- SRWare Iron was doing a peculiar thing: When I used it to view my junkbox.com main page, the title image was broken. This was not the case using IE, FF, or Opera. Nor was it true of the several other images on that same page, but only that big main one. An intuition led me to look up the name of the image file: junkboxmainbanner.png. I renamed the file “junkboxmain.png” (that is, removing the substring “banner” from the filename) and the image began rendering normally. I guess there’s a downside to adblockers as twitchy as this one.
- From Bruce Baker comes a nice chronological screenshot survey of computer GUIs since the primordial Xerox Alto in 1973, up through Windows Vista and KDE 4. No judgements are passed on the products, and not much history is offered, but it’s unusual to see them all lined up in one place, and one definitely gets a sense for the way it all evolved, and especially for the immeasurable debt that Apple owes Xerox.
- On a tip from Pete Albrecht, I’ve learned that the Progressive Insurance girl Flo and one of the Geico cavemen shared a scene in the short-lived 2007 TV sitcom Cavemen . Here’s a YouTube clip of the scene. This was sheer coincidence; the Progressive ad campaign did not happen for at least a year after that and Stephanie Courtney just happened to get the part. I tried to like the series and failed, but I’ll admit that it had some surreal moments, a few of which we evidently didn’t appreciate at the time. Now, cavemen ate geckos. (Cavemen ate anything they could catch.) Dare we hope…
- Here’s an old article from Popular Mechanics on building your own Geiger counter. Michael Covington reminds me that there was a circuit in Alfred Morgan’s book The Boys’ Second Book of Radio and Electronics, though it had a peculiar power supply and didn’t work when I tried to build it in 1966. (I may still have the G-M tube somewhere, but I can’t find it and in truth haven’t seen it in decades.)
- Yet another one, this time from Popular Science, March 1950.
- Todd Johnson suggests using scrounged or surplus fluorescent lamp supplies from computer scanners for homebrew Geiger counters. I’ve got two defunct scanners on the woodpile downstairs, but if you don’t, Todd also sent along a pointer to a surplus source, for only $5.
- Today is Ubuntu 9.04 day. It’s like the Day after Thanksgiving at Marshall Fields up there, so don’t expect much in the line of download performance. I’m going to wait for the dust to settle a little (and maybe for my assembly book to be done) but it will happen here sooner or later. If you want it, look for torrents. And come with a backpack of patience.
- Do you have Linux running on an Intel DQ35 motherboard. If so, be careful.
- Finally, this clever food hack reminds me vaguely of something. I don’t know what. That’s probably just as well.
Odd Lots
The Moon Eats Venus
I had a tough time sleeping after 4:30 AM this morning, probably because I slept so well the previous night. (The Powers seem to ration my sleep for reasons I’ve never understood. Maybe if I got a complete night’s sleep every night I’d be unbearably perky, like that retro 60s babe Flo on the Progressive Insurance commercials.) So I finally gave up about 5:15 and got dressed. I went out on the back deck to see what I could see of the Moon and Venus, to find that the positioning was optimal bad vis-a-vis the huge pine tree behind the house. My eastern horizon is very good, where I have an eastern horizon–and alas, the Moon was rising right behind the tree.
However, by 6 AM the pair had cleared the tree, and were getting very close. I put my Canon G-10 on its greatest zoom, propped the camera on the deck railing, and took some shots. The sky was getting pretty light at that point and I knew I wouldn’t get much contrast, but there’s something a little subtle and spooky about what I did get, and I’m quite happy with the shot overall. When I knew that the occultation was only a few minutes off, I went back in and got Carol up. We both watched it from the deck, passing my 8 X 50s back and forth and marvelling at the terrific weather.
I haven’t seen a lot of planetary occultations, and there’s a fundamental difference between those of planets and stars: Stars are point sources of light. When a star goes behind the Moon, it blinks out instantly. Planets fade as their disks are covered by the Moon’s limb over a period of a few minutes. As I watched Venus dim, I realized that this was the first planetary occultation I’ve watched through binoculars. Every other occasion (I think maybe three) I was watching through one of my big scopes. I regret a little not having put the 8″ scope on the back deck last night, but experience has shown that the deck is not a very steady platform for observing. (And the driveway looks west, with the house blocking the eastern horizon completely.) There’s something to be said for brand-new experiences. Why always do everything the same way?
Odd Lots
- 138,000 words in, out of about 175,000. Maybe a hair under 3,000 words left on this chapter, and then only two more to go. Whew.
- I’m collecting pointers to print magazine articles about building your own Geiger counters. I have a few articles from Popular Electronics and one from Popular Mechanics on Google, and may do a survey article on the topic for Jeff’s Junkbox. The trick with most of the tube-era circuits is those 300V dry batteries. Somewhere in the stacks I’ve stickied a neat hack consisting of a 2N554 pumping square waves into a tube-era output transformer to put out at least 300V at a few mils. That would do it…
- There’s going to be a very nice conjunction of the crescent Moon and crescent Venus just before dawn tomorrow morning. More here. West of Ohio and a line tilting southwest, Venus will actually be occulted by the Moon. Our weather promises to be good here and given that I’ll be up at 6 anyway, what’s another forty minutes?
- Michael Arrington’s Crunchpad (which I mentioned in my January 19, 2009 entry) seems to have some recent quantum leaps toward reality. I’m watching it as an ebook reader, and while I doubt we’ll lay hands on it for only $200, I’d be happy to pay $400 if the implementation is good. E-Ink is just painful in bad light, like you get in most hotel rooms and the corner bed of your RV.
- Suddenly I’m seeing more articles on polywell fusion; here’s the latest, courtesy Frank Glover. Most of the deep theory goes over my head, but people I respect seem to think it will work and can be scaled to useful outputs.
- Cold fusion is hot again too, judging by several major items in the MSM, including 60 Minutes. The Navy’s in on it too. My take: The test of a true scientist vs. a phony scientist is the difference between “We don’t know what’s going on here” and “There is nothing going on here.”
- I guess this may be Fringe Science Day. The Big Face on Mars is so 1980s…have you seen the Big Pac Man Game on Mars? (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the pointer.)
- Finally, from Bruce Baker comes a link to a life-size status of Jesus in Lego. Nicely done, whether you’re a theist or not–but again, if you don’t glue the pieces together, how do you stop the parish’s munchkins from stealing Jesus’ toes?
Iron Filings
I’m a little disappointed in the new Chromium-based browser SRWare Iron (see my entry for April 18, 2009) or perhaps I should say a little disappointed in SRWare itself. The browser has worked extremely well the last couple of days here on my quad-core XP machine. After only a little sleuthing I made the ad blocker work: All you have to do is download a text list of ad sites into the Iron directory, and the browser runs with it. (The browser is shipped with an empty adblock.ini file.) However, Pete Albrecht alerted me to the fact that Iron won’t run at all on his Windows 2000 machine–even though SRWare hints that it might.
Google is quite firm about it: Chrome won’t even install under Win2K. XP and Vista are all you get. However, down in the German-language portion of the SRWare Web site, Pete (who is fluent in German and in fact translates engineering texts for a living) found this:
There is something new for users of Windows 2000 as well; for cost reasons, there are still many users of this system, for example, in business. While Chrome can’t even be installed on Windows 2000 systems, Iron has also removed the warning message that appears whenever it is started on a Windows 2000 system. However, installations under Windows 2000 remain unsupported, as there may be isolated problems.
(Pete’s translation; the item is not present in English.) Well, if the problems are isolated, they’re isolated in a peculiarly concentrated fashion. I loaded Iron Portable on a Cruzer Mini and woke up every operational Win2K machine I still have in the house. (This took some waking; my poor 2001 ThinkPad doesn’t work very well anymore.) Iron failed on all four machines, with variations on the following error message:
The procedure entry point <whatever> could not be located in the dynamic link library KERNEL32.DLL.
KERNEL32.DLL is one of several places where the fundamental Windows API lives. The API call that failed was not always the same, but in every single case, Iron failed to start.
0 for 5 on Win2K, sigh. Iron won’t run on Linux or Mac either. (Nor will Chrome.) What bothers Pete and me is that SRWare suggests that the software should run under Win2K, with only “isolated problems.” Why not just be honest? If people get their hopes up that your software will run on their systems and then find out the hard way that it won’t, it only makes your software (and you) look bad. This is not the way to make a very promising software product catch on.
The Google Books Settlement
My miscellaneous low-priority do-it list has gotten mighty long since January, and every so often I set aside some time to knock off a few items. This morning something interesting bubbled up to the top of the stack: Claim my books under the Google Books Settlement. I’ve known about this for quite some time and haven’t had the mental bandwidth to look into it deeply, but having been roused by rowdy dogs this morning a little earlier than I’d like, I sat down here and read the material.
I’m not quite sure what to think. Google is helping to create a registry of old books that are still in copyright but no longer in print. This is a very good thing, and I signed up to support that effort if nothing else. What Google intends to do is create a legal framework for making those old books available as paid ebooks, and give authors (and where publishers still have rights, publishers) a portion of the take. Google has already scanned a great many books, including a few of my own, and if I can pick up a few quarters by buying in to the system, I will. (Alas, I doubt my 1987 work Turbo Pascal Solutions is going to be a hot seller.)
Mostly, I want the problem of orphan books to be finessed, and I want it finessed without Big Media’s copyright lobby shaping it so that it routes all the money to them and leaves the rest of us penniless in the dust. People gripe about Google’s interest in the whole thing–they could make an enormous amount of money here if this thing catches on, and in essence become the planet’s largest publisher–but the idea is sound and Google may be the best that we can do.
If anyone has any interest in this, go to the Google Books Settlement Site and read the sizeable FAQ. I especially encourage any of my author friends who have published books to decide what they think about the whole thing, and either sign in or opt out. Signing up can be done until January 5, 2010, but opting out must be done by May 5, 2009. I’m guessing that popular authors and their heirs will opt out, figuring they may be able to get a better deal somewhere, and the great starving writer masses (who know that there are no deals on their horizon) will sign on. And that’s actually a good thing: The great starving writer masses deserve a way to get whatever scraps may fall from the ebooks publishing table, as the publishing industry generally becomes more and more of a “winner takes all” kind of business.
The framework has not yet been completely created, but it’ll happen over time, and it will be very interesting to see if anything comes of it long-term. I’m watching the whole business closely and will report here from time to time, especially once I finish the Book That Ate 2009.
The Iron Sandbox
I’ve been pretty focused the last three or four months, so I mostly missed the whole discussion about Google Chrome and its pros and cons. Parts of Chrome are very impressive, particularly the “sandbox” security model–and parts are about what you’d expect from a monster company that makes its money on Web ads. I caught snatches of the debate here and there, but it wasn’t until I found myself at 3 PM today with 5,100 words’ worth of progress made since 7:30 AM that I decided, enough of this. (I’m now 133,000 words in and pretty much on schedule again, having lost some ground in March.) So I kicked back and started reading up on Chrome. In doing so, I found something I hadn’t expected, or heard about at all: SRWare Iron.
What Iron looks like to me is Chrome with Google’s business model stripped out. Chrome itself was based on a number of different technologies, most of them open-source, including Google Code’s Chromium browser framework and the WebKit rendering engine. Google built a number of tracking mechanisms into Chrome, including a unique user ID and a few other mechanisms for sending search statistics back to Google. These seemed relatively benign to me (perhaps I’ve seen too much of the really bad stuff, heh) but a lot of people got very upset over the Chrome privacy model.
Enter SRWare, a German software security firm. They took the open-source codebase for Chrome and stripped out whatever they considered dicey from a privacy standpoint. They updated the WebKit rendering engine, did a few other miscellaneous security tweaks, and re-released the product as Iron. This sounds presumptuous to some people, but that’s how open source works. (There’s nothing preventing Google from re-absorbing SRWare’s changes, but as the changes are mostly features removed, that wouldn’t be especially useful.) Basically, we have a Chrome variant that doesn’t track your searches and phone home.
That’s good, and as browsers both Chrome and Iron have reviewed well. Chrome (and therefore Iron) do well on Web standards, passing Acid1 completely and Acid2 with only minor glitches. But what I find best about Chrome/Iron is the security model. Each tab is a separate process, and each tab process has its system rights severely restricted. Even if the browser itself is running in an admin account, the tabs run as restricted users, with a few further restrictions. Malware may well run in a tab, but there is very little that the malware can do except run in the tab. It can’t install software, sniff other processes, write files, or survive the closing of the tab. It’s not a per-tab virtual machine (which is where I think malware will eventually force Web browsers to go) but it’s a giant step in the right direction. (InfoWorld has a nice discussion of the Chrome security model.) I’m still having a little trouble getting a technical grip on the merits and flaws of Chrome’s V8 javascript virtual machine, but I’ll keep sniffing around and will eventually figure it out.
The security model prevents many plug-ins from working correctly, and this may bother some people more than others. Not me: Plug-ins are the 900-square-foot hole in browser security generally, and for basic Web research, I can do without, well, all of them.
I’ve only had a couple of hours to fool with Iron, and I’ll tell you right now that I like it a lot. I installed the portable version, which confines all of its files to a single directory and does not touch the Windows Registry. The rendering is very snappy, snappier than Firefox 3. (I haven’t touched IE in so long I didn’t even bother making a comparison.) It imported all my bookmarks without a burp, though it did not automatically place my Firefox toolbar bookmarks in its own toolbar. (I did that from Iron’s bookmark manager with one drag and drop.) I read somewhere that Iron had a built-in ad blocker, but I don’t see any controls for it, and I’m still seeing lots of ads.
Still, what attracted me to Iron is its approach to Web security…and over and above everything in the code, what may make Iron safest of all browsers is that it’s rare. Security exploits are often (if not always) app-specific or at least library-specific. Malware depends heavily on the density of the installed base to succeed, which is why so many exploits target IE, and more recently Firefox. As long as the software works well for me, I don’t care how few copies are out there–in truth, the fewer the better. SRWare has kept up with patches on both the Chrome code base and the WebKit code base (which Chrome itself hasn’t kept up with) and assuming they continue to do so, we may have us a breakthrough in the malware wars. It’s still early, but I’m already very impressed. (I’ll come back with “highly recommended” if I still think so in a few weeks. Stay tuned.)
Odd Lots
- How about a steampunk Segway? It’s self-balancing as long as its rider is self-balancing, I guess–and certainly burns more calories.
- Or (while you’re pretending to be King Edward VII) a steampunk snowboard? Are there any steampunk types who are my age, or is it all a twentysomething crowd? I recently saw an antique foot-powered dentist’s drill machine circa 1890. Nice ornate cast ironwork and bronze–and made me very glad I’m 120 years away from it.
- If you use Linux, staythehell out of Boston. It’s considered prima facie evidence of criminal activity. Damn, those people need another invasion of the Mooninites. (Thanks to Bruce Baker for the link.)
- Ah, the price of increasing popularity: There is now a Mac botnet launching DDoS attacks. (Or…I wonder…could Symantec be about to launch a new Mac security product?)
- Our TV Guide listings stopped working on Comcast basic analog cable a few weeks ago. We thought it was our TV–and the Comcast people were less than helpful–but apparently it’s a consequence of the big move to digital TV. The TV Guide listings data rode in on an analog sidecar to the analog PBS signal, and now that PBS has gone all-digital, there’s no sidecar anymore. (Thanks to Bill Roper for digging this one up–he has a similar problem with his DVR.)
- There is a pizza place in San Diego called Killer Pizza from Mars. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.) Interestingly, my best friend Art and I did some brainstorming about opening a pizza place in Rogers Park called Tranquility Base when we got out of college in recession-year 1974, but nothing came of it. (He would have been the cook. I would have been the waiter; probably the one thing that paid less than fixing Xerox machines.)
- They do things big in Nebraska: The last full week of September sees the Nebraska Junk Jaunt, in which ten midstate counties hold a collective garage sale along a 300-mile route, with 500+ vendors participating, and that’s only the ones they know about. Start early, see them all! (Damn, I’m tempted!)
- Finally, it’s April 17, and we’re in the midst of a blizzard here in Colorado Springs. The carpet cleaners had to postpone the job, and we had to cancel our gym session today. We may get a foot or more between here and Sunday, and peeking out the window I already see 3″ or so. This has been the damndest coldest, longest winter in our six years here. Has Al Gore been sneaking around the Springs somewhere?
Cuisine
For those who care, I’m 124,266 words in at the moment, shooting for 175,000. Chapter 10 must be submitted before the end of April, and I’m rustier on some of this stuff than I thought.
I recognize that I’m way overdue for writing something profound here, but my head’s still too full of conditional jump instructions. So I’ll punt and offer something less than profound: Whether or not the book cover at left is funny depends heavily on whether or not you have very young children underfoot.
(Couldn’t they have drawn Pooh stirring a pot of spaghetti sauce?)
Odd Lots
- From the Words I Didn’t Know Until Yesterday Department: “charcuterie,” meaning cured meats like bacon, ham, prosciutto, and the preparation thereof.
- I talked to the realtor who’s handling the listing of the old Heinlein house here in Colorado Springs. What she said astounded me: Heinlein’s 1950 custom house is still in there. They built that ugly thing around it in 1995 or so. Parts of the original structure were removed, but most of it still exists, although it evidently was used as framing more than anything else.
- And further relevant to the Heinlein House is a report from elder SF fan Bruce Pelz, who not only visited the house in Colorado Springs in 1963 when the Heinleins were still living there, but he slept in their legendary fallout shelter. (Cool photo there–definitely click through! And thanks to Bruce Baker for the link.)
- Needless to say, I haven’t visited the Heinlein fallout shelter (I stood in line to shake the great man’s hand at MidAmericon in 1976, and that was the only time I ever met him) but I frequently visited the 10-foot-deep underground fallout shelter of the late William A. “Bill” Rhodes in Phoenix, which he was using as a cool (literally) computer room until his death in 2006. It was culturally jarring–people of my parents’ generation took fallout shelters for granted, and people of my generation (for the most part) found them appalling.
- CFLs may not be the big environmental win that they’re being touted as, because the power factor of the lamps is very low. Thery’re still a win, but the hype needs to be pruned back a little.
- The whole idea of a CAPTCHA may be flawed, and although there are a number of objections to CAPTCHAS, this article pins down the primary and probably unfixable one: You can pay people to solve them. There are apparently some porn/pirate sites that charge for access in solved CAPTCHAS. And if nothing else works, hire a CAPTCHA-breaking firm in the third world. It looks to me like CAPTCHAs are becoming at best speed-bump hindrances to bots. If I had to guess, I’d say make it slower to establish accounts, and certainly slower for one IP to sequentially attempt a CAPTCHA. Could teergrubing make a comeback?
- For the benefit of those who asked, here is the Web site of the people who did my crowns over this past year. They are artists, especially Dr. Frank Seaman. The 15-month project was actually a collaboration between two independent offices in the same building. Dr. Jeanne Salcetti did the periodontal portion (gingivectomy, tooth extraction, bone graft, and implant) and she was wonderful too. I recommend both of them without hesitation.
Boy, That Took a While…
…but it’s over. (No, not the book.) I’ve felt this way a time or two. The best example is the day I woke up after graduating from college. I remember thinking: Yikes! It’s over! I’m done! I don’t ever have to go back there! (I enjoyed high school a lot more than college.)
On January 14, 2008 I started in on a major dental project. My long-time readers have seen me post reports here from time to time. It involved removing the two botched sets of joined crowns that I had had installed in September 2001–which took almost four hours and a fortune in carbide burrs all by itself–a gingivectomy all the way around my lowers and parts of my uppers, two root canals, an extraction, a bone graft, an implant, and an immense amount of fussy work to create 25 individual crowns and a bridge over the bone-eroded gap where I haven’t had a tooth since 1991.
Today I went in and had the last crown attached to the implant post that was inserted November 6. Dr. Seaman used a little torque wrench to tighten it down, and even quoted me a torque value in newton-meters, which I have already forgotten. This one was easy, as there was no biological material involved. Some cranking and torque wrenching and a little grinding to get the bite right, but there was that thought again as I got in the car to head home: It’s over!
It’s not entirely true that I never have to go back there. Bionic or not, teeth need cleaning and looking over a couple of times a year, and I’m happy to go back for that. I now have 28 chewing surfaces for the first time in a long time, with nothing loose, nothing bleeding, and nothing inflamed; in short, everything is as it should be.
Let me reiterate: I’m as nervous as anyone about the state of the world today (though I worry about different things than most people) but as much as I enjoyed the early 1960s and even the late 1970s, I would never go back in time unless I knew that I could fast-forward again for dental work. I miss 60’s Sunshine Pop and sometimes I miss my hair, but I’ve had enough agonizingly crude dental work done in the last 50 years to kiss the point in time I’m standing on and shout to the sky: God bless the 21st Century!
