Last night I went to the Hills Market with A for root-beer floats made with Snowville Creamery ice cream. They made it on-site with a stationary-bike-powered ice cream machine.

Very good stuff.

While the show was getting started outside we went in and ordered a pizza from their deli. We wondered a bit while it baked. In the liquor section I overhear a child and her mother talking. The child is in her inquisitive "why?" phase.

"Mommy needs to get some margarita mix"

"Why?"

In my inner-voice I answer: "That's why."

The best part was that the child was pushing around one of those kid-sized carts and it had all of the liquor in it.

Fill in your witty comment here

My albatross property in Akron caused a couple of minor crises last week.

The neighbor on the right is in a difficult situation. They have empty properties on both sides of them and too much time on their hands. The result is that they call the city at every opportunity. Last Saturday I received my second complaint this year. I hadn't set up a lawn care service yet so things were getting out of hand.

While I was trying to line up someone to take care of the lawn this season, and mildly freaking out over the impending deadline and fine. It was annoying that of all the things to be worried about (A's injury, work, the sale of the house itself) I was stressing over a $250 fine.

Unknown to me, forces were at work in my favor. The neighbor on the left had seen the notice, and taken care of the lawn. Not to be helpful, but spoil the efforts of the other neighbor. When I finally got them on the phone to chat, they had no interest in payment to keep mowing the lawn-- they'll do it out of spite.

I'll be sending them a thank-you card. "Thanks for being a spiteful bastard-- my kind of bastard"

I'm working on a telemetry project for the Red Cross' Mobile Communications Center. We're trying to make it more of a Mars Rover/Mission Control kind of feel, where the Disaster Communications Center located at HQ can monitor and control the systems when the MCC is in the field. Now that we have semi-reliable internet link between the two we can finally start to do some of these interesting tricks.

I'm playing around with a Arduino micro controller to collect data, package it and broadcast it to the truck itself, my laptop if I'm wandering nearby, and of-course the DCC at HQ.

One of the data-points that we want to measure is how high our camera tower is from the truck-- it's a pneumatic mast and it would be nice to know if it's 10 feet, or 20 feet above the truck, fully deployed, or stowed. A possible option would be a simple sonar sensor pinging down form the instrument module on the mast down to the big flat top of the truck. So, I'm sifting through sparkfun.com looking at potential modules. They're not clear about the full, effective range of the sensor, so I click into the comments. Inside, someone notes that the circuit board has a bunch of Christian logos on it, fish and crosses and stuff.

I know some businesses are proud of their religious and political affiliations. I've always found it a bit risky from a business standpoint, mainly because I find it a bit odious as a consumer so I quietly exercise my dollar vote and don't usually support such businesses. That seems like a fairly sane response.

Anyway, the commenter mentions that they don't think it's cool to markup the PCB like that, and that they wouldn't have purchased it had they known it had a Christian-fish on it.

Their response: if you don't like our freedom of religion move to China or North Korea. Wow.

My take-away from all of this is: I plan to always post in my feature-list a warning if I'm going to have a flying spaghetti monster on my PCB or not. Nobody should be surprised by something like that.

Source: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2009/05/07/dobson_disappointed_obama_skip.html?wprss=44

Thank God.

As I read the reports from several honeypots coming in, noting that the conficker update has been:

i) install Waledac
ii) install a FakeAV product
iii) install a keylogger

The business model behind it is now clear: they built up their network using a novel infection approach to tap new markets of compromisable systems, and now they're selling them off to other parties.

Now I can get those brain-cells back and retask them to new issues.

I've been struggling to come up a believable scenario where allowing the legal recognition of a same-sex marriage would lead to the destruction of the institution of marriage. I've phrased the question, asking someone to explain how this would occur without relying on the Bible and haven't received an answer.

I've been asking the wrong question. Because it is all about the Bible and the Church. It's not a defense of marriage, it's in defense of the church. Arguable, I could see how people would find the downfall of the Church leading to all sorts of calamity.

Here's how it would play out.

Assume that same-sex marriage is legalized. Joy and Julie want to get married. The get their license from the state and are looking for a venue. Joy went to Saint Cuthburt's as a kid and thinks the church there is lovely. So they go to schedule but get refused because, well, St. Cuthbertines don't look kindly on the gashlappers and refuse. Joy and Julie enjoy anti-discrimination protection and next thing you know, the ACLU is suing the church, the Pope looses, and suddenly the infallible is trumped by the supreme court and literally all Hell breaks loose.

See?

So, how do we keep this from happening, while still allowing Joy to keep their kids should Julie get run over by a Hummer?

I like the fact that if I don't happen to believe that the Pope is infallible, I don't have to attend St.Cuthburt's and they can't sue me to do so. I also happen to think that I shouldn't be able to make people think like me just because I might think they're wrong.

So how do we allow the church to exclude people, keep their beliefs, while allowing other's to keep and practice their own?

I'm aware of cases where organizations like the Boy Scouts of America have been sued to include people they were against including. Are churches protected from this?

Is this the scenario that nobody has been able to tell me?

I had to download the PDF version of this month's SERVO because my copy didn't arrive. Normally they arrive the same day as Nuts and Volts (since they're from the same publisher.)

I find that I still don't like to read more than a few pages of a PDF at once. I still like to lay down with a magazine before bed. I haven't found a comfortable spot in my house to read, so most of my reading is done in bed, or while flying (or waiting to fly.) The economy what it is, this means, I'm falling behind on my reading. Though I suppose I could just hang out at the airport pretending that I'm waiting for a flight.

Recently I picked up a subscription to Make. There's simply no way I'd pay cover price ($14.99 USD) Not when I can get a year for $25 (I think it's quarterly.) When I was kicking around picking it up, the SpyTech issue was on the shelves (Nov 2008.) I really wasn't impressed with that issue. It also happened to be the first issue that they sent me. I still wasn't impressed.

The first new issue that I received was March 2009's steampunk issue. While I jumped around the spytech issue, this one I'm carefully going through page by page. The talent they have working for them is quite surprising. So far I've seen names like Corey Doctorow (not really a surprise,) Bruce Sterling, and freaking Forrest M. Mims III. It still have his old Engineers' Notebooks printed on graph-paper when I was kid first learning electronics.

Unlike Server, or Nuts and Volts, which inspire me to do what they're writing about, Make simply inspires me. I hope I can keep riding this wave of get-up-off-of-my-assness and keep doing things.

I've had a for-salvage roomba sitting on the worktable for a while. I've recently been making time to fix stuff. I find that I feel better when I fix something, so it seems like a healthy habit. I suppose until I can't fix something and then I get frustrated, so I've been picking things that don't really matter if they fixed right away or not. More deadlines is something I just don't need at the moment.

So, one of the things that I made progress on was getting a laptop to talk to the ailing roomba.

It looks like I have a bit of work to do on it. It charges, and drives okay, but it won't work autonomously. The sensors were definitely an issue from when I was fist inspecting it. Now that I have a working cable and a program to poll the sensors I could really get a decent inventory of what's working and what isn't.

The list:
* The left Bump sensor works
* The right bump sensor is always on
* The center wheel-drop sensor works
* The right wheel-drop sensor does not
* The left wheel-drop will fire both left and right wheel-drop signals (by design?)
* All cliff sensors are failing-- well, it always thinks it's on a cliff
* wall sensor is always off

I think a good cleaning is the first step, since most of the sensors are optical.

Also of note, the tether that I built myself does not work, but the one that I got from iRobot works. This is no real surprise since I'm still really rusty when it comes to the soldering iron. I'm a software guy.

The eventual plan? Not sure, maybe a wandering security sensor for my house in Akron? Command and Control for that plan is up in the air, maybe a go-phone or something since I don't want to spring to run internet to the place.

So as I walked out to my car tonight being pelted by snow, I'd say that yesterday's forecast was a fail.

The topic of discussion is weather. Folks on the street are saying snow. A. and I are concerned about the garden. So I've been sent off to look at numbers and graphs to determine what will most likely happen.

For the micro-climate of North Columbus, OH, I expect no snow in the next 24 hours. I expect high 30s/ low 40s and bone-chilling precipitation.

Further north, you're getting snow kids-- but not the school closing kind.

I can't wait to see how far off target I am.

The days leading up to April first were challenging. With the media hyping up Conficker to Armageddon-like proportions it was difficult to craft a coherent message to our management and our security staff. I wanted to project upward that everything was under control, while projecting down that "you'd better be extra sensitive to odd behavior."

Since November I've been spending a lot of time trying to find internal infections. Given that the estimates had it up in the 10 Million infection range (although I think it's more like 3.5M) and our environment is so huge, it was simple laws of probability telling me that I HAD to have an infection or 12 on the inside. Our users click on anything. But this got its start as a scanning worm, and an autorun infector. So, I suppose our patching process, and harsh USB policy helped us out. So, is this a case justifying the draconian measures? Or, as other's have called it, just hyping the threat to justify my existence. Out of all of this effort, I found only one real infection, where a contractor had brought in an infected laptop that was scanning away. They had left the building before I could find them with my hammer.

So it's been a balance of: tell the management that everytying's groovy, while on the inside knowing that I've got to be missing something, there has to be an infection or two that we just can't see.

The same struggled, but inverted was playing out in the media. The Press is going crazy with end-of-the-world predictions, while I'm trying to tell them that it's not going to be that bad, or anywhere near that bad. I had my models, and could tell you how many infections you needed before you'd even notice. For small businesses with cable modem connections, you needed dozens of infections before it would become noticeable.

Yet there were some outliers. Some networks, when they got infected suffered a lot of damage when the worm started to brute-force their AD accounts, locking critical accounts, leading to service failure. That's pretty bad, but this kind of event has been happening since November as it spread.

So, it's March 31, 2009 and the media has people on vigils. And I'm stuck online with a couple of monitoring groups and VPNed in to work to sound the alarm should we need it. As predicted, nothing happens. Awesome, my reports say that nothing was going to happen, we had a plan just-in-case to test/develop some procedures, and nothing happened. I should look pretty good on April 2.

No. That's not how it plays. The media, now blames security researchers for hyping up the event and wasting the media's precious time.

"Those kids need to stay in their mother's basements and stop fearmongering to get attention" wrote one commenter in response to one of the many "Conficker a big bust" articles that are filling our RSS feeds.

So, thanks, dude. I appreciate that. I'll be sure to stay in my basement and level my WoW character when you double-click on that special codec required to watch Monica's striptease on facebook, and Ivan empties out your 401k to drive up the price in their pump and dump scheme.

No, not for Tax Day, but for this: http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=9016

SparkFun (one of my favorite geek-candy stores) is holding an Autonomous Vehicle Competition. Most of the entries are less then $300 budgets and there are even some UAVs in the roster.

It might encourage me enough to get back to work on old projects. I don't want to reinvent the wheel, but I may have to rewrite some roomba status monitoring software to debug what is wrong with the salvaged roomba that I have.

I also have a cheap RC mini-helicopter that is nearly unflyable because of sensitivity of the controller. I think either replacing some of the inputs with better components or going to a totally computerized control would make it a really fun project.

Because I need a hobby, and A. keeps recommending Yodeling.

... especially people who share their banking credentials on bugmenot.com.

"Something's broken."

What would have happened had Lee Dannacher had the rights to the Watchmen intellectual property:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDDHHrt6l4w

Are you guys following this? http://sourcesandmethods.blogspot.com/2009/03/80-church-burglaries-in-400-days-can.html

I've been slowly accumulating a small cache of old Dell servers. I'm about to reach a critical mass where it makes sense to build a computational cluster in the basement.

We've tried deploying clusterknoppix in a classroom/lab environment once. We were able to get the cluster up and running, but didn't really have a decent problem to work on it with.

Now that I've been furthering my studies in data mining, I have a number of clustering and classification problems that I could be working on, and having a little cluster in the basement might actually be helpful.

Still the cool factor outweighs the need for a cluster.

Tonight I did a little bit of googling around to see what the latest clustering solutions there are for a heterogeneous collection of nodes-- since none of the servers are really identical at all. So far the to likely solutions are crafting a debian cluster (http://debianclusters.cs.uni.edu/index.php/Main_Page) or replicating the old clusterknoppix experiment with BCCD (http://bccd.cs.uni.edu/)

I think it will be a combination of the too. There's little investment to test it all out with BCCD to see if it works. Then, if it's enjoyable to work with, I can try the crafting solution.

The all-important, what to do with it question shall be addressed with generous use of R and Weka-- and perhaps a bit of POVray (http://www.povray.org/)

So, I have to update my criteria for enjoying Watchmen. You have to either read/liked the book, or read enough graphic novels to understand the flow. A. hadn't read Watchmen, but was able to follow along and enjoy the film.

As an addendum, you have to have lived through the 80's to catch any of the media references. Otherwise the film is just about crazy, dysfunctional people in tights. Which, arguably, a great portion of the film is about.

I wouldn't bring your kids to see the film.

... and Rorscach rules.

From reading the reviews of the film, it is clear that people familiar with the comic (read, Fanboys) enjoyed the film. Critics unfamiliar with the original complain of being lost, unable to follow the plot or identify with the characters.

I'm likely going to enjoy the film. Actually, I'm certain that I would find a few hours of Rorschach running around cracking skulls would be worth the price of admission.

But my concern is that A. hasn't read it. I suppose she could read the wikipedia entry to reduce the WTF-ery that may result.

I suppose a latax-clad heroine kicking thugs in the junk and she'll be on-board.

I had some nice phone calls with the people at Wells Fargo. It turns out that I have a name in common with one of their customers and a very similar email address at gmail. So, on the down side, no great opportunities to take a bite out of crime, yet on the up side, my credit isn't going to take a beating.

Quote of the day: "You know Kevin's really mad at you when he stops dropping f-bombs."

That came to me in an IM while on a conference call I asked the security engineers: "so, do you just not care, or are you really not very good at your job?"