technology

I have fond memories of Omni magazine -- I think there might be some old issues up in my attic. Slate looks back at Omni's look forward into the future world of 2010:

For anyone who was raised in the '70s and never had a date in the '80s or who thought the 2000s would look like a cross between a Yes album cover and Journey concert T-shirt, Omni magazine was essential reading—one with a ready answer to all your robot and rocket questions. And to a 10-year old getting a subscription for Christmas in 1979, Omni was The Future.

The magazine was a lushly airbrushed, sans-serif, and silver-paged vision dreamed up by Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione and his wife, Kathy Keeton. It split the difference between the consumerist Popular Science—which always seemed to cover hypersonic travel and AMC carburetors in the same page—and the lofty Scientific American, whose rigor was alluring but still impenetrable to me. But with equal parts sci-fi, feature reporting, and meaty interviews with Freeman Dyson and Edward O. Wilson, Omni's arrival every month was a sort of peak nerd experience.

There are reports of POS credit/debit card terminals and cellphones jumping from 2009 right past 2010 to 2016. The problem seems to be the interpretation of what's intended to be a BCD value, as a hexadecimal one.

(For non-geeks: remember way back in school when you learned about different "bases" for numbers? Because computers use on-off signaling -- two possibilities -- we need to use base-2, "binary" arithmetic a lot. But because base-2 is a pain, we often use base-16, "hexadecimal", which is easy to convert to and from binary. In hexadecimal, the string of digits "10" actually means the value sixteen: instead of the ""one times ten plus zero times one" that we usually mean, we read it as "one times sixteen plus zero times one".)

Alan Turing was one of the most brilliant mathematicians of the Twentieth Century -- indeed, one of most brilliant mathematicians ever. During World War II he was instrumental in breaking the Nazi's "Enigma" code. In the process, he developed much of the theoretical framework for the field of computer science. The mathematical model of computers that every comp sci major learns about, the "Turning machine", was his invention. Every time you use a computer -- such as reading this -- you are benefiting from his genius.

But let's get back to the fact that he helped defeat the Nazis and thus helped save the UK, and all of Western civilization.

Usually, people who help save a nation are treated with gratitude. But Turing was gay.

In the homophobic society in which he lived, that was a crime. His security clearance was revoked, he was prosecuted, and sentenced to "chemical castration" via hormone injections. In 1954, he committed suicide.

Over 55 years later, the UK has finally apologized for its wretched treatment of this heroic genius.

So here's another loopy conspiracy theory: the right-wing National Legal and Policy Center found (cleverly hidden right out in plain sight at www.fbo.gov) a Request For Proposal "to conduct a massive, secret effort to harvest personal information on millions of Americans from social networking websites." The blogosphere is abuzz with how this is an attempt by Obama's secret team of socialist fascist secret Muslims to create an "enemies list"

Or, as Hot Air exposes...not.

The Presidential Records Act (PRA) essentially requires each administration to keep every pixel and keystroke ever published for later review by Congress or investigators, in case illegal activity takes place. We have seen this invoked ex post facto to the Clinton and Bush administrations, in the latter over e-mails sent and received outside the White House mail system. At that time, legal experts and investigators insisted that everything produced by an administration for anything remotely concerning official business had to be archived within the EOP. [Executive Office of the President]

A more careful reading of this RFP shows that to be the project. The contract directs the contractor to archive the “information posted on publicly-accessible web sites where the EOP maintains a presence“, including social networking sites like MySpace, Twitter, and so on. It doesn’t call for everything on those networks to be archived, but only “information posted by non-EOP persons on publicly-accessible web sites where the EOP maintains a presence[,] both comments posted on pages created by EOP and messages sent to EOP accounts on those web sites.” In other words, the archiving will include interaction on EOP websites and pages, but not anything else.

In other words, this massive spying effort is nothing more than applying the retention requirements for Presidential e-mail to Facebook and Twitter messages.

Somehow I'm sure that if the Obama administration didn't do this, these same folks would be complaining how he was using social networking sites as an attempt to get around the PRA. (Like, say, how Bush administration crooks used an e-mail server run by the Republican National Committee to circumvent the PRA.)

So over at the day job, it looks like we want to upgrade the firmware for the RAID controller on our web server, a Dell PowerEdge. So I poke around support.dell.com and find the file. Great. I'll use wget to download it to the server...

xkcd on how to be a tech support guru. Seems about right.

From emacs-fu.blogspot.com:

Emacs-users like to stay in their own little world, even when interacting with the Others - and they are right of course. Why leave the comforts of your well-configured emacs for the inconveniences of yet another app? For example, when using twitter, I prefer to do that from within emacs. There are different ways and packages to do so. My favorite so far is twitter.el.

The last remnant of CompuServe, the first major commercial online service, has been shut down by its current owner, AOL.

I was never a user -- I started on BBSes (back in the glory dayes of FidoNet), then became a USENET addict around 1990 when I got access as a student at the U of MD. (And then right around the time I finished grad school there was this new thing called the "World Wide Web" starting up...) But CompuServe had an important place in the history of networking, and technophiles should pause a moment in memorium.

For many years, I've been railing against "top posting" -- creating e-mail (or similar) messages with quoted material from the previous messages (usually, the entire message, unabridged) in the thread at the bottom, and the added content at the top of the message. I just stumbled across this perfect little illustration of why it's a horrid practice:

A: Yes.
> Q: Are you sure?
>> A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation
>>> Q: Why is top posting annoying in email?

Dan's Mail Format Site has more on the evils of top posting -- and, more importantly, how to do it right with interleaving and bottom-posting.

On Tuesday, for about two hours Indianapolis' Methodist Hospital had to send incoming ambulances to other hospitals. Why? A power surge knocked out their computer system (bad design part 1), and patients' records had to be hand entered. They couldn't deal with the backlog (bad design part 2).

It looks more and more like electronic health records are going to work as well as electronic voting.