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Driving Across the United States day 5
The fifth day began with visiting Petroglyph National Monument just outside of Albuquerque, a city whose name I can now spell without looking it up. While the petroglpyhs themselves are interesting, I found the best part of the park was the short hike to the top of one of the mesas to see an awesome view of Albuquerque and the surrounding landscape. The lava rock fields that constitute the national monument were formed by the cinder cones that are atop the mesa. The volcano’s discharge covers much of the tops of the mesas and spills over the edge into the folded canyons where the images are carved.
Next up was the Painted Desert and Petrified Forest in Arizona. Though the petrified wood is quite striking, I found the painted desert to be more breathtaking. The majority of the painted desert scenes are North of Interstate 40, displaying a vivid array of color stripes across the canyon walls and cones. I hadn’t thought about the fact that the landscape is formed by wind and water erosion, but it’s unsurprising that the wind in the entire area is constantly gusting.
After seeing the first park in Arizona, we headed toward Flagstaff and then North to the Grand Canyon. We booked a room at a hotel just outside of the park and tried to drive in to get dinner at the main lodge but failed because they were completely full, which is probably the case nearly year round at the canyon. In the few minutes we were walking around the lodge, however, we were within 10 feet of the rim, a fact we didn’t realize until the next day upon seeing it in the light the next day.
Driving Across the United States day 4
The fourth day started with a trip to see White Sands National Monument which is contained within the Army’s White Sands Missile Range. That point is important because when we arrived at the park around 8:30AM, we were told that the road in wouldn’t open until 9:45 due to a missile test at the surrounding range. Immediately upon entering the park, you are surrounded by brilliant white sand in the form of dunes covered with desert vegetation. In short order, the vegetation subsides leaving nearly naked alabaster mounds surrounding the park road. Even from atop the dunes, the only thing visible is the white sand and the mountains surrounding the Tularosa Basin.
After seeing White Sands, we drove back through Alamogordo North to Carrizozo, NM, West to Socorro, NM and further to the Very Large Array. The 25 meter radio telescopes at the VLA are individually huge and the array is something to behold even in the medium configuration that we saw, with only a few hundred meters between them. What’s more striking is to see the enormous size that the telescopes can be arranged as each of the railroad track arms is 25 kilometers long. Thankfully, the VLA was courteous enough to put this in terms very easy for a Washingtonian to understand.
After seeing all of that, we headed to Albuquerque and had dinner at a standard city brewpub, Kelly’s near the univeristy. Driving through the city was very nice, as the facades throughout town are all very entertaining to see.
Driving Across the United States day 3
After a couple days of seeing next to nothing while driving through southwestern Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas and Texas, a day of absolutely nothing was on tap in the form of West Texas. Our drive took us from Abilene through Sweetwater to Big Spring where we ditched the interstate in favor of state highways. Plentiful along this route are oil wells, pumps visible for as far as one can see. There were also a number of drilling crews working to create new wells in the the most productive oil fields on the continent. Additionally, Sweetwater is home to the largest wind generator concentration in the Western hemisphere. The hills in the town are home to innumerable multi-megawatt, 90+ meter diameter wind turbines. Other than said hills, the highest thing around is a highway overpass, from which I took a few pictures.
After passing through Hobbs, NM, we headed south-southeast toward Carlsbad, NM in order to see the Carlsbad Cavern near that town. Though I had been to Luray Caverns as a kid, I remembered little of that cave. No matter, as Carlsbad dwarfs its East-coast equivalent. The size of the cavern, from the incredible entrance and the significant depth to the amazing underground area is astounding. Most striking is the lighting, apparently designed by a Broadway theater technician. If you are going through Arizona, Carlsbad Cavern is certainly something to stop and see. Even outside of the cave, the drive through the canyon in the park and the resulting view from the mesa are worth the trip.
Driving Across the United States day 2
The second day started with a trip through Memphis, TN to stop by Graceland, not because either of us particularly care about Elvis but it’s a major stop for Americana, so you can’t just drive by. Surprisingly, even on Easter this landmark of tackiness was open and visitors could take a tour of the mansion, were they so inclined. This was of little interest so, after a couple of pictures, we drove on to Arkansas with a stop to see the Mississippi river up close. The river is incredibly wide as everyone has always heard and it was moving quite quickly due to recent rains.
In Arkansas, the terrain more or less continued getting a bit flatter as we moved on. Little Rock isn’t very big and the sparsely populated terrain continues all the way to Dallas except for the border town of Texarkana. Dallas-Fort Worth is as huge as one would expect, but we were on our way to Abilene, TX which held another pleasant gastronomic surprise. In Abilene we had dinner at the Lytle Land and Cattle Co. which served undoubtedly the finest steak I have ever had. I wouldn’t have believed prior to this that a steak could be so good and it’s surely due mostly to the quality of the local beef. Texas is, unsurprisingly, a great place to get a steak and I am now inclined to try Omaha Steaks that you can get by mail.
Driving Across the United States day 1
I’m moving from The Commonwealth of Virginia to The California Republic. As an adventure, and a means to get my car to the West Coast, I’m driving across the country with my dad in my M3. Because of the nature of the car, we’re avoiding the snowy highways through the middle of the country and following a generally southern route.
The first day took us through southwestern Virginia and into Tennessee, ending at Jackson, TN, about 100 miles from Memphis. There isn’t much to speak of in this are, save the fairly constant expanse of Appalachia that I’m used too. Lots of deciduous trees, rolling hills and blue mountains.
One good part of the day was stopping at a barbecue shack near Vanderbilt University in Nashville.
Off The Hook - 12 March 2008
This is the synopsis of Off The Hook that aired on 12 March 2008. The show runs live on WBAI at 7pm on Wednesdays. Call in at 212.209.2900 or send letters to oth@2600.com. The show is also available as a high-quality podcast.
In the studio: Emmanuel, Mike, Redbird, Not Kevin
On the phone: Bernie S in Philadelphia
Chinese hackers claim to have gained access to worldwide sites including the Pentagon and are purportedly funded by that state’s government.
A computer security analyst says that a major telecommunications carrier, perhaps Verizon Wireless, is in cahoots with the FBI after he was told not to enable any security on a circuit named “Quantico” by supervisors while performing a migration. Such a lack of security gives the aforementioned circuit unfettered access to the carrier’s entire network perhaps even uploading their own firmware to customers handsets. Not Kevin points out that with GSM phones it is much easier for users to prevent such tampering with their phones, since customers have a choice and can easily change their carrier by changing the SIM card. Bernie brings up the recent CALEA legislation that allows federal agencies to bypass the step of obtaining a warrant and providing it to the phone companies. Furthermore, there is no logging of such taps making it impossible to account for wiretapping actions.
If you are suspicious of the number of mobile phones that someone has, notify the London police at 0800789321 (PDF link).
MAKE Magazine has an article for a method of blinding surveillance cameras. It uses infrared LEDs to wash out the image by flooding the camera with infrared light that isn’t visible to the naked eye but is picked up by most CCDs.
Muni drivers in San Francisco have had trouble with hooligans turning off the buses via an unlocked panel that hides a switch controlling the power for the entire bus. Those on the show first heard about this vulnerability from Shapeshifter at least 4 years ago. Bernie notes that the reason for the switches is to allow the power to be cut in an emergency, necessitating easy access to the switch.
A listener writes in about a service, EarthCaller a browser-based VOIP service that works only with Internet Explorer. The listener brings magicJack mentioned on the program a while back that allows you to use a normal phone with VOIP via a Windows computer. According to Not Kevin the Personal Computer Show hosts have one of the devices and are unimpressed with its quality.
The same listener also advocates the use of the use of 800-call-411 rather than GOOG411 because the former service doesn’t mention whether or not they record the call. Emmanuel first calls GOOG411 attempting to get the number for WBAI but gets some other business on Wall Street that sounds like Dubai. The other service, 800-call-411 comes up with WBAI immediately without fuss, though it is unable to understand WBAI’s telephone number.
“P” writes in asking for Jim’s information:
Caton Park Nursing HomeEmmanuel says that a number of people have visited Jim and it has been well appreciated.
Attn: Jim Vichench
1312 Caton Avenue, Rm. 312B
Brooklyn, New York 11226
A Massachusetts listener brings up the cell phones for train conductors test that was mentioned on last weeks show applauding the fact that the municipality is at least testing the system. The listener notes that this is better than a program in his commonwealth that equipped snowplows with GPS enable cell phones that turned out to be a complete failure.
Someone writes in to mention the new Mac OS X “virus” Newton. The letter also mentions Windows XP Black Edition and notes that it is very likely filled with malware.
Those in the studio and a listener mention that they haven’t received their vouchers for digital to standard definition converter boxes.
An amateur radio operator who also acts as a weather spotter says that hams perform a valuable public service during times of emergency.
A caller asks about HD radio, specifically whether special antennas are needed. Not Kevin points out that all HD radios contain a decoder created by iBiquity who has a patent on the technology. He and Bernie both say that HD radio is of no higher quality and doesn’t stand for High Definition, unlike new television technologies.
A question about cell phone repeaters comes from a caller and Bernie says that such systems are available, though probably not economical.
Smart Bookmarks
Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror made a very good point recently about browser shortcuts that make browsing the web quicker because they reduce your dependence upon the mouse. If you have any semblance of RSI caused by mouse usage, like mine is, then learning to maximize use of the keyboard in place of the mouse is paramount. Following on this I will share a number of smart bookmarks that I have found to be indispensible since I started using them way back when Galeon was my browser of choice and Firefox née Phoenix wasn’t even on the drawing board.
Smart bookmarks are bookmarks that you call with a keyword and an argument; the argument is shoved into the appropriate place within the bookmark and the resulting URL is then retrieved. Their function is similar to the manner in which a fresh installation of Firefox will automatically bring up a Google search results page if you type something that isn’t a URL into the address bar. To create a smart bookmark in Firefox, first bookmark a page such as a Google Search results page in the normal fashion.
Then, open the “Organize Bookmarks” window by selecting it from the Bookmarks menu in Firefox.
Select “Properties” for the bookmark you created and enter something into the “Keyword” field; for Google, I use the letter “g”. To actually make it a smart bookmark, you need to tell your browser where the string you pass needs to end up by placing “%s” (a percent sign and an “s”) in the appropriate place. For my Google search bookmark, the resulting URL string is this: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%s&btnG=Google+Search
What does this get you? Well, now you can select the address bar (Apple+L in MacOS, Ctrl+L or Alt+D in Windows & Linux) type “g foo” in order to search for “foo”. A lot of people use the search bar in Firefox to do just that already, but I find my method better because I have a ton of smart bookmarks for performing different searches. Alongside that one for Google, I have a Wikipedia smart bookmark (bookmark that link and add a keyword such as “w”) which will take me directly to the Wikipedia article for the string I enter, a Wikipedia search bookmark that does a Google search of just Wikipedia (“ws”) and a Google Finance search bookmark (“gf”).
Others that I use include:
By far the ones that I use the most are those for Google and Wikipedia searching but having ultra-quick access to a thesaurus and dictionary greatly heightens my writing skill. Smart bookmarks are something where, once you start using them, you’ll wonder how others ever get stuff done while they waste time reaching for the mouse.
Richard Dawkins on Atheism at TED Talks
Richard Dawkins’ talk from the 2002 TED Talks was recently posted on the web (ok, it was a year ago, but I just saw it) and it’s a very good summary of his views militant atheism. Now, Dawkins isn’t advocating violence in support of atheism, unlike that done by so many religious groups, but rather supporting of strong atheism and an end to religion.
In my view, not only is science is corrosive to religion and religion is corrosive to science. It teaches people to be satisfied with trivial, supernatural non-explanations and blinds them to the wonderful real explanations we have within our grasp. It teaches them to accept authority, revelation and faith instead of always insisting on evidence.
Off The Hook - 5 March 2008
This is the synopsis of Off The Hook that aired on 5 March 2008.
In the studio: Emmanuel, Mike, Redbird, Not Kevin On the phone: Bernie S in Philadelphia
Emmanuel credits last weeks record donations to the Lego kits that were given as premiums and promises many Legos at the HOPE conference this year. Pre-registration for the conference is open.
Mike brings up the case brought against Wikileaks by Bank Julius Baer that caused the California-based registrar that registered the domain wikileaks.com, Dynadot, to de-register the name. The Swiss bank with ties to the Cayman Islands has since dropped their suit against Wikileaks after the Streisand Effect brought more press to the issue than it would have gotten had they simply left Wikileaks alone.
Meanwhile, a British man running a travel agency specializing in trips to Cuba has had a number of his domain names, ciaocuba.com and bonjourcuba.com among others, de-registered because they were bought through an American registrar, eNom. The man was recently added to the Treasury department’s list of Specially Designated Nationals which consists of persons who deal with organizations and countries that the United States finds unsavory.
Emmanuel mentions a new law in New Jersey law which makes talking on cellphones and two-way radios illegal but has an exemption for amateur radio operators.
The German constitutional court has struck down a law allowing investigators to install spyware on suspects’ computers.
FBI director Robert Mueller has announced that a DOJ report will show that FBI investigators abused national security letters using them to obtain information from banks, telephone and internet providers under circumstances that did not warrant their use.
Pakistan has blocked access to YouTube because the video site posted a blasphemous video. After being told that routers were probably used to block the site the head of the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority said, “We are not hackers, why would we do such a thing?”
Digital television is coming in 2009. In order to use non-digital TVs with the new over-the-air digital signal a converter box must be used. Vouchers for the boxes can be obtained from dtv2009.gov. The group speculates that the changeover won’t go smoothly at all.
One out of 99 American adults is in prison, with a total of 1.6 million prisoners in the company. The United States leads the world in incarceration rates.
Phone calls - 212.209.2900 Letters - oth@2600.com
A listener who hosts a show on Radio Free Olympia, a pirate radio station in Washington writes in to praise Off The Hook.
A caller says that he saw NYPD vehicles using what are presumably automatic license plate scanners that resemble spotlights in their vehicles. He says that they drive slowly through neighborhoods, presumably to scan all the plates of parked cars. Bernie has an idea to print out the license plates of most wanted criminals and posting them where the police scan in order to slow down such automated scanning.
A caller asks about receiving digital television signals from Jersey. Despite having a large antenna in his attic, he is unable to receive the digital version of a channel that he receives fine in analog. Bernie notes that the UHF frequencies for digital TV are higher than those for analog and so the antenna might not be tuned properly.
Rsync from Mac OS X to a Linux Machine
If you try to rsync from a Mac OS X machine using the -E switch (capture extended attributes & resource forks - you want this) to a Linux or BSD computer, you’ll get something like the following error:
rsync: on remote machine: -vlogDtprzE: unknown option rsync error: syntax or usage error (code 1) at main.c(1108) rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (0 bytes received so far) [sender] rsync error: error in rsync protocol data stream (code 12) at /SourceCache/rsync/rsync-30/rsync/io.c(359)
What’s the holdup? Well, resource forks are a purely Mac OS construct (though NTFS has Alternative Data Streams that aren’t often used) allowing specific data, such as icons and application metadata, to be shoved into a file. The standard version of rsync doesn’t support these containers, so Apple includes a patched version in Mac OS X to handle them and in order to get this support on a non-Mac, you must install this patched version. Doing so is a fairly simple affair, since Apple makes the patch readily available through their Darwin source site.
Since I’m running Mac OS 10.5.2 (the latest update to Leopard), the files I need are in the 10.5.2 branch of the darwinsource directory; change that number to your version of OS X or navigate from the above mentioned Darwin source site.
wget http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/10.5.2/rsync-30/rsync-2.6.3.tar.gz \ http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/10.5.2/rsync-30/patches/EA.diff
Don’t ask me why the directory is rsync-30 when they’re using rsync-2.6.3. Now it’s just a simple matter of unpacking the source, applying the patch and compiling rsync:
tar zxf rsync-2.6.3.tar.gz && cd rsync-2.6.3 && patch < ../EA.diff && \ ./configure --enable-ea-support && make && sudo make install
By default, it installs to /usr/local/bin/rsync so installing this version won’t trash that put in place by your sytem’s package manager. I also found a post on macosxhints.com concerning rsync interacting with the disk indexing of Spotlight. If you are writing tons of files to a Spotlight-indexed disk on a Mac, the indexer can become overwhelmed. The solution is to disable Spotlight on the disk in question with mdutil -i off <mountpoint> or to write into a directory appended with .noindex.