Category Archives: Technology

Quote of the day–Spider Robinson

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I really did comprehend, intellectually at least, that I was engaged in one of the most profoundly thrilling endeavors in human history.

How conservative can you be if you have jumped off the edge of the solar system?

Do conservative people travel at relativist speeds?

By the end of the first year of our voyage we were already traveling at more than a third of the speed of light. And even though there were no sensory cues at all to confirm that we were all well of it and believed it. And I think I can safely say we all found it more than a little thrilling. By the time we reached turn over in nine more years our velocity was going to peak at a hair frying 0.99794 C.

Does a conservative man race photons?

Joel Johnston
A character in the book Variable Star by Robert A. Heinlein and Spider Robinson.
[Johnston is referring to a literal definition of conservative, not the present day political definition. I have another 20 minutes worth of the book to listen to. Both James and I are enjoying it a great deal.–Joe]

Quote of the day–G. Eric Engstrom

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Dear Jamie,

Money is the root of all evil. A man does need roots.

Remember to dream with your eyes open so you can act on them to make them real.

G. Eric Engstrom
March 23, 2000
Inscription inside the front cover of Renegades of the Empire: How Three Software Warriors Started a Revolution Behind the Walls of Fortress Microsoft
[This inscription was addressed to our son James–who now works at Microsoft. The book is about Eric, Craig Eisler, and Alex St. John. I worked for them when I first started doing contract work for Microsoft in 1995. I’ve known Eric for about 20 years now starting when we both worked for Zortech (they sold a C/C++ compiler for MSDOS and later OS/2 and Windows). While researching this quote, much to my surprise, I discovered Craig is now back at Microsoft.–Joe]

It may be illegal to delete files

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I consider Stottlemire’s actions unethical. But he does have a point:

Stottlemire, 42, of Fremont, California, insists there was no encryption or hacking involved, and therefore he did not violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. “I honestly think there are big problems when you are not allowed to delete files off of your computer,” says Stottlemire.

I also think he is on shaky, at best, legal ground. The law says:

`(2) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that–

`(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;

`(B) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; or

`(C) is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person’s knowledge for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.

The law doesn’t say the circumvention has to have anything to do with “encryption or hacking”.

Where it gets interesting to me is that if someone were to design their copy protection based on the existence of a browser cookie such that if you had the cookie you couldn’t copy the “protected work” and if you didn’t you could do the copy. Then if someone make a program or script that selectively deleted just that one cookie they would be violating the law. But a web browser which allowed the user to selectively delete cookies would apparently not subject the authors to legal action. And furthermore someone who told you how delete the cookie with the browser or even the command prompt would not be subject to legal action either.

TSA fodder

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You can make a crude stun gun from a disposable camera. A better quality flash unit will have a faster recycle time.

There is no limit the number and type of weapons that can be easily made and gotten past the Theater Security Agents (TSA). I’ve already mentioned making dust explosions with flour (powdered coffee creamer works too). It’s long past time to consider some alternatives to existing airplane security.

Handcuffs are just a minor impediment

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Via Bruce:

Unlock Plastic Handcuffs! Police Style!

The latest in children’s back packs

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It’s back to school time. Time to buy your child a new back pack. Rated at level II it’s available here.

Quote of the day–Steve Swain

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I don’t know of a single incident where CCTV has actually been used to spot, apprehend or detain offenders in the act.

The presence of CCTV is irrelevant for those who want to sacrifice their lives to carry out a terrorist act.

You need to do this piece of theater so that if the terrorists are looking at you, they can see that you’ve got some measures in place.

Steve Swain
August 3, 2007
‘Ring of Steel’ coming to New York
Swain served for years with the London Metropolitan Police and its counter-terror operations and now works for Control Risk, an international security firm.
[Found via Bruce. If you don’t see the folly of the security theater argument send me an email and I’ll explain.–Joe]

Quote of the day–Paul W. Cooper

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The field of explosives engineering incorporates a broad variety of sciences and engineering technologies that are brought together to bear on each particular design problem. These technologies include chemistry, thermodynamics, fluid dynamics, aerodynamics, mechanics, electricity, and electronics, and even meteorology, biology, and physiology.

Paul W. Cooper
1996
Preface to Explosives Engineering
[Chemistry? Check. Thermodynamics? That class was lots of fun. I got an A+ in it. Fluid dynamics? Check. Aerodynamics? Check–see Modern Ballistics. Mechanics? Check, Electricity and electronics? I have a BSEE and MSEE. Meteorology? I’ll keep the explosive events to a size that shouldn’t be affecting the weather. Biology and physiology? Not particularly–That’s what the flak jacket, mask, gloves and apron are for–keeping explosives components, by-products, and accelerated objects out of my body.–Joe]

Golf anyone?

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Get your golf ball launcher here. Teaser material from the site:

Each launcher fits ANY NATO standard 22mm flash suppressor or grenade launcher.—M-16/AR-15, Yugo SKS, FAL, CETME/G-3, PTR-91, Galil, MAS 49/56, FR-7, FR-8 and many more.

Lot of other interesting stuff on the site too. You can find videos of “reactive target” shooting also and what a one or two pound charge of explosives will do to a car.

Stupid engineer

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The guy that drove the Jeep into the airport then tried to blow it up wasn’t a medical doctor as was originally reported:

THE terror suspect critically ill in a hospital burns unit is an engineer with the skills to make the explosives used in the Glasgow and London attacks.

It has emerged that Kafeel Ahmed, who allegedly drove the Jeep into a Glasgow Airport terminal last Saturday, is a doctor of engineering, not medicine.

Police believe he may have made the two bombs found in vehicles in London, as well as the one in the foiled Glasgow attack.

Ahmed, 28, who was previously thought to be called Khalid, has a masters degree in aeronautical engineering and a doctorate in computational fluid dynamics, a highly specialised subject in which computers are used to simulate the flow of fluids and gases.

The bombs from London and Glasgow consisted of gas cylinders, petrol and a detonating system using mobile phones.

Aeronautical engineering isn’t normally about making explosives for bombs–although occasionally that is the inadvertent outcome. But still one would think a good engineer would be able to make something work and would also know enough to do some tests. But it could be he didn’t have any practical experience. Schneier called it Terrorist Special Olympics in the UK.

As Ry and I discovered some things that you think would be incredibly easy are not. For example, we spent a couple years, off and on, before we came up with a exploding fireball target that worked. See Project Fireball for both our successes and our failures. And even with all our experiments we occasionally change “some little thing” and we get a failure. As Ry puts it, “We don’t have enough columns on the spreadsheet.” I recently purchased some ammonium nitrate from a new supplier. The old stuff was fertilizer grade material which took us a couple years of tweaking our recipe, containers, and procedures before we got reliable detonations at Boomershoot. The new stuff is explosive grade. We will do extensive tests and probably make some changes before trusting it for an actual event.

I think it’s Hollywood that changes our expectations of both the ease and the effect of explosives. In the recent U.K. cases we can probably thank Hollywood as well as a stupid engineer for the failures of the terrorist bombs.

More testing

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It looks like Ry and I have some more testing to do. We just make fireballs when we could make fuel-air explosives. We’ve known about F-A explosives for a long time but it’s a much tougher problem than the fireballs. You need some very good timing on the second explosive charge.

Maybe someday–certainly not for this 4th of July.

Quote of the day–National Counter Terrorism Security Office

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Terrorists generally select targets where they can cause most damage, inflict mass casualties or attract widespread publicity. VBIEDs can be highly destructive.

National Counter Terrorism Security Office (U.K.)
Police explosives experts prevent carnage at the Tiger Tiger Club
[Just in case you have forgotten, I gave you the minimum evacuation distances for Vehicle-Borne Improvised Explosive Devices (VBIEDs) here. It’s only a matter of time before we see them in the U.S. You should be prepared.–Joe]

Schroedinger’s cat–the rest of the story

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Tamara K. posted:

Heisenberg used to house sit for Schroedinger, and would get annoyed when his buddy would call home from out of town and ask “Where is my cat? And how fast is it going?”

I thought this was quite funny. My son James responded with “*groan*” but my friend Sean wanted to know what the punch line was.

You must not assume Sean didn’t “get it”. That thought crossed my mind for only a few milliseconds before I dismissed it. So I told him that was it and explained that I thought it was funny just the way it is even if it is a bit obsure. Two minutes later he delivered his punch line for the story:

So Heisenberg put the cat the box with a gadget that released poison gas based on radioactive decay. Schroedinger called again, asking, “Where is my cat? And how fast is it going?”

Heisenberg replied, “Let me check. Oh! It’s dead. You killed it.” And hung up.

Scope Eye (How Not to Hold a Rifle)

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Ouch!  It hurts just watching this, especially having myself fired the Safety Harbor 50 Caliber AR that Ry loaned us last summer.  The 70+ year-old who’s firing it didn’t get the buttstock on his shoulder, so it slid under his armpit from the recoil, causing the optic sight to clock him in the face.  That’s a heavy rifle moving back at him at a good clip.  He was OK, after he stumbled to his feet and I was able to get him to reply to questions.  Notice the image blur as the shock wave (usually referred to as “muzzle blast” but in this case I use “shock wave” as a more descriptive term) hits the camera.  Also notice the gravel being hurled back and to the sides from the high-pressure jets coming out of the muzzle break.

Firing the little .50 BMG “carbine” with a proper hold feels about the same as firing a magnum load from a 12 ga. shotgun.  Quite nice, really.  Its all about style.

Quote of the day–John Stossel

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When everyone in politics jumps on a bandwagon like ethanol, I start to wonder if there’s something wrong with it. And there is. Except for that fact that ethanol comes from corn, nothing you’re told about it is true.

John Stossel
May 23, 2007
The Many Myths of Ethanol
[Remember when I wrote about ethanol a while back? My brother Doug did some quickie “back of the envelope” type number crunching and came to the same conclusions Stossel writes about.–Joe]

Quote of the day–Tom Scocca

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Replace my real light bulbs with fluorescents, in sickly yellow or morgue blue, and I’ll have to burn something else for color. Whale oil, maybe.

Tom Scocca
May 22, 2007
Fluorescent Fanatics Turn Me Off

This is what you get in a police state

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Big Brother gets to watch you in return for the false promise of increased security. From our worlds airports:

Faces are blurred, but not chests or crotches. Snoerwang said that was necessary because otherwise “women could just hide things by stuffing them in their bras.”

…

Snoerwang said the images generated by the machine were not like photographs.

“They’re kind of futuristic. There’s nothing sexy about it,” she said.

What does “nothing sexy” have to do with making it acceptable? And to who? There are people that find animals and fecal material sexy. Want to bet that there won’t be a culture of some sort of deviants built around these photographs? And there will be names attached to the photos as well. Names are checked on your ID just before you go into the machines. People watching the images will snap pictures with their cell-phones or other miniature image capturing devices and associate the picture with the name from their friend checking the ID.

It will do nothing to prevent determined people from getting weapons on board. It only will catch those that are careless. In the mean time airport security costs billions. The airplane security game cannot be won with the current assumptions. It’s time we considered the alternatives.

Just testing

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Before bringing my blog back online I did some performance testing while it was hosted on my own machine. This included tests with all the links, sitemeter, etc. visible. Most of the testing was done early (as in midnight until 3:00 AM) on Wednesday morning. Can you tell from my Sitemeter graphic?

If it would available I would consider this

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No hair transplants for me. I would consider regrowing it though.

Idaho hardware testing

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I had two old computer hard drives that needed to be disposed of and Jaime had another. I had deleted everything on mine then overwrote the free space with random data and wasn’t too concerned about someone getting their hands on it. But Jaime’s hard drive failed in a strange manner. She could read from it just fine but couldn’t write to it. She transferred all the data to her new drive but couldn’t delete the data off of the old drive. “Dad”, she said, “I think this is something for you to take care of. Boomershoot is next weekend, right?”

The two cardboard boxes on the sides each contain about two pounds of Boomerite (a impact sensitive high explosive manufactured by FlashTek). The cardboard box on the top contains another pound of Boomerite. We call this stress testing.


Here I am about to initiate the stress test with a shot to the top cardboard box.


The stress test is completed in microseconds.


This is where the hard disks used to be. That is my size 14 boot for comparison purposes.


Although there are lots of smaller pieces in the crater this is the majority of the mass we were able to recover from the three hard disks.

Except for the first, all pictures are by Kimberly Joe Huffman-Scott. Idaho Hardware Test (also sometimes called an Idaho Stress Test) is a name used by Ry from years ago when he was using AK’s and 12 gauge shotguns on Mac’s and PCs.