Weapons of mass destruction

During the cold war the US deployed over 1000 Minutemen missiles. (the big "destroy any city anywhere" type of human innovation). To prevent unauthorized launch they were protected with an 8 digit password. Now the scary part, the US command didn't want that "limitation" to delay possible authorized launch so they set all the passwords to "00000000". And everyone involved knew that.

Scary, and true. (Link to article)

Related to that, here are 20 Mishaps That Might Have Started Accidental Nuclear War. My "favorite": The time US bombers were starting down the runway after a sabotage alarm was triggered. They were only stopped by someone driving out and catching them before they could take off. The reason for the alarm turned out to be a bear (number 6 on that page).

What if that jeep had been a few seconds too slow? Scary. Anyone else a Kubrick fan?

Meccano difference engine

Wow, check out the web page for details

The author's small scale model of a difference engine from standard Meccano parts. This model operates on principles very similar to Babbage's original designs, though the constraints of using only standard Meccano parts inevitably mean some aspects of the operation are somewhat different. The model can handle decimal numbers with up to four digits, and up to three orders of differences...

Builders Busy Building Biggest Bridge

Check it out
Another picture from farther away

Drawing cat toes

I'm a fan of Darby Conley's Get Fuzzy. I love the way he draws the cats & dogs, especialy the toes.

Qmail: a case study in security patterns

This morning I attended a breakfast seminar hosted by BrightSpot and featuring a lively Ralph Johnson.

In the development world we have "design patterns", basically smart, experienced people helping us new guys out by sharing what works and what doesn't. In working towards making some security design patterns, Mr. Johnson and some of his students studied the notoriously secure application Qmail.

The short version: You can either try to build the perfect (unbreakable) application, or build your application accepting the fact that attacks happen. Qmail is designed to minimize the effect a break in one part has on any other parts. Split your application into multiple processes with each one being as simple and having the least permissions possible.

Oh, and at the end I won a signed copy of his book in a draw.

American company apologizes for G. Bush

:) http://atbash.net/blog/archives/000046.html

The final countdown

I'm looking forward to being married :)

GPS and Galileo

Interesting PDF of the keynote speech from the recent European Navigation Conference (4 pages). Galileo is the new GPS style satellite global navigation system the EU is building. The document talks about how it will work with GPS and provides an interesting summary of GPS development. Example: I didn't know GPS was so old - the first satellite was launched in 1978.

Absolute 3D

In 1997 I left university to start a graphics company called Absolute 3D Computer Graphics Inc. I pursued it full time for 3 years. Although it wasn't a financial success, I learned a lot about business and the contacts I made got me where I am today. I let the absolute3d.com domain expire a while ago, but I wanted to post some of my favorite images I created back then. All images were created in 3D Studio MAX

Switch to Blogger

I've switched from my home brew blog tool to Google's Blogger. I'm glad I wrote my own, I learned a lot. However there were too many features I wanted and too little time to write them myself. Most notable, spell checking, syndication feed, archiving, and the always popular software feature - reliability :) Still to do:

• Replace this nice pre-built style template with my own custom look
• Republish the few posts I actually made to my old site