Misc. Ramblings

In its April 1st issue, the respected American Scientific magazine editorializes by admitting that they were wrong on "creationism, missile defense and global warming."

In retrospect, this mag-azine's coverage of so-called evolution has been hideously one-sided. For decades, we published articles in every issue that endorsed the ideas of Charles Darwin and his cronies. True, the theory of common descent through natural selection has been called the unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time, but that was no excuse to be fanatics about it. Where were the answering articles presenting the powerful case for scientific creationism? Why were we so unwilling to suggest that dinosaurs lived 6,000 years ago or that a cataclysmic flood carved the Grand Canyon? Blame the scientists. They dazzled us with their fancy fossils, their radiocarbon dating and their tens of thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles. As editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence....

Good journalism values balance above all else. We owe it to our readers to present everybody's ideas equally and not to ignore or discredit theories simply because they lack scientifically credible arguments or facts. Nor should we succumb to the easy mistake of thinking that scientists understand their fields better than, say, U.S. senators or best-selling novelists do. Indeed, if politicians or special-interest groups say things that seem untrue or misleading, our duty as journalists is to quote them without comment or contradiction. To do otherwise would be elitist and therefore wrong. In that spirit, we will end the practice of expressing our own views in this space: an editorial page is no place for opinions.

Having read that, I too must confess that I've been wrong. After long discounting the right-wing wackos deeply conservative who are against everything from fluoridation of drinking water (which they recently persuaded the local county council to make it illegal to fluoridate water in the city of Honolulu) to death with dignity (not to be confused with sticking electrodes into prisoners and running 120volts through them until their brains and internal organs fry), I must admit I was wrong.

How could I have been so fooled by human-based science? Doesn't faith-based science explain everything? Who needs scientifically controlled studies? Doesn't the universe revolve around the Earth?

Doesn't faith-based education teach everything anyone should know? Who needs pedagogic theory?

Why shouldn't the President use faith-based criteria to determine how to spend billions of tax payer dollars?

Doesn't faith-based medicine heal all (who needs doctors, hospitals, and medicine anyway)?

And finally, recent events suggest the need for a faith-based judicial system. Surely that would better than an independent judiciary, right? Who needs the Constitution and the rule of law when you can proudly carry the Bible into the courtroom and rule directly and solely from that?

Yup, how could I have been so wrong? I guess you just have to believe and ignore reality.

Have a Great Weekend, Everyone - Aloha!

My wife's PC is overheating. Again. Sigh. I've done everything except switch to water cooling but the CPU in her PC began overheating over this past weekend. Maybe because the weather is starting to warm up. Or maybe because the motherboard is controlling fan speed and it doesn't react fast enough to load changes. I dunno.

The only thing I can think of is to install the included fan controller ( Fan Mate2) and manually set the fan speed to stay at maximum, regardless of the load, while ignoring the increased noise that will result. Big Sigh.

Aloha!

The MosNews.com site has an article about a man who may have saved the world. According to the report, on September 26, 1983, Lieutenant Colonel Petrov was in charge (a Lt. Colonel, in charge?) of the Soviet Ballistic Missile Early Warning System. He was the man who was responsible for pressing the button that would launch the Soviet missiles in retaliation to a US first strike.

At about half-past midnight, Lt. Colonel Petrov's monitoring systems indicated that the US had in fact launched a single missile towards the USSR. A few seconds later, two, then three, four, and finally five in bound missiles were supposedly detected.

Petrov was dumb founded. None of the launch scenarios he had been trained for covered this contingency. Why launch only five when the US had thousands of missiles? What to do? He had but minutes to decide whether to irrevocably launch the Soviet Union's missiles against the US.

Fortunately, for everyone, he had the courage to make the decision that this was a false alarm. Which indeed it was. A "bug" in the warning system had created the false report.

Now, I don't know if Petrov knew before hand the system was riddled with problems but, in any case, having a human being in the loop is what may have saved mankind from a nuclear winter.

Aloha!

Sergeant First Class Paul R. Smith United States Army

Spouse: Birgit Smith
Children: David A. Smith, Jessica M. Smith
Parents: Donald and Janice Pvirre
Hometown: Tampa, Florida Graduated Tampa Bay Technical High School

Enlisted: October 1989 Completed Basic and Advanced Individual Training at Ft. Leonard Wood, MO

Assignments: 82nd Engineer Battalion (Bamberg, Germany), 1st Engineer Battalion (Fort Riley, Kansas), 317th Engineer Battalion (Fort Benning, Georgia), 9th Engineer Battalion (Schweinfurt, Germany), 11th Engineer Battalion (Fort Stewart, Georgia)

Deployments: Persian Gulf War, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Operation Iraqi Freedom

For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty:

Sergeant First Class Paul R. Smith distinguished himself by acts of gallantry and intrepidity above and beyond the call of duty in action with an armed enemy near Baghdad International Airport, Baghdad, Iraq on 4 April 2003. On that day, Sergeant First Class Smith was engaged in the construction of a prisoner of war holding area when his Task Force was violently attacked by a company-sized enemy force. Realizing the vulnerability of over 100 fellow soldiers, Sergeant First Class Smith quickly organized a hasty defense consisting of two platoons of soldiers, one Bradley Fighting Vehicle and three armored personnel carriers. As the fight developed, Sergeant First Class Smith braved hostile enemy fire to personally engage the enemy with hand grenades and anti-tank weapons, and organized the evacuation of three wounded soldiers from an armored personnel carrier struck by a rocket propelled grenade and a 60mm mortar round. Fearing the enemy would overrun their defenses, Sergeant First Class Smith moved under withering enemy fire to man a .50 caliber machine gun mounted on a damaged armored personnel carrier. In total disregard for his own life, he maintained his exposed position in order to engage the attacking enemy force. During this action, he was mortally wounded. His courageous actions helped defeat the enemy attack, and resulted in as many as 50 enemy soldiers killed, while allowing the safe withdrawal of numerous wounded soldiers. Sergeant First Class Smith’s extraordinary heroism and uncommon valor are in keeping with the highest traditions of the military service and reflect great credit upon himself, the Third Infantry Division “Rock of the Marne,” and the United States Army.

Aloha!

The 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning was awarded to Nick Anderson of the Louisville, Kentucky Courier-Journal . Here is a collection of his work. Below are a couple that I especially like:

Aloha!

Sorry, I have a meeting first thing this morning that I have to prepare for so I gotta go.

Have a Great Weekend, Everyone - Aloha!

Some students over at Purdue University, with way too much time on their hands, three-peated by winning the Rube Goldberg Machine Contest. The contraption, in 125 steps, removed the batteries from a flashlight, replaced them with new ones, and turned the flashlight on. There is a link on their page to a 3.4MB QuickTime(r) 61-second video of the machine in action. Unfortunately, the video doesn't do a very good job of following the action so you may want to forgo the download.

Speaking of Rube Goldberg, this story from Wisconsin chronicles the sad tale of one Tim Bender. It seems Tim was cleaning up the garage in preparation for moving to another house. While doing so, he accidentally knocked over a can of spray paint. Said can landed square on a hammer. Said hammer punctured the can, which sprayed paint into the air. Said paint fumes spread to the gas fired water heater. Said water heater had a pilot light. Said light ignite the paint fumes. Said fire burned the apartment and most of the contents. Rube would be proud, even if Tim isn't.

Speaking of things that may not be wise, check out the Hoverwing. For a mere $8,000 you too can go hovering across the lake at break-neck speeds.

And then. There's this...

Aloha!

Some people, full of hate and anger, seem to only see what they want to see. [insert disclaimer here]

As the US slowly moves toward ultra-conservatism, and the totalitarian state that would logically result, some are trying to get people to see the danger. Some are trying to get us to pull back from the abyss that lies inches from our feet.

I don't know Arthur Silber. As far as I can remember I've never visited his site nor read anything he has written. But he has a short post entitled "Towards a Stalinist Theocracy, Advocating Murder, and Hell Draws Closer." It documents the thoughts of certain people on the right who seem to be calling for changes to the courts that would destroy our system of Constitutional checks and balances and the republic it protects.

These checks and balances were put in place by the forefathers to make government inefficient. They were willing to make this tradeoff, it can be argued, because they lived under totalitarian rule and knew the feeling of government's boot pressing down on their throats. So, they were willing to trade a little efficiency for a lot of freedom.

What is so strange to me is that the US Congress already holds the final trump over the Executive and Judicial branches because it is only Congress (and state constitutional conventions) that can create, amend, or destroy the Constitution. It is only Congress that creates the very laws Congress now seems to want the Judiciary to ignore.

Talk about wanting activist judges! These conservatives seem to want sycophants who will do their bidding, regardless of the rule of law. Forget about separate, but equal. They want servants who will do their dirty, political work. Heck, forget about interpreting the law, many of these people don't even want the Judiciary to hear many types of cases. In the end, the Congress seems intent on breaking down the separation of powers so that it alone is the final arbiter of the law.

It is not without reason that federal judges are appointed for life. While, in the past, I have wondered whether that was a Good Thing, I now see the wisdom of the forefathers. They saw the passions that swayed the minds of men. They saw the irrational fears, anger, and yes, hate that filled men's souls. Emotions so strong that ideas so contrary to freedom and democracy could not only take hold, but spread like a wild fire across the parched prairie. A fire that consumes like the fires of Hell.

We make our own destinies. Nothing is set in stone. You can choose freedom or you can choose Hell. Choose wisely.

Aloha!

It's no secret that the lifestyle of the average US citizen is being financed by foreign banks (see especially "Ownership of Federal Securities", 8MB Word document, Table OFS-2, column 11). The trade deficit, the difference between what we buy from other countries versus what we sell hit a record in February of $61 billion. As the US government, that is you and I, runs up a deficit for this year alone of $477 billion, a 10-year cumulative deficit projected to be $2.4 trillion dollars, and the current total debt of $7.8 trillion, this article says Asian markets are becoming afraid.

The problem is, if the foreign banks (mainly China and Japan) panic and start dumping dollars, the impact on the economy of their biggest customer (i.e., the US) would be negatively affected. If that happens, their customers won't be able to buy the stuff they sell.

So, strange at it may seem, the Asians are in a bind. They can't keep funding record US borrowing forever. But if they cut off funding too abruptly, Bad Things happen. So they must walk a narrow path wherein they gradually reduce their buying of US debt (in various forms such as US Treasury securities) while not reducing it too quickly.

But whatever the Asians do, there will be an impact on the US economy. Interest rates will go up. It is inevitable in an economy dominated by debt and a Republican dominated Congress intent only on spending as much as they can, as quickly as they can, that the cost will eventually have to be paid. That time may be now.

Aloha!

While no security solution is perfect, we need something better than just passwords. First it was ChoicePoint. Now it's LexisNexis. PCWorld has a story saying that the identifying data of about 300,000 people may have been stolen from the data company. While LexisNexis is spinning the story by saying the first 2,800 people contacted have not yet noticed any illegal activity, it is just a matter of time. I can imagine someone burning copies of CDs with the stolen data on it and selling it to crime syndicates around the world.

Identity theft will now be, if it isn't already, the biggest growth industry in crime. Close to half a million people may have had their personal information stolen. And that's just from two companies that reluctantly admitted the break ins. How many other companies, big and small, have had their security breached and financial data stolen? How many millions of people are even now at risk?

Data brokers and financial institutions make it entirely too easy to create and access accounts. Most use only passwords to identify their customers. How insecure is that? Many European banks have long since switched to more secure ways by using things like digital signatures, two-factor authentication, or other means to identify their customers.

Why aren't US businesses more concerned about security?

There are many books and movies based on the premise commonly referred to as a "fish out of water." That is, you take a person of one culture/race/age/gender and place them in a different culture/race/age/gender. You then step back and watch the hilarity ensue as each learns about the other.

This web page chronicles the travails of an American in Japan. In this case, a Black-American teaching English to Japanese students in what we call junior high school (children around the age of 10 to 12 years old). We see, through his humorous writings, a culture, at times, very different from ours.

Now, the Japanese culture has been around for a long time. Over that time, it has evolved into being a very complex, and to a certain extent, caste oriented system. One of the ways of describing a complex system is to note it's paradoxes. These tend to illustrate not only the tension within any system, but also the range of behaviors exhibited within that system.

This American teacher, using the lens of his own culture to examine his surroundings finds startling, and many times humorous, insights. I can't quote anything here because he has copyrighted his site (Bad JuJu) but believe me when I say you will probably want more after reading everything there.

Warning: There is strong language in his writings. If that offends you, do not go there.

Aloha!

There be wholphins aplenty at Sea Life Park on the island of O'ahu, Hawaii. The cross between a whale and dolphin, while rare, is not unknown. The mother of the new wholphin is herself a wholphin. Mother and calf both seem to be doing fine. Read more here from the Honolulu Advertiser.

Happy Tax Day and Have a Great Weekend, Everyone - Aloha!

Mr. Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds, is saying that President Bush is a champion of democracy in the Middle East, and has been for years.

Before I go any farther, I want to state that I have no ill will against Mr. Reynolds. He has the right to his opinions and nothing I say here should be construed to mean I don't have anything but respect for what he says.

That said, I wonder how it is a GoodThing to champion democracy now, but when former President Jimmy Carter talked about it, neocon Jeane Kirkpatrick, writing in the neocon magazine Commentary, and as quoted in a Washington Post column by Michael Kinsley, mocked:

"the belief that it is possible to democratize governments anytime, anywhere, under any circumstances." Democracy, she said, depends "on complex social, cultural, and economic conditions." It takes "decades, if not centuries."

Kirkpatrick attacked President Carter for trying to "impose liberalization and democratization" on other countries. Hmmm, talk about historical revisionism!

I'll let you decide who is revising what.

Aloha!

Some of you may have noticed that the Daynotes.org site went away last week. It seems the Registrar did not notify the domain owner that the registration was about to lapse, so the registration did lapse. The Daynotes Gang decided it wasn't worth the cost and trouble to get the domain back (the registrar wanted $75!) and have therefore decided to just go let it go and stay with the Daynotes.com and Daynotes.net sites. Your understanding in this matter is appreciated.

There's yet another Mozilla Firefox security update. The security changes for version 1.0.3 include one of those dreaded arbitrary code execution things so please get the update as soon as possible. The install instructions vary by the version you have so read it first before installing.

MovableType (MT) announced version 3.16 yesterday. There are over 100 bug fixes, including several security patches. MT is recommending that you install this new version as soon as possible.

Even though it doesn't require it, I may do a clean install so that I can get rid of all the cruft that builds up over time. If I do, the default template may get over written and therefore things may look a bit different. If it does, you'll know why.

You may also be interested to know that I'm again looking for new blogger software. One reason to switch is that running MT, and most other solutions, require that I have access to to CGI/Perl. My current host, pair.com, charges extra for such access.

Hence, I've been fooling around with Blogger because the database runs entirely on their own server while the static output can be displayed either on their server or on seto.org. This bypasses the need to have CGI/Perl access on my host site and thus could save me $144 per year.

Even cheaper yet is if my ISP, Time Warner Verizon (not to be confused with my host), allowed hosting of servers from the home. If they allowed that, I could just setup my own web and mail servers and be done with it. But since they don't, I can't (legally, anyway).

If anyone has suggestions on software that can run on, for example, a free service or even my desktop PC (Windows or Linux) while publishing to my host server, I'd like to hear from them. Thanks in advance.

Aloha!

The Inquirer website is saying AMD will launch not only their new dual core Opterons (Is it just me, or does the name sound like something Captain Scarlet should be concerned about? -ed. /digress) tomorrow, but also dual core Athlons as well. The desktop chips (there are four of them), called the Athlon 64 X2 series, will supposedly fit existing Athlon 64 compatible motherboards. However, you will need a BIOS update to get them to work. No word yet on prices (or how they will keep these things from burning the paint off of your modded PC case).

Aloha!

As you can see, things look a little different around here. I'm not done changing the CSS but it won't look much different from what you see now so if you see something you really don't like, let me know.

Today marks the 35th anniversary of the near fatal explosion on NASA's Apollo 13 mission to the moon. At the same time it was NASA's worst and finest moments. The story behind the story is that Apollo 13 made it home, due in large part, to a simulation done a year before the explosion for Apollo 10.

As part of training, the flight teams go through various scenarios. Each scenario is carefully scripted and is intended to prepare everyone for possible problems. The fear is that if you come across something you haven't prepared for, you may perish because you don't have the time or you do something that irreversibly leads to your death.

Such was the case in a simulation for Apollo 10 much like what eventually happened. A flight simulation in which the fuel cells failed, at about the same point in the mission as actually occurred, resulted in the simulated deaths of the astronauts because they didn't have procedures required to power the various systems (and didn't have the time to come up with them in real time before running out of oxygen).

However, even though the simulation indicated developing such procedures were critical to the crews survival, NASA decided the possibility of losing the fuel cells was unrealistic and therefore did not order such procedures to be developed.

Fortunately, for the Apollo 13 crew, James Hannigan, the Lunar Module branch chief felt otherwise. He ordered his deputy, Donald Puddy, to form a team to come up with a set of procedures that would work. Just in case. Critical to the procedure, that the team came up with was the idea of reversing the power flow, via umbilical cables, from the Lunar Module back into the Command Module to provide the current required to re-start all the systems.

It is doubtful that the crew would have survived the actual emergency had not these procedures been developed before hand and solutions found for problems that just could not be solved in real time.

You can read the fascinating account of human systems dealing with mechanical and electrical systems from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers article, here. It was indeed, their finest hour.

Did you ever wonder why some articles in the press didn't make any sense? Perhaps it was because a public relations (PR) firm wrote it and was trying to spin the story to their customer's advantage. This guy writes a short, interesting post on what PR firms do and why.

It's fascinating how PR firms sometimes plant stories by getting unwitting reporters to do their bidding (Move along, these aren't the droids you're looking for - ed.). Especially interesting is how you plant one idea, get it into the media, and then point to the idea as confirmation of what you are saying.

Terrific stuff. Anyone who thinks critically should arm themselves with the tools provided by this posting because one thing is sure - these people aren't stupid and they will come up with new ways of fooling people.

Speaking of critical thinking, this post is a humorous look at PR speak. It translates what Adobe is really saying regarding the merger with Macromedia. Dude! Good job.

Have a Great Weekend, Everyone - Aloha!

The web site "GoUpstate.com" has a New York Times article that says seven months after the so called assault weapons ban was repealed, there hasn't been any increase in crime related to assault weapons.

I think most people realize criminals carry pistols, not rifles (assault or otherwise). Pistols are easier to conceal, cheaper, and work better in close quarters. Hence, banning assault rifles doesn't do much. For that matter, passing a law against pistols might not be effective either. But that's a debate for another day.

Aloha!

There is a firestorm brewing over two tech reviewers who may have been on the payroll of the companies whose products they reviewed. The Washington Post has a story revealing the connections of Corey Greenberg and James Oppenheim to various companies such as Apple, Sony, Hewlett-Packard, Seiko Epson, Creative Technology, Energizer Holdings, Microsoft, Radio Shack, Atari, Mattel, LeapFrog Enterprises and Kodak. Each apparently charged the companies between $12,500 and $15,000 each to speak favorably about their products.

Public trust is a very fragile thing. It is difficult to create but very easy to lose. What's more, we need to be able to trust our institutions because if we can't trust anyone, society falls apart. That is, we literally become hermits hiding in our houses, fearful and untrustful of everyone and everything.

Hence, when that trust is broken, those responsible need to be held accountable.

Opera 8.0 went gold last week. There are two versions, the free ad-supported version or the pay version ($39US). Within these categories, there are versions for Windows, Mac, Linux (including Xandros), PDAs, and mobile devices.

I'm trying the Linux version and find it substantially faster than Firefox (YMMV). You may also be interested in this comparison between IE 6.0, Firefox 1.0, and Opera 8 that finds Opera is the most standards compliant. Thanks to 18-year old student David Hammond for his work on the comparison.

Speaking of Aussies (and Kiwis, too), the photo below was taken yesterday at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific inside Punchbowl Crater in Honolulu. Members of the U.S. Marine color guard stand at attention as an Australian flag waves during Anzac Day ceremonies. Anzac Day commemorates Australian and New Zealand soldiers who have died in wars.

Aloha!

It's the 15th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope so you know where my wallpaper for the week is coming from.

But to echo Aussie Don Armstrong's comments earlier about NASA and where it is going (or not going), how is it we can't find some money to keep the Hubble Space Telescope up there and creating science that is difficult, if not impossible, to do any other way?

What are our priorities? Why do we spend billions a year fighting wars but can't find the money to fund the only large, space-based telescope there is? Sigh.

A soda pop can, a candy bar, and the sun. Supposedly, that's all you need to start a fire by using this technique here. Essentially you use the chocolate to polish the concave bottom of the pop can. Once you have a polished surface, you can then use it to focus the sun on tinder. Said tinder is then used to start a fire. Note to all hikers, take a lighter and a cell phone, too.

According to this article from ZDNet, the next version of Windows will include their own spyware. It seems the new version of the Watson error reporting tool will collect much more information than it currently does.

For example, when your systems crashes, while using Outlook to email that new job prospect you haven't told your boss about, the contents of said email would go not only to Redmond, but possibly also your boss. Or when that replay of Sunday's amazing putt by golfer Tiger Woods crashes MediaPlayer 10, the URL would make its way to your IT administrator.

But, you say, you shouldn't be doing such things anyway. Yes, you are right. You shouldn't. And only bad guys should fear the black helicopters, or the FBI breaking down your door in the middle of night, or the police beating you to a pulp because you are a minority. None of those abuses of power would occur. Right? This is all for our own good. Right?

Aloha!

The administrator of a Kaua'i public school was sentenced to jail yesterday for viciously beating her adopted son. She pled guilty to two counts of felony assault. According to one report, she tied up her son, making sure to wrap the rope around his neck, then beat him with a baseball bat.

She will apparently keep her job as principal of the public school as if nothing has happened. As if she can do her job from jail. As if beating a child, her child, counts for nothing. At least, it doesn't appear so at this particular school because the school's board fully supports her and will not fire her. Even though she will be in jail, as a convicted felon child beater.

Here's the rest of the story. These charter schools are an experiment in local control. Each school is run by a local board. For good or evil, the boards have the power to, among other things, hire and fire and set their own budget priorities. The schools are free of all "statutory and regulatory requirements that tend to inhibit of restrict a school's ability to make decisions relating to the provision of educational services to the students attending the school". They are free of "bureaucratic red tape and accommodating of the individual needs of students to allow the State to dramatically improve its educational standards for the twenty-first century".

This is done, they say, because it focuses accountability directly onto a local group, rather than some faceless administrator on another island, thus releasing the innovative energies of the community.

So what message are we sending when a local board fails to hold their own administrator accountable? What remedy do the people of this child's district have when the problem is holding the local board accountable?

In at least this case, the answer appears to be nothing.

So if there weren't any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and if, according to this report no such weapons were secreted out to Syria, or anywhere else, tell me again why we went into Iraq? What? Oh, right. Freedom in our time. Whatever.

As part of our home security system, I recently added a Hawking Tech HNC300 network camera. This camera, that costs about $100, has its own web server built in. This allows you, with the correct setup, to access your camera from anywhere on the Internet.

I'll talk a little about the camera itself then briefly describe what you need to do to setup viewing the camera outside of your home network.

The HNC300 is a 640 X 480 CMOS color video camera with its own built in CPU and web server. All you need to do to get an image out of it is to connect its Ethernet port to a network, plug in the power, and view the output via any Java/ActiveX enabled web browser on the network.

Unfortunately, the focal length of the camera (listed as 6 mm) is such that it has a very narrow field of view. This means that in a small room you won't be able to see much other than a very small portion of the wall opposite the camera. Since this is intended for indoor security surveillance, one has to wonder how big a house/office this camera is intended for. All I can say is it's almost useless in the small hovel known as the SetoShack(tm).

In addition, the image the camera transmit is not very good (click on the sample below to see the full, unretouched, 640 X 480 version). Notice how the image is full of digital noise, washed out, lacking in highlight and low light detail, and sharpness. I'm not entirely sure it is good enough for even its intended purpose of catching a burglar. I mean, if you did a video capture of the image and tried to use it to identify someone in a court of law the defense lawyer would have a field day.

If that wasn't bad enough, even though the camera specs says it can do 30fps, all I've ever gotten is, at the most, 1.5fps (within the home network). In fact, a typical frame rate for me, over the Internet, is less than one frame per second.

As to getting the image onto the Internet, you need to do two or three things. First, you need to assign a static address to the camera. If you are lucky enough to have a bunch of Class C addresses at your disposal your work is done. If you are like most people, you don't have any static addresses and you will be using something in the internal, non-routable IP address range of 192.168.0.XX.

For my network, where I use a Netgear FR318 8-port VPN router (similar to the newer FR328 here) using DHCP to assign IP addresses, I have to reserve an address and link it the MAC address of the camera. How you setup a static IP address on your network may be different but the process should be similar.

Also, I have to open a port in my firewall and forward it to the camera. The Netgear router has several ports pre-configured, including port 80 which is typically used for webservers, so all I had to do was enable the port and I was done on the internal network side.

Now comes the tedious part. Unless you have a static IP address, your Internet address is dynamically assigned and therefore, periodically changes. Hence, if you want reliable access from outside your home network to a particular resource, such as your web camera, without checking what your IP addrss happens to be at the moment, you have to use a service like DynDNS that creates a pseudo static address for you. There are other free services out there but this seems to be the most supported by consumer grade routers. Just sign up (follow the link to the Dynamic DNS(sm)) and choose a free domain, configure your router to use it, and every time you use your browser from outside your home to access the domain, DynDNS will point to your modem/router (and thence to your camera).

Most tech savvy people should be able to accomplish the above without too much trouble. For others, using the Hawking Tech camera, the Appendix of the CD-ROM based PDF manual tells you how to do most of the setup and the manual to your router hopefully tells you how to open the port and forward it to a specific resource. That said, this is not something for your Aunt Millie to be doing.

A note about security. I have no idea what operating system nor web server application the camera uses. Hence, I can't make any statements about how secure this setup is. By opening a port in your firewall you are not only making your presence known to the world (i.e, you are no longer "stealthed"), but you are inviting all of them in. This may not be a GoodThing. If you choose to follow what I did, you do so at your own risk. Don't come crying to me if some l33t hax0r 0wnzs your b0x. You have been warned.

While the Hawking Tech camera may not be the best, I don't know of too many other cams in the $100 range that have a server and CPU built in. If you know of any that are better, let me know.

Aloha!

Dennis Conner, four time winner of the America's Cup yacht racing series, apparently will not be fielding a team in the next Cup regatta in 2007. Citing the extreme cost of running a competitive team, Conner indicated he would just let today's entry deadline come and go.

The America's Cup challenge is now officially the domain of billionaires who can afford the $100 million needed to race. It appears that only one or two US-based syndicates will enter the series. The first is San Francisco-based BMW Oracle Racing. This team is backed by Silicon Valley billionaire Larry Ellison and the German automaker BMW. The other, who must still secure additional financial backing, is called Sausalito Challenge. It appears unlikely that they will be able to get the needed funding by today so it's possible that the series will include just one U.S. team.

I have a meeting to get ready for so I gotta go.

Have a Great Weekend, Everyone - Aloha!