This is for all you Office Space fans (me included)…
… and here’s the classic scene that inspired this poster:
(requires Adobe Flash plugin… click HERE to watch it on YouTube)
Okay, I’m always interested to know how things work… especially when there is a correllation to what I’m working on (large distributed systems). Data Center Knowledge has a summary of Wikipedia’s back-end infrastructure and links to more in-depth presentations. Take the plunge if you’re nerdy enough…
Click HERE to read the article.
Click HERE (PDF) for the in-depth details.
So, there was a lot of hoopla today over the discovery that Mars’ soil may be similar to that found on Earth and thus conducive to supporting life. The Phoenix Mars Lander previously found water in the soil, which was exciting enough. Now, it has shown that the soil has a pH between 8 and 9, and contains magnesium, sodium, and potassium. This has got a lot of people excited about the possibility of finding life (alive or exstinct) on Mars. They are also excited about the possibility of growing food for extended missions there.
You can read about it HERE on the New York Times website.
I’m wondering how long until NASA applies for farm subsides? 
The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) has just ruled that [emphasis mine]:
The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home.
This is a landmark ruling that the antigun lobby has been fighting against for many years. The argument was that the 2nd amendment didn’t apply to individuals; only a state run militia. If this argument prevailed, then it would have effectively prevented an individual citizen from owning a gun.
While the ruling is a victory for those of us who take responsibility for our own self-defense, it doesn’t give carte-blanche rights to own any type of gun you want. Nor does it allow an individual to carry a weapon outside the home without a license. Those issues are left up to the states (which I agree with since I’m a big states-rights guy). From the ruling:
Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose…
I thought this was pretty cool: There’s a group of amateur observers around the world that have made a hobby out of finding and tracking US spy satellites. They have a site called Heavens-Above where they post their data and provide tools for calculating when a given satellite will be visible in your area. Wired has a great article about this group and what the government has been doing to try and ‘hide’ the satellites from them… it’s harder than you might think.
The article starts off with this interesting anecdotal story:
Sometime around dawn on the first day of the 1991 Gulf War, Ted Molczan was woken by a mysterious phone call. Molczan had been up until 3:30 am in his Toronto apartment, riveted by the televised images of Tomahawk missiles raining down on Baghdad, so he was groggy when the phone rang. A male voice with a thick accent said: “I know you’re involved in satellite tracking. I’m interested in doing a trade.” The caller offered Molczan information on the orbiting patterns of a constellation of eight US satellites. In exchange, he wanted to know the orbits for the CIA’s KH-11 “Keyhole” satellites – from space they can discern an object as small as a softball, and they were sending US forces hi-res digital imagery of Iraq and Kuwait.
You can read the full article HERE.
Nicholas Carr’s article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” has some good insights (though I think his fears are unfounded). He discusses how new technologies don’t only change the way we work, but also the way we think. He worries that the Internet is causing us to think less, as we now rely on the instant access to information. This is the same argument people made years ago about the use of calculators… they signaled the demise of mathematical education as we know it. That turned out not to be the case, because the benefits far outweighed the drawbacks. The same thing is true about the Internet… yes, we don’t have to retain as much information in our heads, but it allows us to broaden our knowledge far beyond anything that was possible before. Mike Masnick at TechDirt expands on this a little.
Here are some excerpts from “Is Google Making Us Stupid?“… the full article is still worth the read:
The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected in the changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating “like clockwork.” Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as operating “like computers.” But the changes, neuroscience tells us, go much deeper than metaphor. Thanks to our brain’s plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a biological level.
When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed.
The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets.
There was an interesting article this last Friday at the New Scientist about how the contents of encrypted VOIP conversations could still be deduced via traffic analysis. The short version is that many spoken words have a signature to them even when they are encrypted. This signature is related to the size of the data packets used to represent the sound data. Many phonemes in a word have a distinct encoded data size… by analyzing the packet sizes you can deduce the phonemes and thus the spoken word.
This got me thinking I should write about the complex problem of securing a video stream. There are many aspects to securing a video stream: integrity, authenticity, and privacy being the most important. I’m not going to spend time talking about integrity and authenticity, because those are somewhat simpler problems to solve (integritiy = digital signatures, authenticity = digital certificates). The main focus of this post is about privacy; keeping an eavesdropper from deducing the contents of a video stream.
I found this great site MoBuck.com that allows you to easily create your own motivational posters. For $1, you can download a high-resolution version, and for $14 they will send you a 8.5 x 11 inch print. It’s a lot of fun.
Here’s a Mr. T poster I made about not breaking the software build:
