Dan Seto j20000317

Week of 13 March through 17 March 2000
Last Week 牋 Mon 牋 Tues 牋 Wed 牋 Thurs 牋 Fri 牋 Next Week
Home牋牋 Diary Index牋牋 Search
Email Dan牋牋
Jump to Last Update: Friday 12:00 noon HST

It's Monday. Need I say more? The topic for the weekend, among DBC (Daynoters Back Channel), was search engines. Dr. Keyboard has graciously volunteered to search for one that can index all of our sites. Good show. And thanks in advance.

Kaulana e ka holo a Hokule'a. The Polynesian sailing canoe Hokule'a returned home yesterday after sailing back from Rapa Nui (Easter Island). This after sailing 9,000 miles (14,481 km) over eight months without the aid of modern navigational instruments. As you may remember from before, the Hokule'a sails using sea signs - winds, stars, and waves. The story from the Honolulu Advertiser is here (note that the link changes at the end of the day). Oh. The Hawai'ian phrase above means; "Famous are the voyages of Hokule'a."

Gas Prices Rise. Gasoline prices soared a record 12 cents a gallon in the past two weeks. This brings the national average to $1.59/gallon USD (4.546 litres). Unfortunately, it has now become a political issue with Governor George W. Bush saying that if he were President, he would help things by temporarily suspending a 4 cent/gallon federal tax. Energy Secretary Bill Richardson responded by saying this would not help since the problem is a demand greater than the supply, not taxes that are too high.

That Sinking Feeling. The Long Beach, California based Sea Launch program suffered a major loss yesterday when a Russian-Ukrainian rocket carrying a British communications (ICO Global Communications) satellite apparently crashed into the sea after lift-off from a platform in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The platform, a converted ocean-going oil drilling rig was towed from Long Beach to the equator southeast of Hawai'i. This was the third launch of the fledgling Boeing led venture. The first was a test launch a year ago and the second was a Direct TV satellite in October. The cause of the failure is under investigation.

Fiolet. Or perhaps Chevroiat. Italian automaker Fiat is reportedly on the verge of striking a partnership with General Motors. The Financial Times of London is reporting that GM will acquire 20 percent of Fiat and in turn Fiat gets 5 percent of GM in a stock swap valued at about $2.4 billion USD.

Feeling the Need for Greed? Washington Post Columnist Joel Achenbach may be shouting into the wind when he cautions people that hi-tech stocks should be as carefully vetted as any other stock. For too long people have been looking for get rich quick schemes when, in the long run, this is fundamentally unsound. Whatever happened to making your money the old fashioned way (Earning it)? See his column here.

Palm V Goes to Sea. Things sure get complicated when you involve the military. The US Navy is buying 2,000 Palm Vs. So what you say? Well, first of all, these are the same Palm Vs you and I can buy, and so they aren't waterproof. Secondly, they aren't hardened against electro-magnetic interference (like the kind from a giga-watt radar system revolving just above your head). And finally, there isn't much if any security built in to your standard Palm V (imagine having fleet plans loaded into one). So now you know one of the reasons why the military doesn't usually buy civilian grade systems (although they sure are saving tax-payers some money). And while I do appreciate the money savings, perhaps this is a case where the Navy should look at some alternatives (even if they cost three times as much). The story is here.

Cute FTP 3.0, GetRight, etc. Alert. Readers of Dr. Pournelle's site (see the mail from Robin Juhl) are already aware of this so feel free to skip this one. But there are certain Internet programs such as Cute FTP 3.0 (among hundreds of others) which install a "stealth" program from Aureate Media Corporation (see the full list here). This stealth program does the following according to Steve Gibson (yes, that Steve Gibson. See the story here):

NO indication was provided that the Aureate system was being installed.
The Aureate system communicates in complete secrecy.
The Aureate system establishes a "server" on the user's machine then solicits connections from foreign advertising servers.
The Aureate system is running even when its hosting program is not.
The Aureate system survives the removal of its hosting program.
And even then it continues to operate secretly in the background

While Steve is doing his best not to get people overly excited about this, alarms bells sure went off at the Seto Shack when I read this one! Based on several recommendations from others over the past year, I installed GetRight. Little did I know I was installing what I would call a kind of Trojan Horse program (OK, perhaps this is too strong a term). But if it quacks like a duck, etc. etc. etc.

In a way, perhaps it was a Good Thing that I had to reformat my drive recently. At least that's one way of getting rid of such programs. In either case, do read Steve's take on this and then you decide.

Gigabyte Shmigabyte. When is an 8-gig drive, 13 gigs? When Western Digital resells 100,000 8-gig drives it recalled last fall to repair a faulty chip. WD apparently repaired the drives, relabeled them as 13-gigs, and re-sold them. At this time, there is no indication that the relabeling was done intentionally to mislead. On the other hand, if you bought a 13-gig WD drive recently I would double check the capacity if I were you. See the story here from PC Week's Spencer F. Katt (it's towards the bottom).

No Joy. Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, Inc., is sounding an alarm that the day is rapidly coming in which sentient robot technology could lead to the extinction of humankind. Sounds like something out of Science Fiction. See his Wired article here.

Denial is Not a River in Egypt. For our local readers, we went to a members preview of the new "Mystery of the Nile: Treasures from Ancient Egypt" exhibition, opening on the 16th, at the Honolulu Academy of Arts (follow the link here). The exhibition, organized by the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and the Dallas Museum of Art includes approximately 150 artifacts ranging from small figurines to wall-sized friezes. The exhibition runs through July 20. Recommended.

Nice to Meet You. If you haven't taken a gander at the Daynotes "Meet the Gang" page (see it here) lately, you might want to do so. Shawn updated the biographies for those who sent in their responses. He also added links to their PGP keys. Great job Shawn (and Tom). And mahalo from me and the gang. It's much appreciated.

Bass Ackwards. Anyone noticed that Dr. Keyboard's picture of Chateau Keyboard was flipped recently? Originally, it had Daisy on the lower left-hand corner. Now she is on the right (unless you click on the image and view the full screen version). One wonders if Daisy has shifted her political leanings towards the Tories? [Tory n. and adj. Originally = Irish outlaw: probably Irish toraidhe from their tóir 'pursue'] Just wondering.

Et tu Brute? The latest rumor has Alec "Hunt for Red October" Baldwin vying for the Col. James H. "Jimmy" Doolittle role in the upcoming movie "Pearl Harbor." The movie will start filming next month with a budget of $135 million. As you may remember, Doolittle led the raid on Tokyo, just four months after the bombing of Pearl. While very little damage of strategic value was done, the raid provided a much needed psychological boost to the American public in the early, dark days of the war.

Zounds! I've been unmasked! The following is from Daynoter Phil Hough regarding Dr. Keyboard's dastardly plan to cause the ozone layer to disappear and to make us love the A-bomb. What? Oh. Ummm. Yes, Doctor Strangelove, I've been taking my medications just like you said to. Really. [NOT! Does he think I am some sort of fool!] But I digress. <G>

Mail at itool.com has been intermittent today. Sorry if mail from or to you gets jammed up. The dog ate Matt's mail server.

Act I. Last night was the first of the events referred to as acts of civil disobedience. The event took the form of a sleep-in at the University of Hawai'i Manoa campus. However, rather than being based solely on the Rice v. Cayetano US Supreme Court ruling against the Office of Hawai'ian Affairs, this event included increased tuition at the University and the proposed development of lands used for astronomy atop Mauna Kea crater (home of 13 telescopes).

As far as the turn-out. About 200 people were there for the rally. But by 10:00pm, the numbers dropped to about 100. As of 6:00am this morning, only about 25 were still there.

Power4 to the People. PCWeek is reporting (see the story here) that IBM has working prototypes of a 2GHz processor called Power4. Unfortunately, for desktop jockeys, it's targeted at the server market. Specifically, the RS/6000 and AS/400. It will actually have two processors within each package and will execute 64-bit instructions. It is slated for release next year.

Dogs and Ponies. I've got an 8:30am presentation to go to on court schedule management software so I'm out'ta here. See you at the noon break if anything interesting pops up.

Show Time. OK, back from the show and tell. Currently, our courts keep most case management information (scheduling and case related information) in a fragmented and labor intensive manner. Often, identical information is entered into different databases multiple times. Hence, we are looking for an integrated case management system with an integrated database so that info is entered only once.

This morning, a Kentucky based company called SCT gave us a presentation on their software offerings that they say may help solve our problems [insert Disclaimer here and remember that no endorsement by me/us is being made or implied].

As is the case with most companies, they have various modules that can be mixed and matched, depending on the court's needs. But the base module is called "SCT Courts." It is Oracle based and runs on WindowsNT. The price? An average configuration for a state our size would be between three to five million USD.

Act I, Scene II. Bowing to overwhelming opposition, the University of Hawai'i Regents voted yesterday to reject a proposed tuition hike of 3%. While this increase was not large, it came on the heels of prior increases which nearly doubled the tuition costs for students. Unfortunately, if there isn't an increase in tuition, there will be a cut in services to make-up the difference. Something the students won't like either.

Sumo. Yokuzuna (grand champion) Wakanohana shocked the sumo wrestling world by announcing his retirement yesterday due to "declining fighting spirits." Hmmm. Burned out at age 29. Wakanohana began wrestling in 1988 rising to the top rank of Yokuzuna 10 years later. He ended his career with a 61 and 37 record.

Another meeting this morning to get ready for so this will be a short one. See you at the noon break.

Give them Credit. Rumors of hackers breaking into supposedly secure sites and stealing credit card information have been circulating for some time. And in fact, one of my old ISPs, GST.com had a server stolen which contained the credit information for probably hundreds if not thousands of users (they notified my bank, which then issued me a new card).

Well, MSNBC (see the story here) is reporting the theft of the data on 485,000 credit cards. The theft apparently occured more than a year ago and was discovered only because the hacker stored the data on an US government server. The sysadmin of the server noticed a large segment of resouces being used for no reseason that they knew of. So by auditing what was being used by whom, they discovered the files. Ain't life grand?

Misc. Ramblings