Misc. Ramblings

Okay, things went much better yesterday than the days before. But before I proceed I want to emphasize that these are my personal opinions and do not reflect those of my employer. Further, I have not yet received any formal training in the system nor seen the system as a whole. And finally, I do not wish to cast dispersion on anyone connected with this project, whether within the Judiciary or the vendor chosen to create the system. Everyone involved seems to be committed to doing as good a job as possible and the vendor appears to have qualified people here to lead the project.

With that said, the system worked and I got to see how things are configured. I will try to use an analogy to describe what the system does (fully acknowledging again that I've seen just one very small part of it).

At the level of use I saw yesterday, the system is similar to a content management system like MovableType. By that I mean you take something like HTML and then add your own tags that work only with your system. In this case, you use WordPerfect or Word as your form editor to create the look and feel of the form. You then insert their (a company called ACS) tag variables where ever you want information from the central database to be displayed. You then publish the form by doing a merge that populates the form with the data drawn from the Oracle database.

There are something like 400 predefined variables. These variables come with the system and are the same whether you using it here or anywhere else the vendor has sold their software. It is possible to custom design variables but, of course, you are on you own when it comes to supporting any changes you've made (which sounds fair to me).

In order to save money, the Judiciary is trying, to the extent possible, to keep customization of the base software to a minimum. As fellow Daynoter Sjon Svenson correctly states in his email below, one of the major reasons for the failure of large projects like this (centralized or not) is feature creep. That is, the scope of work, as originally designed, changes so much, as new features are added or existing features are substantially modified, that the project collapses in confusion, cost over runs, and cross charges of featherbedding or incompetence.

In my opinion, to the extent that the Judiciary and the vendor can avoid this is the extent to which this multi-million dollar multi-year project will succeed.

Posted by DanS at 09:20 AM | Permalink

For you l33t h4x0rs out there comes a translation project worthy of your talents. The NHV (New Hacker Version) Bible from the folks over at the ChristianHacker site here appears to be an effort to translate the Bible into hackerspeak. Whether this is for real or just a parody I don't know. But for what it's worth, they provide a sample of what John 3:16 would look like:

F0r G0d $0 l0v3d th3 w0rld, th@t h3 g@v3 hi$ 0nly b3g0tt3n $0n, th@t wh0$03v3r b3li3v3th in hi|v| $h0uld n0t p3ri$h, but h@v3 3v3rl@$ting lif3.

Posted by DanS at 09:19 AM | Permalink

From: sjon svenson
Subject: daynote
Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2004 23:53:55 -0700 (PDT)

I am looking from the other side of the fence and can add another good reason for many failing projects. Open specifications.

That's where the client (-state in your case-) gives specification and the programming starts. And then the client adds extra requirements and keeps changing the specs until the deadline is exceeded.

Of course usually more than one thing is wrong. Like choosing the right tool for the initial specs but by the time you reach the deadline the specs have changed so much that the tool is no longer appropriate for the job.

--
Kind regards,
Sjon Svenson

---

Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2004 21:20:59 -0700
From: JHR
Subject: Centralized Data Systems

Dan -

They DO fail - and with a great deal of regularity. There seems to be some reverse "economy of scale" effect. Californica has had ongoing problems with its attempts to computerize its Department of Motor Vehicles over the past 20+ years. At a glance, it would seem DMV operations would be tailor-made for automation. Didn't work out in practice, due to incompetence, politics, etc. - the usual things that beset Gummint operations anywhere. Turned out to be a vast money and time sink, with no end in sight. The Californica DMV site is still a dicey thing, not to be trusted atall.

OTOH - this vulnerability is not all bad. It tends to mitigate against centralized control and access to Citizen information - a VERY good thing! Tends to emasculate FBI attempts to implement yet another spying-on-citizens attempt (Carnivore, etc.).

Cheer up. There may be some benefit in even the worst circumstances!

Regards,

JHR

Have a Great Weekend Everyone - Aloha!

Posted by DanS at 09:17 AM | Permalink

Well, that was interesting. Yesterday afternoon I got to see how to create a form in the new information management system that is being written for the Judiciary. Unfortunately, it didn't go very well. Things started going down hill when the speaker tried to copy a form (in PDF format) to WordPerfect for editing. He chose "Select Table" from the Adobe Acrobat menu and then drew a box around the entire one page form. He then opened WordPerfect but when he tried to paste in the what he had highlighted he realized that he had not copied the data to the clipboard so there was nothing to paste in.

Okay, no problem, I've done that myself a time or two. So he highlighted everything again and copied it to the clipboard and then tried to paste it into WP. Unfortunately, nothing was displayed. We waited. And waited. But nothing. When something did finally copy over, it was the text from a previous copy. Sigh.

Okay, rather than trying to copy from PDF, lets start from the original WP file. So he copied the WP file (form diskette, yikes!) to a network drive and opened it for editing through the information management system. Once open, you insert database variables (pre-defined fields in the Oracle database being used). But after doing that, he couldn't do a merge between the template and the data to output the final form.

I think I overheard that the servers running the applications and/or the database had gone down. I don't know why. But servers crashing do not engender trust in this new system. Whatever happened, we were sent back to our offices.

I've used one other large scale, state-wide, centralized online system before. This was about 15 years ago. To this day, there are still severe bugs in the system that bring it down on a regular basis. The project went over budget. So many of the planned modules never got implemented (and apparently never will) thus making the system less helpful to the users. In addition, system performance is a joke during regular periods each month when many people are using the system (but not more than the system was supposedly designed to handle).

I seem to remember somewhere that the majority of the efforts to create large scale centralized information systems fail. And by fail, they mean completely and utterly unusable and you have to start over again. If this is true, there are many reasons why this occurs. Sometimes what is being computerized doesn't lend itself to automation. Sometimes the contractor chosen to write the application is not qualified to do so. Sometimes the software tools chosen to create the applications are inappropriate to the task. Sometimes not enough money is realistically budgeted for the task. Sometimes the infrastructure (network and servers) is not up to the task.

And sometimes, a centralized database is not the best way to go. Sometimes, its better to decentralize and distribute things while still being networked and being able to query the other databases/servers.

Oh well, today is the last of the three days (I hope) so we will see what what we will see.

Aloha!

Posted by DanS at 08:52 AM | Permalink

The folks over at MovableType are announcing what will be in the next version of their popular content management system (see the announcement here). Version 3.1 will include a choice between static versus dynamic page displays on a per page basis, post scheduling (allows you to create posts ahead of time then have them posted at whatever interval you want), and a bunch of award winning plug ins. No word yet on a release date.

Posted by DanS at 08:21 AM | Permalink

One of the images from NASA's Cassini mission to Saturn and Titan (see it here) looks an awful lot like the "Death Star" a certain space movie. One hopes that the menacing image is just a trick the mind sometimes plays.

Posted by DanS at 08:21 AM | Permalink

Using CSS to replace tables in web page design is not new. Some have been doing it for years. For those who haven't taken the plunge yet, this site here gives an overview, based on converting how Microsoft's home page would look if it were done in CSS, and how much faster and lighter the page would be. That's not to say all is goodness in CSS land because different browsers interpret CSS differently. Sometimes the differences are minor and sometimes they aren't. Of course, you minimize the problems by using a modern browser such as Mozilla or Opera.

Posted by DanS at 08:20 AM | Permalink

Day One of the meetings that will not die actually ended early yesterday when the Adobe file the speaker was looking for couldn't be found. This probably wasn't related to the fact there were over 20 files in the directory with descriptive names like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

I've talked about meetings and how if you don't use tools such as written agendas and facilitation you end up wasting a lot of people's time. Such is the case, so far, in the three day marathon of meetings I'm attending this week. The meetings focus on deciding which legal forms to use in the Judiciary's new court information system. Each island uses different forms and the intent is, where possible, to consolidate on one version. Remarkably, progress is being made but is awfully slow going because of the lack of focus that naturally occurs when you bring over 25 people together to discuss anything.

Oh well, if you ever have to lead a meeting, make sure you know how to use facilitation because, if you do, you can make things flow much faster and end up with a product that is better than if you didn't use facilitation.

Speaking of which, I gotta' go.

Aloha!

Posted by DanS at 08:19 AM | Permalink

I have to go to my all day meeting so feel free to follow this link to a page with more Democratic Party Convention bloggers than you can shake a stick at. I don't know how many are listed but there are a bunch.

Posted by DanS at 08:32 AM | Permalink

From: Jan Swijsen
Subject: share
Mon, 26 Jul 2004 10:30:15 +0200

One of the less known problems with [file/printer] sharing is that the sharing Windows PC becomes a server. So it starts broadcasting the availability of shared resources on to the network.

For a typical small peer-to-peer network that is not a big problem. For a big server based network letting lots of workstations become -peer-like broadcasting- servers can put a serious strain on the network.

-- Kind regards,
Sjon Svenson

Aloha!

Posted by DanS at 08:31 AM | Permalink

We now mark the official beginning of the silly season. What is the silly season, you ask. It is the period beginning with the U.S. political conventions and ends with the elections. During this period, anything and everything one political party says about the other is to be disbelieved. Every call for Congressional investigations should be ignored. Every "revelation" of political wrongdoing is not. You have been warned.

Posted by DanS at 09:34 AM | Permalink

Speaking of people to disbelieve, Fox's TV host Bill O'Reilly is taken to task for making allegedly false statements regarding one Jeremy Glick. Mr. Glick lost his father in the September 11, 2001 attacks. However, Mr. Glick does not support the war in Iraq and Mr. O'Reilly apparently believes that if you oppose the administration line you must support terrorists. Stanford Professor of Law Larry Lessig has a post, done earlier this year, that does everyone a favor by dissecting what Mr. O'Reilly said, what Mr. Glick said and lays out just how unfair and unbalanced Mr. O'Reilly appears to be. Professor Lessig reports, you decide.

Posted by DanS at 09:33 AM | Permalink

This year, more than ever, is the year of the blogger. So it should not be a surprise when the most interesting thing to come out of the political conventions will be the coverage provided by bloggers (read one story about it here). If nothing else, you will have the opportunity to hear many sides of the story (instead of the controlled three or four you would get from the major media). This is a good thing.

Posted by DanS at 09:33 AM | Permalink

Liberalism. Who would of thought President George W. Bush would turn out to be a rampant liberal? But that is exactly what blogger Andrew Sullivan is saying President Bush really is (see the post here). Points to ponder:

• President Bush's foreign policy is expansionist (having invaded two sovereign countries) and is based on the radical notion of reformist nation building.

• President Bush has gone on an unprecedented binge of federal spending.

• There is no agriculture subsidy that your tax dollars shouldn't be spent on.

• The drug entitlement program he rammed through Congress (while lying about the cost) may bankrupt the government.

• He has usurped states rights in a blatant power grab based on his feeling that centralized government knows what's best.

• He has appointed radical activist juritst to the federal bench in the hope of making law through the courts rather than through Congress.

In essence, everything you thought President Bush is, is wrong.

Posted by DanS at 09:32 AM | Permalink

While conversations, facilitated by blogs can be a good thing, there are those out there who confuse the medium as just another way to get their tired old message out. For example, this article from the Wonkette that indicates a supposed unrehearsed online chat session with the President's daughters turns out sounding like something scripted by Karl Rove (yikes!).

Posted by DanS at 09:32 AM | Permalink

Even though presidential hopeful Mr. Ralph Nader denies that people voting for him is a vote for President Bush, it should not be a surprise to anyone that of the 30,000 signatures needed to get on the ballot in Michigan, 5,400 came from his campaign, and 43,000 came from the Republican party (see the story here).

Obviously, the Republicans don't want Nader to become president. What they want is people voting for Nader instead of Kerry, just like they did in the last election - thus making Bush the winner. All I can say is anyone who believes anything Nader has to say, including his books, really deserves Mr. Bush as President.

As noted last week, I have all day meetings on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday so posting will be short on those days.

Aloha!

Posted by DanS at 09:31 AM | Permalink

TheGuys over at MSDN Channel9 have a bunch of video interviews with various people at Microsoft. One of the coolest interviews is this great video (note, the link works in Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox but not Opera. Also, you need the Windows Media Player or compatible to view it) of something Microsoft's Research is working on called the Media Browser. It's kind of a visual look at a database of photos or videos which allows different views, including 3D stacking of images.

It's difficult to describe what it does, which is why they did a video of it. So if you have about eight minutes and a broadband connection, click on the link above and watch what may be the next generation of explorer/finder in Windows Longhorn.

Posted by DanS at 09:37 AM | Permalink

One of the features of Windows is the ability to share printers (and folders). But you know, most people aren't aware of this functionality and only find out about it when they accidently print something to someone else's printer or vice versa. So I was not surprised this morning when someone asked me how was it that a document they did not print ended up coming out of their printer (as if by magic).

I guess it was a good opportunity to explain networks and, in the instance of sharing folders, security and how it's possible for people to read what you have on your computer. But I really wish MS would not install the printer and sharing protocols by default.

Have a Great Weekend, Everyone - Aloha!

Posted by DanS at 09:36 AM | Permalink

Starting yesterday afternoon, things got very hectic around here because the servers (and/or the switches/routers/DHCP/Notes servers) that the token-ring users (I think the majority of people in the Judiciary are still on token-ring) use went down. I don't know what the problem is or when it will be corrected. In the mean time, since I'm on Ethernet, I can access everything except our internal Intranet web sites and so I emailed our Information Technology people to get the rest of our office switched over.

So, while I work on that, there's no time for a post. Sorry about that.

Aloha!

Posted by DanS at 09:06 AM | Permalink

Using a cross site scripting exploit, this site here was able to display text of their choice on sites such as the MasterCard, Barclays, and others. By using these sites, rather than their own, they can present to you, even under SSL conditions, whatever they want to and you would not know the site was under the control of someone else.

Needless to say, this opens a new avenue for phishing attacks that could occur even if you go directly to, for example, your banking site. Or Amazon. Or eBay. Or PayPal. You don't need to respond to emails. You don't need to click on links. All you have to do is visit your bank, etc. The attackers could conceivably create such a realistic presentation on your own site that you would not know you have been taken over.

Unfortunately, the site does not indicate how to prevent such attacks (Another site says to check all user provided input in forms. However, they give no examples for what to look for.).

Posted by DanS at 09:18 AM | Permalink

This article here says WiFi chip makers are producing products that intentionally interfere with their competitors products. These so-called "Turbo" mode products promise speeds double the usual 54Mbs of 802.11a/g. But if a competitor's system is operating nearby, the interference caused by the systems will effectively slow or even block all transmissions (unless, of course, you switch to their brand of chip).

A pox on all their houses I say. I disconnected my Linksys access point and got a Microsoft one instead. Not only do I get higher throughput without "Turbo" mode, I also get greater range.

Posted by DanS at 09:18 AM | Permalink

Every so often someone takes up the challenge of deciding which audio codec is the best. The latest is ExtremeTech and their review (see it here) of MP3, Ogg Vorbis, AAC, and WMA.

According to their results, which varies by bit-rate (they used 64, 128, and VBR set at 98 percent), the best is...now wait for it...dependent on several factors.

Those factors boil down to what hardware are you using. For example, if you are using a flash memory based product that has very little storage you may need to compress at 64K. On the other hand, if you are storing your music on a 5TB array you can encode pretty much at any rate you want (including no compression at all). On the other hand, should you choose the ubiquitous Apple iPod, you only have one choice, albeit a pretty good one based on the results.

The results in the table below are the geometric means of the ratings used. Each subject rated the sample from 1 through 5 with the higher number meaning better sounding. The numbers below are the overall aggrate of four different music samples:

So, if you are forced to encode at 64k, use Ogg Vorbis (assuming your hardware supports it, which many do not, otherwise, use WMA). If you can encode at 128k, use WMA9 or AAC. It is difficult to recommend VBR since the resulting file size is about twice that of 128k while the scores, albeit subjective as they are, are lower than 128k. YMMV.

Posted by DanS at 09:17 AM | Permalink

In regards to the Sandy Burger investigation two people come to mind: Fawn Hall and Lt. Col. Oliver L. North. 'Nuff said.

In related rumors, it is said Washington is not known for its oversight of federal programs or the money spent on them (especially if it's one of "their" programs). But remember this, it's your tax money being spent (and wasted). Every time someone illegally spends money on one program, it means another doesn't have enough to run or more money has to come out of your pocket to replace it.

In the end, the danger that occurs when one administration replaces another is the feeling, on the part of the new administration, that the previous administration consisted of a bunch of clowns who didn't know what they were doing and were only there because of their political connections. Which may or may not be true.

Of course, all of the appointees from the new administration are there only because of their political connections but that's different because, it is said, that they know what they're doing. Only, they don't. There are many totally unqualified people in this Republican administration who have no experience running the departments they head. Indeed, some of them don't have experience running any department, much less the one they head. What's further, they appear ready, willing, and able to ignore/break/feign ignorance of the law to make it appear they know what they are doing.

Reflecting on this situation, I think what brought down the Hawai'i Republicans in 1954 and Hawai'i Democrats in 2002 was the same thing. Hubris. Given this situation, I think the current Republican administration (in Hawai'i and in Washington, D.C.) has already sown the seeds of their own downfall.

Posted by DanS at 09:16 AM | Permalink

Hawaiian singer Israel Kamakawiwo'ole's fame has now made it to Wired (see the story here). The short article notes the continuing popularity of Bruddah Iz's version of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow/What a Wonderful World" on the iTunes site as well as making it to number one on Microsoft employee buying list on Amazon (Microsoft? - ed.).

Obviously, his type of music is not for everyone but many people, having heard this song, can't keep it out of their head (and hearts) and so are buying it from iTunes and Amazon.

Posted by DanS at 09:15 AM | Permalink

For some time now, when I code these pages, I've been using the <acronym> tag to surround acronyms like NATO. If you point your mouse over the word NATO, you should see a text box with the words "North Atlantic Treaty Organization." This is helpful to people who are not familiar with a particular acronym. But I've also been using this tag to surround abbreviations. Now, as you English majors out there know, acronyms are words formed from the initial letters of other words (e.g. laser stands for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation). On the other hand, an abbreviation also uses the first letters of other words but they, in English anyway, do not spell a word.

For example, VBR is the abbreviation of the words Variable Bit Rate. But if I use the tag for <abbr>, like this VBR, not all browsers will create (ahem, cough, Internet Explorer, cough) the text box. While modern browsers like Firefox and Opera do just fine, others do not. So, I am conflicted about what to do. If I use the correct tag, many of you (i.e., those using Microsoft's Internet Explorer) won't see the text box. But if I use the acronym tag, I am technically using the wrong markup. If this matters to any of you, one way or the other, feel free to email me using the link to the right. For now, I'll continue to use the acronym tag even if it is incorrect. Hopefully, most people will soon switch to a modern browser and at that point I can start using the correct tags.

By the way, enjoy the posting now as I will be very busy next week attending all day meetings. I think I will have enough time to put up some short posts, but that is as much as I will be able to do.

Aloha!

Posted by DanS at 09:14 AM | Permalink

Sometimes, the choices people make are not good ones. By that I mean the choices lead them down roads that can only bring about personal ruin. Like, for example, Roy. Roy was, and still is, a surfer. A good one. He won several national surf meets.

But in Roy's younger days, he chose to start partaking of a lifestyle involved with taking drugs. The more drugs he took the more he wanted. In order to get the money to buy drugs he started stealing it from his friends and family. Needless to say, after awhile, he didn't have many good friends left. But he did have a bunch of bad ones. So he became an entrepreneur and started selling drugs to them so he could make even more money to buy more drugs.

But as sometimes happens, he awoke to the realization that he could not continue to live like that for very much longer. That his chosen lifestyle would end up killing him sooner, rather than later.

In local fashion, Roy humbly gives credit to his children for opening his eyes to his problems. But I think Roy himself deserves the credit here. Roy turned his life around, gave up the drugs, and decided to try to repay society for the things he had done.

As part of that, Roy reckoned if he could guide at least one youngster away from the path he had chosen, he would have done good. Being a surfer, he decided to start a charity longboard surfing contest. While the money generated from the entrance fees have certainly helped the charities involved, the biggest pay-back has been the changes to the people, especially the keiki, who entered the contest.

Roy acted as a respected elder, explaining, cajoling, and guiding these keiki into paths away from drugs by keeping them focused on the discipline required to surf well. This weekend will mark the 20th anniversary of the event. The event has grown to more than 300 entrants in several divisions.

Eight years ago, Roy noticed that most surf contests had no place for the wahine. So he started one. His second charity contest is only for females and gives them a chance to have their day in the sun. It is now one of the bigger, if not the biggest wahine surf contest in the world with two to three hundred contestants entered each year. The most recent wahine contest, held this past June, included Bethany Hamilton, who had previously lost an arm to a shark attack. Hamilton won her event and donated the $1,000 prize to the Sex Abuse Treatment Center (the charity for this event).

It is amazing to me how some people can turn their lives around and by doing so, have a positive ripple effect that touches thousands of others.

Roy "China" Uemura is one of those people.

Posted by DanS at 09:54 AM | Permalink

My hosting service, pair.com, is having problems again with their mail server so I can't send any mail. The problem was reported yesterday morning (HST) but as of this writing, they are still working on it and have no estimated time for completion of repairs. Sometimes mail will get through and sometimes it won't so, I guess, you'll just have to wait for my words of wisdom to reach your email box [g].

Aloha!

Posted by DanS at 07:55 AM | Permalink

This article from Microsoft simply confirms what many of the Daynoters have know for a long time. When it comes time to switch from one version of Windows to another, it's best to "wipe and load." That is, it's best to format the hard drive first and then install Windows rather than doing an "upgrade."

The downside of doing this is you have to reinstall all your applications and data (which takes time and requires that you have copies of your applications and data). Of course, if you partition your drive (or use more than one drive) you can place Windows and your applications on one partition and your data on other. Thus, it's possible to reformat the Windows partition but keep your data.

In addition, for many programs, you have to have a version that has a full install as opposed to an upgrade version. Even though many so called upgrade versions actually are the same as the full install, the installation program will check of an earlier version. If it doesn't find said earlier version, it won't install.

Further, in the age of Microsoft's efforts to prohibit software stealing, you have to have the product codes to unlock the installations. No code means no installation.

Hence, make sure you have all the program disks and their codes (and your data) before you reformat the drive!

The upside is you get rid of what Microsoft calls "performance problems that occur due to normal performance degradation." Some of those problems are listed below:

• Registry size and fragmentation.

• Master File Table size and increase.

• Page file fragmentation.

• Discretionary applications.

• No longer needed or outdated device drivers.

• No longer needed networking protocols.

Posted by DanS at 08:51 AM | Permalink

Speaking of wiped and loaded. Many people say the press is biased to the left. Perhaps, perhaps not. In Hawaii, we have at least two Republican run media sources. One is the morning newspaper and the other is the Fox affiliate [gasp!] TV station.

How do I know this? Well, this weekend a Republican state representative "approached a plainclothes police officer outside a Kapiolani Park restroom and groped his crotch, police said."

[Name of the person omitted] "(R, Olowalu-Kapalua) was arrested for fourth-degree sexual assault, a misdemeanor offense, for an incident which allegedly took place at 11:15 p.m." The incident took place in a public restroom in a public park where people have complained to the police of unwanted homosexual advances by individuals in the area.

First, be clear that even though the representative has said he "plans to take full responsibility" for the incident, he has not been convicted of anything. But the fact he was arrested for this kind of conduct is newsworthy. This kind of thing does not happen every day. In fact, I cannot think of any legislator being arrested for this kind of thing. Ever.

So, you would think this would make all the local newspapers and TV stations.

You would be wrong. As far as I could see, the Republican TV station never reported the incident during its newscast the next day. On the other hand, I think the other two TV stations led their newscasts with the story.

The Republican newspaper buried the story four sections deep and then used the word Democrat in the bold-type subheading and the first paragraph before naming the representative as a Republican in the second paragraph (one would assume the editors were trying to confuse people into thinking the representative was a Democrat?). The unbiased newspaper had the story on the front page above the fold.

Perhaps in other areas of the US there is a left bias but here in olde Hawai'i, the right wing is strong and doesn't see any reason to report anything that might reflect badly on their party. Even if it's true.

As for me, as a Democrat, I don't care if the man is a homosexual or bisexual or totally abstinent. What he does in this private life is his own business (as long as he doesn't harm anyone else). The main question is does he represent the people of his district? I will leave it up to the good people of Maui to decide that question in the coming elections but how would they know how to decide if the media never report such things?

Posted by DanS at 08:50 AM | Permalink

My wallpaper for the week is of the Enterprise NX-01. There are five high resolution views from this model site here.

Aloha!

Posted by DanS at 08:47 AM | Permalink

This article from the NewScientitst website says noted physicists Stephen Hawking has changed his mind about black holes. Up to recently, he postulated that everything that fell into a black hole was destroyed. But according to the article, Hawking will recant this belief at the 17th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation in Dublin, Ireland next week. Of course, we will have to wait for the conference to see what he actually has to say but if true, this could radically change our understanding of black holes.

Posted by DanS at 09:46 AM | Permalink

This seems like something that theOnion would dream up but Reuters is reporting that the US House of Representatives has deleted $25,000 from the $19.4 billion foreign aid budget for next year. The $25,000 was earmarked for Saudi Arabia. I guess the Republican dominated House wants to show that they really, really mean business about not supporting regimes that harbor terrorists by reducing their budget by 0.00001 percent. Knowing that the House has done this makes me feel so much safer. Not.

Posted by DanS at 09:44 AM | Permalink

In other unrelated news, foreign female workers in Saudi Arabia are sometimes sexually abused by their employers. When the women become pregnant, they (the women) are then charged with "illegal pregnancies" and thrown in jail where they are further abused and tortured. No word yet if the US House of Representatives will reduce the foreign aid to Saudi Arabia by an additional 10 cents.

Have a Great Weekend, Everyone - Aloha!

Posted by DanS at 09:43 AM | Permalink

When I was much younger, I loved building plastic models. Most of them were cars but I also built planes, rockets, and even a ship or two. But what I did cannot be compared to those master modelers that build stuff for movies or TV.

One of those masters is Martin Bowers. He has all kinds of scratch built models including ones from Space 1999 here.

This link here is to a five-foot long model of the Star Trek Enterprise 1401-D. It includes a full lighting package using neon lights!

It is too bad that with the coming of computer generated images, the need for miniature models is on the decline. That being said, feel free to spend some time taking a look at some really amazing work.

Aloha!

Posted by DanS at 09:21 AM | Permalink

The July 12, 2004 column from Bob Lewis talks about making business decisions (The column will disappear behind his lead curtain at the end of the week. You have to give his company permission to spam you to retrieve it later.).

Specifically, do you compete on features or price. Smart companies realize they have to chose one or the other, not both. I am reminded of my time at the local bank while working on my Masters. The bank had a rule that all customer calls had to be answered by a person, not a phone mail system. Thus, it seems, the choice was to compete on features. But, unfortunately, the bank also cut the number of people available to answers these calls by, if I remember right, more than half.

Imagine, if you will, working at this bank. Your management tells you they value what you do. They also say they value their customers. But what management does is drastically cut the staff available to answer calls from these customers. What message is management sending to staff and how much trust do you think employees have in what management tells them?

Now, imagine you are a customer of this bank. You need to talk to someone about your bank statement (which seems to be off by a couple of thousand dollars, perhaps because the bank outsourced some of their back room offices). So you call and hear either a busy signal or the sound of the phone ringing. And ringing. And ringing. What message has management sent to this customer and how much trust and loyalty will this customer have?

Even smarter companies realize they have to be consistent in their choices. That is, they can't say they will make their decision on a case by case basis so that sometimes they choose features and sometimes price. If your business is to prosper, you have to choose one or the other and then consistency apply that choice to all situations. Choose unwisely and your business eventually may go under. Don't choose at all (or choose both) and your business will definitely go under (or be bought by someone else).

So, as in many things, it's about the choices you make. Choose wisely.

Posted by DanS at 08:52 AM | Permalink

My wallpaper for this week is an image from the Cassini Orbiter. It's of Saturn's rings and was taken using the ultraviolet imaging spectrograph. Follow the link above and you get choose either the 254K jpeg or the 9MB tiff.

Aloha!

Posted by DanS at 08:51 AM | Permalink

One of the classes I took while working on my Masters in Public Administration was taught by a futurist by the name of Dr. Jim Dator. One of the tools he uses is called alternative futures.

While no one, including futurists, can predict the future, the process of creating and then temporarily "living" in alternative futures (plural) opens the mind to the possibilities available therein.

However, not all scenarios lead to what I would define as beneficial outcomes. In fact, some scenarios are down right frightening.

Such is the case with a dream (nightmare?) I had last night. I awoke at about 3:00 am with a vivid recollection of the dream. Usually, I have problems even remembering I dreamt at all much less remembering the subject of the dream but this one was so disturbing that I can remember the details even now.

In this future, the U.S. military has decided that they have had enough of a president who had misled the people. A president (and vice president) who had a hidden agenda. An agenda that led to the killing of thousands of military personnel in a war that was not justified. A war that was run from Washington that tied the hands of commanders even to the extent of telling them how many troops they would need.

In this future, the military decided that things had gone too far and so they (the military) took over the government and instituted martial law. Security, which had been high before under civilian control became a heavy blanket covering all aspects of American life. One could not travel freely without approval of the local military provost marshal. Citizens were subject to strip searches at the whim of roving bands of military personnel. And all elections were "postponed" until the threat from external forces were countered.

As I said, it was a bad dream...

Aloha!

Posted by DanS at 08:41 AM | Permalink

I don't know if this is for real but former US President Clinton apparently has a blog. A pretty good one at that (in the sense that it appears to be a conversation and not written by some marketing droid). Again, I don't know if this is for real and if so, I don't know if he actually writes the posts. But whomever is doing it is showing a lot of insight into who President Clinton is/was/may become.

Having said that, I'm not sure I want to hear much of what former President Clinton has to say. It is difficult for me to separate his humanity and his public self as President. I still have so much disappointment over what he did in office and how, in no small part, it paved the way for who we have now. I believe, had he resigned, Gore would be President today.

I guess I shouldn't judge President Clinton harshly as I've never had to face the challenges he has. But he seems to be trying to get me to feel sorry for him. He seems to be saying how he is so misunderstood and lonely.

I don't know. People say we hate in others that which we hate in ourselves. Perhaps I see too much of myself in him? Judge him for yourself.

Posted by DanS at 08:32 AM | Permalink

Speaking of the unreal. Sometimes, I have to wonder if the present administration in Washington is evil or just really, really stupid. This article here says the Bush administration is looking into what has to be done to postpone the presidential elections in November in the event of a terrorist attack.

Excuse my paranoia here but why would we need to postpone an election? In my opinion, the only reason would be if all 50 states were attacked simultaneously and because of the destruction, all 50 election commissions were eliminated. Barring that, there is absolutely no reason to be even launching such a trial balloon.

The founders set up a system that has been resilient through two world wars and various conflicts. A terrorist attack does not mean we need to postpone anything. Yes, it's always good to be prepared and have contingency plans in place, but we are talking about end of the world kinds of attacks. If such does occur, voting would probably not be high on the list of things to be worrying about.

Otherwise, the only reason to "temporarily" postpone an election is to avoid being voted out of office. I realize dictators in ThirdWorld countries do this all the time and become Presidents for life. But, this is the USA so it really makes me angry when politicians in Washington start talking about postponing elections.

I know this is becoming almost trite, but we are doing to ourselves what terrorist could never do. We may as well burn the Constitution now and be done with it rather than continue with the facade perpetuated by this administration.

Aloha!

Posted by DanS at 08:31 AM | Permalink

Mozilla has confirmed a security vulnerability in Mozilla/Firefox/Thunderbird (see the announcement here). You download either a patch or new versions (Mozilla 1.7.1, Firefox 0.9.2, and Thunderbird 0.7.2). It affects only the versions running on Windows (why am I not surprised) so if you are using a Mac or *NIX this does not apply.

While no one wants to see security problems in their software, it is heartening to see Mozilla owning up to the problem and fixing it in one day. Compare this to Microsoft's typical behavior of first attacking the person who discovered and reports the problem, then denies it's a problem, then admits it a problem but insists it is not widespread, then admits it is widespread but fixing the problem will take time because their browser is integrated into the operating system, to releasing a fix that doesn't (fix that is), to releasing a fix that works but also breaks an earlier fix, to a fix that works but doesn't break anything else. You decide which company you trust. The one that fixes its mistakes immediately or that "den of scum and villainy."

Have a Great Weekend Everyone - Aloha!

Posted by DanS at 08:42 AM | Permalink

Busy day today so no time for a post. Sorry.

Posted by DanS at 08:43 AM | Permalink

Subject: sve: whitebox
From: Jan Swijsen
Date: Thu, 8 Jul 2004 13:14:05 +0200

<quote>The first kink in the armor, however, may be the line of white-box laptops by Asus </quote>

Umm, I don't think they were first.

I bought my first notebook somewhere in 1996. A Mitac (AMD486/100) but there was no Mitac label (other than the serial-number sticker) on the box. There was no real manual either, just a stapled stack of leaves with the pictures each on a separate leave.

At the time Mitac produced lots of notebooks on order for relative[ly] small brands, lots of small desktop firms were branching out into notebooks. The notebook had a few cutouts in the plastic caseing where the companies could fix brand name labels to it.

The advantage was that I could easily and relative[ly] cheaply upgrade the standard memory (from the 1MB to 4MB) without using the single expansion slot (which took another 16MB later). I also upgraded the disk from a standard 120MB to a generous 800MB (now there is a 2GB disk installed).

I admit that those Mitacs were not directly available to the public, I got mine from a reseller (low price but no warranty).

-- Kind regards,
Sjon Svenson

---

Date: Thu, 08 Jul 2004 06:37:11 -1000
From: Dan Seto
To: Jan Swijsen

I guess what they are saying is you can buy the case without memory, hard drive, or CPU. This is not the same as being able to increase memory or switch the hard drive. Whether you save any money doing it this way I don't know, but at least you control what goes in - not the manufacturer.

Aloha!

Posted by DanS at 08:42 AM | Permalink

So, we liked staying at the Hawaii Prince Hotel Waikiki so much we decided to come back for the July 4th holiday and watch the fireworks from the room. The view from our 30th floor room was terrific. We actually looked down at some of the fireworks and we were so close that the windows rattled every time one of the bigger ones went off.

Unfortunately, I guess a lot of other people decided to to stay here so it was a lot more crowded than the last time we were here. In fact, the pool was so busy we spent most of our time out shopping [g]. I got a silk aloha shirt from Avanti and a couple of golf/polo shirts from NikeTown. SWMBO also bought a pair of shoes from Nike. We also went to the DFS Galleria Hawaii with its huge one story high aquarium and got a few trinkets to mark our stay in Waikiki.

Posted by DanS at 08:05 AM | Permalink

While building your own white-box desktop PC has a long history, doing something similar for a laptop was a problem. Namely, the laptop manufacturers made sure you couldn't do it by keeping things proprietary to the extent possible.

The first kink in the armor, however, may be the line of white-box laptops by Asus. Legit Reviews has an article on their building a laptop based on this line (see the article here).

Posted by DanS at 08:04 AM | Permalink

These guys here have created a PowerPC emulation that runs on either Linux or Windows. That's right, you too could be running Mac OS X 10.3.4 on you very own Linux or Windows machine. Of course, running may be too strong a word to describe software emulation that turns a 3.0GHz blazer into the equivalent 77MHz Tiger wannabe. But hey, as the guys say, it's still cool that it runs at all.

Posted by DanS at 08:03 AM | Permalink

I've ranted before about the poor service Hawaii gets from the two major parcel delivery companies. Either they get things here faster than the two-day service (so they take boxes off the truck and hold them in their warehouse until later) or they do what FederalExcrement did last week.

Before we get to that, let me give you a time line of events. At a little before 11:30 am HST, on Tuesday, June 29th, I ordered some software from Amazon. I paid additional for second-day air shipping in the hope of getting the package by Friday, July 2nd. According to the Amazon processing screen, with 2nd-day air the package was in fact scheduled to be delivered on Friday.

On Wednesday, June 30th, the package was picked up by the shipper at about 3:30pm Mountain Time Zone, in Texas. From there it went to Memphis, Tennessee. For those of you without a GPS plugged into your brain, the package went from West to East. I guess the shipper uses their hubs even if it means it's farther away and even if it means they won't deliver in two days. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The package arrived in Memphis on Thursday, July 1 at about 2:20 pm (Central Time Zone). It was held there all day and into Friday and then into Saturday. I don't know why it was held in Memphis when if it had been put on a plane to the west coast and then on to Hawaii it could have been here on Friday. But it wasn't. Instead, it stayed in Memphis until late Saturday when it was finally put on a plane heading West. I don't know how many stops it made on its way here but it finally arrived in Honolulu Sunday evening, July 4th. Since they don't deliver on weekends or holidays, it stayed in the warehouse until Tuesday, July 6th, SEVEN DAYS after I ordered the software. Sigh.

And people complain about slow government service. Well, if it positively has to be there by a certain date, don't use these guys. Use the U.S. Postal Service instead. At least they deliver on Saturdays.

Posted by DanS at 08:02 AM | Permalink

Speaking of FederalExcrement, this guy has written an application that uses RSS to let you keep track of your shipped packages. YMMV, use at your own risk, I have not tested this myself.

Posted by DanS at 08:01 AM | Permalink

Speaking of bums. Some people say life is a journey, not a destination. Well, here's a couple of guys who are doing both. They quit their day jobs and began a bicycle journey across the U.S. They have a blog here where you can follow their adventures.

Aloha!

Posted by DanS at 08:00 AM | Permalink

I had a couple of posts ready for uploading this morning when I found out the Administrator of our Policy and Planning Division (which our office comes under) passed away of leukemia yesterday.

I worked closely with Larry Coldiron during this past legislative session on the Judicial Salary Commission and got to know him pretty well.

Larry was the kind of Administrator who trusted the people who worked under him. He would hand assignments to me and would let me do them the way I felt was best. That's not to say he wouldn't check on how things were going or always have a back-up plan ready to go, but in the end, when reviewing what you had done, he would very rarely make changes to your recommendations because he felt you were now the expert on the subject and knew best what to recommend.

Larry was a retired officer from, I believe, the Air Force. He never discussed his military service but I believe it shaped who he became. Organization, a clear chain of command, and responsibility for your actions were the watch words of his life. Conversely, he would give credit to those under him before allowing anyone to give him any praise for the good work of his division.

Larry was also a Christian. When I went to visit him in the hospital during his first bout with leukemia he had a Bible by his side and a framed picture of the Lord on the counter of his room. But what was most important, he had the love of Christ in his heart.

Larry had been fighting his cancer for several years. At first, it appeared the treatments had worked but the disease came back stronger than the first time. Larry fought as hard as he could but in the end, he didn't make it.

A better, braver person person you could not find. He will be missed. Our thoughts and prayers go out to his family and friends.

Farewell, good friend.

Posted by DanS at 09:05 AM | Permalink

Not much going on right now other than listening to some patriotic songs from iTunes (Independence Day here in the US is July 4th) while I work on correcting the problems with the PERL scripts. The webmaster got around to changing the permissions on one PERL script yesterday so I was able to change the path therein, thus fixing the problem with our voting page in about 10 minutes.

Now I need to persuade him to do the same to the search engine script so I can change the path there. By the way, yes the problem was the paths. My best guess is the directory where our intraweb site was stored was sym-linked to another directory. By deleting the link and creating a new directory the absolute path, of course, changed. Hence, the scripts which use absolute paths all failed.

I know where the changes need to be made, the problem is getting the webmaster to alter the permissions on the files so that I can make those updates.

Baby steps. That's how government works. Baby steps.

Monday is a holiday so I will see you folks back here on Tuesday.

Have a Great (Long) Weekend Everyone - Aloha!

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. --

Posted by DanS at 09:46 AM | Permalink

There have been a few updates to two of the more popular modern (i.e., non-I.E.) browsers out there. Firefox is at 0.9.1. While you're there, you may want to update the Thunderbird e-mail client which is at 0.7.1. Over at Opera, they've updated their browser to 7.51.

Posted by DanS at 08:55 AM | Permalink

Speaking of modern browsers, now is the time to switch from Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) to something else. Why? Regardless of what you may think about Microsoft, the types of attacks being launched against IE now make it likely that your personal banking/credit card information will be stolen. If not today, then tomorrow, or next week. It's become a matter of when it will happen, not if it will happen. Prior to now, most attacks were from teenage boys trying to prove their manhood to their friends by owning as many other PCs as possible.

Bad as that may have been, now, Russian/Pakistani/Indian organized crime syndicates have begun to exploit security holes in IE to steal your banking and/or credit card information so they can steal your money and identity. If you've ever been a victim of such crimes you know that it takes years to clear the problems caused by these attacks.

So, there is no time to waste. Right now, go to Mozilla or Opera and download one of their browsers. Use them instead of IE and remember to be careful out there...

Posted by DanS at 08:54 AM | Permalink

I don't want to be an alarmist here. But. Democracy and freedom in the U.S. is hanging by a thread. The U.S. Supreme Court, through a series of 5 to 4 decisions, has so far turned away those who are afraid of or detest freedom and the personal responsibility that comes with it.

But President Bush and his fellow travelers in Congress are one justice away from achieving what the enemies of America have not been able to do since our founding over 200 years ago - to burn the Constitution and grind the ashes into the dirt.

I don't want yet another law to "fight the war against" [insert your favorite issue here]. I don't want yet another law to imprison innocent citizens without being charged, without access to legal counsel, without basic human rights once guaranteed in the Constitution.

We live in an unsafe world and all the laws man can design will not change that. I am reminded of something H. L. Menken once said: "The worst government is the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression."

We live in a time that hangs in the balance. If we choose wisely we may have freedom. Choose unwisely and we will have oppression the likes of which we have never seen here before.

Aloha!

Posted by DanS at 08:54 AM | Permalink