technology

Been a lot of talk recently on the net about the damage to the Space Shuttle; anti-environmentalists have been bringing up old BS about the CFC-free foam used in insulating the main tank. Here's something I posted to Slashdot on the topic:

environmentalist groups got their way and now we have a riskier space program.

This point about how the foam insulation process was changed has come up many times in discussions about the damage to Endeavor. And it's wrong.

It has its origin in one of Rush Limbaugh's lies.
As it turns out, the foam that dealt Columbia the death blow was the
old-style CFC foam. The problem was in the hand-spraying application method
used on that area, which left gaps and voids in the foam.

Yes, when they first started using the CFC-free foam in 1997 there were
some problems seen. Changes were quickly made to improve the adhesion.

There were also plenty of problems with the CFC foam - "popcorning" from
trapped air bubbled was noted in 1995, while in 1992 Columbia was
struck by a large piece of foam, ripping a 12cm gouge in the tiles. Both of
these were before the switch to CFC-free foam.

Back in 2000, I put a profile up on developers.net, which at the time was largely a job board. Job leads were all I wanted out of them (and as I recall, didn't get any useful ones).

Somewhere along the line, they became a "resource" site, and started sending me weekly sales pitches for their sponsors' various products. It wasn't really spam, I suppose, but it was annoying. Only a bit though, so I tolerated it.

Until today. When I went to unsub, they wanted to collect more data from me to complete my profile, before letting me unsubscribe from their mailing list.

Um, no. When I'm telling you to stop bothering me, I'm not about to give you more information about myself so you can market to me better.

Somebody hand me the clue-by-four. Bam! Bam! Bam!

So now there's an entry in their database telling them I'm from Zimbabwe and work for a company called "Bite Me". I hope the marketing drones have fun with that.

"Don't give your right name, no, no, no." -- Fats Waller

From the fine web comic XKCD. What will they think of us in a few hundred years? Maybe I should go put on a cape.

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 (hexadecimal notation).

What's so magic about this number, you ask? It’s an HD-DVD Processing Key, and it the movie industry would like to censor it to keep monopoly control over the manufacture of HD-DVD players.

This is not the first time the industry has tried to maintain its monopoly by infringing free speech - a few years back there was the DeCSS case, which led to people putting the code on t-shirts to demonstrate the absurdity of trying to censor such information.

As I reported last year, BrowserCam
is a cool service that allows you to obtain screenshots of web sites in a number of different browsers, and even use VNC for live tests.

It is, however, on the spendy side - one day's access is
$24.95, or $499.95 for a year. But they are offering a special for a group purchase via Fundable.com: a group of 20 can get a year's access for $25 each. Way cool. Come join us!

When I was a kid, my folks got a multi-band radio that picked up not just AM and FM, but shortwave and audio channels from TV. (If memory serves, they got the radio with a big stack of game tickets from an arcade in Atlantic City.)

While we mostly used it to listen to Johnny Walker or Brian and O'Brien in the mornings, or listen in on TV shows while in the tub in the evening, every once in a while I'd fool with the shortwave. Sometimes I'd pick up a weird channel with someone reading numbers, ghostly voices reciting nonsense.

I am a light sleeper. So a while back I was thinking about getting a "white noise" generator for my bedroom.

Then I remembered that my computer sits right across from my bed. Certainly there must be a software option...

Sox is "the swiss army knife of sound processing programs". It comes standard on most GNU/Linux distributions and is available for other platforms.

Very interesting tale of social engineering at DarkReading.com:

I entered the bank lobby and was immediately greeted by a woman in a small glass-paneled workspace. I mentioned we called earlier, dropped the contact's name, and indicated I was here to service the copier/printer. Without hesitation I was escorted to the machine and left unattended. To make it appear as if I were working on the device, I opened every panel on the machine, pulled all the trays out, and placed my laptop on the glass surface of the copier/printer.

I was approached by a few people who needed to make copies, I apologized for the inconvenience and said the machine might be down for 30-40 minutes. I then disconnected the network cable from the copier/printer and attached my laptop. As soon as my laptop booted up, DHCP provided a network address and I was on the internal network. I started a few of our utilities and started sniffing the traffic on the network.

The Motley Fool reports on a stock-pumping fraud scheme involving a clever use of compromised on-line brokerage accounts:

The new breed of brokerage account hacker isn't looking to milk your account dry. There are safeguards against that, since account redemptions would be delivered in your name to your home. No, a broker hacker is simply after the ability to pump up a thinly traded stock's price by selling your stocks and then using the proceeds to snap up shares of a targeted speculative stock in your account.