Oh-a oh

They took the credit for your proud efficiency.
Worked over by machine and new technology,
and now I understand the problems you can see.

Oh-a oh

I met your children
Oh-a oh

What did you tell them?
Txtspk kld teh shrthnd str.
Txtspk kld teh shrthnd str.

Cellphones came and broke your heart.
Oh-a-a-a oh

And now we meet in an abandoned steno pool.
We hear the scritching and it seems so long ago.
And you remember the girls, how they used to go…

Oh-a oh

You were the first one.
Oh-a oh

You were the last one.

Txtspk kld teh shrthnd str.
Txtspk kld teh shrthnd str.
In my mind and in my heart, we can’t erase we’ve gone to far
Oh-a-aho oh,
Oh-a-aho oh

Txtspk kld teh shrthnd str
Txtspk kld teh shrthnd str

In my mind and in my heart, we can’t erase we’ve gone to far.
Cellphones came and broke your heart, put the blame on SMS.

You are a shorthand star.
You are a shorthand star.
Txtspk kld teh shrthnd str
Txtspk kld teh shrthnd str
Txtspk kld teh shrthnd str…

They do good work, and they provide a valuable service, don’t get me wrong. Thing is, they’re also really slow - expect to wait a month or five weeks to get your PCBs - they don’t offer any real options to speak of, and their prices simply aren’t competitive if you need more than one or two copies of the same PCB.

So, with that in mind, here are some recommendations for alternative fabrication houses that I’ve used.

First up on the list is Sure Electronics. They’re better known as internet (and eBay) vendors of assorted electronics components - LEDs and LCDs and switches and resistors and so on - but they do, in fact, offer a variety of PCB fabrication services. Prices start at $50 for five boards of sixteen square inches each, including shipping. (By contrast, supposing you had a 3×5″ PCB, you’d get two copies from BatchPCB for slightly more money.) They do good work and their turnaround time is pretty good, but their customer service leaves a bit to be desired and they insist on 12 mil (yes, 12 mil!) trace/space. If you can live with that, though, they are a pretty good deal, particularly on larger boards; on smaller boards, they’re usually beat on price by others….

Such as Seeed Studio. They have some slightly confusing PCB offerings, but their prices are excellent, their boards are great, and their turnaround time is about as good as it gets for China-based PCB fabrication. Their prices start at about $50, including shipping, for ten boards of 100 square centimetres or less each (near enough sixteen square inches), with shipping. (It looks like they’ve suspended their PCB offerings until late February, because of the Chinese holidays, FYI.)

Seeed offer a number of options, but still don’t offer the full range of choices a real board house does. If you want something a little different, my suggestion is to try MakePCB. They offer some very high quality boards at prices that are very attractive if you need more than a dozen or so, and offer choices like different board thicknesses, different copper weights, gold plating, and so on. They’re who I generally use to produce “production” PCBs for projects, and I highly recommend them. Their standard trace/space size is “0.2mm”, which is basically 8 mils.

Next on the list is OurPCB. They do good-quality boards with a reasonable lead time, and their support is pretty good. Their prices are quite attractive if you need larger PCBs in relative quantity - 100 twenty-square-inch two-layer boards for $290, for example, plus shipping. They do 6 mil trace/space as standard.

Golden Phoenix are the fab house in China that BatchPCB actually get their boards from. So, same quality, better turnaround, and good prices, though you’ll need to order a few boards from them (prices start at about $99 for 155 square inches, which you can actually beat in some circumstances at, e.g., Seeed). They require 7 mil trace/space. Their ordering process is not the most sophisticated thing in the world, but it works.

Yes, all these outfits are in China. That’s part of why they’re so cheap - not necessarily because their quality is crap (it isn’t), but because you get all the benefits of a competitive high-volume industry. If you need boards fast, they’re not the choice for you - but they’re excellent alternatives to BatchPCB, who are anything but fast, anyway.

A government commissioner in the UK bemoans England’s hostility to young people. Notably glossed over? Young peoples’ hostility to the world around them…

Wikileaks, if you haven’t noticed, are up to their usual mild incompetence and still begging for money which they claim desperately to need but refuse to give an accounting for…

There are worse ways to kill a few hours than by browsing through Notebook Stories dot com;

Two pieces of hard-hitting journalism from our friends at Pravda:

Russia willing to restore Soviet Legacy in Afghanistan; and

Most popular stress reliever turns 60… bet you can’t guess what it is!

And from the folks at Ria Novosti, a look at a suspicious Google translation error that seems to have strong political views…

Consider the wind turbine for a moment, if you would, the “green energy” source that nobody really likes. People in the energy sector don’t like them - they produce a random amount of energy at random times of day, which they don’t, for some reason, view as terribly useful. The more excitable environmental activists don’t like them, because they can and apparently do kill birds and bats. Anyone who lives within eyesight of one seems to hate them, because they’re ugly. And anyone who lives really close to one seems to really hate them, because they’re ugly and noisy, too.

Even the most gung-ho supporter of wind turbines, though, will probably concede, however grudgingly, that American energy independence probably shouldn’t rely terribly much on something that seizes up in the cold.

When I first heard about this on the local news, I thought that the recent ice storms we’d had were at fault - that the turbines had iced up, or something like that. That would be kind of sad, but we did have something like forty-eight straight hours of freezing rain, which isn’t quite a regular occurrence, even in this wonderful winter wasteland.

Instead, however, it appears that the problem is much more basic - the various fluids in these turbines just can’t handle the temperatures we get here.

To be fair, this does appear to be only affecting some unsurprisingly craptastic turbines manufactured in the People’s Republic of California, but that such equipment, incapable of handling relatively mild winter weather, could be sold to, you know, Minnesota, suggests to me that the wind-power industry has a long way to go before it can hope to be taken terribly seriously - someone, somewhere, should have recognized that this could be a problem. I don’t care who - the manufacturer, the owners, their consultants, some regulatory body or industry standards group - take your pick. It’s just an unbelievably boneheaded oversight that it makes you suspect that nobody really knows what they’re doing, which means you can’t help but wonder what else is being done wrong…

For a couple of weeks now, we’ve been having horrible problems with our home DSL connection, which is Powered By Qwest(TM). (Well, there’s your problem!, I hear you all shout. I know, I know.) From about 1600-2330 local time, we’re frequently unable to get even 20Kbps speeds on what should be a 1.5Mbps connection, and ping times can exceed four seconds to servers a few dozen miles away. Clearly, our DSL trunk or whatever it’s called is “congested”, a complicated technical term that basically means “oversold”. When we contacted our (local) ISP, they sympathized with our plight, agreed that it sounded like congestion, and said they’d contact Qwest, but said “the odds of anything being done about it are slim. Qwest is pushing fiber-optic internet service now, and considers copper-wire DSL service a basically unsupported legacy product they just don’t care about.” We’re doomed…

One of my roommates had a strange dream the other night; in part, this is notable because she very, very rarely ever remembers more than vague details once she wakes up. In the dream, she arrived at her old college campus to find a loud demonstration in progress; a new sculpture had been installed in one of the courtyards, replacing an older sculpture that had succumbed to the elements. The grass around the sculpture’s plinth was full of gopher holes, which the angry students thought was part of the “installation”, and while some were yelling that this was dangerous, the majority were upset by the “sexist and misogynistic overtones” of the holes. (Yes, she went to college in Minneapolis; why do you ask?) When her dream-self tried to point out that they were just gopher holes, a bunch of eco-activists denounced the exploitation of animals, and attempted to burn down the art department. (Psychoanalyze that!)

In something that resembles actual news, albeit obscure, Russia has announced plans to invest 330 million USD in the disputed territory of Abkhazia over the next three years. That might not sound like a lot, but that basically subsidizes the relatively small territory’s trade deficit for the next couple years, and between the outright cash and “economic investments”, should serve to greatly increase Moscow’s influence in (and by proxy control over) Abkhazia.

It’s easy to not care about that part of the world, but the timing is suspect, coming as it does amid an important election in the Ukraine, and the tensions over Poland, and it’s not hard to see this as a sign that Russia wants to increase its influence with as many of its neighbors as it can, and move as many polities into the “firmly pro-Russia” column as possible. It’s just like the Cold War, all over again - controversial missile basing issues in central Europe, a gently antagonistic ascendant Russia trying to increase its influence over its neighbors… Everything old is new again… again.

What I do know, though, is that it really doesn’t matter the least bit.

If people really wanted, they could virtually eliminate traffic deaths. How? By banning motorcycles, trucks, SUVs, and compact cars; by banning people from driving in the rain or at night or within forty-eight hours of a snowstorm. By banning people under the age of 25 from driving in groups of three or more. By banning people from driving with pre-teen children in their car. By banning people from having radios, iPods, or cellphones in their cars.

It would be grossly inconvenient. It would, in fact, be outright tyranny. It would work, though, sort of, because traffic fatalities are semi-random accidents. None of those things really address the causes of traffic deaths - they just eliminate conditions that increase their odds.

The same mentality really doesn’t work with airborne terrorism, though. We can ban brown people from flying, we can ban anyone who’s ever visited Yemen from flying, we can ban people from buying one-way tickets, and we can ban people from flying without luggage. That doesn’t really matter, because those sorts of preventative measures are extraordinarily easy to overcome, and may actually be detrimental. (Keeping in mind that we still don’t screen every piece of checked luggage, do we really want to force would-be terrorists to check luggage containing God-knows-what?)

Terror isn’t random, though - it’s deliberate. You can ban things left, right, and centre in the hopes of preventing it, but it won’t work. If the government decided that the only people allowed to fly were anglo-saxon single-mothers under the age of 30 employed by the federal government and pregnant with their second - not first or third or fourth - child, I guarantee that al-Qaeda or some other terrorist group would find and recruit just such an individual for an attack of some sort, because that’s what they do.

People like to say “the underwear bomber did this” or “the underwear bomber did that”, and this should have been enough of a red flag to prevent him from flying.

Lots of people pay cash. Lots of people fly without checked luggage. That doesn’t mean anything.

What could mean something is the cliched trifecta of crime: means, opportunity, and motive. Does the individual want to commit terror? (Motive.) Does the individual know how to carry out such a plan? (Means.) Does he or she have the chance to do so? (Opportunity.)

Some people think that just visiting Yemen is good enough reason to ban someone from flying, because they might have acquired dangerous skills or knowledge there. That’s pretty damned tyrannical, I think. Do you know what that kind of policy would look like, applied domestically?

Remember all the bitching about government repression at the 2008 RNC and DNC conventions? And at the 2004 ones? Imagine that the government had setup roadblocks at the state borders of Minnesota and Colorado several months before the conventions, and refused entry to everyone who’d ever used the internet.

In Yemen, there are people who can teach you how to make a bomb, and wage war against the West.

On the internet, there are websites that can teach you how to make a Molotov cocktail, and wage war against the State.

Really no difference, is there?

By that pretty outlandish standard, Abdulmutallab possibly shouldn’t have been allowed to board the plane. But hindsight is always 20-20, and the question really becomes “was there ample evidence beforehand that Abdulmutallab likely had the means, opportunity, and motive to commit an act of terror?” The answer to that is almost certainly “no”.

The intelligence community had uncorroborated evidence that he’d become radicalized. That’s motive, maybe. And, obviously, he booked a flight - that’s probably as good an opportunity as any. But did he have the means to carry out an attack? Nobody knew. So he’d been to Yemen. So what? If it was known and disseminated that he’d spend a fortnight at the compound of Ali al Baksheesh bin Yusef O’Pipebomber, regional Irish-Saudi bombmaker extraordinaire, then yeah, that would have implied a high probability that he posessed the means to make a jetliner go boom, and things might have been a little different.

But, you know what? It shouldn’t have fucking mattered, anyway. It’s supposed to be a reasonably free world, and people should be reasonably free to travel wheresoever they damn well please.

Barring spontaneous human combustion, which may or may not exist, human beings do not blow up aeroplanes. Bombs do.

The no-fly list is a joke. A sham. A charade. Mildly Orwellian security theatre. People are not threats.

If a mafia hitman wants to board a jet, let him. If some frothing-at-the-brain college student who hates America wants to board a jet, let him. If a mild-mannered business executive for a Fortune 500 company wants to board a jet, I say let him.

Just screen them all for weapons and explosives and other dangerous items, first.

Wait… that’s what we already do? Well, shit.

The underwear bombing was not an intelligence failure. It was an airport screening failure.

Nothing more, nothing less.

We put our faith in the screening system to detect dangerous items. Abdulmutallab beat that system by bringing a bomb on board the plane. It could just as easily have been someone else who the intelligence community had never heard of.

Improve the screening system, because that’s what failed.

U. K. Bansal, an Indian Home Ministry official, told reporters that the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba faction was thought to have acquired a number of the gliding parachutes.

“We have intelligence reports that LeT has purchased 50 paragliding kits from Europe with an intention to launch attacks on India,” he said

This is a very interesting statement. Paragliding is not particularly popular in the Indian subcontinent - hence the supposed purchases from Europe - and nobody seems to be mentioning how or where the terrorists are supposed to be receiving training in the sport.

This is also the sort of carefully-considered (or so one hopes!) statement designed in part to leave the subject - in this case, the LeT terrorists - looking over their shoulders. “We know what you purchased”, India is in effect saying, “we know where you purchased them, and we know why”. Assuming the intel is good, this is a pretty audacious bit of saber-rattling by India.

Is it carefully considered? Is the intel good? It’s hard to say, but:

“The Mumbai attack [where ten LeT gunmen sailed to Mumbai from Karachi, murdering the crew of a fishing boat en route], was the group’s first act of sea-borne terrorism,” said B. Raman, a former counter-terrorism chief in the Indian foreign intelligence service, the Research and Analysis Wing.

“It would be natural for them to plan another spectacular attack from the air. The warning has to be taken seriously.”

…this sort of thing doesn’t really inspire confidence. They committed one (quite spectacular) act of terror with the almost tangenital aid of a small boat, so it’s “natural” that they’d now attack from the air? That really doesn’t parse, for me.

LeT probably won’t try another seaborne attack, because like all modern Islamist terrorists they seem to have this bizarre drive to never do the same thing twice. They were quite successful in Mumbai, where they came ashore from a boat - so, because it worked well, they’ll never try it again. (In a certain twisted way, I kind of hope some Islamist militant group sets off a dirty bomb, somewhere, simply because that basically means that the world can then stop worrying about that particular oh-so-scary-sounding threat. With the intent to be sarcastic quite implicit, is the illness of a few thousand not worth the peace of mind of millions? No? Nevermind, then.)

(I’ve thought about this, and I’ve discussed it with people, and I still really can’t fathom this “it worked great, so let’s never do it again” terrorist mentality. Nor do I get why terrorist groups keep coming up with these grandiose plots involving lots of people and lots of room for human error. Look at the Mumbai massacre - ten guys, all kind of shenanigans, 300-something dead after several hours’ effort. Not that it wasn’t horrible and gruesome, but they could have achieved that in five minutes with three guys, a lorry, and a mortar. Line up on a long, straight street during a crowded rush hour, and start dropping a mix of explosive and incendiary rounds every hundred yards or so… but I digress.)

But their use of boats once doesn’t mean that using paragliders is a logical or “natural” inference to make. How would a paraglider attack work, exactly? I understand that in the past there have been concerns involving paragliders and ultralight aircraft and so on theoretically being used for either aerial surveillance (has nobody heard of Google Earth?) or to get people inside “secure” locations, like military bases and power plants and so on. It all seems very romantic and James Bond-ish, but, come on… what are LeT supposed to do, float around above a cricket match or something, firing Kalashnikovs at the people on the ground? Float over a - what, power plant or something? - and somehow manage to drop explosives down a chimney or smokestack or something?

I just don’t buy it. Even though LeT are one of the more competent terrorist organizations out there - by the standards of these groups, anyway - I just don’t see them getting fifty volunteers for a suicide mission (martyrdom is sexy; being captured and tortured… isn’t) trained as competent paraglider pilots. 9/11 was the only modern Islamist terror attack that required any degree of serious skill on the part of recruits, and it was very much the exception to the rule. 50 paragliders and associated equipment is also a relatively expensive outlay, by terrorist standards. (A single paraglider and harness runs upwards of 750 USD, and it’s probably more like 1000 USD once you add in the bare-essential bits and bobs. $50,000+ is one hell of an outlay for equipment for a hare-brained terrorist plot in that part of the world.)

So, you know, that really makes one wonder just what’s going on here. Only time will tell, if we’re lucky.

I requested a copy of the paper through the FOIA, and asked for the report to be provided in electronic format. Ironically, given the subject of the paper, it was eventually released as photocopies… some two years later.

I don’t know the exact date it was written - Mr. Rasmussen has never bothered to reply to my emails asking about the paper - but I think it was 2006 or early 2007. Given the changing nature of technology, it’s a bit dated in the “real world”, but I’m pretty confident that it’s still very relevant to the IC, which is still thinking - at a glacial pace, I might add - about making a decision about adopting new technology at some point in the future Real Soon Now.

Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants isn’t a hugely exciting paper, but it’s been cited in a few public places, and deserves to be available to the world at large. If you have a professional or academic interest in this sort of thing, you can download a copy here (16pp, 5.5MB PDF).

Enjoy…

He’s Not the Messiah, He’s a Very Naughty Boy is a look back at the troupe’s most controversial - and perhaps enduring - feature-length film, Life Of Brian. It runs 56 minutes, is 51 megabytes in size, and can be downloaded right here.

Monty Python’s Wonderful World of Sound is a look back at the group’s audio production, particularly the records they produced, such as the wonderfully-named Contractual Obligation Album. It’s in two roughly hour-long parts which run just over fifty megabytes each; part one is right here and you can get part two right here.

If you like Monty Python, these new shows are probably the three best hours you’ll have with your MP3 player this week…

Sells cocaine on the streets, of course. Hey, why not? No real special skills required, no real physical labor, and it can be extremely lucrative.

It’s even more lucrative, of course, when you don’t pay your supplier for your merchandise, which is an all too common “bright idea” that down-on-their-luck dealers sometimes hit upon. That rarely ends well.

What’s safer than - but just as lucrative as - selling cocaine you didn’t pay for? Why, selling fake cocaine, of course.

That’s what a guy tried to do on Friday - he sold a baggie of crushed-up drywall powder for $20. He probably would have gotten away with it, too, had he not sold it to an undercover officer.

Say what you will about America’s drugs policies, but some people really are just so stupid that it ought to be a crime.

(Fun statistical footnote: A 4×8 sheet of 7/8″ drywall weighs about 70 pounds. If you powdered the whole damn thing up and sold it at prevalent street prices for crack cocaine, it’d be worth around $635,000. It’d also last you a year… if you sold 86 hits a day, which I’m guessing would be a pretty high volume of sales.)

Anyway, this means that I’ve been living, breathing, eating, and in some cases sleeping numbers and statistics and pattern analysis for a while, and I think it may be taking it’s toll…

Over the weekend, I was about to clean the catboxes when one of my roommates commented quite innocently that lately it seems like the upstairs litterbox gets used more than the ones in the basement, which used to be far and away the cats’ favorites.

It was a casual offhand comment, but it got me thinking, as I scooped poop from litterboxes. (Hey, I do a lot of my best contemplation while scooping out catboxes…)

What information would I want to collect to plot litterbox usage over time? Dates, for obvious reasons. Litterbox location, of course. Day of week, to see if human behaviour patterns affect the cats’ toilet routines (i.e. they poop upstairs more on weekends, when more of us are home). Weather.

When comparing upstairs versus downstairs litterbox usage, how should “surprises behind the couch” be tallied? Should hairballs and other oral expulsions be tracked? Should the cats’ dietary history be taken into account? (i.e. if we give them wet food more often, do they poo more? What happens when they escape through an open door and eat grass?)

Eventually I realized I was - urgh! - trying to analyze the behavior of cats, for crying out loud - or at least that of their rather delicate lower intestinal tracts. I’d be better off trying to estimate what effect the Russian Navy’s increased operational tempo will have on contraceptive consumption both domestically and in their overseas ports of call, or something of equal importance.

I have relatively high confidence that I need a vacation.

(Obligatory disclosure: I haven’t actually examined anything to do with sugarbeet production, anywhere, imaginary war-torn country of Pastafazool or otherwise. Nor have I examined prophylactic usage among Russian sailors, or the recreational habits of Russian sailors on foreign shore leave, as fun and exciting as that might be. As far as I am aware, Pastafarians are no more likely to be killed by landmines than any other minority group, real or imagined. I don’t know whether there really is a Beet-Boring Beetle. Some names and details were changed for reasons of national security, job security, or comedic value.)

He wrote a memoir about his twenty-year friendship with JFK in 1966, called The Pleasure of His Company, and that was pretty much the last thing anyone ever heard about him, until his death in September 2009.

When he passed away, I made a Freedom of Information Act request to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, suspecting that they had performed an investigation of Fay in 1961.

This month, I was proved correct when I received a bit over a hundred pages of documents from that investigation…

The story begins on January 23th, 1961. On that date, a member of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy’s staff “dropped by” the FBI Headquarters and requested that a “Special Inquiry investigation” be conducted on Fay because of his nomination by the President. This meeting was recorded in a memorandum the next day, which ordered an investigation “for immediate attention”, and asked that the summary “go to the Attorney General to take up with the President as the President does not want this processed through his staff.” (FBI HQ Serial 161-212-2 - 209KB PDF.)

That meeting set in motion a whirlwind of activity, which ultimately culminated in a ten-page memo to the Attorney General from Director Hoover on 9 February 1961, detailing the largely uninteresting details of Fay’s life and career to date. By then Fay had been confirmed as Undersecretary of the Navy, so it was a bit of a moot point, politically.

In a nutshell, the Bureau interviewed dozens of people, dug into the background of Fay, his family, and associates, and found no significant detrimental information. Most people interviewed praised his character; a few questioned his suitability for his new post in light of his lack of serious government experience or business acumen. Checks revealed that Fay had been arrested three times in California while a student at Stanford - once for public intoxication, and twice - on the same night - for an interesting bout of alcohol-fueled college shennanigans:

The report concluded by noting that neither the Civil Service Commission, the Secret Service, the Office of Naval Intelligence, the House Committee on Un-American Activities, or the Central Intelligence Agency had any pertinent information concerning Fay. (FBI HQ Serial 161-212-17 and -18 - 3.47MB PDF.)

That was very nearly the end of the Bureau’s interest in Fay… until June of 1961, when a taxi driver in San Francisco approached the FBI with some very salacious gossip:

The Bureau didn’t officially look into this, noting that no other information had been received corroborating this allegation, that Fay was married with several children, and was, well… connected:

…and that was that, as far as the Bureau was concerned. (FBI HQ Serial 161-212-20 - 590KB PDF.)

Would such an allegation have been treated differently, had Fay not been in “close affinity with the Presidential family”? Almost certainly. Was there any basis to the allegations? It’s impossible to say, of course. I know it adds a bit of fuel to some conspiracy theories, but let’s be honest, making that sort of oh-so-careful allegation was a pretty popular - and effective - form of character assassination back in the day (and even now, alas).

It’s fairly obvious that Fay became Undersecretary of the Navy purely through his relationship with Kennedy, and I have no doubt that Fay was both well aware of that and grateful for it. One can’t help but wonder, though, if he ever realized that his relationship with JFK helped deflect a potentially career-ending character assassination?

It’s good to be da King, as Mel Brooks so cornily pointed out. I’d say it’s arguably better to become a close friend of future Kings, myself, as you get to enjoy many of the benefits while experiencing few of the risks…

It’s now 13 January 2010, and the site still isn’t back. Why? Nobody’s talking. They’ll still happily take your money - having only raised a quarter or so of what they claim to need - and will happily take your “leaks”, but for now, and for the immediate future, their operations appear to consist entirely of repetitive rumour-mongering on Twitter.

Ah, the free market at work. Gotta love it.

Offered for your consideration at this moment, however, is a question I suspect will not figure prominently in any of the discussions of Google, China, and the alleged cyber-attacks that Google has revealed…

Google asserts that this recent incident or series of incidents were intended to compromise the Gmail accounts of individuals who are “advocates of human rights in China”, and that the accounts of “dozens” of such users are being “routinely” accessed by third parties.

That’s all certainly worrisome enough, and I don’t have any reason to doubt that it’s true.

Here’s the big question, though:

How does Google know the accounts in question belong to Chinese human-rights campaigners?

I mean, it’s one thing if you Google - hah! - their email addresses, and find information which identifies them as such. But this is Google we’re talking about, the 52nd-Level Grand Masters of data mining, and whose far-from-transparent practices have raised a large number of concerns among privacy advocates.

If Google has developed the ability to pigeonhole users as “human rights advocates” based on… what, exactly? Their Google searches? The people they correspond with? The contents of their emails? …then that, IMO, would be a far bigger deal than this announcement that, you know, the Chinese regime are up to their usual, albeit fairly sophisticated, mischief.

Chinese human-rights advocates tend, by and large, to be pretty tech-savvy, and make widespread use of encryption and anonymity and privacy technologies online; they have to be, to a very great extent, to avoid attracting the attention of the Chinese authorities, so identifying them - online, without resorting to trojans or rootkits or, you know, throwing friends and relatives in jail and torturing them - should be a bit trickier than, say, identifying current students at Ridgemont High School, or something like that.

That Google can do user-profiling and social-network-analysis should surprise nobody. That they have done so, and are doing so now, under circumstances which gain them no economic benefit, might be a little more of a surprise for people who like to think the best of multinational behemoths…

I could be wrong about the whole supposition, of course. But somebody, I think, really needs to get an unequivocal, technical, on-the-record answer from Google about the whole thing.

When you think of The Lone Ranger, you think of Clayton Moore, right? Well, Moore is only the iconic, best-known actor behind the famous mask; it turns out that in 1952, a little-known actor named John Hart took up the role for two seasons of the show.

Hart passed away in September 2009, at the age of 91.

According to the FBI:

Records which may be responsive to your Freedom of Information-Privacy Acts (FOIPA) request were destroyed June 14, 1990 through September 8, 2003. Since this material could not be reviewed, it is not known if it was responsive to your request. The retention and disposal of records is governed by statute and regulation under the supervision of the National Archives and Records Administration…

Additionally, a search of the Central Records System maintained at FBI Headquarters indicated that potentially responsive records have been sent to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Since these records were not reviewed, it is not known if they are actually responsive to your request.

If you wish to review these potentially responsive records, send your request to NARA at the following address using file numbers 91-9371, 173-6375, 44-38346 as a reference:

National Archives and Records Administration
8601 Adelphi Road
College Park, MD 20740-6001

It sounds like, potentially, there’s a lot we don’t know about the “other Lone Ranger”, waiting to be unearthed at the National Archives in Maryland. The three files involve bank burglary or robbery (91-9371), violations of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (173-6375), and election laws or voting rights violations (44-38346). What’s in them? Your guess is as good as any.

If you wanted to request these files from NARA, it could potentially be a pretty big “scoop”. Feel free - I’m not going to ask for them, because I can’t afford NARA’s extortionate fees just at the moment ($0.75/page duplication, no freebies or exemptions.)

I can’t guarantee the contents of the files contain anything earth-shattering or exciting, but that’s the gamble you take, isn’t it? Now go, fledgling entertainment reporter, and file your FOIA requests to discover just who that masked man really was…

It’s okay, because I did, and I did some digging to try and get to the bottom of these little linguistic nuggets…

First off, shit and turd are possibly the oldest contemporary scatological terms in English, dating in something resembling, however loosely, their present meanings to the fifteenth century or thereabouts. Interestingly, both began as proto-Germanic verbs involving the concept of separation or division - think something akin to “expulsion” and you’re probably on the right track; an almost identical word is excrement, from the latin excerne, which means to “to separate”.

Poop is a linguistically interesting word, and one whose scatological origins seem a bit unclear. It originally meant - and we’re talking the fifteenth century or thereabouts - the stern of a ship; hence “poop deck”. By the eighteenth century, it had acquired it’s scatological, euphemistic sense, though nobody agrees on how or why.

Crap was a noun before it was a verb before it became a noun again. Confused? So am I. The term originally referred to chaff - in the grain sense, not the radar countermeasure, a distinction I like to think I don’t have to point out - and somewhere along the way became a term for most any worthless thing, much like “junk”. (Just think, in an alternate universe, people might “take a junk” on the “junker”, and consider the implications for the term “junk in the trunk”!)

Piss is 13th century, from the old French “pissier”, meaning… to urinate. Pee is merely a quaint 16th century abbreviation, spelled phonetically.

Scatology is a 17th century term originally applied to obscene literature, though I’m a bit unclear on its usage. (”A scatology”? “A pile of scatologies”?) Scat is merely a shortened form.

Most other scatological terms are apparently either onomatopoeic, or fairly obvious modern slang. (”Fart” comes from old English, but is considered onomatopoeic; “raspberry” is Cockney rhyming slang (raspberry tart = fart) for the same.)

Now you know - and knowing is half the battle…

As Bruce Schneier points out, quite a number of encrypted USB flash drives have a really, really stupid vulnerability, despite their government certification. Doh. Double-doh is that I have no less than five encrypted USB drives that may or may not be affected, including three for which no updates will likely ever be available (the original M-Systems XKeys which later got rebranded as Verbatim Corporate Secure drives). Joy. At least my battered old Kingston DataTraveler Secure drives appear to be, um, secure, still…

I’ve updated the Debian kernel I made available for the Acer Aspire One to 2.6.32.3; you can get it here if that’s what floats your boat.

Sign the petition to save Better Off Ted, my favoritest television comedy just at the moment. It’s like The Office, only actually funny.

Geekdad a couple days ago came up with a list of one-hundred quotes every geek should apparently know. Sadly, something like 95 of them are from movies or television shows. So here’s my abbreviated list of “short quotes every geek who isn’t a couch potato should know”:

“The enemy’s gate is DOWN.”
“The cake is a lie.”
“Outlander, you’re wearing no clothes!”
“It is pitch dark. You are likely to be eaten by a Grue.”
“Truth, Justice, Freedom, and Reasonably Priced Love.”
“The Turtle moves.”
“Whenever serious and competent people need to get things done in the real world, all considerations of tradition and protocol fly out the window.”
“Oh, was that liquor of yours a stimulant?”
“Hey, cousin, it’s your cousin!”
“Look behind you! A three-headed monkey!”
“Ahoy, fancy-pants.”

Unrelated, but pretty cool: 1960s instructions on comic and cartoon lettering, from back when people used pens, brushes, and ink for everything.

What’s a fountain pen? It’s a pen - a writing instrument that uses liquid ink, applied directly to a writing surface via contact (and capillary action) - which has an integral, internal ink reservoir of one sort or another. They came into being around the turn of the last century, and some contend they had their heyday in the late 1940s. Today they’re seen as anachronistic throwbacks to yesteryear - obsolete, inconvenient, and expensive.

That’s not actually true - fountain pens don’t just survive today, they thrive, in part because they’re more affordable and more convenient to use than ever before.

Numerous writers have enunciated elsewhere the reasons you’d want to use a fountain pen, and I have no intention of reinventing the wheel. A brief summary of the arguments looks something like this: they’re more comfortable to use than ballpoints or most rollerballs; they’re easier to use, and actually help improve the handwriting of most people who use them; they allow a much greater degree of personal expression via the written word (in terms of nib and ink choices); they’re better for the environment; and they’re fun!

Don’t take my word for it, though; most everything you’d want to know about fountain pens can be found over at this website, whose collective contributors know most of what there is to know about all things fountain pen.

When you think of a fountain pen, you probably think either of some classic, chunky pen from the 1930s, or some ostentatious status symbol like a Mont Blanc. (Or perhaps a classic, and ostentatious, status symbol from the 1930s?) Believe it or not, there are still over two dozen companies making fountain pens today, and thanks to the internet, they’re not exactly expensive - you can quite easily get started for as little as 15 USD, with a pen and some ink.

There are, roughly, a gajillion pens out there, from antique collectibles to new-production, and everything in between. eBay is a good source, if you know what you’re looking for; so too are websites like this one and this one. And if you’ve ever felt constrained by the color choices in life, you can rejoice - there are over three hundred colors of fountain pen ink on the market today, in damn near every color imaginable. (Including invisible inks, white inks, waterproof archival fraud-resistant inks, and everything from conservative blues and blacks and browns to eye-popping neon yellows and reds and electric greens… you name it, somebody probably makes it. And if three hundred colors isn’t enough, you can mix most of ‘em to meet your needs - try that with a ballpoint!)

What kind of pen should you look for, as an introduction to fountain pens? Usually, if you ask that, you get one of two sorts of answers - people will suggest the usual suspects of entry-level pens, the Lamy Safari or the Waterman Phileas (both of which are around 30 USD)… or they’ll suggest their favorite, rather more expensive, pen - a Pelikan M200, say, or a Mont Blanc of some sort.

For my money, that’s kind of putting the carriage before the horse. Before you think about which pen, you should think about which kind of pen - mainly the filling system.

Fountain pens take ink in two basic ways - they can accept small plastic cartridges of ink, or they can fill from a bottle of ink. The former is easier and more convenient, but rather more expensive, and you’re greatly limited in ink availability. The latter is slightly fussier, but substantially more economical, allows you to use any ink out there, and - generally - means you have to fill your pen less often than you would with cartridges. Most but not all pens that accept cartridges can be used with bottled ink by means of a “converter”, so you can have the best of both worlds.

Unless you’re really concerned about bottled ink, I’d suggest you stick with bottle-feeding pens, as they’re easier to use in the long run, in my opinion. They also come with none of the compatibility issues that cartridge pens can have - not all cartridges fit in all pens, and it’s all too easy to wind up buying a pen for which cartridges are only made in three or four colors, or are only readily available, online, from a few suppliers.

Among pens that fill from bottles, there are several filling methods. Some use a rubber sac inside the barrel to hold ink; they fill by having the nib inserted into ink, and a lever or button or bar on the body manipulated somehow to suck ink up into the sac. Others use a squeeze filler of some sort, where you have to unscrew the pen body and squeeze a metal-and-rubber filler inside the pen to fill it. Others use a twisted piston to suck ink into the pen, and there are a few where you simply fill the entire inside of the pen with ink from a syringe or eyedropper… plus there are some variations on these that are mainly found on vintage pens, as well.

All of these systems have their proponents and their detractors, and their strong and weak points. A lot of people really love the piston filler, for example, and it certainly has its strong points - chief among them a typically large ink capacity - but there are relatively few models of pen that actually have a piston filler, and they tend to be relatively pricey.

My suggestion is, for a first pen, to look for something that uses a squeeze filler. Why? Because it’s a very simple and reliable mechanism, with almost nothing to go wrong, and because it’s commonly found on inexpensive pens. (…and some quite pricey pens, too.) It’s also arguably the most noob-proof filling system out there. (If you try to force a piston filler hard enough, for example, you can break it, and people never fail to amaze me with the ways they can screw up inserting a cartridge into a pen.)

For a first pen, my suggestion is - if you live in the United States - to hunt through the ISellPens website, looking at the various $5-10 pens, or to browse eBay in the “other” fountain pen sub-category, and maybe limit yourself to pens costing 10 USD / 8 Euro or less. You’ll see an enormous variety of pens coming out of China, and I know it’s hard to believe, but almost all of them are actually quite excellent writing instruments. For sometimes as little as 3 USD - with shipping anywhere in the world - you can get a quite nice first pen with which to test the fountain pen waters. Brands to look at include Hero, Duke, Wing Sung, Jinhao, and Luoshi. Most of these pens will have fine nibs and use an integral squeeze filler, and they should all be perfectly serviceable pens right from the get-go. Read the descriptions carefully, as pens come in all sizes, from Bic biro size up to Sharpie size and beyond, and you probably won’t enjoy a too-small pen. Also watch out for calligraphy nibs, which aren’t really meant for everyday writing. Oh, and the Hero models 70 and 360, which have very strange nibs unlike any other pen out there. (I actually quite like the Hero 70, but it’s very much an acquired taste, even where fountain pens are concerned.) If you’re bewildered by the choices, and looking for a specific recommendation - look at the Hero 616 or the Wing Sung 233, two excellent, average-sized pens that can be had for under 10 USD.

For a first ink, get a bottle of something tried, tested, and boring - Sheaffer or Parker or Waterman or Pelikan inks in blue, black, or blue-black. I know, I know - there are hundreds of much more exciting inks out there, and you’re probably dieing to try “Sonic Blue” or “Bad Blue Heron” or “Gruene Cactus” or “Saguaro Wine”… Please, curb your impulses, and go with a tried-and-true, boring ink first. They’re cheap, they’re easy to find, and they perform consistently and reliably in pretty much any pen. The same is not always true of some of the most exotic “boutique” inks out there, and you sometimes have to make sacrifices to get, you know, bright electric ink colors that sear people’s eyeballs.

Fill pen with ink; blot excess ink with a tissue or paper towel. Apply nib - gently - to paper, and write. If you’re anything like me, within half a page, you’re going to be wondering why on earth the crude horror that is the modern biro ever replaced the fountain pen in the first place. Convenience? Progress? The hell with that, thanks.

I compiled a custom 2.6.32.2 2.6.32.3 kernel for the AAO, based on Baldrick’s configuration, but with a few changes to suit my needs - and probably those of other AAO users, too.

In addition to the more modern kernel revision, I changed the kernel preemption model to “low-latency desktop”, a/k/a a “preemptible kernel”. It’s debatable whether this will make any real difference, but it can lead to reduced latency (or at least perceived latency) when running some applications, so I think it’s beneficial.

I enabled MTRR cleanup, as this seems to be a persistent BIOS issue with the AAO, and eliminates the need to pass a configuration option to the kernel at boot time.

I added in the “conservative” CPU frequency governor, which might be desirable in an AAO for some people, and enabled the default (”ondemand”) governor, as well.

I added support for writing to NTFS filesystems.

I enabled optimization for the Aspire One’s Atom processor.

I enabled the new Aspire-specific kernel options (i.e. thermal/fan control).

…and a couple other less notable changes.

If you’re comfortable installing a kernel on your AAO running Debian or a derivative (like Ubuntu), and understand the risks of doing so, you can grab a copy of my custom kernel at this link. Like all good things in life, it’s provided as-is without any warranty whatsoever. If it breaks, you get to keep both pieces.

Post comments, et cetera, below…

I didn’t really want to be there, and I really didn’t need to be there - it wasn’t so much a collaborative meeting as one of those fun “here’s what we’re going to do” meetings. What, you screwed up everyone’s schedules for this? But, hey, the conference room is heated, and it’s about ten degrees below zero, Fahrenheit, outside right now, so it could have been worse.

It wasn’t entirely a waste, though…

See, yesterday morning I was making breakfast for myself and one of the roommates - scrambled eggs and sausage and toast. Somewhere along the way, frying the sausage, I splattered my right arm with hot grease. Not really a problem or anything; it happens.

Except that this morning, I’m being introduced to a nurse who’s giving part of the presentation on the proposed zero-tolerance drug policy, right? We shake hands, and she doesn’t let go for a few moments, staring at… the inside of my right elbow. Where three or four drops of hot grease landed yesterday morning, and where I’ve now got a couple of nice little welts that look at first glance quite a bit like “track marks” from intravenous drug use.

It was awkward.

I mean, what do you say? “I’m not a drug user”? Bit defensive, innit? How about “I’m not a heroin junkie, honest”? I think that might qualify as a suspiciously specific denial, don’t you?

I opted for silence, hoping that a medical professional would be able to spot the difference between a grease burn and an injection site. Still, if my decision not to have cold pizza for breakfast yesterday means I’m going to have to randomly whizz in a cup at work, I’m going to be a little pissed… no pun intended.

In our household, we’ve got three netbooks, for reasons that mostly defy explanation. Since they’re all 8.9-inch models, and reasonably identical, I figured I’d do a quick review based on our experiences with them…

The first one we acquired was an Asus Eee, a model 901. It’s perfectly good at what it does, and I have no real complaints about it, nor does anyone else in the house. The screen is good, the SSDs are fast, the keyboard has function keys, the touchpad works as it should, battery life is decent, and there’s an aftermarket battery that can make it run more than six hours on a charge. It’s running Windows XP, and does so well. I think it came with 512MB of RAM, and upgrading it to 1GB was pretty easy, as I recall. The 16GB of storage is split between two 8GB SSDs, which is kind of strange, but not really a problem.

The second computer is a Dell Vostro A90, the “business-class” version of the popular Dell Mini 9. This is a very nice netbook, all things considered. The screen is good, the touchpad is good; the keyboard is okay, but doesn’t have dedicated function keys… It came with Ubuntu, which for the most part works just fine; most of the issues I’ve run into have had to do with applications that didn’t want to play nice with the screen resolution on the Vostro. It runs over six hours on an extended aftermarket battery, but the BIOS isn’t happy about the non-Dell battery. The build quality is substantially better than that of the Asus, it’s a breeze to upgrade the RAM, and if it wasn’t for the chopped keyboard, this would be unquestionably better than either the Asus or the Acer, below.

Last - and very much least - is an Acer Aspire One, a netbook-shaped object we like to refer to as the Fisher Price Netbook, and which unfortunately cost more than either the Dell or the Asus. The whole experience with this has been horrendous. First, we were sent the wrong netbook - an 8GB model instead of a 16GB model, though the box, from Acer, was marked 16GB, which ultimately prevented us from getting any satisfaction from the merchant… or Acer. Then, we tried to run the provided copy of Windows XP. Nevermind that this takes up more than 7GB of the “8GB” (really 7.4GB) SSD - that SSD is slow. The fresh install of XP took more than four minutes - four minutes! - to boot to the desktop. Seriously, it’s a joke, and completely unusable. So we decided to put a new drive in and install Debian… only the BIOS wouldn’t detect any of the five new drives of various brands we had laying around. Eventually, after two weeks of fighting with this, we gave up and reassembled the “netbook” without an internal drive; while we had it torn completely apart we upgraded the RAM to 1.5GB. Plan two was to put a 16GB SDHC card in one of the two card readers, and use that as a boot disk, running most everything in RAM. Alas, the Asus can’t boot from the card readers, so that idea was out. Eventually we just gave up and attached a 6GB USB drive - which the Asus can boot from - and installed Debian on there. Everything but the wireless worked from the beginning, and upgrading the kernel took care of the wi-fi. The screen is okay, the keyboard is okay, and has function keys; the touchpad is so completely useless we left it disconnected internally, and just use an external trackball instead. Overall, Debian runs great on the USB drive… though we’ve had a few issues using it with an external monitor… Our overall experience with this flimsy plastic piece of shit is to stay far away from the Aspire One, and probably all Acer products in general. I’d even go so far as to suggest that Asire One owners should look into a class-action lawsuit against Acer for continuing to sell what they have to know is a horrendously useless excuse for a computer. Get the gist?

In short, if you want a sub-$300 8.9-inch netbook and don’t need an aftermarket battery or function keys, get a Dell. If you want a big honking third-party battery, or function keys on your keyboard, get an Asus Eee with an Atom processor. Under no circumstances buy the Acer Aspire One. Just don’t. You’ll have nothing but regrets.

Given President Obama’s strong promotion of openness and transparency, you’d think this sort of thing might be kind of an important priority or something, wouldn’t you?

Well, the Counter-Espionage Section of the National Security Division of the Department of Justice - the folks in charge of the FARA - haven’t published a report on the FARA since Obama took office. A report should have been published at the end of June, but doesn’t seem to have been, which is… interesting. Another is due tomorrow; anyone want to bet on whether it actually appears?

I’m not; it’s a very funny show that’s culturally relevant and accessibly to a lot of people. I’m a huge fan, and I make no apologies for that. I also like the “new” med-school incarnation of Scrubs, and am not at all bothered by the new cast. So JD and Turk are going away? So what? I liked Dr. Cox, and as far as I can tell Denise is more of the same, albeit cuter. And so far Lucy seems a perfectly adequate replacement for JD, as far as lead characters are concerned.

I mean, Dr. Cox and Denise for half an hour, followed by thirty minutes of Portia de Rossi’s Veronica on Better Off Ted? Hello, Tuesday Night Snark Bloc.

Clearly, this is not everyone’s cup of tea, and that’s fine. It’s a mostly free country; I don’t have to watch America’s Next Something Or Other or Survivor, and you don’t have to watch Scrubs or Better Off Ted. Live and let live, I say.

Now, TVBTN and people who have nothing better to do than obsess over meaningless figures - and they really are meaningless - think Ted and Scrubs are doomed, because the ratings figures just don’t indicate that ABC has decent ratings for either show. I think that’s not at all true.

First, I think they’re overlooking things like Hulu, where both shows are apparently among the top twenty most-watched, and top-ten subscribed-to. I have no idea what that amounts to in terms of actual numbers, but that’s got to be pretty respectable. (As near as I can tell, Better Off Ted is watched on Hulu more than 30 Rock.)

Second, I think they’re overlooking internet piracy as an audience. Now, I’ve written about this before, and how meaningless absolute figures are when discussing piracy, but I think it’s probably useful to note that on a large (the largest?) television download site - dedicatedtv.net - the two most downloaded shows last week were Scrubs and Better Off Ted.

That ought to count for something. It doesn’t, but it should.

Scrubs and Better Off Ted air tonight on ABC, at 9 Eastern. Catch them while you can, because they’re good - and like all things that are good, they’re probably doomed to be all too short-lived.

Some of you might remember Shaun’s post, which read “I was born on March 23, 1982. On April 26, 1982 my father was in Stuggart, Germany and attempted Mission Skyhook. My father died due to faulty equipment and fell to his death at 1400 hours. Any information would be great.”.

And some of you might recall Col. Moore’s response, which began “Shaun, I was the co-pilot (right seat pilot) on the flight on which we lost your father…”.

What are the odds, right? Well, that was 22 Dec 2008. I tried to contact Shaun to give him the news. Col. Moore tried to contact Shaun to give him the news. We tried several times over the last year, but were unable to get in touch with him over the last year.

I promised, in that earlier post, I’d make an update whenever I heard from Shaun about this little Christmas miracle.

Saturday, I got a message…

It was from Shaun Strickland, and if it doesn’t make you at least a little teary-eyed, well… Here’s what it said:

WOW!

In July of 2008 I went to watch Batman: The Dark Knight with my Mom.
They used the Fulton Recovery System in the movie which is the first time I had ever heard or seen it. She started to cry. I had no idea why and I didn’t ask.

As of October 2008 I had no idea how my father died.
I went to see my Nana (his mom) who lives thousands of miles away that month. She then gave me a short book she wrote about my dad which gave away minor details of SkyHook. When I got home from there in 2008 I posted on this website…..then do to lifes busyness, I forgot to ever get back on.

This Christmas 2009 my older sister gave me a book with pictures of my dad in it and all the messages you guys sent above. I had know idea where she got all the info from until she told me it was from the site I posted on over a year ago.

Anyways, I can’t believe it. This is an AWESOME Christmas. Any more info you guys would like to share…ANYTHING…please post on here again or email me at stricklandengineering@yahoo.com

You guys are awesome.

That’s got to be the coolest thing that’s ever happened because of this blog. I mean, if that doesn’t provide empirical evidence that not all humans are irredeemable bastards, I don’t know what does.

So Happy Holidays, Shaun. And all the other readers of this blog. And I owe a big thanks to Col. Bernie Moore, as well as “Paul”, “Buff” Underwood, and SSG Patrick Keon, who all contributed time and comments for Shaun’s benefit. Like Shaun says, you guys are AWESOME, all caps and everything.

Not necessarily because they’ve made some bad choices in their lives, mind you, or have turned into addicts of a powerful and illegal opiate. Rather, because there appears to be anthrax in the heroin supply, with one user dead and two in hospital with the disease.

Authorities insist there’s no reason whatsoever to believe this is anything other than an accidental contamination of the heroin supply with naturally-occurring anthrax spores, but you have to wonder. I mean, if you were a villain who’d cultured anthrax spores and wanted to test their potency, there are a lot of worse ways to go about it than carefully contaminating the heroin supply and seeing what happens…

Jokes aside, a lot of people already treat (hard) drug users like lepers; they fact that they now might actually have a fairly serious disease isn’t going to exactly improve their social standing or treatment, you know?