The other day Lyle posted “We Can’t Drill Ourself Out of This Problem”.
Today I was poking around in my quote collection and ran across this:
Drill for oil? You mean drill into the ground to try and find oil? You’re crazy.
Drillers who Edwin L. Drake tried to enlist to his project to drill for oil in 1859.
Apparently the “progressives” still haven’t caught up with the capitalists of 150 years ago.
Uncle points out that gun bloggers can change the perception of the world. By providing more links to the viewpoint we want presented we move the ranking of web pages up the chart on Google and other search engines.
Our next target is Carry Permit Holders.
Microsoft is run by a very bright, very energetic, very healthy person who has very few outside interests — and he has a killer instinct. I admire the guy — I think they ought to bronze him and break up his company.
Scott McNealy
[Bill has left the building. His last day at Microsoft was June 27.–Joe]
I changed a setting on my blog a few days ago and apparently there are some bugs associated with that feature.
It turns out that some of my blog posted only showed up for me. I wondered why some of my posts didn’t get the attention I though they should. Now I realized that their invisibility contributed to that.
The rest of the world was being deprived. Once I realized this could mean the end of the world as we know it I changed the setting back to the original. Still the postings did not show up. I finally hand edited the .xml and the missing posts appeared. The RSS feed still didn’t work but it was 1:30 AM and I went to bed anyway. This morning I found another field in the .xml that needed to be fixed so I went all geeky on that the RSS feed was populated and probably everyone is wondering, “Where did that come from?”
So now you know. I’m using a “daily build” of software under development and, surprise, surprise, it has bugs. But you probably already knew that from all the time my blog waits several minutes to respond or just plain says, “Service unavailable.” Now that Boomershoot 2009 registration is almost complete maybe I can spend some time on upgrading my blog software.
Man catches girlfriend’s sex romp on mobile call:
The court was told that the girl named Toni Milton sat on her cell phone by mistake while having sex with her old flame, and thereby unknowingly dialled the number of Neil O’Brien.
She came to know about the blunder only when she heard the muffled sounds of O’Brien.
Not knowing who was on the other side, she said “Hello”, and heard O’Brien shouting in rage.
“I take it we’re finished, then?” British tabloid The Sun quoted O’Brien as shouting.
Angered by what his girlfriend had done, O’Brien drove 15 miles to her home, beat her up in her bedroom and smashed up her possessions.
Just wait until your cell phone GPS can be queried remotely and without your permission.
Last December I made two posts about how busy I was at work:
About 10 days ago while I was in Louisville our Corporate VP held a meeting for all the people under him. I missed out on the big meeting but I’ve watched part of the video of it since then. One of the topics at the meeting was awards for various people. My officemate, Sapna, mentioned in one the previous posts, our PM, our test/system integration guy and I got one of the awards. Here is a screen capture from that video:
I told Barb about this and she thought it was pretty cool… until I told her what we had done. We designed/wrote/tested some of the website code that puts ads on mobile phones (like what you see here depending on what country you are in) for our mobile websites.
Barb’s response was basically “ads are evil”. But ads are the reason so much of the Internet is “free” just like most television programs and radio. For example Hotmail requires dozens of servers with massive amounts of storage and bandwidth. Ads pay for those resources. There haven’t been many ads on a lot of mobile phones for various reasons but that is changing and my little team (above) helped change that.
I find the diversity of our team interesting. Sapna is from India and on Monday participated in a folk-life event at the Seattle Center attended by some large number of people. She and about a dozen others put on several dances from India. I showed up and took a bunch of pictures. At 5′ 3″ and 110 pounds she doesn’t look like a software geek:
Taqi is from Pakistan (don’t India and Pakistan lob expolsives and high speed pieces of metal at each other on a regular basis? Odd–they get alone so well here.) and when he visits “home” I sometimes ask him about what “training camps” he spent time in. He takes it quite well and tells me stories from his time, years ago, in the military–which he makes of point of telling me was the secular military. He is about to finish his master’s degree from the U of W in physics.
Zane is of Asian descent and a Canadian citizen who loves to play basketball. Snowboarding is also up there on his list of things to do.
All of them are great people and I’m proud to work with them. However, I’m sometimes intimidated here at Microsoft. If you open your mouth about something you should know what you are talking about because I suspect the average I.Q. in our section of the building is probably about 150. Damn, these guys are smart.
On Saturday night (Sunday morning), at the NRA Convention, I stayed up until 3:00 AM socializing and blogging. I arrived at the Press Room a few minutes before 9:00 the next morning and found I was the first one there for the meeting with Paul Helinkski of Guns America. Wimps. Even the NRA staff hadn’t arrived to unlock the door early after being late the day before. If it hadn’t been for the wheelbarrow full of cash I received on arrival I would have been a little bit annoyed with the NRA for dropping the ball in this regard two days in a row.
About 9:00 other bloggers and press people showed up to wait. Bitter had no explanation:
More people showed up–and waited:
Then Helinkski showed up and waited with the rest of us:
Finally, about 15 or 20 minutes late, the NRA staff (names withheld to protect the guilty) showed up, let us in, and we all sat down to listen to Helinkski:
He gave us his background and while interesting from a technical aspect most of my readers aren’t going to care about that. What probably is interesting is what he had to say about the future of gun sales on the Internet.
Helinkski is of the opinion that gun are a very unique product that cannot be sold like other products. The required FFL for shipment and NICS checks for most sales is the reason. That “speed bump” could be smoothed out by “dealers” that do not stock firearms but simply do the transfers and charge $20 or $30. But, according to Helinkski, this would be the very bad for gun owners. Sure we could get guns a few dollars cheaper if we did our purchases that way but having the gun store down the street on the corner is more important that those few dollars. The public visibility is important and having the customer service locally available is important.
So what is the future of Internet gun sales? Helinkski has an innovative web product that addresses that. Check out GunsAmerica.com. His website allows dealers to post their inventory on the web and the customers to comparison shop. You can search for guns within X miles of your zip code and then if the dealer makes a sale because you found what you liked on the website Helinkski makes a flat fee on the deal. You still have to visit the dealer and purchase the gun face-to-face but what Guns America has done is make the comparison shopping much easier.
Transfers data wirelessly at 2.88 MBytes per second. It also doubles as a gun effective against squirrels, vegans, clowns, hippies, street urchins, hooligans, carpetbaggers & scalawags. Don’t try it with the girl scout though. She shoots back.
H/T to Kevin I. of the Lewiston Pistol Club.
People who use Earthlink for their e-mail must have a very different impression of human behavior, because no one ever responds to their e-mail inquiries. Every time I get an on-line order from an Earthlink user, our auto reply e-mail gets bounced, as we get the following message:
“I apologize for this automatic reply to your email. To control spam, I now allow incoming messages only from senders I have approved beforehand.”
Usually followed by a hand-typed e-mail a day later– some variation of;
“I placed an order from you guys the other day, but I never got a confirmation, so I reordered, and still got no confirmation. What’s wrong with you guys? Please respond!!!! Hello!!!????”
The world is a very impolite place for Earthlink users. No one ever writes back. I wonder if they ever wonder why.
Update: We got two of these responses today. Our only option is to use the old-fashioned telephone, assuming we get a phone number. I’ve thought about writing a series of essays on communication skills.
I’ve never had a big problem with automated traffic law enforcement as long as it was used only for enforcement of moving violations and not for general surveillance.
Now you can add another objection to my list of objections. From Dallas:
Citywide statistics obtained by NBC affiliate KXAS-TV found that red light cameras do reduce accidents. That is a good thing.
But they do it by reducing red light violations, by as much as 29 percent from month to month at particularly busy Dallas intersections. On the face of it, that, too, is a good thing — but not, necessarily, if you rely on traffic fines to make up a healthy chunk of your budget.
Dallas lawmakers originally estimated gross revenue of $15 million from their 62 cameras this fiscal year, which ends June 30. But City Manager Mary Suhm estimated last week that the city would fall short by more than $4 million.
So Friday, the city turned off about a quarter of the least profitable cameras, saying it couldn’t justify the cost of running them.
Yeah, I’m naive, I take things at face value. I actually believed traffic law enforcement was to reduce personal injury and property damage, not just a source of revenue. I don’t recall ever believing in Santa Claus and having the myth shattered, but this must be what it feels like.
Last night I wrote a simple encryption program. Basically it’s “Encryption for Dummies”. You can use it to encrypt text message such as email or even instant messages.
Here is the zip file: CryptLight_1_0_0_1.zip (225.56 KB)
Download it. Unzip it, read the ReadMe.htm file and you should know all you need to know about it. If it sounds like something you could use run Setup.exe and have fun.
As a test message use this with the passphrase of “Password” (without the quotes):
gmPtGYutvQCrqXMT++rFLwcN53qTuDpieDL/Z3svuIz4RnHNTCeJ+8aGC4Z2orZ9Zsen/rg7
8JG/Rm/cQ33D5bqSWqTXU4ctDCabZAKw2po=
Update: I forgot to mention, because of my exceedingly Microsoft centric view of the universe, this only works on Windows. I tested it on XP and 32 and 64-bit versions of Vista.
Update2: If you enter in corrupted cipher text and try to decrypt the program will crash. I have fixed it but haven’t released new version yet. I’ll wait for a few more days to get feedback and bug reports. Consider what you have as an Alpha release.
Sean said he has a dream. Now he just has to get a really big bonus this fall so he can bring it to Boomershoot 2009.
Mobile Tactical High Energy Laser (6 MB WMV).
Boomershoot enthusiast, Bruce, sent this to me. He wants one for the flat trajectory when shooting squirrels.
Sebastian points out new technology may make concealed carry more difficult.
What the people that develop these tools don’t tell the politicians that will buy them is they are easy to defeat. Just as a tank can be defeated with a Molotov Cocktail, if you know what you are doing very simple and readily available materials can defeat multi-million dollar surveillance equipment.
In this particular instance what the developers probably aren’t telling the potential buyers is that there is something called the Skin Effect. This is, in essence, a law of physics that says the higher the frequency of an electromagnetic wave the shallower the penetration of that wave through a conductor. It depends on the resistivity and magnetic permeability of the conductor but for copper a 1 Terahertz wave will have a skin depth of about 66 nm. The typical aluminum foil you buy at the grocery store has a thickness of 200 um which is over 3000 times thicker. I don’t have the skin depth numbers for aluminum but I can tell you that lining your jacket with aluminum foil will make your jacket completely opaque to such machines. Even aluminized mylar balloons or “space blankets” will be opaque. Hence, these machines will not be able to see anything on the other side of the metal lined clothing. I expect even sequined purses and dresses will be opaque.
I’ve explained build breaks before and why they are big deal.
Last night about 10:40 the guy across the hall submitted a code change for review. About 11:35 someone else replied saying it looked good. At 11:49 the guy across the hall checked it in.
This morning I saw the request for a code review and took a look at it and thought, “Hmmm…. just one line was changed. I’ll look at the bug report to make sure this is the right thing to do but it almost for certain should be fine as long as it passes the buddy build.” Then I saw that he had already checked it in–without any mention of a buddy build. Hmmm… Okaaaaay.
Then I saw the email about the build being broken this morning. Then I saw the email about a new bug assigned to the guy across the hall. About 30 minutes ago another other guy showed up with a very large baseball bat* in the hall. I started laughing and went out to watch more closely. I stopped laughing and left when the thumping started. It wasn’t going to be pretty.
I came back after a few minutes and the guy with the baseball bat was gone and I examined the guy across the hall for bruises. There were none showing so I’m assuming his clothes cover them all.
They take their coding processes seriously around here.
*Made of hollow plastic.
.22 Caliber Conversion Kit
STI international, Inc has joined with Bob Marvel to bring you the finest .22 conversion kits available anywhere. With these conversion kits, you can easily swap out your top end to go from one caliber to another- it’s like getting a second pistol for less than half the price. This will allow shooters to increase their trigger time while decreasing the cost of good training.
The improved Bob Marvel design locks the barrel in place for improved reliability and accuracy. The conversion kit may be purchased for either the 1911 (single stack) platform or the world famous 2011 (double stack) platform. The kit comes complete with adjustable sights, lock back on last round (single stack), an excellent extended 10 round magazine, complete cleaning kit, magazine loading tool, and a custom fitted hard case. The top end works on either 1911 or 2011 frames with only the magazine to replace if the shooter wishes to change frames. Extra magazines for the 1911 and/or 2011 are available.
It’s an extra $35.00 for the 2011 frame over the 1911 frame but that is a small price to pay if you don’t have the 1911 frame to put it on.
In competition I shoot a STI gun, I carry a STI gun and you should too.
I found the following line here:
Want to find some tools for fighting junk email?
It made me laugh. Actually a pretty good argument could be made for imposing the death penalty on people that send mass junk mail–assuming that sending junk mail should be considered a crime. As much as I hate spam I don’t think it should be a crime, but the argument for making the offense punishable by the death penalty is an interesting intellectual exercise for me. I may have hinted at it here before, I’ll have to see if I can find it and flesh it out a bit more sometime.
I listen to a lot of Audible.com books on my long commute (300 miles one way) between Moscow Idaho and Redmond Washington. This is one book that I can see raising my adrenaline level to “no sleep for you tonight” levels. From Audible:
In a hard-hitting and provocative polemic, Silicon Valley insider and pundit Andrew Keen exposes the grave consequences of today’s new participatory Web 2.0 and reveals how it threatens our values, economy, and ultimately the very innovation and creativity that forms the fabric of American achievement.
Our most valued cultural institutions, Keen warns, our professional newspapers, magazines, music, and movies, are being overtaken by an avalanche of amateur, user-generated free content. Advertising revenue is being siphoned off by free classified ads on sites like Craigslist; television networks are under attack from free user-generated programming on YouTube and the like; file-sharing and digital piracy have devastated the multibillion-dollar music business and threaten to undermine our movie industry.
From Amazon:
Keen’s relentless “polemic” is on target about how a sea of amateur content threatens to swamp the most vital information and how blogs often reinforce one’s own views rather than expand horizons. But his jeremiad about the death of “our cultural standards and moral values” heads swiftly downhill. Keen became somewhat notorious for a 2006 Weekly Standard essay equating Web 2.0 with Marxism; like Karl Marx, he offers a convincing overall critique but runs into trouble with the details. Readers will nod in recognition at Keen’s general arguments—sure, the Web is full of “user-generated nonsense”!—but many will frown at his specific examples, which pretty uniformly miss the point. It’s simply not a given, as Keen assumes, that Britannica is superior to Wikipedia, or that record-store clerks offer sounder advice than online friends with similar musical tastes, or that YouTube contains only “one or two blogs or songs or videos with real value.” And Keen’s fears that genuine talent will go unnourished are overstated: writers penned novels before there were publishers and copyright law; bands recorded songs before they had major-label deals. In its last third, the book runs off the rails completely, blaming Web 2.0 for online poker, child pornography, identity theft and betraying “Judeo-Christian ethics.”
First, my opinions are not those of my employer.
Second, I point you to the article titled EU fines Microsoft record $1.4bn.
Third, I bring your attention to a comment about the fine following the article:
Microsoft MUST be brought to account for its’ practice of dominating by exclusion. If the company, Microsoft, continues to practice in a manner which refuses to be competitive, then it should be excluded from the EU. Nicholas Carton, USA
Nicholas Carton, Saint Louis, Missouri USA
Fourth, my opinion:
If people only knew how much time and effort MS spends groveling and trying to please these socialist jerks…
I am sometimes (and this is one of those times) of the opinion MS should tell the EU, “Then do without any of our products. Not only will your languages not be supported but all future versions of our software will not run without having at least intermittent Internet access and will not run if said Internet path traverses any part of an EU country.”
But that’s an emotional response without looking at the cost/benefit numbers. Rational analysis will require looking out for the stockholders best interests on a number of fronts. I know such a response would allow competitors access to a cash cow as well as cutting off MS income from this source. I just can’t help wondering at what point the EU will push MS too far and the numbers no longer add up to continue trying to please the greedy socialists.
I wish MS were in a position to demonstrate to the EU they need MS more than MS needs them and had the courage to follow through on a very forceful demonstration of that.
As I said before this brand of stupidity will be laughed out of the legislature. The companies pushing this should try a free market approach to making money on bullets.
640K ought to be enough for anybody.
Bill Gates
1981
[I’m listening, live, to Bill Gates tell us his vision for the future of our group. I’m reminded to not take everything he says as the word of god.–Joe]