Misc. Ramblings

My wallpaper for the week comes courtesy of the POVCOMP site. The "Persistence of Vision Raytracer" (POV-Ray) is a ray tracing program that provides the tools to make photo-realistic computer generated images. Versions are available for Windows, Mac OS X, and i86 Linux.

Aloha!

The race to make space more affordable, relatively speaking, took another step forward recently when the SpaceX Falcon I launch vehicle tested its first stage engines on the launch pad at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California (read an article here).

The privately funded reusable rocket was developed by South African and co-founder of PayPal, Elon Musk. As CEO of SpaceX, Musk is developing two rockets, the Falcon I and V. The FI, at a price of about $6 million USD, has a low earth orbit lift capability of 670kg while the FV, costing about $16 million, can reach escape velocity while lifting 6,000 kg.

Most reasonable people would agree that very few "rights" are absolute. That is, each right is usually balanced by another because if you take one right to an extreme you end up violating another.

Such is the case with transparency in government. While citizens should be able to know what their government is doing in their name, that doesn't mean all documents should be available without redaction to protect the privacy rights of those involved.

For example, many court records are considered to be open to the public. So, anyone can walk into the appropriate office, fill out the appropriate request form, and view any of these records. The thing is, many of these records include private information such as Social Security numbers, birth dates, mother's maiden names, addresses, phone numbers, and even the names of pets.

And for the most part, this has not caused problems (although there have been incidents with stalkers). But with the age of computers, where millions of records can be searched or compiled in seconds, problems arise.

In the rush to make public records available in electronic form, millions of records have been released without redaction. It is now possible for anyone with an Internet connection to find and compile information that wouldn't/couldn't be done before.

Some jurisdictions have even seen this as a money making opportunity. That is, they are selling the unedited records to anyone who is willing to pay. Unfortunately, some of those willing to pay are up to no good. For instance, they want to steal your identity or bury you under an avalanche of spam.

The point is, government needs to be doing a better job of balancing the right to privacy versus the right of the public to know what's going on.

One way this is going to happen is when citizens hold government accountable. Like this woman who is making it her cause to embarrass or harass politicians into doing what should have been done in the beginning - redacting private information before releasing government records.

What frightens me the most is that it may be too late to do anything effective. Once this information hits the Internet, it's almost impossible to erase it. The only hope, if there is any, is to keep new unedited information from being published.

Aloha!

We've all heard or read about elderly people who, thinking they are pressing on their car's brake pedal when they aren't, drive full speed into store windows/other cars/pedestrians/the nearest tree.

Bad as that may be, this incident really frightens me. Imagine you are on a flight from San Diego, California to Hawai'i. You're sitting there, several miles up going at hundreds of miles per hour minding your own business when you notice an elderly man get up and head towards the restrooms.

Nothing to get excited about. Right? Except instead of opening the door to the restroom, he begins to open the EXIT DOOR. Let me repeat that, he begins to open the door of the plane while said plane is traveling hundreds of miles per hour, miles in the air.

If that doesn't get your heart pumping, I don't know what does. Fortunately, his trying to get the door open did not succeed and a spokesperson for the airline said it's not possible to do so while the cabin is pressurized (assuming here that you have to pull the door inward to open it).

Still...

Have a Great Weekend, Everyone - Aloha!

Not making it up is Apple's switch to Intel processors. The MacRumors site blogged the announcement live and confirmed the change will take place over the next year or two. According to the site, Mac OSX, for at least the last five years, has been cross-compiled on to the Intel platform and is easily done because it (OSX) was designed to work on both. That said, many applications will have problems being ported over.

The new Intel Macs will be available sometime next year. One wonders when a version of Windows will be sold on the Mac?

Over and above that, one wonders what will happen to hardware sales now that the coming Macs have been announced. The danger to Apple is that sales will fall through the floor while people wait for the next generation hardware to appear a year from now.

If Apple can weather the short-term storm, the future looks bright, especially in laptop sales.

I recently read somewhere that PC laptop sales, for the first time, surpassed desktop sales. If this is true, then I'm sure Apple wants to get in on some of that money. The problem, up to now, was that the IBM chips just couldn't do the job by way of speed and the resulting heat. Intel, on the other hand, has processors specifically designed for use in laptops.

No one can accurately predict the future all the time. But it seems Apple took a look at their own and decided it was change or die.

Aloha!

Over at the Weekly World News site is a story that must have been left over from Loof Lirpa Day. According to the story, President Bush authorized the selling of the Hawaiian Islands to the highest bidder. In an auction held soon after the second inauguration, supposedly, that bidder was Japan.

"It's so far away, that it doesn't even seem like part of America anyway," the President is alleged to have said at a cabinet meeting, adding, "Besides, I talked to Daddy about it and he says there's no oil there, just pineapples and coconuts."

I'm not making this up (although they are).

I've had my Motorola Razr V3 for a couple of weeks now and have a better feel for its strong and weak points.

Weak Points:First, the volume of the ear piece is too soft. If I'm walking along the street, normal traffic noise drowns out everything coming from the phone. Speaking of volume, the feedback tone from pressing a key is also too soft.

Secondly, when outside, both the external and internal display screens are unreadable. Even with the backlight on, which shouldn't be required outside, all I see is a shiny black rectangle. Changing the brightness does not help. Not being able to read the screen is a *BIG* problem when trying to use the address book, check email/text messages, or just about anything that requires seeing the screen.

Thirdly, speaking of shiny screens, before I installed the Martin Fields Overlay Plus protective plastic film on the displays, they would attract fingerprints as if by magic. It is almost impossible to use the phone without leaving unsightly fingerprints all over the screens. Now that I have the overlays, they stay much cleaner. Not to mention they protect the displays from minor scratches.

Fourthly (is that a word? - ed.), the voice activation system, which allows you to save voice commands linked to phone numbers, is not all that great. You have to speak at a specific volume at a specific speed for it to recognize the command. Once you get it to work, it is a bit more convenient than trying to type in a phone number (especially when outside and you can't see what you are typing on the display) but it takes awhile for the processor to make the match and start dialing the number.

Fifthly, the images from the camera are not very sharp. Everything looks fuzzy, although the colors are true-to-life. On the other hand, I'm not sure what a camera is doing on a business class phone. But if they are going to have one, why not make it sharper?

Strong Points: It is very thin and easy to fit in just about any pocket. Thus, it is more convenient to take with me than any other phone I've owned.

The wide keypad is easier to use. It seems many companies have made phones so small that you need a stylus to press the keys. Is this progress? I don't think so. I need a phone that I can use. This one works for me.

The mini-USB port is a convenient and secure way to move data back and forth. While I could use the phone's Bluetooth capability, I find a USB cable is simpler (and probably more secure).

I've had no problems with dropped calls. I was afraid that switching to this phone would result in less reliable connections (which is what happened to my wife when she switched from a Motorola StarTac to a LG 3200). But so far, and I haven't exactly yet taken it to places like Waikiki where reception is bad, I've had no problems with reception.

I'll update things after I've used it more.

The Firefox vulnerability of the week appears to be a regression of something more than seven years old. According to the Register, Firefox 1.0.4 is vulnerable to a cross-site frame injection spoof that allows hackers to insert the contents of one window into another, while making it appear as if the content was from the original window.

So, for example, you could be on the password page to your online bank and hackers could insert HTML code that re-creates a screen that looks like the original but actually sends the information to Russia. Not a GoodThing(tm).

For now, the work around appears to be: "Do not browse untrusted web sites while browsing trusted sites." Not exactly specific advice but the bottom line seems to be don't open more than one site at a time.

Aloha!

The UK Royal Society's Biology Letters published a twins study that found a genetic link to women's ability to achieve an orgasm.

Abstract:

Orgasmic dysfunction in females is commonly reported in the general population with little consensus on its aetiology. We performed a classical twin study to explore whether there were observable genetic influences on female orgasmic dysfunction. Adult females from the TwinsUK register were sent a confidential survey including questions on sexual problems. Complete responses to the questions on orgasmic dysfunction were obtained from 4037 women consisting of 683 monozygotic and 714 dizygotic pairs of female twins aged between 19 and 83 years. One in three women (32%) reported never or infrequently achieving orgasm during intercourse, with a corresponding figure of 21% during masturbation. A significant genetic influence was seen with an estimated heritability for difficulty reaching orgasm during intercourse of 34% (95% confidence interval 27–40%) and 45% (95% confidence interval 38–52%) for orgasm during masturbation. These results show that the wide variation in orgasmic dysfunction in females has a genetic basis and cannot be attributed solely to cultural influences. These results should stimulate further research into the biological and perhaps evolutionary processes governing female sexual function.

Aloha!

I've talked before about ClamAV, the open source anti-virus software scanner. Being utterly and completely crazy an intrepid kind of guy, I decided to try the Windows version yesterday.

As you may remember, the Linux version appears to be a command line only utility. In porting to Windows, someone came up with a GUI version that allows you to run it as a Windows application.

Being a Windows application, the install went without problems. I then ran the program to scan my hard drive. What usually takes me no more than 20 minutes, using AVG anti-virus, took almost an hour using ClamAV. Once completed, it reported two worms in emails stored in the PopFile directory.

OK, no big deal because my spam filter, PopFile, makes a copy of emails to track common traits. AVG already has removed the virus itself but the copy PopFile makes appears as if it is infected.

Since it didn't matter to me if the copy was kept or not, I decided to have ClamAv put the file into quarantine and then I could delete the file there.

This was a bad decision in two ways. First, all the stored email in Thunderbird, my email client, which totaled several thousand emails, some several years old, was deleted. Secondly, the junk folder in Thunderbird was also deleted.

It is possible that the two events, running ClamAV and the deletion of the emails, were unrelated events. But I will say that you need to be careful if you decide to use ClamAV for Windows with Thunderbird.

Aloha!

If the politicians in Washington know nothing (which is probably true - ed.) else, they should know that the country is deeply divided over just about everything. Hence, before they go off pontificating about how they won the election and therefore they can do anything they want, they need to know that half the country will not follow. And if the country doesn't follow, everything they try is doomed to failure.

For example, support for what Washington is doing in Iraq is fading. The latest evidence of this is a Washington Post/ABC News poll that finds:

Nearly three-quarters of Americans say the number of casualties in Iraq is unacceptable, while two-thirds say the U.S. military there is bogged down and nearly six in 10 say the war was not worth fighting -- in all three cases matching or exceeding the highest levels of pessimism yet recorded.

Don't get me wrong, that doesn't mean US citizens don't support the military or the unfortunate citizens of Iraq and Afghanistan. One cannot view this photo of "Aussain Ali, an Iraqi policeman who was wounded in clashes between Iraqi police and gunmen in west Baghdad, Wednesday June 8, 2005 after gunmen attacked a police car. One police officer was killed and six injured" and not feel for the brave men and women trying to bring peace to their troubled land.

But a smart politician will lead wherever his or her constituents want to follow. Unfortunately, many politicians are extremist who don't care what their constituents want. Therein lies the tragedy that befalls us.

If you like free schwag (come on, be honest, I know you've ouuuued and ahhhed at MS seminars so you can get the free t-shirt), then for the cost of a stamp and self-addressed envelope, you can get three buttons and two stickers from Flickr. Unless you've been living in another universe for the last few months, Flickr is, according to them, the "best online photo management and sharing application in the world." I don't know if that is true but it is certainly the most well known.

In any case, if you want the schwag, send them the self-addressed envelope. If you want to help them decorate their walls, you may also want to include a nice postcard.

Sorry, no post today. Itś a state holiday (King Kamehameha Day) so I have the day off.

Have a Great Weekend, Everyone - Aloha!

Sorry, no post today. I'm working on finalizing a contract that needs to be done by the end of this fiscal year (June 30th). There are all kinds of hurdles that have to be cleared before I can do that. At this point, I'm not optimistic that it can be completed. But, I am doing my best.

Until that's done, things may be a bit sparse around here.

Aloha!

I had intended to do a post this morning about Hawai'i 15-year-old amateur golfer Michelle Wie and her second place finish this past weekend at the Ladies Professional Golfers Association Championship. Several female golfers have said Wie doesn't belong and shouldn't be playing in their tournaments.

Perhaps the reason why they say that is because they are afraid she will continue to beat them...

In any case, I have to run and work on the contract I talked about yesterday. Sometimes this job is like trying to herd cats across a raging river. Oh well, no rest for the weary.

Aloha!

Airplane! What is it? It's a form of transportation that flies through the air, but that's not important now. And don't call me Shirley. It's been 25 years since Jim Abrahams and the Zucker brothers brought to the screen one of the funniest movies, ever -- Airplane!

Although, perhaps you have to understand the times in which the movie placed itself to understand most of the jokes, it is still funny today.

Congratulations to all involved.

Aloha!

It just keeps getting better. Amateur golfer Michelle Wie tied for first place yesterday in the men's US Amateur Public Links sectional tournament in Pennsylvania. She thus qualified for a spot in national tournament where the winner goes on to the mens' Professional Golfer Association's Masters tournament.

Wie is the first female to be first in a sectional tournament and, of course, should she win the national amateur mens' public links tournament, she would be the first women, as far as I know, to play in the Masters.

But, that's a big step away and even Wie would be cautious in saying playing in the Masters is a dream that may be just out of reach. For now. Still, in her short 15 years, she has done more than most men people do in their lifetimes.

This article is a prime example of what I say many Republican politicians (and bloggers) do. Or don't do, as the case may be.

What they don't do is admit they are in error. Many US citizens, Democrats and Republicans, were concerned about the Terri Schiavo case. However, many politicians on the Republican side, apparently seeing this as a situation ripe for political posturing, passed federal legislation trying, essentially in my opinion, to coerce the courts into violating the Constitutions of Florida and the United States (insert disclaimer here).

Comes now the autopsy which finds massive, permanent brain damage. As many people know, the brain cannot regenerate itself. The brain cells you have is all that you will ever get. As they die, they are not replaced (barring stem cell research, another thing many Republicans seem to be against).

The autopsy also proved that Schiavo was totally blind (as opposed to legally blind, which is something else). Many true believers said a video tape showing Schiavo supposedly reacting to visual stimuli proved that she was not in a permanent vegetative state. But since she was blind, this belief is provably and objectively unsustainable.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying anything about the motives of Schiavo's husband. Nor am reducing the power of prayer or faith. I am, however, saying that the medical record indicates that Terri Schiavo was in fact severely brain damaged and, barring a miracle, was never going to get better.

Aloha!

I'm getting awfully burned out working on this contract. There are various requirements, some of which I have no influence over because they involve outside agencies.

As we come down to the last week before closing the fiscal books for the year, things will get even more stressful. This is my way of saying that there may not be updates for the next couple of days (or next week).

I'm still working on the contract that needs to be done by this Friday. The contract itself should arrive from the mainland today. But we can't sign the contract until we get the tax clearance from the federal Internal Revenue Service and the Hawaii Department of Taxation. I emailed the Hawai'i tax office last week Thursday, but have not received a reply.

This is coming down to the wire but, it seems, all I can do is wait.

Aloha!

High atop a windswept, extinct volcano on the island of Hawai'i are some of the better, if not the best, astronomical sites on Earth. The Mauna Kea Observatories include 13 telescopes run by eleven different countries, including the world's largest optical/infrared scope, the Keck Observatory.

Hence, it is not surprising that Mauna Kea was factored in to NASA's Deep Impact mission to comet Tempel 1. According to this article, NASA planned the impact of its probe so that telescopes on Mauna Kea would have the best view possible.

Assuming that the July 3rd mission goes as planned, the Hawaii observatories (and their sister observatories on the island of Mau'i) should have the first, and perhaps best views, of the experiment.

Although the courts dealt a blow to the supporters of the so called broadcast flag, it is Congress that always has the last trump. According to this EFF alert, an un-named Senator or Senators have inserted legislation into an unrelated appropriations bill reviving the broadcast flag.

If successful, as I understand it, the hardware and software to implement the digital rights management would block your VCR, TiVo, DVD recorder, home theater receiver, cell phone, personal video device, router, or PCs from transporting, displaying, or recording anything containing the flag without the permission of the provider.

If this legislation had been effect earlier, there would be no VCR, DVD, CD-ROM, TiVo, or any other device that could transport, display, or record anything containing the flag.

If it's not already too late, you may want to contact your Senator and ask him or her to vote to remove the broadcast flag amendment.

Aloha!

[Insert Disclaimer Here. I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice nor an offer of such. The door is a jar.]

One of the core values of the US Constitution is the right of citizens "to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures," It is enumerated in Article IV of the Bill of Rights.

But, as with most if not all rights, it is limited by other rights. In this case, the next Article of the Bill of Rights says "No person shall be...deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." [Emphasis added.]

The last part of Article V balances Article IV in that seizures, by the government, of private property can be legal if done for a public use and with just compensation. The exercise of such power is called eminent domain.

The key question in disputes between parties is usually what is a public use. Think about this hypothetical. A municipal government wants to buy several private properties so that a hotel, shopping mall, and office complex can be developed on them. This is part of a planned redevelopment effort with the intent of making the town more attractive to businesses and therefore generating more tax income. The city then condemns the land and pays the going rate for both the property and any homes on said properties. All of your neighbors agree to the offered prices and soon move away. For your part, you have lived in your home all your life and don't want to sell or move. The city goes to court to force you off your land and out of your home. Is this taking for a public purpose?

Expand, if you will, that hypothetical a little farther down the road. You are the owner of a hotel. You want to expand and create a much larger complex that would include not only a hotel, but an office building and shopping mall. But your neighbors are other hotel and small business owners and they do not wish to help you run them out of their businesses. So you go the the city government and get them to condemn the land and force the others to sell their businesses to you. Government has thus created a monopoly and the hotel owner can now raise rents to levels not possible when there was competition. Is this taking for a public purpose?

According to a ruling from the US Supreme Court today, the answer to both hypotheticals appears to be yes, they are. Previously, eminent domain was traditionally used to build public schools, public roads, or public parks. The key word being public. Now, eminent domain can be used for private purposes such as privately owned hotels, privately owned shopping malls, or privately owned office complexes.

I can't comment on these cases but it now appears government has an expansive right to seize your property for uses that lay, in my opinion, far from what what appears to be a public one.

Aloha!

15-year old amateur golfer Michelle Wie is at it again. After a rain delay, she finished the first round of the Women's US Open tied for first place (see a short article from Reuters). Obviously, you need to lead the last round if you want to win. But still, she is doing very well.

Speaking of Michelle, below is an advertisement I saw on the Internet. I don't think it's Michelle, because she is an amateur and might jeopardize her standing if she were paid for an advertisement. But my guess is that's who they were trying to imitate.

Have a Great Weekend, Everyone - Aloha!

I've pointed to mega-pixel images before but this site has 4,000 megapixel (i.e., 4 gigapixels) images. This translates to 88,000 X 44,000 pixels.

For those of you wondering who makes a digital camera with that kind of resolution, think again. They actually use a view camera with 9-inch by 18-inch film, then scan the film to digitize the image.

In looking at the images, the thing that strikes me is not the resolution, but the smoothness of the objects. It creates in some of the images an almost 3-D effect. No observable jaggies, banding, or other pixel noise is seen. This creates a smooth panorama that is next to being there.

Below is an image of the camera with the photographer next to it for scale.

Aloha!

The ability to create your own holograms has been around for years. But this kit here seems to be the easiest, if not the least costly, way to go.

For $139USD, you get everything you need (except an R2 Unit to transport the image to Old Ben) to make your own 3-D image. The kits comes with a laser, instant film, various accessories, and instructions.

The contract I was working on since the beginning of this month was completed last Friday. I don't know if I'll ever have to do that again but clearly, this kind of effort can be successful only if a lot of people are persuaded to work together.

I was lucky enough to have a team of people who made the contract a priority and helped move it forward in what must be record time. From beginning to end in three-and-a-half weeks is amazing when you consider it takes about that long just to get the tax clearance.

I can't name the people who helped out but I hope they know that I'm thankful for their assistance.

In other news, I am a brand new grandfather. My wife's daughter gave birth to an eight-pound baby boy. He is having some health problems but is getting stronger every day. It is hoped that he will come home from the hospital in about a week or so.

And finally, since I finished the contract and can now reformat my hard drive, I will do my twice annual hard drive deep cleaning. The deep cleaning is intended to get rid of the rubbish that Windows seems to collect over a period of time. As the registry gets bigger and bigger, my computer runs slower and slower (and gets less reliable).

That said, I do have to say Windows XP Pro is much more reliable than earlier versions and perhaps, once the next version comes out in a couple of years, I won't need to do these deep cleanings so often.

By the way, you Linux lovers out there shouldn't get too complacent because I have to do the same thing with whichever version of Linux I may have at the time. The installation and upgrading of applications, under Linux, is so inexact that it is a miracle that you can do any work with a Linux box. The sad thing is, I don't see it getting any better anytime soon because the world of Linux is still so balkanized and I don't see any solution (save one distribution taking control of the market).

Even if one distribution did take control, I don't know if that would be, on balance, better than what we have now. Linux is flourishing because, it seems to me, there are so many different versions that you can find a distribution that suits what you need to do best rather than having to settle for what you get.

If only the different distributions could settle on a core set of directory structures and utilities such that application developers could stop worrying about the differences. If this were to occur, Linux would be set to really take off because installing and upgrading applications would become trivial.

However, as I've speculated before, I don't think this will happen anytime soon (although there have been efforts to do this) because the distributors don't see any advantage to themselves to do so. As long as they think they can lock people into their own distribution by being different, they will continue to do so.

In any case, I'll probably wait until the end of the week to wipe the drive just in case anything should come up. So don't expect any updates on Friday. Monday is a national holiday (Independence Day) so there won't be any post on that day nor probably Tuesday, as it usually takes me two business days to get everything reloaded and back to how I like it.

Aloha!

We have enough real problems and real enemies in the world that we don't need to make some up. But the Washington Post has an article on the new McCarthyism. I've talked about this before but it is helpful to summarize what President Bush's White House senior political advisor Karl Rove does.

It comes down to this kind of question that Rove, and neo-McCarthyites like him, like to use: Will or will not Karl Christian Rove stop having sex with furry farm animals? Yes or no? Will he or won't he? There is no gray area. Either he will or he won't. Answer the question. The American people have a right to know. Will he stop having sex with furry farm animals? Michelle Malkin is all over this story.

Obviously, this presupposes he is having sex with furry farm animals. If he isn't, and I have no evidence to believe he is, trying to answer such a question is a no win situation. That's why he and others of his ilk like to use such tactics. It immediately puts the target on the defensive.

From there, you then segue to asking: When are you going to stop being a socialist/communist/liberal/Jewish/black/Hispanic/insert your choice here? Don't you realize that the events of September 11th changed everything? How can you be socialist/communist/liberal/Jewish/black/Hispanic/insert your choice here after the 9/11 murders caused by the Iraqi terrorists Saudi Arabian terrorists and their weapons of mass destruction our airplanes?

During his time, US Senator Joseph McCarthy really asked these types of crude questions. But the dirty secret was that it worked. People were afraid of the power that he grew to have. Until, that is, enough patriots stood up to the playground bully. Once it became clear that the accusations were false, the accuser had no power to hold the stage and left in disgrace.

When will that happen to the neo-McCarthyites I don't know. But it can't come too soon.

Aloha!

A Daytona Beach, Florida woman won a court case in which a judge found it legal for her to go topless during a political protest.

It seems there is a local law that exempts nudity as part of a political protest. Hence, when she went topless, as part of a protest, she was within her rights to do so. I say, down with tops! Full speed ahead.

In other news, backless panties are back in the spotlight. Tired of showing your thong straps when wearing your low cut jeans? Tired of the label from your high cut panties showing everyone what size underwear you wear? Well then, wear backless panties instead and everyone will think nothing comes between you and your Calvins.

Aloha!