If you haven’t seen it yet be sure to check out the “Canon Rock” guitar video by funtwo. This electric guitar version of Pachabel’s classic “Canon in D” was arranged by JerryC in the style of the Trans-Siberian Orchestra (another great group). While JerryC has his own version I prefer the cover by funtwo. The arrangement apparently requires that you have mastered the skill of sweep-picking, something easier said than done. The video has gotten popular enough that New York Times reporter Virginia Heffernan did some research published in this article about just who funtwo is and, after discovering at least one imposter, ended up concluding it is Jeong-Hyun Lim a 23 year old from Korea who studied at Auckland University in New Zealand where he mader the now famous recording. For those interested you can still download a copy of the original WMV file from the site where it was originally uploaded by funtwo, the Korean music site mule.co.kr.
Author Archives: benfranske - Page 12
Have you seen the light?
I don’t know about you but I’m still waiting for fiber optic connectivity to my house. If you’re one to dwell in the past you could check out “The $200 Billion Broadband Scandal” aparently written by someone with a strong dislike for the Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs) but that’s unlikely to change where we are today.
Perhaps it’s time for a paradigm shift in communications facilities. Telephone companies are whining that it’s simply too expensive to install fiber connectivity to the premises and the payback is too slow. Of course these are the same companies trying to extort money from web service providers such as Google and Yahoo claiming they aren’t paying their fair share and the same companies which have scammed us in the past (see above). But what if the telephone companies didn’t own the fiber network? What if your local municipality installed the fiber from your house back to a central point, leased it to you and allowed you to make a service agreement with any ISP who would be responsible for “lighting up your fiber”, maintaining the circuit and providing access?
This is just the proposal made by Bob Cringely in a recent column. It appears that someone may have been listening too as the Register (and later Cringely) pointed out the Berkley, California city council tabled a proposal for citywide WiFi to expore a fiber optic proposal instead. If the council moves ahead with the fiber plan and it is sucessful this could result in a string of such projects nationwide, speeding fiber deployment from coast to coast.
It’s worthwhile to look at where this idea originated and some of the details. It seems Bob got the idea (via Bob Frankston one of the VisiCalc inventors) from Bill St. Arnaud, a Canadian researcher. In this presentation St. Arnaud outlines a proposal for muncipal fiber leased to customers. SUch proposals have existed in the past but are often fiercly fought by incumbant carriers worried about loosing marketshare. What makes this proposal different is that the city only installs the fiber loops from a common access point to individual subscibers, they do not provide any services. Customers are responsible for contracting with a seperate service provider to receive voice, data or TV service over the fiber. The idea is that incumbant companies, along with startups, would provide these services and have little to loose as they have not made the large invenstment in running cable to individual subscribers. Another benefit is that the local loop would not be owned by a company removing the need for an incumbant to lease local lines to a competitor as is now common practice in the telephony industry and increasing competitve choice by reducing the barrier to entry.
St. Arnaud further suggests that the customer’s contracted service provider would be responsible for maintaining the fiber (either itself or, more likely, subcontracted out) removing ongoing maintenance expense from the municipality. In addition, the municipality would be able to use fiber connectivity itself to connect various city, county and school buildings to a high speed data network. The presentation suggests that a fiber system such as this using either optical ribbon fiber or micro-conduits would cost only about $1000-1500 per subscriber at 25-40% take up. St. Arnaud also points to a similar installation in Sweeden which he claims has been extremely successful.
I would love to see how this idea would play out in the real world, and would love for my community to be the one to try it yet that seems unlikely. In the meantime I’ll monitor resources such as the Fiber to the Home Council and FiberFirst Minnesota for details about fiber connectivity proposals in my neck of the woods.
Tracking the Weather
Not too long ago I was driving through a town and saw they advertised themselves as part of the National Weather Service “StormReady” program. Being a trained spotter for the NWS I’ve heard a lot of jargon and have a better than average idea about what the NWS is responsible for, but I had never heard of this program. Of course when I got home I had to look it up and found that such a program does exist, but apparently is not widely used (as of this date only 1086 communities nationally are certified).
According to the National Weather Service StormReady website:
StormReady is a nationwide community preparedness program that uses a grassroots approach to help communities develop plans to handle all types of severe weather—from tornadoes to tsunamis. The program encourages communities to take a new, proactive approach to improving local hazardous weather operations by providing emergency managers with clear-cut guidelines on how to improve their hazardous weather operations.
As an amateur radio operator and trained spotter I’d like to see more communitites participate in programs such as this as they prepare for inevitable natural disasters.
On another weather related note I discovered a piece of software called Swift WX which claims to have real-time weather radar you can watch from your PC. My suspician is that the software polls the NWS servers for the already free NEXRAD radar data overlays it on maps with other graphics. Note that with current weather radar technology the radar must make several sweeps at varying angles to create a usable composite image which takes several minutes. Furthermore, unlike systems hooked to dedicated radars such as those at many TV stations software such as this must wait for the next data update from the NWS. While this happens frequently, calling it real-time is probably a stretch. I suppose that if you weren’t satisfied using a web-based radar viewing solution a product such as this could be useful, but it doesn’t appear to be anything special.
This airplane will self destruct in…
The purported recent plot to explode a number of airplanes traveling from the UK to the US using liquids mixed in-flight to created improvised explosive devices reminded me of an article I had read some time ago about a much simpler option. As far as I know the method described in this article has never been used in a terrorist attack but the possibility exists and would be difficult to detect. This just goes to show that the current ban on liquids (and in some areas electronics) in carry-on luggage is simply an exercize in futility and making people feel better. Futhermore, it would be foolhardy to spend untold millions (billions?) upgrading airport security with detectors for liquid explosives. When will people learn that anything less than chaining naked passengers who have had full body cavity searches to their seats and flying luggage on a seperate cargo plane will do much to stop terrorists. Yet we continue with the farce of security as our rights and privladges are stripped away by a bloodthirsty federal government led by the so-called “states’ rights” supporters of the Republican Party. But I digress, this story is really about the science of destroying an aircraft in mid-flight with only a single easy to obtain and hide substance.
Unless you are a representative of a national meteorological bureau licensed to carry a barometer (and odds are you’re not), bringing mercury onboard an airplane is strictly forbidden. Why? If it got loose, it could rust the plane to pieces before it had a chance to land. You see, airplanes are made of aluminum, and aluminum is highly unstable.
The entire story can be read at the Popular Science website. The general gist of the article is that airplanes, held together by aluminum parts, are vulnerable to complete disintigration by a chain chemical reaction started by a small amount of mercury. It would be simple to hide such a small amount of mercury or mercury paste in any number of products carried on to an aircraft. Just another example of how simple everyday products could be used in an act of terror and the impossibility of protecting people from such an attack.
Happy 25th birthday to the IBM PC!
The introduction of the IBM PC on August 12, 1981 changed the world, or at least the personal computing industry, forever. Of course this year marks the 25th anniversary of that announcement and it is being covered in a number of places on the internet. Two sites worth looking at are the official IBM site and the brief history of the IBM PC article at LEM.
Survey on putting electronics in checked airline baggage
I received the following message today and I encourage all readers to respond. I think it will be interesting to see the results and I will forward them along as I can.
Please distribute widely, as considered appropriate
I’m (Lauren Weinstein) conducting a little unscientific survey on whether or not airline passengers are willing to place their expensive or important electronic equipment in airline checked baggage (whether “locked” or not, but on most flights unlocked will be required), and how this would affect their flying patterns.
With the above as preface, there are three questions:
1) Are you willing to place all of your significant electronic equipment (including laptop or other computers, cellphones, DVD players, iPods, etc.) in checked baggage for airline flights?
2) If you are required to place such electronic equipment in checked baggage, would it have a significant negative impact on your willingness to fly?
3) Do you mainly fly for business or pleasure?
I will only publish aggregated statistics from this survey, unless
individual persons specifically note that their responses may be
released publicly.To participate in the survey, please e-mail a note with your responses to:
baggage@vortex.com
Only a one word reply is necessary to each of the questions
unless you wish to add comments, which are invited.Thanks very much.
–Lauren–
Lauren Weinstein
Co-Founder, PFIR
– People For Internet Responsibility
Co-Founder, IOIC
– International Open Internet Coalition
Moderator, PRIVACY Forum
Member, ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Lauren’s Blog
DayThink
It’s like stealing from a big monopolistic corporation
I can’t help but assume this amusing page is a humorous jest and ploy to sell novelty toys. It looks like someone had a little too much fun with a soldering iron and superglue and decided to dedicate a webpage to it. Interesting considering the rest of the site looks fairly legit. Of course the patent they claim applies to these devices has nothing to do with the devices themselves.
So what am I talking about? You’ll have to go see for yourself!
Phone distribution in small business and residental applications
One of the best ways to distribute phone lines in residential and small business applications is to use some kind of punchdown block in combination with a star (also called home run) topology. While the site is not completely devoid of commercial aims (they do sell equipment) the Phone Man site has great explantions of how to wire 66 and 110 blocks for phone distribution (when you don’t have a PBX type system and simply wish for all phone lines to go to all jacks).
For what it’s worth I recently bought a DSL splitter from the site for a recent project and highly recommend installing a centralized DSL splitter such as the Wilcom PS15-I3S and doing away with all those individual DSL filters around your house.
Schneier suggests US Navy has patented the firewall
Respected computer security analyist and writer Bruce Schneier has suggested that the US Navy has filed for a patent which could apply to many computer firewalls. While there remains some debate in the security community about whether this applies to all firewalls or only application level firewalls it could still have widespread impact on the network security market.
Isn’t public data great?
Thanks to this website at the National Weather Service (a friend to all free data lovers these days) you cna get a complete list of counties in the US and US territories. The list includes data such as the NOAA/NWS FIPS codes, centralized coordinates and a description of where in the state the county is located. The list is currently provided in three formats at least one of which (dbf) can be opened in the free OpenOffice Calc (spreadsheet) program. If you don’t have a use for this data right now at least you can look at this lovely map of all 3110 counties in the continental United States.
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