CJC.org

There was a sort of Gen-X litmus test, where we’d remember where we were when we heard the news that the Challenger had exploded on take-off. It was our generation’s JFK. I was coming out of a physics regents test, and I remember that we were all shocked and disbelieving. We were high school students then.

Times change. All of us have gotten older, and, particularly in the past fifteen months, all of us have heard a litany of disasters, both accidental and purposeful. We heard about Columbia at a rest stop on the Mass Pike on our way to Boston. I was disbelieving — Could the cashier have been talking about an unmanned launch for some reason? Didn’t the last shuttle mission land last week? — but not shocked. Unlike our past selves, we now know the shuttle missions are fraught with peril, that the ship itself is built and flown with old, labor-intensive technology, that many parts can break, even if NASA has a thousands eyes watching every possible cog and circuit. There was no shock, just sadness.

When we got back to the car and onto the highway, we tried to get the news on the radio, but we couldn’t pick up anything clearly in between Boston and Springfield, and gave up after scanning the dial a number of times. We finally found out what happened after we got to Grace’s cousin’s, and saw a bit of the CBS broadcast around 12:30. Columbia had broken up at more than 40 miles up, travelling at Mach 12. So fast and so high: in another sign of the times, I mentally crossed out “terrorism” from the list of possibilities. We were busy the rest of the day, and didn’t see the news again until much, much later.

Gregg Easterbrook wrote an article for Time magazine:The Space Shuttle Must Be Stopped. The basic argument is that pork barrel politics have kept the shuttle program going, rather than being replaced by a more rational combination of cheap unmanned launches and the development of a new space plane for the situations where a manned launch is necessary. The current shuttle program is so expensive it sucks resources from any research that may develop a shuttle replacement. The contractors that maintain and operate the shuttle liked the status quo — a complicated-to-maintain ship implies large contractor fees indefinitely. Easterbrook had written an article for the Washington Monthly in 1980 about the hazards of the shuttle.

One thing he didn’t note in this most recent article is that the shuttle program as constituted is almost a dollar-auction, where no one is willing to throw away the already large investment into a clearly suboptimal program. This vacuuming up of other resources locks into place a technology system designed in the 1960s and built in the 1970s; he does note that the heat tiles for the shuttle were developed before new discoveries in materials sciences, and that the computers were stunningly old. He doesn’t follow up with the idea that in an era of rapid technological change, the operating life spans for these sorts of vehicles should be designed to be relatively short or upgradeable, rather than for four decades long. New generations of space planes will take advantage of new technology. We shouldn’t be stuck with the vehicles we built twenty years ago. We shouldn’t plan on using them for the next twenty years.

A checklist for Solaris installation. Some of it is relatively obvious, but it’s all there.

Solaris Firewall, Example Installation & Configuration

I was looking for a property sales database to figure out how much my neighbor’s apartment is worth, and how much a combined apartment would sell for, and came across this: Search Systems New York – Largest Free Public Records Database Collection.

New York City Subway Track Maps

This shows the location of switches, terminals, etc. For example, the 72nd Street IRT stop allows switches between local and express only before the train reaches the station. This applies to both uptown and downtown.

Because I’m somewhat fascinated how strangers find their way to this blog, I’ve done a quick perl script that parses out the most recent referrals from Google, and puts them into a file for including into the index.php. No statistics have been done, but I think the majority Google referrals are people looking for ways to crack Master Locks and wire Honda factory stereos. I have no idea why this site should rank anywhere near the first few pages of results on Google, but whatever.

I guess the next thing is to put up a column for Slashdot syndication, so I can see what the most recent posts are there. Then I can make cjc.org my home page, and not use bookmarks anymore.

Sensei mentioned that Itai and I may be taking our first brown belt test — sankyu — towards the end of March. This fills us with fear; green belt is rank of frustration, as we’re being pushed to move and do technique like brown belts, but our bodies aren’t quite trained well enough to pull it off consistently. I suppose this leads us merely to feel that we’re not ready, rather than simply not being ready. I can’t tell which is true. October would be better; as Itai notes in semi-haiku, leaves change color in fall, green to brown; same with jujitsu.

Anyway, the sankyu test is supposed to be more about spirit than perfect technique. This means testing us to the point of exhaustion. Being in shape and having good aerobic endurance apparently doesn’t matter that much, since that just means they’re going to have to beat on you more until you are too tired to move.

Sempi Steve said jokingly that taking a couple of acting classes to portray exhaustion might help more than taking that extra spin class in the gym. I think this means that we should all take up chain smoking.

On more practical matters, I’m told I should to more work with uke where the uke chooses which attack to deliver. I have trouble distinguishing between different attacks. I’m told I should watch the shoulder, but I can’t see what’s going on yet. There were a few times last week with stick work where I thought the stick was coming as a slash, but came in as an overhead. I did move and get behind uke, so I wasn’t hit, but I was simply so shocked that my head was still attached to my body that I wasn’t doing anything from such an advantageous position. Sensei pointed out a different instance where I was working with sempi Daniel and sempi was moving first without thinking about technique; he was doing whatever technique came to mind after he was out of the way, which is the only way to deal with not knowing what’s coming. So, more work on those lines.

Last night, I was doing stick with Lee, also, with the attack being uke’s choice. It helped somewhat, though I still would have gotten my head taken off a few times if he’d been going at speed. For the sankyu test, he suggested taking a lot of time locking up uke, to catch one’s breath. More ideas to file away.

Implemented this hack: boardom :: View topic – [Hacks] Vbulletin Style Page Numbers.

This will put go-to-page-number style navigation at the bottom.

Joel on Software

Mentioned on Plastic. This looks like a blog run by a software engineer, who goes through the various design mistakes he’s make over the years, and the leasons learned therein.

Holy crap, this method worked! I finally got around to trying it, and the article’s method for finding the last digit actually gave me something to go on. Granted, I was losing faith, since I had tried almost 60 of the 64 possible combinations off that last digit before the lock popped. But it worked. I now have one more relatively easy to crack $5 combination lock to use at the gym. (Not a serious security threat, I think. It’s not clear how many former jocks are at a given gym, compared to former geeks. At Stuyvesant, where everyone was at least a semi-geek, it was common knowledge that these types of Master Locks can be trivially cracked. Fewer people knew how to do it — I had to find the docs on the web, but at least I knew there was a method. I’m not sure how many people in non-geeky high schools knew about the vulnerabilities in these locks, or would remember such things. That, and there are few people who are sociopathic enough to crack locks in a commercial gym, as opposed to a high school locker, since the stakes would now reach the level of felonies and not pranks.)

The main observation in the article was that the real last number may not “get stuck” exactly on the mark. It’s distinguished by a small difference — a quarter of a tick mark — from the fakes. I’m still surprised I saw the difference; it’s subtle, and you have to write down the details for every sticking point on a piece of paper.

Total time, with pencil and paper, was about 30 minutes. It’s the first lock I’ve cracked.

A side note: sometimes, I think the majority of hits for www.cjc.org comes from Google searches on ways to crack MasterLock combination locks. Well, for you guys, the above link is a good way to go about it.