None Of The Above

Anything that doesn’t fit into existing categories

Tweeting the Big Whistle

Wow. I think I finally happened upon a use for Twitter. The Union Pacific railroad tweets status updates on the tour of its restored 4-8-4 steam loco, #844, as I described in my entry for October 31, 2011. I have line-of-sight from my house to the BNSF tracks on which #844 would be taken south to Pueblo yesterday, and I wanted to actually see it from my back deck. Now, it’s a long line of sight–a little over five miles, according to MapPoint–but since I’m on the slopes of Cheyenne Mountain, 600 feet higher than the tracks, I have no trouble making out BNSF’s coal trains, though it’s easier with binoculars. On quiet summer nights I can hear their horns (faintly) when they go through grade crossings. Uphill seems a favorable direction for sound. As I’ve mentioned here several times, we hear Fort Carson’s bugle calls on most quiet days.

#844 has a whistle, a real steam whistle, but not just any old steam whistle: It’s got a whistle transplanted from one of the now-extinct but inexpressibly awesome Big Boy 4-8-8-4 articulated locomotives, which seventy years ago began hauling freight up Rocky Mountain grades. None of the Big Boys are still operable, but a piece of one of them remains in service, and #844’s got it.

I wanted to see #844 from my deck, and I wanted to hear it too. The window was short, probably two minutes or less, so if I wasn’t out there at precisely the right time I would miss it. Enter Twitter: By following the UP’s status updates while I worked here on my quadcore, I was able to grab my jacket and binoculars as soon as #844 pulled out of downtown, and be there on the back deck (along with QBit; Carol was still in Chicago) when the loco went past.

QBit sat next to my chair and gnawed a Nylabone. I leaned back and did a little deep breathing and some ten-second-meditation exercises. A couple of minutes later, I felt annoyed at the sound of some damfool 18-wheeler engine-braking on Highway 115. (We hear those a lot too.) But…it wasn’t engine braking. It expanded to the deepest, thrummingest whistle I’d ever heard, and for four or five seconds it blasted, echoing among the hills and against Cheyenne Mountain itself. It wailed the way nothing on earth but a steam whistle wails, a wail that doubtless inspired ghost-train stories and infused the history of steam traction with something like mythic sadness. Steam trains sounded sad long before they were an endangered species. (The physics of that wail is simple but surprises many people when they first learn of it. You all understand it, right?)

I stood up, leaned on the railing, and looked hard. Sure enough, a comet’s tail of cylinder-vented steam crept out from behind a hill, and for two minutes and change #844 crossed my field of view. Five times the big whistle sounded, and then it passed behind another hill on Fort Carson and was gone. It’s far from certain that I will ever see it again.

Why didn’t I go down there closer to the tracks and get a better view? I’m not entirely sure myself. I can guess, though. This house was a first for us: We’re 600 feet higher than Colorado Springs itself, and we get a view from a height. The wide view off my decks is a personal metaphor for the world as a whole. I can see buildings and cars and traffic lights and water towers and the aviation beacon from Butts Field. Houses and offices and a little bit of everything are right there, and I can take it all in at one glance. Seeing #844 from my deck made it feel like steam was still part of the world I live in, and I felt it viscerally. Big steam whistles will do that.

And yeah, Twitter made it possible. As silly as I consider it sometimes, broadcast IM may well have its (occasional) uses. I wonder how many years it will be before I run across another one?

Odd Lots

Aug 24th, 2011

by Jeff Duntemann.

8 comments

Fairness requires that I point this out: An article in the Guardian that I cited in my last Odd Lots was in error. NASA had nothing to do with the paper in question, which was written in his spare time by a postdoc who happens to work for NASA. That makes the paper no less ridiculous, but at least NASA isn’t doing stuff down that far along the dumb spectrum.
And I’ll give this project a fair shot, though I would prefer to see NASA do this on a non-exclusive basis rather than for a particular publisher only. No word on whether and what Tor/Forge is paying for the deal. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
Samsung has cited Kubrick’s film 2001 in a patent prior art case. (Engadget has a shorter entry with a still.) I wasn’t aware that fictional concepts can be raised in prior art challenges, but evidently it was done back in the 1960s when waterbeds were coming into common use. Robert A. Heinlein had described a waterbed in his 1942 novel Beyond This Horizon, and it was cited in a prior art challenge that cost Charles Hall his patent on the waterbed in 1968.
My computer books and articles have been cited in patent applications 37 times, but I don’t know if it’s possible to look up prior art case citations. Will have to research this.
While we’re citing citations, I was recently cited in a book by Paul J. Nahin, Number Crunching: Taming Unruly Computational Problems from Mathematical Physics to Science Fiction . The citation, on page 281, briefly describes my reprints of the Carl & Jerry stories from Popular Electronics. Alas, he cites me as “Copperhead Press” but mentions of the boys are way down in the last year and I’m glad they were mentioned at all. Thanks to Bruce Baker for letting me know.
If you’re interested in hurricanes, here’s a nice summary page with automatically updating satellite imagery and lots of interesting graphics. The satellite imagery can be animated to show changes over the last several hours.
I didn’t think this was new news, but apparently star formation is slowing down, as material that was originally hydrogen is “locked up” in white dwarfs, neutron stars, and heavy elements, even after a supernova has blasted a star’s substance back into interstellar space. I didn’t think that 70% of a supernova’s mass fails to return to the gas pool, but that seems to be the case.
Jim Mischel sends along a link to a marvelous homebrew bandsaw made mostly of wood. (The blade and the hardware may be inescapably metallic.) The site as a whole has lots of interesting woodpunk concepts and projects. I especially like the wooden gear template generator, which calculates a gear outline that can be printed to paper and then cut out from wood.
Whew. We get the message, guys.

Odd Lots

Mar 13th, 2011

by Jeff Duntemann.

3 comments

Finally, the epic review of the Motorola Xoom that we assumed we’d eventually see from Ars Technica. My only gripe is that somebody over there needs to learn how to take sharp, close-in photos of hardware.
While we’re talking Xoom, I learned that my Degunking collaborator Joli Ballew is doing a Xoom book for Wiley. According to Amazon, it will be out on June 7.
Ibuprofen (Advil etc.) may provide some protection against Parkinson’s. It may also tear up your stomach lining, as happened to me in 1999. Be careful.
And damn, I shoulda gone to Polish school when I was four, like my mom wanted. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
Here’s a list of the ten most powerful earthquakes since 1900. (They have not yet included the Japanese quake, which has recently been promoted from 8.9 to 9.0.) I remember the stories in the papers about the 1964 Alaska quake. Man, that was ugly. Let’s be glad it wasn’t in the Cascades.
My assembly language book is now for sale on both the Kindle and the Nook stores. Kindle: $36.86. Nook: $52.00. Print: $65.00. (But nobody pays cover anymore.)
I’ve been called a crank for my position on this, but I don’t care: Sleep is more important than food. (If you won’t listen to me, maybe you’ll listen to Harvard.)
Here’s a nice page on magic eye tubes, which are remarkably little-known (especially among the young) given their off-the-charts coolness factor. And another photo page. Some of the miniature types were used well into the 1960s. We had a Grundig tape recorder from 1961 or so, and it incorporated a DM70, which I still have in a box somewhere, along with a 6AL7 and a couple of 6U5’s.
From the Ideas You Can Have For Free And Are Worth Every Nickel Department: Somebody should start a Wikipedia extension wiki that automatically grabs and posts anything deleted from Big Wiki for that peculiarly intense Wikipedia fetish, non-notability. In this era of pervasive broadband and $50 terabytes, why shouldn’t the 6U5 get its own page? It’s certainly notable to me.
From the Law of Unintended Consequences Department: Scrupulously green San Francisco is turning brown because government-mandated low-flow toilets aren’t moving solid waste through the system quickly enough to forestall clogging. Be glad you live in New Yawk, Ed. (Thanks again to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
Although I’ve always known what hops are used for (beer, basically) I realized this morning that I had no idea what a hop looked like. Now I know.
Classmates.com has evidently been bought out by a nostalgia site called Memory Lane. I haven’t gotten any email pitches from them lately, so I’m quietly hoping that either Memory Lane has reformed their fraud-laced marketing practices (telling me of girls who supposedly attended my all-male high school back when I did) or that the whole mess will soon sink into bankruptcy and vanish.

Odd Lots

Jan 20th, 2011

by Jeff Duntemann.

7 comments

At our most recent nerd gathering here, four of my friends and I managed to carry our 1997-vintage, 198-pound Sony CRT TV set up our precipitous stairway out to the 4Runner, and a few days later I paid Blue Star recycling $37 to see it to its final rest. Many thanks to the guys–we had been pondering how to get rid of it for the past several years. Friends are most excellent to have, especially for people like me who can’t lift 100 pounds anymore.
And this means we’re shopping for a downstairs TV. I came across a good site focused on plasma TVs, which as a class may be problematic at our current altitude of 6600 feet. Apparently they buzz and run far too hot, though the physics of the phenomenon remain obscure to me.
I’ve found the first (thin) review of the Motorola Xoom. Few details yet, but I will say up front that the cloud-based ebook system doesn’t thrill me. Early releases of Honeycomb may not support the XD card slot, but Motorola hints that an OS update will take care of that. That’s important here: Given that 16GB MicroSD cards are already down to $35, sideloading my entire ebook library would be a snap, with room left over for lots of music and videos.
I also recently found out that the Xoom GUI borrows from the quirky but interesting BumpTop, recently bought by Google and then pulled from general distribution.
I may be too old to appreciate the BumpTop 3D metaphor (I always think it looks like working inside a refrigerator box) but some good themes have been created for it, including this steampunk specimen.
Xoom has a “barometer.” Most commenters, including the LA Times , don’t seem to understand that a barometer can measure altitude with more accuracy than GPS. I doubt that the Xoom’s barometer will have anything to do with weather reports. (Else there’d be a thermometer and a hygrometer as well.)
There’s a long-running feud between Samsung and US cell carriers over who pays for Android updates, with the result that many Samsung phones are stuck at Android 2.1 and may never get an update from the vendor. (Applying the update yourself is not for the squeamish.) Yesterday afternoon, of course, Samsung denied it all. As intriguing as the Galaxy Tab looked when I played with it back in November, issues like this may keep me away from Samsung wireless products entirely.
Some images speak for themselves. Like this one. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
Oxytocin may be the biochemical basis for tribalism, racism, political parties, and just about everything else that the human species would be better off without. “Cuddle hormone” my ass.
Good-bye to seigniorage, not that one person in ten thousand ever knew what it was–or how to spell it.
Ahh, well. I may have eaten my last pistachio.

Mal De Caribou

Dec 30th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

5 comments

I spent a week in Chicago and gained four pounds. This wasn’t unexpected: A great deal of what Christmas is about these days is sugar, and Christmas is one of the very few times of the year when I let my sugar guard down. Cookies, candy, and egg nog were all over the place, and I indulged. Fortunately, I know how to lose that weight again: Eat animal fat. So it’s back to my accustomed diet, which depends heavily on meat, eggs, and full-fat dairy, plus whatever vegetables I can choke down against my gag reflex. I also eat one slice of Orowheat Master’s Best Winter Wheat Bread per day for fiber, and a few Wheat Thins here and there for carb balance. Desserts are off the table for awhile.

If I can resist the temptation to indulge in potato chips (we don’t keep sweet stuff in the house, as a rule) I’ll be back in range (150-155) in about ten days. Better still, I’ll stay there, probably until next Christmas.

Our visceral fear of eating fat would be funny if it weren’t so tragic. Researchers have begun to admit that low-carb diets are best for keeping weight off, but are still terrified of admitting that animal fat is not only harmless but medically necessary. Best illustration: the wonderfully named mal de caribou, also known as “rabbit starvation.”

Mal de caribou (literally, “caribou sickness”) typically afflicts explorers and other cold-weather adventurers who attempt to live on hunted animals but only eat the muscle tissue. Rabbits (and most wild animals, actually) have very little body fat. (I have to brown the local ground buffalo meat in butter or it would burn. There’s basically not a shred of fat in it.) If all you can score out in the wild are rabbits, plus the occasional deer, you run the danger of severe vitamin deficiencies, plus liver dysfunction caused by an overload of protein. Eating carbs helps short-term, but as studies of aboriginal peoples deprived of their natural diets have shown (see Taubes for all the citations you could ever digest) replacing fat with carbs over the long haul leads to obesity, diabetes, and various other degenerative conditions. Farley Mowat has much to say about this in his book People of the Deer; a good summary can be found here. The original diet of most northern aboriginal peoples consisted of meat and fat. Grains and sugar were basically absent.

I’ll have to come back to the issue of whether or not total caloric input matters, and how much–the research there is divided and contentious–but I will freely admit that I eat less than most people do. The key is that eating fat keeps me from getting hungry, so I’m less tempted to binge on starches. Maybe it won’t work that way for you, but granting that we’re all different biochemically (to the extent that I wonder sometimes if we’re all one species!) there seems to be a trend in this direction. Dump the Honey Bunches of Oats and fry an egg in butter for a month instead and see what happens. You may be surprised.

Daywander

Aug 21st, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

4 comments

We’re at a dog show in rural Greeley, Colorado, a little north of Denver–and right smack dab next to a huge cattle feedlot. Now, I’m a caveman and a realist–manure is the price we pay for beef–but that stuff sure do stack up and make its presence known. We kennelled QBit and Aero to simplify show logistics, but it’s funny not having Aero with us at a show. He’s a champ now, and the spotlight has shifted to Dash, who at 15 months already has 11 points (of the required 15) and one major win (of the required 2) toward his own championship. Aero was always a shy dog, and fearful at the outset. This cost him points early on, but Dash has never had any such problems, and it’s (remotely) possible that he could score a big enough win this weekend to make him a champion while still technically a puppy. (He won’t reach his majority until 18 months.) Master groomer Jimi Henton will be helping Carol make him and Jack look their best, and we have high hopes.

I just finished a dozen Lucerne eggs and I’m still alive to write about it, so the big contaminated egg thing may not be as horrible as some are making it out to be. But half a billion eggs, sheesh–and that from one company. Am I going to give up eggs? Hardly. My sole gripe is that Lucerne’s are the only eggs I can find locally in Medium, and I’ve titrated myself to a pair of Medium eggs scrambled for breakfast as what best carries me until lunchtime without any energy lapses. So I may have to fall back to a single Extra Large until I can scare up a different brand of Medium eggs. And while eggs are on the table here, does anybody see size Small or Peewee eggs sold at retail? (As best I know, these are generally sold to food producers for cakes and such.)

I bought and have been tormenting a new-ish WYSIWYG EPub editor product called Jutoh, from the guy who gave us the free ECub editor. It’s available for Windows, Linux, and Mac, and I’m testing it under Windows and Ubuntu. My first impressions are generally good, though the product still has a couple of thin spots, foremost of which is an inability to import .DOC files. More on it once I have a chance to get a couple of projects through it.

It may sound odd, but I’m pleased that Jutoh is not free software. It’s only $22, which is trivial–I’ve spent more than that just having an indifferent lunch with Carol at Village Inn. I don’t want to see the category of inexpensive commercial software die out. For a long time it seemed that software was going to cost either zero or a thousand dollars, which would mean that few solo software geeks would attempt to field an innovative utility that would not sell for hundreds but might sell for tens. I bought Atlantis some time back for $45 and love it–it generates the best EPubs of anything I’ve tried so far. (Jutoh is still in the running, but the race has barely begun.) Free software can be superb but all too often evolves slowly, if at all. Zoundry Raven, on which I write this, hasn’t been updated since 2008…though I must balance this by citing the free ebook manager Calibre, which is updated every couple of weeks.

We have lost the Star Hustler. Jack Horkheimer has gone off to see what the stars look like from the other side, and as little as I saw of him (I’ve not watched much TV in the last 40 years) I will say that he did a spectacular job making observational astronomy compelling to ordinary people, especially young people–and as goofy as he seemed sometimes, he never made me want to kick his teeth in, as all too often happens with Bill Nye. Science should not be full of itself (nor, alas, full of something else, as is the case far too often) and Jack was not. Keep looking up…maybe you’ll spot the light of the Big Bang glinting off the top of his head.

There Goes My Banner

Jul 15th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

1 comment

I know that my custom banner’s gone; I upgraded to the latest PrimePress theme here a few minutes ago, and the damned thing is too stupid to check if custom graphics exist before overwriting everything. Alas, I don’t have time to fix it right now, as I’ll be out the door in a couple of minutes. Will try to get to it by this evening.

Meerkats. This thing was written by meerkats.

UPDATE 7/16: All fixed. And really, I like meerkats. They’re cute and I’m sure they mean well. But we shouldn’t let them get near PHP or CSS.

Report: EntConnect 2010

Mar 30th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

2 comments

The first thing you see is an unattended and otherwise empty folding table holding a Sharpie marker and a roll of duct tape. A strip of tape reads “Nametag Station” and there is an example. Remember that this is a conference for people who learn fast, do things their own way, and use what they have on hand.

Welcome to EntConnect 2010.

I briefly described the conference in my February 22, 2010 entry. It was a piece of early community building by the founder/owner of Midnight Engineering magazine, the other Bill Gates. Bill originally pitched it as a ski outing, but it grew from there into go karting, skeet shooting, and ultimately conference sessions–and has long outlived Bill’s poor magazine, which like my own has been gone for a number of years. The 2010 gathering was the 19th, and I was no more than ten minutes into the first session when I was kicking myself for not having attended years ago.

It’s not a huge group. I’m guessing 35 people came out, and an amazing number have been there for most and sometimes all of the previous conferences. Nor is it an especially young crowd; I’m guessing a median age of 45 or 50. Nearly all of them own their own technical businesses, and some have owned (and sold) several. That’s the core mission of the conference: to leverage the collective experience of the attendees in working on their own and making a living thereby. The presentations were a good balance of technical and life-experience descriptions. (Here’s the schedule with the names of the sessions.) I shared a table in the conference room with Jack Krupansky, who was a long-time advertiser at PC Techniques and very much a kindred spirit, and met a great many others cut from the same rugged and mostly self-organizing cloth. The dinner conversation was dumbfounding, with ideas and insights whizzing past my ears far faster than I could internalize them.

The sessions were superb, and some were so high-energy that I felt a little drained when they were over. The keynote session from Dave Grenewetzki was like that. Here’s a guy only a little older than me who has lived life at a dead run, having had careers in aerospace engineering, early computer software (back to the CP/M era) and computer games, with several startups to his credit and a longish stint at the helm of Sierra Online. He’s also one of the world’s most accomplished geocachers. His message: Follow the fun. Well, I try, but most of the time the fun runs a lot faster than I do.

Lee Devlin presented a technical and economic overview of 3-D printing, which was not all new news for me, having loosely followed the field since I began studying nanotechnology fifteen years ago. It was, however, the first time I was able to hold in my own hands and examine some ABS parts created on a professional 3-D printer. The parts were much less “fuzzy” than photos I’ve seen online, granting that they were produced on a $32,000 machine (the Stratasys Dimension SST1200es) and not the $1000 Cupcake CNC gadget we’ve been seeing on the Make Blog recently. I have been hoping to learn 3-D CAD for many years, and seeing the Alibre Design parametric CAD software pushed that item up my personal priority list a few dozen spots. Lee persuaded me that this technology is coming into its own (I had been thinking it was still a sort of stunt driven by mechasmic Extropian dreams) and I would love to give it a shot in the reasonable future.

Some of the sessions presented topics worthy of their own entries here, and I’ll come back to them eventually–especially Bill French’s presentation on auditing your own Web site for customer accessibility. I saw some things I probably won’t pursue (like the Flash-based prezi.com presentation software) but think may be useful to others; certainly take a look. Digital photography loomed large (several of the attendees are professional photographers) and a great deal was said about the practical challenges of starting businesses, running businesses, and (courtesy Jeff Schmoyer) getting free of them when you have to move on.

The intensity of the conference was remarkable. Everybody who spoke spoke with the kind of passion that makes problems run screaming. I recall that passion from my early days with Keith launching The Coriolis Group and PC Techniques, and I miss it. The passion didn’t end with the sessions, and in fact I don’t know precisely when it ended because I had already collapsed into bed long before the lights in our conference room went out.

The next EntConnect will take place March 24-27, 2011, at (as best I know) the Crowne Plaza Hotel in downtown Denver, right off the famous 16th Street Mall. It’s already on my calendar, and I’d love to see you there.

A Viral SSID

Mar 5th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

5 comments

First of all, you can stop worrying about me–Carol and I took an intense week-long trip to Chicago tending to family business, and I just couldn’t summon the energy to post while I was there.

But I was reminded of an interesting thing on the trip home, while we waited at the gate for our plane at O’Hare. I opened my new laptop to check for connectivity, and in addition to the airport’s Boingo network, I saw the oft-encountered but poorly understood “Free Public Wifi” SSID. I’ve seen that SSID in airports on almost every trip I’ve taken in the last three or four years, well-aware that it’s not anything like free connectivity. I’ve always assumed that it was a virus running on somebody else’s close-by laptop, because it’s not an infrastructure node like an access point, but an ad-hoc (peer-to-peer) node instead.

Well, it is a virus, but one of a truly fascinating sort. And that may be a little unfair. It’s not malware in the sense of adverse execution on the machine, but a consequence of some Windows foolishness in XP and (possibly) more recent versions. The “Free Public Wifi” SSID spreads virally without the help of anything except Windows itself. I never completely understood the mechanism until I looked it up yesterday. There’s a great writeup here, and I’ll summarize:

Wireless Zero Configuration (WZC) is the part of Windows that manages Wi-Fi connections. When enabled, it will do the following when the machine is booted:

It looks to see if one of your preferred network SSIDs is present in the list of detected infrastructure networks, and will connect if present. Failing that,
It attempts to connect “blind” to infrastructure networks on your preferred list that are not detected, to cover the possibility that your network’s SSID beacon is disabled. This is the Wi-Fi implementation of “security by obscurity,” and no one really uses it anymore. Having failed to connect to a hidden infrastructure node,
WZC will look to see if one of your preferred network SSIDs is present in detected ad-hoc networks, and will connect if it finds one.
Now the weirdness begins: If none of your preferred network SSIDs is present as an ad-hoc node, and if there is an ad-hoc SSID in your preferred networks list, WZC sets your system up as an ad-hoc network with the first ad-hoc SSID it finds in your preferred list.

Hoo-boy. Read that again: If you’ve ever connected to an ad-hoc node and no networks in your preferred list are available, your machine becomes an ad-hoc node. This may not be the worst wireless idea ever, but it’s right up there. Basically, you’ve opened a door to your machine, and (depending on your firewall situation) if somebody connects to your laptop through the ad-hoc node that WZC has created, they can browse your shares.

It didn’t take malware to make this happen. Windows did it all by its lonesome. Here’s a likely scenario explaining why this SSID is so commonly seen in airports:

Somewhere, somewhen, there was a mesh (peer to peer) network named “Free Public WiFi.” It was probably legitimate. I don’t like mesh networks for various technical reasons, but they have their uses, and there’s nothing necessarily scurrilous about them.
An XP user logs into this original “Free Public Wifi” network and connects to the Internet. The SSID is added to their preferred networks list as an ad-hoc node, where it remains. When finished using the mesh network, the XP user breaks the ad-hoc connection and life goes on.
Later on, which could be months or even years, the same user (“User #1”) goes to an airport and while waiting for a plane, boots his or her laptop to do some local spreadsheet work. No connectivity is found, so Wireless Zero Configuration happily establishes an ad-hoc node called “Free Public WiFi.”
A nearby XP user (“User #2”) boots a laptop, looking for connectivity. He or she sees “Free Public Wifi” as an available network, and (naively) clicks to connect. An ad-hoc connection is established to User #1’s laptop. Nothing happens, since neither user is connected to the Internet. However, the “Free Public Wifi” SSID is added to User #2’s preferred networks list. User #2’s plane eventually comes in, and he or she shuts down the laptop, disappointed that no free connection was found.
Later on, User #2 is again at an airport and boots the laptop. WZC establishes an ad-hoc node, and this time, two users see the “Free Public WiFi” SSID and connect. Again, nothing either good or bad happens, but the “Free Public WiFi” ad-hoc SSID is added to the preferred networks list of both User #3 and User #4.
User #3 and User #4 (neither of whom have any idea what’s going on) boot their laptops at other airports, or at conference centers, or some place where laptops tend to congregate. Similarly naive users connect, looking for a free Internet connection, and add “Free Public WiFi” to their preferred networks list.
Contagion continues, as road warriors spread the SSID as explained above.

Although malware isn’t involved, this is far from harmless, since an ad-hoc connection is a door to your machine. Your firewall will probably stop any shenanigans…if you have it working and configured correctly. Some people won’t.

Note well that this only happens if your system has the WZC service running. If you have vendor-specific software installed to manage your wireless subsystem (as all newer Dell laptops do) this craziness won’t occur. Only if Windows and WZC are in charge of wireless are you vulnerable. The solution? Limit your connections to infrastructure networks. There’s a step-by-step at the end of this article.

Other such viral SSIDs exist; I’ve seen “hpsetup” and “default” myself, and others have been reported. Any ad-hoc network SSID can go viral with the help of Windows Wireless Zero Configuration. The “hpsetup” SSID was “contracted” from certain HP printers that connect to laptops via ad-hoc connections. I’ve only confirmed this on XP; the issue may have been resolved with Vista and 7. It’s a fascinating example of unintended consequences in system design, and should become a textbook case in CS coursework. (Why don’t I think that this will ever happen?)

FreePascal (And Lazarus) From Square One

Jan 9th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

43 comments

About two years ago I started piecing together a book on FreePascal based on my 1992 Bantam book, Borland Pascal 7 From Square One. I set the project aside in part because I needed to get my assembly book updated and back into print–something that took most of a year and all of the personal energy I could summon. But there was another problem: The text-mode IDE included with FreePascal is erratic in the extreme, and crashed constantly on me, especially under Windows. I had hoped that there was an easy fix, but apparently not. I installed the new 2.4.0 release of FreePascal yesterday, and the IDE hasn’t changed a bit. Try to set the text display resolution to anything at all (25 X 80, 43 X 80, whatever) and it crashes. One wonders why the damned thing is still there.

I’ve been following the Lazarus project since it had been the Megido project, back in 1998. The idea was to create an open-source alternative to Delphi, by writing a GUI front end for FreePascal. It’s possible to create ordinary console apps in FreePascal using Lazarus as the IDE, but I hesitated to use Lazarus as the example IDE in the book because it’s only available for Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD. (There’s a Mac port, but I’ve heard it’s less complete and much less robust than the others.)

Pascal and VDM readers, feel the irony: Jeff Duntemann hanging back from a RAD environment because he’d hoped to have a more broadbly applicable (read here: portable) book. Wow.

Heh. I changed my mind. I’ll have to go back to the beginning and pull out all the references and screenshots involving the text-mode IDE, but Lazarus is a much better IDE, even if you’re not actually doing any RAD work….yet.

“Yet” is key. If this first book works out, I hope to adapt some of my material from The Delphi 2 Programming Explorer into an intro book for Lazarus as a RAD tool. So getting readers familiar with the editing and project management machinery built into Lazarus is a good thing, even if the bulk of the app goes to waste while people learn the fundamentals of Pascal.

I’m going to try something new with this book. I’m going to pull a Cory Doctorow and give away the complete PDF version for free, and sell the printed version on Lulu. The book will be yet another descendant of Complete Turbo Pascal (in fact, it will in essence be the 25th Anniversary Edition!) and I’ve been paid for the work many times over. So I won’t be losing much by giving it away, and I’m very curious to see how many paid print sales I’ll make based on a free ebook.

Most of the work lies in the early chapters, where I introduce people to the Lazarus RAD environment. After that, well, it’s all basic Pascal, and while Delphi has extended Pascal fantastically in the last fifteen years, CASE statements are still CASE statements.

Unlike my earlier books, I intend to post regular PDFs of the work in progress, so you can follow the project as it happens. (There’s a 2008-era PDF out there now, and you can get it from my FTP area using HTTP.) I’ll post an updated PDF as soon as I untangle all the existing references to the text-mode IDE. Watch this space for more details.