1/26/2006 08:23:00 PM|W|P|Bob Hall|W|P|January 28th will mark the 20th anniversary of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. It is one of those seminal moments that most people can tell you exactly where they were and what they were doing. It was a Tuesday so many people my age were either in college or high school. At 10:39:13 AM CST the Rogers commission determined that “a powerful lateral flame from the SRB that impinged on the adjacent external propellant tank and aft SRB connecting strut, and within seconds the flame caused full structural failure.” It was a dark day and one that most everyone has burned into their memory. I’d encourage you to leave a comment on where you were and what you were doing.
On a much happier note NASA is planning to do something pretty cool. On Feb 3rd they are going to take a space suit that is past its expiration date, stuff a transmitter in and throw it out of the International Space Station. I always been pretty negative about the ISS and its lack of real science, and this is probably as close as we are going to get. What is so cool is that a message and telemetry will be transmitted using a voice module on 145.990 MHz using frequency modulation. Anyone with a police scanner should be able to hear this by simply going outside. Let's use this like Sputnik and try to get some kids hooked on science. For Tulsa, I have calculated the over flight times. It would have been nice if they had chosen a release date that would have made this more accessible (say 8:00 PM).
Feb 3rd 4:04 - 4:15 AM CST
Feb 4th 1:51 - 2:04 AM CST
Feb 5th 2:15 -2:29 AM CST
Feb 5th 3:18 - 3:28 AM CST
Feb 6th 2:40 - 2:54 AM CST
Feb 7th 1:27 - 1:41 AM CST
Feb 7th 2:31 - 2:41 AM CST
They anticipate the batteries will last two to four days. You will note that we get two successive orbits on the 5th and 7th. Objects in near Earth orbit, orbit at about 90 minute intervals. In an interesting twist of orbital physics, any satellite in near orbit around a planet size object will have a period of about 90 minutes. I still remember this derivation from college. You can post your results here. (Editor's note: the first draft had an error in the times.)|W|P|113832863052774190|W|P||W|P|ChaseHelp@gmail.com1/26/2006 10:07:00 PM|W|P| Steve Miller|W|P|Mrs. Trimble's 4th grade classroom taking a spelling test.
The Principal came on the intercom and made everyone in the elementary school go to the gym where we sat for a little while. He came out and gave the news of what had happened to the shuttle.
I remember filing out ot he gym and everyone was very quiet. Imagine 600 elementary school students being quiet. It was truly creepy.1/24/2006 08:04:00 PM|W|P|Bob Hall|W|P|Another M&A that will fail
As you have likey heard, Disney is acquiring Pixar in another big business blunder. Pixar is the only studio that has made billions of dollars and never had a flop. Their mixture of great story telling, humor, and stunning visual imagery is the pinnacle of movie making. On June 9th they will release “Cars” and it will be all down hill from there. Disney under the horrific management of Michael Eisner was transformed from a great company into another soulless behemoth that cranks out progressively crapier products so as to lower the expectation for all audiences. Disney has become the Wal-Mart of entertainment.
A college friend of mine went to work for Pixar right out of college. I got to visit their production facility 11 or twelve years ago. His first assignment was the Listerine commercial where the bottle was swinging to through the jungle to tune of “Tarzan Boy.” They were working on concept stuff so they had cases of the stuff around the office. Before one of their pitch meetings, Mike gaffed a bottle by replacing the antiseptic with apple juice and added a little more ambiance by using and atomizer to stink up the room with that distinctive odor. Mid-way through the meeting, he makes some comment about being thirsty and cracks open the bottle and drinks half of it. Needless to say the account exec from the ad firm was dumbfounded. She later used the gag on the client. What is amazing is that this kind of stuff is part of their culture and more the norm than the exception. They were a go-go dotcom culture when the internet consisted of FTP and Telnet.
Under the new leadership of the rat… I mean… mouse this kind of jocularity won’t exist. Disney has rules about hair and fingernail length. Have you ever seen an uber-UNIX geek that is responsible for thousands of high-power computers? I’d really love to see some venture capitalist gut Pixar to rescue the talent just keep the streak alive. Get ready for worse story telling, less visual appeal, and humor that is about as funny as a rubber crutch. I hate mergers and acquisitions. I wonder how long the Pixar brand will be retained.
-Bastards!!
On a weather note, click on the photo and look the that beautiful cumulus tower going up.|W|P|113815516276226777|W|P||W|P|ChaseHelp@gmail.com1/23/2006 08:14:00 PM|W|P|Bob Hall|W|P|Cyber Warfare
Two weeks ago, one of my home PC’s was infected with a virus and subsequently five pieces of malware. I run XP service pack 2 with Norton System works enabled for automatic definition updates. Between the DSL modem and computers are two stateful inspection firewalls. I utilize WEP encryption and broadcast an SSID of “Intrusion Detected” to mess with and wardrivers. The particular virus was a day zero exploit in that it got me on the first day of the release before a new virus definition had been created and downloaded. I have traced it back to an exploit that I believe is related to the Micro$ost WMF defect. I clicked on a “news story” that apparently got me before I patched the vulnerability. I have subsequently added several additional tools to watch everything, and created a special boot environment to deal with any future incidents. The government has prosecuted what I believe is the first of these “cyber terrorists”
There is much fervor about President Bush’s Illegal direction to the NSA that has them spying on every American. At heart I’m a Libertarian that wants a whole lot less from my government. Less spending, less corruption, less regulation, less invading our fundamental right to privacy and no search or seizure without a court warrant, and better roads.
There is an excellent book entitled “Inside the Puzzle Palace” that gives an amazing glimpse inside the NSA. It is a tough read and you have to want to finish it, but the inescapable conclusion is that NSA has some REALLY REALLY smart people. The reality is 007 looks a lot more like Dilbert than Sean Connery. Since the President has already authorized the NSA to bear all of its resources to illegally monitor network, how about signing a directive that will have a real positive gain for every single cyber citizen. Authorize the NSA to conduct all out cyber warfare against spammers, bot masters, virus writers, and malware creators. We could make this crap disappear in two months.
Seriously, I would vote for Hillary if she were have this as her primary campaign issue.|W|P|113806893633988337|W|P||W|P|ChaseHelp@gmail.com1/20/2006 09:23:00 PM|W|P|Bob Hall|W|P|
|W|P|113648652774460280|W|P||W|P|ChaseHelp@gmail.com1/05/2006 09:56:00 PM|W|P| Steve Miller|W|P|Yep, I'm there. No obligations this weekend!!!
Tin Dog tomorrow for happy hour...1/03/2006 08:58:00 PM|W|P|Bob Hall|W|P|Chasing dreams, chasing rainbows, chasing storms, chasing windmills.
-This a placeholder|W|P|113634354969303113|W|P||W|P|ChaseHelp@gmail.com1/03/2006 06:10:00 PM|W|P|Bob Hall|W|P|Anyone that knows me very well knows I hate crappy software. Specifically I hate bad design that use lots of code to accomplish some nuance that could have been solved easily with a better design. Microsoft is the worst at this. They continued to bloat their OS and applications to add internet functionality to everything and have spent very little time implementing a reliable safe OS.
If you have not read, your machine is currently very vulnerable if you run any version of windows. Merely visiting a website, opening an email or accessing a file and you can be infected. Source code to this exploit is readily available on the internet. Your virus software will need to be updated for every script kiddie that downloads and
decides to create a new variant. An official patch is at least a week away. Many security experts are calling this the largest vulnerability in Windows to date. There is an unofficial patch created by one of the most knowledgeable disassembler developers in the world. In its security bulletin, Microsoft made a general recommendation against unofficial patches, saying it was "best practice to utilise (sic) security updates for software vulnerabilities from the original vendor of the software".
Here are three more jems that are official MS BS:
"Although the issue is serious and malicious attacks are being attempted, Microsoft's intelligence sources indicate that the scope of the attacks are not widespread."
"Customers who follow safe browsing best practices are not likely to be compromised by any exploitation of the WMF vulnerability. Users
should take care not to visit unfamiliar or un-trusted Web sites that could potentially host the malicious code."
"Customers who believe they have been attacked should contact their local FBI office or post their complaint on the Internet Fraud Complaint Center Web site. Customers outside the U.S. should contact thenational law enforcement agency in their country."
Microsoft's intelligence sources? The whole concept of the world wide web was to go anywhere with an incredible diversity of information at your fingertips: but don't go anyplace you don't know. Yeah, I'm sure that special agent will be right over to your house to run some forensics software. I patched my machines yesterday. Happy browsing...|W|P|113633379975521913|W|P||W|P|ChaseHelp@gmail.com
Steve Miller|W|P|Mrs. Trimble's 4th grade classroom taking a spelling test.
As you have likey heard, Disney is acquiring Pixar in another big business blunder. Pixar is the only studio that has made billions of dollars and never had a flop. Their mixture of great story telling, humor, and stunning visual imagery is the pinnacle of movie making. On June 9th they will release “Cars” and it will be all down hill from there. Disney under the horrific management of Michael Eisner was transformed from a great company into another soulless behemoth that cranks out progressively crapier products so as to lower the expectation for all audiences. Disney has become the Wal-Mart of entertainment.
A college friend of mine went to work for Pixar right out of college. I got to visit their production facility 11 or twelve years ago. His first assignment was the Listerine commercial where the bottle was swinging to through the jungle to tune of “Tarzan Boy.” They were working on concept stuff so they had cases of the stuff around the office. Before one of their pitch meetings, Mike gaffed a bottle by replacing the antiseptic with apple juice and added a little more ambiance by using and atomizer to stink up the room with that distinctive odor. Mid-way through the meeting, he makes some comment about being thirsty and cracks open the bottle and drinks half of it. Needless to say the account exec from the ad firm was dumbfounded. She later used the gag on the client. What is amazing is that this kind of stuff is part of their culture and more the norm than the exception. They were a go-go dotcom culture when the internet consisted of FTP and Telnet.
Under the new leadership of the rat… I mean… mouse this kind of jocularity won’t exist. Disney has rules about hair and fingernail length. Have you ever seen an uber-UNIX geek that is responsible for thousands of high-power computers? I’d really love to see some venture capitalist gut Pixar to rescue the talent just keep the streak alive. Get ready for worse story telling, less visual appeal, and humor that is about as funny as a rubber crutch. I hate mergers and acquisitions. I wonder how long the Pixar brand will be retained.
-Bastards!!
On a weather note, click on the photo and look the that beautiful cumulus tower going up.|W|P|113815516276226777|W|P||W|P|ChaseHelp@gmail.com
|W|P|113648652774460280|W|P||W|P|ChaseHelp@gmail.com