MaisonBisson

I should admit to it now before it becomes a scandal. I backfilled some content this weekend. Some of it is stuff that I wrote in the past for work (edited for publication here), but I feel may have some public value. Specifically, two stories about wireless: one about its vulnerabilities and another about (then) current practices in the academic community.

I also posted my Wife’s first story for MaisonBisson: a recipe for fish tacos.

I don’t backfill to deceive anyone, these stories had a time context that was difficult to change. I only posted them so Google could find them and future readers might make use of them.

It’s getting a little late for these roundup things, but I’m too tired with post-New Year’s party haze to come up with much of anything better right now.

Annalee Newitz subtitles her website with “technology, pop culture, sex.” Her index of stories isn’t actually a roundup per se, but it’s good material if you’re too lazy to leave the couch and find a book to re-read off the shelf (because you’ve read all you new books by now, right?).

Then, DefenseTech has been rounding up their year of stories this past week.

Five topics for five days include:

Pain rays, laser jets, and stun gun shockers.

Nukes spread, labs clamp down.

Space war, moon bases, and spysat mysteries.

Explosive, sticky, ad-hoc armor.

Drone doggies, robo-copters, and more.

I’m definitely trying to avoid the standard “year in gadgets” or “year’s best music” roundup. The above relate to technology and it’s role in defense and in pop culture. Fortunately, These should be the last of such stories I’ll post/link to.

In yet another reminder from Mainichi Daily News that American’s and Japanese aren’t so different, now they’re reporting: coeds say college guys ‘childish, irresponsible, stupid.’ A survey of 300 female students selected from 15 universities located in either Osaka, Kyoto or Kobe reveals:

A majority of the 300 women polled said that their main impression of male students is that they are childish, the 52.3 percent given to the most frequent answer followed by the 45 percent who thought guys are kind and 40.3 percent who said they were stupid.

The five words that best describe up male students, according to the survey: childish, stupid, irresponsible, thoughtless and liars. And what do the respondents really think about men? “Many have got no goals and are merely frittering their lives away.”

I got to spend the holidays near home this year, and with everything else going on I didn’t really pay much attention to the Comair/Delta problem that stranded over 30,000 passengers last weekend. Now that I’m starting to pay attention to the news again, though, I was interested in ArsTechnica‘s discussion of the software glitch that made everything go wrong:

At the core of the problem was an application created by SBS, a subsidiary of Boeing. What happened on SBS’s system is that the massive ice and weather delays necessitated an abnormally high number of crew reassignments which overflowed a hard limit of 32,768 changes per month.

It makes a me wonder what hard limits I’ve left in code here or there.

Michael Sciannamea at WirelessWeblog noted that:

BMW, Audi, Daimler Chrysler, Volkswagen, Renault, and Fiat have all received grants from the German government to develop a car-to-car wireless data network using 802.11a and IPv6 technologies to link vehicles to each other to pass on information about traffic, bad weather, and accidents.

They’re calling it “NOW: Network on Wheels,” and there’s more at Wi-FiPlanet.com.

My comment: static mesh networks are so 2004. 2005 will be about fully mobile, autonomys mesh networks. And to prove it I’m posting this quote from Forschungsbereich Dezentrale Systeme und Netzdienste (Decentralized Systems and Network Services) at the University of Karlsruhe:

The research group ‘Decentralized Systems and Network Services’ designs and analyzes protocols and algorithms for computer networks and distributed systems. Our main focus is on increasing the level of self-organisation in networks and oncorresponding efficiency, security and robustness issues. The group has a strong background in ad hoc networking techniques, in particular for inter-vehicle communications, andin IP-based mobility support. Methodology-wise we cover analysis, simulation and actual prototypes and testbeds.

I posted a story about a tour through Chernobyl a few weeks ago. The story still gets a lot of hits, and somebody pointed out a few related Wikipedia links about the accident, the ghost town, and the controversy about Elena Filatova, the author of everybody’s favorite online Chernobyl tour story.

Separately, Peace.ca reminds us about the dangers of war, nuclear contamination, and more.

Jon Aquino‘s holiday gift to us is to make FreewarePalm useful:

Why this work was necessary: FreewarePalm contains a goldmine of ratings of Palm freeware. But it does not provide a way to sort the programs by rating. That is why I extracted the ratings and sorted them.

With over 6000 listings, there’s a lot to choose from, but, as Jon says, no way to sort those listings. Jon has crawled FreewarePalm with “Cygwin lynx, XEmacs, and a 60-line Ruby script” and done what FreewarePalm couldn’t: made a list of apps sorted by rating. And, for those who need pictures, there’s this other list that includes Palm screenshots. Caveat: the lists are one big file.

Now you can wast the remainder of your holiday time playing free games on your Palm-OS handheld.

I’ve got a backlog o stories to post here, including this old one about broadcast programming complaints to the FCC. The FCC reports that it received a mere 350 complaints in 2000, but 240,000 in 2003. So what can account for the nearly 700-X increase? The FCC did some homework on the matter:

According to a new FCC estimate obtained by Mediaweek, nearly all indecency complaints in 2003 — 99.8 percent — were filed by the Parents Television Council, an activist group. This year, the trend has continued, and perhaps intensified. Through early October, 99.9 percent of indecency complaints-aside from those concerning the Janet Jackson “wardrobe malfunction” during the Super Bowl halftime show broadcast on CBS- were brought by the PTC, according to the FCC analysis dated Oct. 1.

ArsTechnica‘s coverage of the story is worth looking into if you haven’t seen this covered elsewhere already.