Reading (For Dummies)

.GOV Security Woes

My buddy Phil pointed me to a little story that points out the humorous: In the search for what's wrong with security in the US, the Department of Homeland Security doesn't need to look too far...

J-Pole

I geeked out a little bit and got my Ham license last weekend. Ham radio is the "new" old internet and has been full of a steady stream of experimenters for nearly a hundred years.

My call number assignment came in Friday. For anybody wondering how long the total process took, I took the exam on September 22nd (a Saturday) and was assigned my call in the FCC database on September 28th (the following Friday) -- pretty fast for government paperwork! I am KE7OZN.

Naturally I wanted to build an antenna and try my hand at getting on the air. The only radio that I have is one that I purchased ~10 years ago, a HTX-202 from Radio Shack. My radio had a little problem that many of the 202's have after a few years -- the RAM battery was totally flat (0.08volts, and it is a 3v battery) and needed replacing. I did what WB3GCK did, and put a little CR2032 battery holder inside -- sure beats soldering a battery in place like RS did back in the day. So performing that little operation was my first order of business for the morning.

Cody with a blowtorch, a menace to society

The placement worked like a charm. I went off to KC7FMM's house where we went through a few basic antennas and settled on a J-Pole. It's a handy antenna for 2m (144-148mhz) and tunes well to 70cm (420-450mhz). The design is quite simple, and requires only a few lengths of copper pipe and assorted joints and bends, and a feed line with connector on the end.

The finished product: my first antenna

The new antenna works well enough, even with the lossy feedline that Cody had in his spare parts box. I am able to hit the KB7ARA repeater well enough on 1.5 watts from Pullman. I need to get a SWR meter and some other fun gear to test it out with in a more thorough manner. I shall probably hold off on all of that until I get my 'real' radio, a nice little HF+UHF+VHF jobber that should let me bounce my waves around the world.

Security (Oh no!)

Congress gets it wrong, again. There's a puffy piece on ABC News saying something like, "Oh Noz!11!! Teh Canadia!11!!"

From the article: "The independent Government Accountability Office told Congress Thursday it sent investigators to test security along the border was able to easily simulate the cross-border movement of radioactive materials and other contraband with no border patrol agents anywhere in sight."

I decided to run some numbers. The Canadian border is 5,500 miles long according to the article. Let's suppose that we want to have a border patrol agent "somewhere in sight" everywhere along the border. Average visibility is probably on the order of 500 feet average for the entire border (moreso in the center of the US, much much much less so in the rockier parts of, well, the Rockies, Maine, etc). 5,500 miles is 29,040,000 feet. This is 58,080 guards needed at any given time. Assuming guards work 8-hour shifts, 174,240 guards would be needed to secure the border.

Assume a $75,000US total cost to the government for the guards each year (after salary, health insurance, etc, and this is very very much on the low end) and it would only cost $13.1 billion dollars to secure the border from drunken hockey players stumbling across with plutonium. Note that unless a geiger counter is given to each guard, the hockey player could just as well hide his/her weapons-grade plutonium in solution inside of an unopened beer bottle.

Honestly, if someone wants to cross the border, they're going to find a way. Seems like an awful lot of money for not a lot of return...

A Good Book on MS Compilers

Rant-time...

I've been learning to use Windows development tools lately. I have roughly 800,000 books on programming with Microsoft Visual Studio. None of them are as good or as thorough as the GCC/libc man pages and some newsgroup archives.

I created a simple class that depends upon some external functions. One of the functions just so happens to be able to return a class object pointer (but I don't want it to be an object method, nor even a static method, for some weird reasons). So the header files are cross-dependent (class headers and function headers). This kind of stuff was simple with g++ and make, I just compile -o and the compiler worries about resolving symbols later on. Declare as extern if it complains for functions or globals. VS2005 barfs all over the place with a rather curious error code (the documentation is helpful "the library needed is probably not in the compile path, or does not exist"), and the linking options are so obscure as to be meaningless. GNU stuff makes you learn what's really happening (like, this is how to compile, this is how to link, these are the explicit errors you'll get if the compiler couldn't find something, and GCC/make won't clean up a failed project for you so can assess what actually failed). Or at least, that's how I learned -- handmaking my own Makefiles and writing all of my code in emacs. VS is trying to make coding perhaps too accessible, and hiding a lot of that stuff, automatically generating build scripts with obscure gui configurations. I did a recent and informal survey of Windows programmers, simple questions like, "Do you know what an object method versus a class method looks like in memory? on disk?" I get quizzical stares from folks that grew up writing VC++ code and never having the distinct pleasure (and it is a pleasure!) of writing C data structures with function pointers, assigning callbacks at runtime, etc. I even got strange looks from a person or two that I interviewed with at Microsoft itself.

I suppose that, on the whole, questions like that are irrelevant. I would also say that, on the whole, kids that grew up with GNU understand their compiler way better. I won't say that they make better coders (I'm a horrible horrible programmer, for example), but they have a deeper understanding of what code does once it is written out to disk. And understanding things like that is a whole lot more fun...

Moscow Mountain (!Madness)

Big Johnny says that Moscow, Idaho is full of large-framed women and not much else. I beg to differ. On Saturday morning, I hopped on my mountain bike (finally it runs well!), and biked up a mountain.

Steve-O looking out from Paradise Point

It took about an hour and a half to get up, and about 20 minutes to come back down. Coming down was a lot more fun, though going up is going to help me shake the gut I gained in San Diego. I've missed mountain biking, I'm glad that the terrain around here is well-adapted for it...

Wifi Moment

I finally got real internet access in my new apartment in Pullman. Today, I re-arranged my networks, also received new batteries for my UPSes, solved a house wiring problem, and otherwise got my home network in order. A funny moment came during my wifi setup (a fun double-nat system wherein I leave several access points open to the world and run an IDS on the private network).

For a while, I had "Bush Hates America" WPA-enabled...

Someone apparently either doesn't like my politics, or doesn't like WPA (or both)...