freemode.net

One point six five billion dollars    [ News ]

So GOOG is buying YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock. Erk. Not too bad for 19 months worth of work for the guys at YouTube, but ... first MySpace for $580 million, now YouTube for $1.65 billion? That's some real money there.

By comparison, let's see what else $1.65 billion buys:

• 24 Airbus A320 super-jumbo jetliners
• About 3/4 of a new US Navy attack submarine designed to replace the existing Los Angeles-class nuclear attack subs
• Verizon Hawaii
• International Paper's controlling stake in New Zealand's largest forestry products exporter, and then some ($1.65Bn in New Zealand dollars, $1.2Bn in USD)
• Racal Telecom, a UK fiber/telecom/networking company
• A rapid-rail transit network in South Africa built by Bombardier, the world's largest train maker
• Annual budget of the WHO

Hmmm. So is YouTube really worth as much as these sorts of things?

Security Theater    [ News ]

The Crypto-Gram: August 15, 2006 edition tells the truth about the recent airline security issues - it's all security theater:

None of the airplane security measures implemented because of 9/11 -- no-fly lists, secondary screening, prohibitions against pocket knives and corkscrews -- had anything to do with last week's arrests. And they wouldn't have prevented the planned attacks, had the terrorists not been arrested. A national ID card wouldn't have made a difference, either.

Instead, the arrests are a victory for old-fashioned intelligence and investigation. Details are still secret, but police in at least two countries were watching the terrorists for a long time. They followed leads, figured out who was talking to whom, and slowly pieced together both the network and the plot.

Thanks Bruce. Someone needs to say this, and say it repeatedly, and hold governments and security bureaucrats to the fire for these sorts of knee-jerk responses.

I'll take half a dozen well-trained policemen and women over $10 million dollars worth of high-tech security contracts anyday.

Prudhoe Bay oil field shutdown    [ News ]

Oil Surges Above $76 as BP Shuts Alaska Field, Largest in U.S. - Bloomberg.com

Apparently this field is responsible for about 8% of US domestic crude oil production.

Hurricane Katrina, by comparison, took about 10% of US domestic crude oil production offline. It also caused significantly greater damage to refinery capacity along the Gulf Coast, but the Prudhoe Bay shutdown may have a comparable effect on crude oil (and thus gasoline) prices.

WETA makeover    [ News ]

WETA radio has been broadcasting classical music for at least 2 decades, but it's stopped now in favor of an all-news lineup.   Current also has an interesting piece on the decline of classical music on public radio.

WETA isn't even my favorite NPR station in the area - I prefer WAMU [listen to their MP3 feed] - but with them backing out of the classical music market, that leaves WGMS in the DC area, which is basically top 40 baroque, thanks to its ownership by Bonneville, which incidentally has snapped up the radio broadcast rights to the Nationals [DC's newish baseball team] first season.   Wa-hoo, go media moguls:   Bonneville also owns WTOP, DC's premier news radio channel, plus other assorted mass-market stations on the local airwaves.

Fresh links    [ News ]

Some fresh new links:

What the Democrats should have said in response to Bush's State of the Union speech:   Sulli's journal on Slashdot

Some good public-domain rendered wallpaper images:   http://dchky.info/

Details on the IBM/Sony/Toshiba Cell Processor from Ars Technica:   Part I, Part II

Carly Fiorina calls it quits:   El Reg

Happy holidays    [ News ]

Happy Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza and Winter solstice! It's the holidays, and time for me to catch up on my blog posts again. A lot has happened in the past few months, Katherine's nearly a year old, and I've moved to a new contract with my same employer.

Blog news - comments are currently turned off, there's still a lot of comment spam that gets through the cracks, so until I find some better way of dealing with the very low signal to noise ratio, they'll stay off.

Firefox 0.9 Released    [ News ]

Woo-hoo!   The best web browser out there just got better.   Mozilla Firefox 0.9 has been released.   Read all about it on slashdot, or get it yourself.

It's faster than its predecessor out of the box, but you can improve its speediness by applying a few hacks to enable HTTP pipelining for page requests and speed up page rendering (see original post by MatthewHSE at webmasterworld):

Type "about:config" in your FireFox address bar.  Scroll down a bit in the list.
Set network.http.pipelining to "true".
Set network.http.proxy.pipelining to "true" if you use a HTTP 1.1-compliant
proxy server.
Set nglayout.initialpaint.delay to 0 to improve rendering speed.

While you may run into connection problems with some older or unusual web servers that don't support HTTP pipelining, these settings will noticeably improve your overall browsing speed.   You may also notice some odd visual artifacts with CSS layouts - if this bugs you, set nglayout.initialpaint.delay back to the default (250).   There's more technical information available on the MozillaZine forums.

Last Morning Edition with Bob Edwards     [ News ]

Listened to NPR on WAMU this morning on the drive into work, it was Bob Edwards' last broadcast as the host of Morning Edition.   Last piece was an interview with Charles Osgood, who happened to be the first person that Bob had interviewed nearly 25 years previous.

Even Ted Koppel (interviewed regarding the Nightline program tonight that will show the pictures and list the names of the 700-some American military casualties in Iraq) wished Bob well for "the next phase of your career".   There's some amount of noise regarding his departure from Morning Edition and his new role as senior correspondent, and perhaps rightly so.   For an organization devoted to reporting news fairly, accurately and in depth, NPR hasn't done a great job of publicizing, explaining or informing its listeners about the change in advance.

Ah well, I'll certainly miss him - he's one of the voices I've grown up with, since my parents had NPR on for most of my childhood.   It's like having an old familiar friend telling you what's happening in the world, and I think that's why there's so many people who are so upset with Bob Edwards' departure as host of Morning Edition.

Hearing the opening music to "All Things Considered" still makes me think of dinnertime and my mom baking macaroni-and-cheese in the oven, my dad getting home from work and the discussions around the dinner table about the events of the day.   Ah well, all things must pass.

Katherine Update    [ News ]

She laughed last night!   Katherine's been smiling for a long time, and has previously smiled while making little "coooahh" sounds that we thought were laughs, but she *definitely* laughed last night at dinner.   I was making "Danger Will Robinson!" hand motions and using my radio-announcer voice, and she laughed out loud with a smile from ear to ear.   Absolutely adorable!

We're trying to get her to laugh again so we can capture it on film, but no luck so far - the same things don't make her laugh all the time. :)

Baby pix    [ News ]

Finally got all the ultrasound images scanned and uploaded to the new image gallery site, they're viewable here.   Let me know if there's issues in viewing the pictures since they're hanging off of a new location now.

More furniture    [ News ]

Assembled another piece of furniture for the house, although for the first time in 4 weeks, it's not baby-related.   Jessica & I went out on Friday to Staples to pick up an honest-to-goodness office desk, so that's put together and serving its purpose in the study / guest bedroom.   Fits fairly well, although I need to grab some dead trees from Lowe's or Home Depot to craft a back lip for the keyboard tray (nothing there right now to prevent the keyboard or rodent from sliding off the rear of the tray) and a middle support beam to counteract the desk's tendency to tilt back towards the wall when it's on a carpeted floor.

In other exciting furniture news, there's now four, count them, four desks of various sizes and usefulness sitting in the basement now.   Have no idea what we'll end up doing with them all.

Baby stuff    [ News ]

Wow, we're on week 34 or 35 now, and finally have the majority of stuff we'll need for the first few days after our baby comes into the world.   We've got the baby room painted and decorated, the crib assembled, a dresser/changing table put together, a comfy rocking chair/recliner moved in, and various & sundry baby supplies purchased from Babies'R'Us.

We've been taking lamaze classes at the local hospital, so Jessica & I get to go on Wednesday nights with seven or eight other pregnant couples to learn about childbirth and breathing methods and what's supposed to happen during labor and delivery.   She's getting very pregnant [pictures should be forthcoming!] and ready to have the baby soon.

The expected delivery date is somewhere between December 24th (latest estimate from the last ultrasound) and December 31st (original estimate).   We're both hoping for a tax-break baby, so a bit earlier would be better, but we're both excited about the impending arrival!

How not to run a startup    [ News ]

Saw this article on Loki (the Linux game company) from Linux and Main which busted up after the boom years.   The account given here about the goings-on at the company is absolutely fascinating, hard to imagine that anyone familiar with corporate law and propriety would act like this.

Flat fees = free use?    [ News ]

Interesting article on El Reg on the online music industry and some futurism-style blather from Jim Griffin of Cherry Lane Digital.   Not sure if I agree with everything that he says, and most of the blather is predicated on a flat-fees-are-good-for-everyone assumption (hmm, wonder why telcos still charge for long-distance calls), but makes for a fresh perspective from an ex-industry-insider.

I do agree that flat fees are generally far more palatable to consumers than per-use charges.   $20/month internet dialup fees are one example, the success of DSL/cable inet rollouts vs ISDN (It Still Does Nothing) is another, but there's enough bass-ackward-minded companies out there with profits and shareholder value to protect that I don't see some glorious digital-rights revolution happening anytime soon.   If anything, a darker, less brilliant future seems to await us in that arena.

Hurricane Isabel    [ News ]

The hurricane has come and gone from Northern VA, and we're left with some downed trees, power outages, flooding and lots and lots of news coverage.   Thankfully there's been very few injuries and only a small number of deaths (11 at last count from the Carolinas through VA, DC and MD).   Got to work from home on Thursday and Friday (a laptop, wireless connection and a VPN make this easy!), and we didn't even lose power at the house.   I did have to convince the home firewall to pass ESP traffic in and out for the VPN to work, but after looking at the IPF logs and going 'duh!', I got that fixed.

Bandwagon Time    [ News ]

Washington Redskins 33, Atlanta Falcons 31!   Second win in a row after beating the Jets 16-31 in the season opener.   Might just be time to starting oiling up the Bandwagon again.

It's been so long since I've consistently watched, cheered or followed the 'Skins - probably as long as they've avoided the playoffs in the post-Joe Gibbs era - that I've nearly forgotten how much fun it is to root for a team.   Being a Redskins fan in the late 90's and early 00's meant ridicule, eternal hope crushed by monumental failures, and general malaise.   Not entirely unlike Jimmy Carter's presidential administration, or Ed Wood's movie career.   Anyway, the first 2-0 record since '91 gives me hope, and I'll be tuning in on Sundays and Mondays this season to see how Washington does in the Spurrier Era.

Solar sails illegal?    [ News ]

Solar sails may violate Carnot's rule, and may not actually work - at least according to this paper:   http://www.arxiv.org/html/physics/0306050

Preggers!    [ News ]

Jessica & I went for our first sonogram on Tuesday!   Looks like the delivery date is closer to New Year's than to Christmas - the Siemens gear used in the ultrasound calculated it as 12/29/03.   We're still working on names and need to get one of the rooms upstairs re-painted and decorated for a baby room, but we're both excited.

Baghdad Falls and CanSecWest '03    [ News ]

Turned on the TV news in the hotel room this morning, and CBC is showing a live video feed of Iraqis in downtown Baghdad pulling down a statue of Saddam Hussein, and people walking freely down the streets alongside American military vehicles.

Quite a moment for the beginning of CanSecWest 2003!

The storm of '03    [ News ]

It's Monday and there's over a foot of snow on our new deck, and drifts over two feet high between our front door and our cars.   The snow's finally stopped after getting over an inch per hour on Sunday, and most folks in our neighborhood are still shoveling themselves out.   Government officials around are saying that it'll take until Wednesday or Thursday to get the roads cleared and most services restored to normal order.

The federal government and Prince William County schools are closed tomorrow, so Jessica & I get to stay home on Tuesday.   Wheee!

Ad Astra Per Aspera    [ News ]

Was driving home from the Potomac Falls invitational this morning, and turned on WTOP to hear that the space shuttle Columbia appears to have broken up in re-entry over Dallas/Ft Worth TX.   NASA officials at Kennedy Space Center have declared a "Space Shuttle Contingency".

Slashdot has an article posted on this, as does CNN.

Ad astra per aspera.   May the lives of the men and women aboard STS-107 be honored, and may the space program of the United States continue onwards despite this tragedy.