise with adult movies streamed online so the inner workings replicate what a fellow might be feeling were he to be the man in the film.

‘You watch the action on a screen and a signal is sent to the box to simulate what is happening,’ Mr Drysdale said.


Rich men in some Islamic countries have many wives unbalancing the normal male/female ratio of approximately 50/50. Sex outside of marriage is forbidden. And women who defy (or are even suspected of defying) this are severally punished. Hence significant numbers of young men have no good sexual outlet. Their religion promises those that die in Jihad go to heaven with 72 virgins for eternity. This is a powerful motivator for many men of warrior age to seek battle. If we could significantly reduce or eliminate this motivation there would be less violent conflict with these radicals.

Bug fixes for Modern Ballistics for the Field

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Scott found a user interface bug. That is fixed now. There was a bug in the “Delete All Data” link that I found and fixed as well.


I have also created a new topic tag for this blog “Ballistics”. I still have to add this tag to old posts but I should get that done sometime today.

Maximum range of bullets

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I added another feature to Modern Ballistics for the Field. It now gives you the approximate maximum range for your bullet under the given environmental conditions.

Quote of the day–Dom De Vitto

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The long-standing Sci-Fi prophecy of intelligent machines rising up to enslave and destroy the human race has disappeared from modern culture.


As far as I can tell, this coincided with the release of MS-DOS.


Dom De Vitto
January 28, 2008 12:42 PM
Comment to Ethics of Autonomous Military Robots
[I was reminded of this after reading Phelps comment to this post of mine.–Joe]

Quote of the day–CodingConventions.doc for the Windows Mobile code base

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Languages are strongly typed in an effort to find programming errors at compile time, not, as some would believe, to cause compile errors at programming time.


From CodingConventions.doc for the Windows Mobile code base
January 2008
[I ran across this today at work and had to share. I know probably only a handful of my readers will get it but I thought it was so funny. Yeah, I’m a geek.–Joe]

What should I do next?

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My Modern Ballistics for the Field software is essentially completed (as long as there are a fair number of people using it software is never done). And I’m debating with myself as to whether I should start work on a Leftspeak to English conversion website or if I should work on some explosives modeling software.


The Leftspeak project would be easy and fun and only take a few days in my spare time. The explosives modeling software will probably take months but be far more useful.


Any votes?

Modern Ballistics for the field

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I’ve fixed all the fixable bugs in my cell phone/PDA web based exterior ballistics program I announced last November and put it at it’s permanent home at http://field.modernballistics.com/.


Enjoy and let me know if you run across any bugs not mentioned on the Known Bugs page. Suggestions for improvements are also welcome. Send them to “JoeH AT modernballistics.com”.