Mike_B's blog

In This Economy...

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 10:10:22 -0500

... you might be earning as much interest on your cash by stuffing it in your mattress instead of leaving it in the bank.

Just don't throw it away.

A Product Warning Obviously Not Written By Lawyers

Wed, 20 May 2009 21:29:07 -0500

From HDTV outdoor antenna instructions:

WARNING
Do not attempt to install if drunk, pregnant or both.
Do not eat antenna.
Do not throw antenna at spouse.

That made my day.

A Simple Comparison

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 20:00:35 -0500

I've been asked to give a talk at my alma mater in a week. (Abstract!) I'm looking forward to it!

While reviewing my slides I'm putting together, I ran across these fun facts:

Highest elemental melting point: Tungsten (74W), ~ 3,400 C
Temperature of Sun’s surface ~ 6,000 C
Fusion reactor: ~ 20,000,000 C

This is why I like fusion. And preparing talks like this -- because it reminds me just how awesome it is to be working on real fusion devices. :)

Time to be (even more) Proud of My Dad -- One of MN 2008 Lawyers of the Year!

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 11:11:06 -0600

The title says it all. What an honor!

Dad's been working this case for quite some time, and it's still going on -- sometimes, seeming like a dramatic courtroom novel instead of being real life.

Links:

Minnesota Lawyer
Firm Press Release

Way to go, Dad!

So, I joined Twitter

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 20:51:15 -0600

Now people have another way to keep track of me. On Twitter.

I'm still not sure if this will be useful, but I'll give it a shot. I mean, if my various blogs aren't enough, or my Facebook account, or an email, or a phone call, now you can see limited character sporatically-updated "tweets" about what I'm doing without any actual interaction with me personally. :)

Not to be harsh. I figure with a shiny new phone that has Twitter integrated, etc. it'd be nice. But for now, my cell phone is just a phone. (No camera, Internet, or anything!)

This is Me

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 11:56:54 -0600

Today's XKCD totally is related to me.

I use TrueCrypt on my laptop to achieve whole-disk encryption that's NSA-proof strength. Why? Primarily anti-theft; I don't want my personal files used/abused in any way. The typical thief will see the "enter password" on bootup and either give up or reformat the disk drive. (The 10% speed boost resulting from its installation was a great benefit, too -- good work Open Source software engineers!)

Still, it offers peace of mind against theft. That the same software offers all the tinfoil-hat precautions like secret hidden partitions, etc. with plausible deniability, is certainly great. Still, this comic totally captures Kristen's sentiments:

Oh my goodness Mike, that is so you.

I'll get the wrench.

Saddlebacking

Sun, 01 Feb 2009 15:13:40 -0600

I've received an invitation from America's best advice columnist Dan Savage to help enshrine the new definition of the verb "saddlebacking." Just like the Savage Love-defined "santorum," we've got a new word to represent interesting dirty concepts.

Please feel free to view the new definition (NSFW!) at saddlebacking.com.

Other Dan Savage-related news: I stumbled across this fun clip of Dan Savage on the Colbert Report where he manages to make Colbert lose his composure. (Not bad!)

Sometimes, I miss cable. :)

Bombadil, I hardly knew ye

Sun, 01 Feb 2009 14:56:27 -0600

Just a little stumbling on the WWW today yielded a rather fascinating, in-depth analysis by Gene Hargrove of who Tolkein's Tom Bombadil really is.

Why would I end up reading such a long, in-depth analysis? Well, it's primarily because I always found Bombadil's presence annoying in the LoTR. He always seemed out of place -- and I could never get over the fact that he had tremendous power over the Ring: immunity to its effects; seeing Frodo while wearing the Ring; and even making it vanish.

Hargrove's argument is that Bombadil and wife Goldberry are in fact two of the Valar: Aule and Yavanna.

And boy, does it make sense. At least, it makes sense to total Tolkein nerds like myself who have read the Silmarillion more than once. He does a great job of pulling together writings of Tolkein's letters, the Silmarillion, and others, fitting things into place.

And it now gives me a nice, consistent view which explains Bombadil's power over the Ring.

A Spontaneous Moment of Hilarity

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 13:16:50 -0600

My wife and I had a fun moment this last week that I felt was worth sharing.

We received a small decorative hot-air popcorn making machine that is essentially a scaled-down version of a movie popcorn maker. Our first trial run of it was this last week, while we prepared to watch some well-deserved "24" man-opera action.

I had set it up to run by itself and found that it made a big mess all over my kitchen counter -- popped kernels of corn were all over the place, presumably because I didn't have a correctly-sized bowl to catch the popcorn. So, for our second run, Kristen had me wait and hold the bowl at an appropriate angle to catch all the kernels on their way out.

And therein lay the fun.

You see, shortly after one minute into the next popping exercise, with me standing at the bowl, I saw that the popping kernels were also causing a sizable fraction of unpopped kernels to be blown out of the popper. "That's strange," I thought, "since my last bowl didn't have lots of kernels all over the place." I kept staring at the bowl with more and more kernels piling up when it hit me.

Literally!

All those unpopped, superheated kernels which I had so efficiently been catching started violently popping all over the place. The entire bowl started erupting popcorn all over the kitchen floor, our countertop, my hair... everything.

As soon as we figured out that what was happening, it was too late to stop, so we just laughed along while the bowl was doing its thing.

We didn't get a big yield of popcorn, since it was all over the floor and ourselves, but it was enough to get us a light snack between commercial breaks. The next time, though, we used a towel too. :)

A Blast from the Past

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 18:40:13 -0600

Today, I ended up conquering an old DOS-based game that was among the first video games I ever played: Miner VGA.

There's nothing terribly special about it. By today's standards, it'd be awful. But on my cousin's shiny new 386 with 4 MB of RAM, it was one of the most fun things I had ever played, partially because it had a) color and b) sound. (The other 'landmark' game of this era for me? Wolfenstein 3D, of course!)

But, things have changed since 1989. (Ah, nostalgia!) The total awesomeness of this game, however, has not. Fortunately, one can use DosBox to emulate it perfectly. I would highly recommend anyone reading this to give it a shot!

A Simple Fact-Check Comparison

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 12:10:27 -0500

After watching the debate last night, I, like many others I'm sure, was a bit disappointed in McCain's demeanor and overall performance. It galled me that he had the nerve to repeat known, disproved lies from his campaign trail on national TV. I like what CNN has been doing with their 'fact check' work (partnering with FactCheck.org; what I don't like is that they don't summarize the fact check verdicts in the summary, forcing a click-through.

It seems like a pattern is emerging:

Summary of Fact-Check Verdicts for Campaigns
Issue	Campaign	Verdict
McCain health care plan; Business thinks bad idea	Obama	True
McCain: Misjudgment on Iraq ("greeted as liberators")	Obama	True
Obama: Never taken on party leadership	McCain	False
McCain: Not leader on Freddie-Fannie subprime lending warnings	Obama	True
Obama receiving record Fannie & Freddie campaign contributions	McCain	Misleading
McCain's involvement in Keating Scandal	Obama	True
Obama: 94 Tax-raising votes	McCain	Misleading; Misleading
Obama's comments re: Afghanistan	McCain	False
McCain health care plan; $5k credit insufficient for $12k cost	Obama	True

Wouldn't you think that the above presentation makes things a bit more clear?

Missed Advertising Opportunities!

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 15:17:11 -0500

I was waiting to give my 26th unit of blood yesterday, when I saw something I don't see every day: a blimp.

Watching that dirigible fly around the sky while I was giving blood helped keep my mind pleasantly occupied. Afterward, I was walking back to work and got a better look at the aircraft -- it was for Outback Steakhouse.

Now, I didn't go and get a steak dinner. But I thought about it. And that's more than I can say for every other form of advertising I've been bombarded with lately.

Sometimes, I'm amazed by the collective efforts of the Internet

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 14:35:00 -0500

In my last post, I wanted to add a little snippet from Seinfeld -- "The Ukraine is not weak!" So, of course, I googled it.

And stumbled onto a site rife with amazingly stupid stuff, which proceeded to eat my spare time this afternoon.

Stupid, but really, really amazing. Check it out.

Pirates! With Tanks!

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 14:27:26 -0500

Pirates Seize Ship Carrying Tanks, Ammo

It's not often you see news stories involving the following actors:

Pirates
The Ukraine
Tanks

Seriously. Now it's going to be even more dangerous to sail off the coast of Somalia -- because the pirates are going to be armed with tanks!

Ever wonder what a plasma looks like at 33,000 frames/second?

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 22:18:47 -0500

I just found out in this last week, after being able to borrow a Phantom v. 7.3 camera from PPPL!

Shiny New Movie (2.5 M DivX-encoded AVI)

Pretty darn spiffy, huh? :) Now I just need to write some image processing software...

This Can't Be a Good Thing (for my thumbs)

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 21:11:18 -0500

Capcom released Mega Man 9.

A stroll down memory lane -- via pure 8-bit Mega Man goodness. Jumpy blocks, cleverly placed pits -- and who can forget those pesky instant-death spikes?

WHO WILL SAVE DR. LIGHT FROM BEING FRAMED BY THE INFAMOUS DR. WILY? WHO??

This can't be good for my Ph.D. research. :)

Waking up on the Funny Side of Bed

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 07:27:04 -0500

Since my wife started her new job as a Assistant State Public Defender, we've been working on getting used to a much earlier schedule.

This has forced us to do several things, in the spirit of making the 5:30-5:45 AM wakeup period as automatic as possible, including:

Streamlining the bathroom
Adding new bathroom shelving
Reorganizing drawers in the bedroom
Pre-making coffee and tea (a lifesaver!)

Still, since we've been at it only for a week, we haven't quite gotten in the groove; I end up getting in her way taking showers, etc.

So, it was a little bit surprising to me when this morning my wife started laughing while the alarm clock was not-so-pleasantly waking us from peaceful slumber. It turns out she had a very elegant, parallel solution to the morning "bathroom problem."

Use the second bathroom.

It's really a shame that it took two people with advanced degrees in law and nuclear engineering a week to figure that one out. :)

The Realm of Thornwood is Safe Once Again...

Sat, 23 Aug 2008 21:37:50 -0500

... now that I have managed to vanquish Dark Sol in the upper lairs of the Labyrinth!

To the 99.5% of people who don't get that at first, my apologies. However, those who DO recognize the sheer awesomeness of the original Shining in the Darkness can appreciate the accomplishment.

It's too bad that the game came out seventeen years ago. It makes me feel old knowing that I was horrifically addicted to it back then, just as I was now. This time, though, I had more detailed maps -- if only because I made them myself. (It's too bad today's games don't make you do that. I thought it was always a fun challenge.)

I Wish I Could Say it Better...

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 20:18:25 -0500

Today's XKCD cross-post:

Seriously, though -- these machines should be taken away and dismantled. I may be a fervent fan of new technology, computers, and the like, but when it comes to the foundation of our democracy, I'm very happy with good old-fashioned paper. I'll happily wait *gasp* a day to find out the election results, as long as they're verifiable!

An interesting choice...

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 07:28:21 -0500

Turns out San Francisco is going to have a ballot initiative to rename a sewage plant after G.W. Bush.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/07/17/presidential.putdown.ap/index.html

Here's hoping it succeeds! ;) (I especially like the predictable phrase "Local Republicans say the plan stinks and they will oppose it.")

A Dark Day for America

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 00:04:23 -0500

Well, I guess we're all going to never know the true extent of the illegal warrantless wiretapping program that has been spying on innocent American citizens with complicit assistance from the telecom companies.

And my current favorite for the Presidency voted for it. Along with 68 other un-American idiots.

Dammit.

I don't care if they're Democrat, Republican, or Whatever -- any politician voting in favor of this unconstitutional bill deserves to be thrown out of office -- immediately -- for directly violating their sworn oath to protect and uphold the Constitution of the United States of America. For me, this means getting Herb Kohl out of office, a longtime Dem whose time is now up in my eyes.

You can contribute your political dollars to this PAC which is dedicated to exactly that purpose. I have. Also you can support the ACLU and EFF. I also have -- and will continue to do so as they challenge this law from the moment President Bush will gleefully sign it into law.

2008 Fireworks Show!

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 23:39:12 -0500

Kristen and I got a chance to see the 2008 Rhythm and Booms annual fireworks display here in Madison. Last year, we decided to go to it rather late, and ended up in a field just outside Governor Nelson state park. (Lots of mosquitoes, a poor view of the fireworks, and ticks, to boot!)

This year was better.

View Larger Map

We found an awesome viewing location in a parking lot just outside Warner park. The lot afforded a wide view of the sky, and (based on my calculations) about 0.5-1 km from the explosions of the shells. A spectacular view, and the booms would give you the whole-body shake that makes fireworks oh-so fun! I strongly suspect that we'll be back there next year.

My Letter to Obama

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 16:40:46 -0500

I am a scientist who is actively working on solving our Nation's (and world's) energy crisis, and hold an advanced degree in nuclear engineering and engineering physics. I respectfully urge Senator Obama to revise his policies towards nuclear energy.

As the Senator is well aware, nuclear power is a proven technology which has zero carbon emissions and is capable of providing base-load electrical power. Despite its wastes, nuclear power is currently the best of our available options when it comes to electric generation while satisfying carbon emission requirements to combat global warming.

I am a nuclear engineer -- and I fully support deploying a broad base of green electrical power generation technologies such as wind, solar, geothermal, and hydro-power in order to help clean up our grid. However, eliminating nuclear power from serious, immediate consideration in the energy discussion effectively removes one of our most powerful weapons against combating global warming from the table.

Therefore, I again strongly urge Senator Obama, as a scientist, nuclear engineer, and an enthusiastic supporter of your campaign to reconsider his stance on nuclear power.

We'll need a lot more of it in the days to come if we mean to seriously combat global warming -- a worldwide crisis which needs to be attacked from every possible angle, sooner rather than later. I do not relish the prospect that my children, and their children's children, will be paying the price for our inaction today.

Arsenals of Folly

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 12:25:53 -0500

I think this post represents my first book review on my website, but hey -- you have to start somewhere!

I recently finished reading Richard Rhodes' Arsenals of Folly:The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race (2007, Knopf). (Amazon link) I have read with great interest his more mammoth tomes The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Dark Sun; the latest book in the series was much slimmer (at a more modest 300-ish pages) and had a different focus.

While the prior two books focused on WWII and the scientists who were crucial to the discovery of nuclear fission and fusion; its eventual application to atomic weaponry; Soviet espionage; and political ramifications of post-WWII following the dawn of the nuclear age, Arsenals focuses primarily on the interplay between Ronald Regan and Mikhail Gorbachev near the end of the Cold War.

A theme that continues to shine through the historical accounts is the paranoia, on both sides of the conflict, which led to the arms race. It's amazing to me how close we've come -- on many more occasions than you'd like to believe -- to full-scale nuclear war. Being a nuclear physicist myself, the prospect is terrifying. (The image below is of the crater generated by a preliminary-phase hydrogen bomb in 1954; modern weapons (and all H-bombs in general) can be scaled to much higher destructive yields.)

Although I lived through the end of the Cold War as a child, Arsenals helped me to put it in perspective. Until I read it, I don't think I truly appreciated the danger that we were all living under (myself included) of nuclear annihilation. And while the arms reduction goals achieved and documented in the book significantly reduce the threat, we still have so many nuclear weapons that it hardly seems justified.

Something else that I found particularly interesting: how people ended up rationalizing the truly awesome destructive capabilities of nuclear weapons. Presidential advisers and military brass of the 70's and 80's were arguing about "winnable" nuclear wars where we would only lose 150,000,000 American lives in the exchange. These people wanted to see such an exchange! I prefer the view of Fermi and Rabi, key contributors to the nuclear science and ultimately the weapons: "By [the H-bomb's] very nature it cannot be confined to a military objective but becomes a weapon which in practical effect is almost one of genocide...it is necessarily an evil thing considered in any light."

So, the interested reader will have lots to learn from Arsenals of Folly. While it is a sobering read, I highly recommend it to all -- and especially Rhodes' prior works on the history of atomic weaponry. They serve as powerful reminders of why we need to continue to strive towards elimination of nuclear weaponry (and more importantly, securing of nuclear materials) in order to ensure the continued survival of all humanity.

Another one bites the dust!

Tue, 20 May 2008 11:49:18 -0500

Looks like another republican congressman is resigning in shame -- this time around, it's a rather mudane sex scandal, albeit under circumstances I find a bit odd: fathering a child with your mistress after she bails you out of jail and a DUI charge after the Super Bowl!

Oops...

I feel for this guy's family, especially his poor wife and existing children. It really sucks when your husband/father turns out to be a total jerk. On the other hand, things keep looking better for the Dems in November!

Mainstream media coverage of the Pin Lapel "Controversy"

Tue, 20 May 2008 10:05:19 -0500

Well, it looks like finally some sense is coming to town regarding the flag lapel pin crap that's been continuing to float around the media and political coverage.

Even if it's coming as an editorial, it's good to hear it. And I wholeheartedly agree, both with Mr. Marten and Sen. Obama, who rightly calls the whole thing "... the kind of manufactured issue that our politics has become obsessed with and ... distracts us from what should be my job when I'm commander-in-chief, which is going to be figuring out how we get our troops out of Iraq and how we actually make our economy better for the American people."

Test your Scientific Literacy!

Thu, 01 May 2008 08:47:32 -0500

Try these three true or false statements before you read on:

1) The continents or land masses on which we live have been moving for millions of years and will continue to move in the future.
2) Antibiotics kill viruses as well as bacteria.
3) The earliest humans lived at the same time as the dinosaurs.

...

Now that you've had a chance to say True, False, False, and "Why are you asking me such easy science questions?" you may be shocked (as I was) that only 23% of respondents, when posed these questions, were able to answer all three correctly. 69% of the respondents had college education, with 27% holding college degrees and 14% having attended graduate school.

The interesting thing is that the survey, reported in the newsletter of the APS Forum on Physics and Society, then went on to ask respondents' views on the teaching of creationism, "intelligent design," and evolution in high school science classes. It turns out that those who answered all three questions above incorrectly were much likelier to support creationism while those answering all three correctly strongly favored evolution.

What surprises me is not the trend of low science literacy and favoring creationism, but that the bar for discriminating "low" science literacy can indeed be set so low and still yield the suspected underlying trend.

It also doesn't bode well for science education in America.

I may be getting the same degree as a rocket scientist, but...

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 21:03:16 -0500

I've always been a lover of science, ever since my parents made the mistake (?) of getting me a chemistry set for Christmas when I was seven.

Of particular interest to me has always been rockets and nuclear stuff. I love sci-fi, and I think it shows. :)

How cool, then, is it that I am now part of the public relations campaign for the Ad Astra Rocket Company, makers of the VASIMR (Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket). (Try and guess which one of the testimonials is mine, I dare you. :))

What's even cooler is that I was personally solicited for the testimonial by a friend of mine who now works on said plasma space rocket.

I think that bears repeating: a real PLASMA SPACE ROCKET.

Awesome.

Circuitry Fun

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 00:22:10 -0500

Seven Channel Mirnov Probe Preamplifier System

I never thought that I'd be an electronics engineer as well as a graduate student, but hey -- it works!

I'm sure you're all saying, "Hey, I thought you studied fusion! What gives?" Still there -- but trying to measure stuff.

My problem is that I'm trying to measure a signal that is O(1 V) that is riding on top of a sea of noise. Noise that's induced in the transmission lines of the cables. Hence the electronics to try and mitigate said noise.

And although the board is a means to an end (i.e. thesis data), and not quite complete (routing I/O connectors, etc) I think it's fun to do. And it looks pretty.

Kravlor.com -- Now with Categories!

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 00:02:20 -0500

I may be one of the slowest people to figure out the nifty things that Drupal can do, given that I've used it for several years now.

I just figured out about categories. And now my posts have them. I like it, if not for the organizational purpose just to see my musings on the stuff from time to time. :)

Sometimes, I'm embarrased to be an Ole.

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 16:30:07 -0500

I like being affiliated with St. Olaf College. I graduated Suma Cum Laude with majors in physics, mathematics, and computer science, having a blast while I was there.

And now that I'm an official alumnus, I get the distinct privilege of being solicited for money to give to my alma mater! Fair enough, I suppose -- so I diligently read the mailings and then usually ignore them. (I am a graduate student, after all. :)) However, I recently got one that was so egregious that I had to break my normal Midwestern politeness to chide the College for sending all of us such a steaming pile of -- well, you get the idea. So, I figured I'd vent a bit more here. Anyway, here's what I wrote to the people regarding the letter:

Dear members of the St. Olaf Partners in Annual Giving Program,

As a proud member of the class of 2004, I recently received a customized solicitation for the 2008 Partners in Annual Giving campaign, dated 4/23/08.

I don't mind receiving such solicitations from time to time from the College; in fact, I expect it. However, this particular invitation to donate to St. Olaf was in rather poor taste, as well as containing grammatical and factual errors in the solicitation itself.

For instance, take the following examples, direct from the letter:

"... but its funny how I always know when I meet an Ole."
"About a week ago I figured out why, he's an Ole."
"Whether its on a plane, in our workplace, or on vacation..."
"Its always crazy sharing..."
"... I hope that we reflect on our St. Olaf experience's as positive ones."

The letter also invites the reader to "put [a donation] on your credit card by hitting the link below," without providing a link in the body of the letter.

I was not an English major (far from it), but reading anything with such blatant errors is extremely annoying. And when it's printed on St. Olaf letterhead, it reflects poorly on the institution and all of its alumni -- not just those of us that need a little extra time checking their grammar.

Furthermore, you may also want to tone down the "Oles are better than everyone else" theme espoused in this particular letter. I sincerely enjoyed my time on the Hill, and would do it all over again; however, that doesn't magically make me intrinsically more capable, likable, or otherwise superior to non-Oles in any way.

I will continue to read your mailings; however, if they continue in the current extraordinarily poor taste and quality of the recent letter, I can guarantee you will not be receiving donations from me and many others any time soon.

Sincerely,
Michael W. Bongard '04

As a sidenote, my wife, a proud graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is now mocking St. Olaf even more. *sigh* As she aptly pointed out, if she submitted a cover letter to a job application of similar awful quality, it'd earn her information a quick trip to the document shredder.

I also thought I should have added the following for good measure, but since it wasn't directly related to the letter's blatant errors I withheld it:

Such snobbery is not only anti-social, but is extraordinarily counter-productive to your aims of soliciting money from alumni who happen to interact with a majority of non-Oles on a daily basis. (Some of us even have the audacity to marry outside the school!)

Sheesh. There must be better ways to get money out of us than throwing this kind of crap our way.

My Software's International Now!

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 10:58:41 -0500

I don't toot my own horn very often, but I feel like this is a good time to do so.

I spent the first year or so of my PhD research developing an obscure, cross-platform library called mdscwrap that lets certain programming languages (LabView, C, and Igor Pro) easily interface with MDSplus, a data archival and storage system that has become the de facto standard to the fusion community. After getting the package off the ground, I started doing science with it and have gone from there.

From time to time, I get requests from research groups across the nation to try out my library. I just got my first international request today. So, my distribution's gone global. Not bad for a graduate student project, huh? :)

Grumble Grumble

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 18:31:29 -0500

Looks like the Pentagon now knows Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda had absolutely nothing to do with each other prior to the invasion of Iraq.

So, now that this blatant lie that was shoved down our throats for years is officially recognized as a blatant lie, will we be ready to impeach the president for causing a war on false pretenses?

A Descent Into Nerdery...

Sat, 01 Mar 2008 10:53:41 -0600

My wife may have inadvertently set me on a path to higher Linux nerdliness the other day.

I was excited about news that dedicated Linux enthusiasts had recently found a buffer overrun exploit on the Wii which has allowed the Wii to run a (demonstration) GameCube version of Linux natively. I know that Linux has been ported to other odd architectures before (such as a cash register), so I figure that with enough time and effort by dedicated kernel hackers, maybe something nice will come up! (The real motivation being, of course, running MythTV on the Wii.)

Well, Kristen asked, "why don't you try and run Linux on the PlayStation 2 instead?"

That has been my hobbyist goal for the last week or so. It turns out it is in fact possible, although far from ideal. I ended up installing a hard drive and a new case on my old, first-generation PS2 so I can try PS2 Linux in the near future! Here's hoping that it can work, but I'm pessimistic at the moment. It'll just be fun to have made the PS2 run Linux "just because I can," though!

REAL Programmers...

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 11:07:57 -0600

I've had this discussion myself:

http://xkcd.com/378

While I think emacs is awesome, it's a nice commentary. :)

My Letter to Hillary

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 12:17:00 -0600

Now that the Dem's contest is down to two, it turns out Obama is cool to nuclear energy (but sees it as a necessary tool to practically reduce greenhouse emissions), while Hillary is blatantly against it.

So, I wrote her campaign the following. Feel free to write her something similar! While I doubt she'll actually change her mind (appealing to the strongly anti-nuclear Democrat cross-section) I feel they're clearly in the wrong on this one.

The letter follows:

I am a scientist who is working on solving our Nation's energy crisis, and hold an advanced degree in nuclear engineering. My aim in writing this message is to strongly urge Senator Clinton to reconsider her stated position regarding the (non-)use of nuclear power.

In order to practically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we need a consistent supply of baseload power. Currently, nuclear power is our only meaningful candidate for this necessity. Certainly, renewables and conservation can and should be employed to their fullest.

However, it is a practical necessity at this point to enable a replacement of the current baseload power provided by fossil fuel (coal and oil) burning plants with a "greener" source: nuclear power.

Transitioning the US nuclear fuel cycle to one which involves reprocessing of current waste, which is more than 98% perfectly usable fuel, would dramatically reduce the amount of material required for long-term storage while ensuring a long-lived fuel supply for the US and the world.

Similarly, investment in longer-term energy options, such as nuclear fusion (via support of the domestic US fusion program and our international commitments to ITER) will contribute to solving the problem in the long term.

We simply cannot solve the problem through renewables alone -- especially if we do what needs to be done and supplant our existing fossil fueled baseload power with a CO2-friendly replacement.

Sincerely,
Michael Bongard
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Genius, pure genius:

Wed, 16 Jan 2008 09:31:26 -0600

http://xkcd.com/371

FY08 Budget: a devastating impact for science

Fri, 04 Jan 2008 07:32:59 -0600

As a scientist working towards making nuclear fusion a reality, this year's budget (passed in a lump omnibus fashion in the wee hours before Christmas recess) contains a very bitter pill to swallow: a zeroing of the US ITER budget. (Nature PDF) This project is the future of the worldwide fusion research program -- and the US has already backed out of it once.

Unfortunately, this budget also carries a tremendous blow to science in general: the failure to come through with the bipartisan-supported authorized investments in American science and science education through the America COMPETES and the American Competitiveness Initiative earlier in 2007.

Both sides of the aisle are pointing fingers at each other. Both sides of the aisle are to blame. And right now, science doesn't deserve to be a political football. It should never be.

Below find a message on the FY08 from the American Physical Society, the world-respected association of American physicists. A second message from the ITER perspective is available here from the APS Division of Plasma Physics, representing the nation's plasma physicists and fusion researchers. I am a member of both societies.

I hope that they can help you write to your elected officials and help turn the situation around. As you can see by reading the APS messages, scientists are not identified as political enough to warrant their pleas to be acted upon.

Perhaps you can help turn the tide with your letter and phone call. Let me know what you think.

APS message:

Dear APS Members:
 
 Although several thousand APS members responded to the last alert on
 federal science funding, the communications failed to affect 
 positively what ultimately became a highly partisan appropriations 
 process.  To attempt to rectify the damage caused by the Fiscal Year 
 2008 (FY08) Omnibus Appropriations Bill, APS President Arthur 
 Bienenstock will soon be asking you to e-mail your Members of 
 Congress urging that they take emergency action early in the next 
 session.  But first, a summary of what is known and documented:
  
 Two weeks ago, almost three months into the new fiscal year, Congress 
 finally passed an FY08 budget - unfortunately, it is devastating to 
 significant programs in the physical sciences.  It represents a 
 dramatic turnabout in a time of unprecedented outspoken support for 
 science across party lines, legislative chambers and branches of 
 government.
 
 Science funding in FY08 was originally set to increase substantially.  
 Consistent with the America COMPETES Act, President Bush's American 
 Competitiveness Initiative (ACI) and the Democratic Innovation Agenda, 
 the National Science Foundation would have received a 10 percent 
 increase; the National Institute of Standards and Technology Core 
 Programs, a 17 percent increase; and the Department of Energy's Office 
 of Science, an 18 percent increase.  The increases represented the 
 beginning of a 10-year plan to double federal investment in physical 
 science and engineering research.
 
 Early in the summer, the House passed all 12 appropriations bills that 
 cover discretionary spending, totaling $955 billion.  By early 
 October, the Senate Appropriations Committee had acted on many of 
 them, but the Senate leadership did not bring any of them to the floor 
 for a vote.  President Bush had already warned that he would veto 
 appropriations bills if, in the aggregate, they exceeded his $933 
 billion ceiling.  Two weeks ago, responding to the President's veto 
 threat, Congress, having already passed the Defense appropriations 
 bill, rewrote and passed the remaining FY08 budget bills as an omnibus 
 spending package.  
 
 The Omnibus Bill is a disaster for the very sciences that our 
 political leaders have repeatedly proclaimed essential for our 
 national security, economic vitality and environmental stewardship.  
 Several reports have suggested a picture less bleak, but they do not 
 take into account the effects of either earmarks or inflation.  In 
 fact, numerous programs will have to be trimmed or canceled.
 
 Hundreds of layoffs, furloughs and project shutdowns at Fermilab, 
 SLAC, LBNL and other national laboratories and research universities 
 seem unavoidable.  U.S. funding for the International Linear Collider 
 project will be curtailed for the balance of the fiscal year, placing 
 extraordinary stress on the high-energy physics program.  FY08 funding 
 for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) will 
 be zeroed out, abrogating our agreement with our European and Asian 
 partners.  User facilities will see reductions in operating time and 
 staff, and university research will contract.  The list is long and 
 the damage significant.
 
 How could this happen, given the strong bipartisan support for science 
 research and education?  There is much speculation that with 
 negotiations having broken down and the President adamant on the total 
 spending, Democratic leaders made the following assessment:  First, 
 that there were insufficient votes to override a presidential veto of 
 their spending plans.  Second, since the Senate had failed to act on 
 the appropriations in a timely fashion, Democrats would be blamed for 
 any government shutdown that might result from a spending stalemate. 
 Their strategy was to accede to the President's $933 billion bottom 
 line, but, to get there, "by whacking GOP priorities" as the 
 Associated Press reported on December 10.  So, with ACI carrying a 
 presidential label, much of the increases for NSF, DOE Science and 
 the NIST labs were erased to meet the budget restrictions. Since ITER 
 was seen as one of the top Administration's priorities, its entire 
 funding was zeroed with strong language to prevent reprogramming of 
 funds to save the project. House Appropriations Chairman David Obey 
 (D-WI) suggested that the $9.7 billion in earmarks be removed to allow 
 funding for other priorities, but his colleagues refused to go along.
 
 Added to this calculus is a well-known fact: Science has rarely, if 
 ever, been a factor in determining the outcome of an election.  Even 
 for scientists, funding for research and education most often is not a 
 major determinant in whom they support -- unlike members of other 
 interest groups, such as the National Rifle Association or the 
 American Medical Association, who frequently vote based on their 
 "special" interests.  Given such a history and the hard-ball politics 
 that played out this month, letters from scientists to their Members 
 of Congress, unfortunately, did not rule the day.
 
 When Congress returns later this month, Members may be more receptive 
 to listening to their science constituents.  We will be sending you 
 another alert next week, after we have determined that the landscape 
 is more favorable.  Please respond when we contact you.  Your voice 
 may well make the difference at that time.  
 
 Sincerely,
 
 Michael S. Lubell
 Director of Public Affairs
 The American Physical Society

Rice and Vocabulary-Building

Mon, 10 Dec 2007 20:03:19 -0600

CORRECT!
omphaloskepsis = navel-contemplation

While such a comparison may be well within the realm of a tortured GRE English section, my wife pointed me to freerice.com, a site which has a quirky vocabulary Web-based game paired with unnoticeable advertising. For each correct answer the UN gets a few grains' rice worth of a donation.

So, they make a buck, the UN gets extra food, and you learn fun vocabulary! What isn't there to like?

A Personal Reason to Dislike George Bush

Mon, 15 Oct 2007 20:22:46 -0500

... among many others.

Thanks to his cavorting around the southeast seaboard today in Air Force One, my wife's inbound and connecting flight schedules were completely, utterly disrupted. Now I don't get a chance to see her tonight, she misses medical appointments, and no one is happy.

Grr.

Sometimes, this is how I feel the public understands my work

Thu, 04 Oct 2007 19:23:36 -0500

Gotta love The Onion. This time, they artfully blend the concept of ITER with that of a particle accelerator like CERN. Of course, there's the amazing infographic, too:

Look familiar? (Yay fusion!)

Mmm... Hypocricy...

Thu, 04 Oct 2007 18:45:38 -0500

Turns our Senator Craig is changing his firm, principled stand to resign from the Senate after voluntarily pleading guilty to lewd conduct (i.e. soliciting gay sex) in the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport mens' rooms.

First, it was a resignation by September 30; then, until a judge ruled on letting him attempt to withdraw his informed, voluntary guilty plea. Now, a Minnesota judge kindly reminded him that "The defendant, a career politician with a college education, is of at least above-average intelligence ... [h]e knew what he was saying, reading and signing."

Motion denied. :)

Well, at least he's consistent now. He's been lying to himself this far; lying to the public isn't that much of a stretch. I can't say I'm surprised for a typical member of his party.

Grr. Just had to get that off my chest.

Car Crashes are Not Fun

Mon, 24 Sep 2007 22:24:13 -0500

This is a little late, since I've been working on fixing an awkward, obscure bug with my website CMS. (Obscure Linux thing: upgrading PHP can break your site -- not because of the site, but because the freaking language changed...)

My wife and I were in an automobile accident on Friday, 21 September at approximately 8:15 PM. She's written about it here, and has photos of the totaled car. To reiterate:

Nobody was hurt in any serious fashion.
The car's gone.
Really, we're OK.
And, of course, the guy who hit us has no insurance.

It just sucks that our car's out of commission. Now we know for sure after hearing from the auto insurance people. Bleh. There's nothing like doing paperwork to make your weekend go even better!

At least this has led to some mildly interesting phone conversations:

Me: Hi, my arm and shoulder are bothering me following an automobile accident and I want your advice about what to do about it.
Nurse: So, you're having pain following an auto accident?
Me: Yes.
Nurse: Does it hurt when you lift heavy objects?
Me: Yes.
Nurse: Then don't lift any heavy objects.
Me: Okay...
Nurse: If it hurts, you can take an over-the-counter pain medication.
Me: Like the ibuprofen I took before calling you?
Nurse: Yep.

Finally, my family members are of course all glad nobody was hurt. (Me too!) But I like my brother's fitting tribute to the car, which he absolutely loved and drove throughout the majority of his high school career.

Nothing like independent confirmation...

Mon, 24 Sep 2007 22:06:53 -0500

Version 2.0 is here! The results...

... are in good agreement with the original test. Except now I'm Uber Cool in addition to being a Nerd God. I like it.

Looks like this Senator got a little more than he bargained for!

Mon, 27 Aug 2007 20:46:36 -0500

ID Senator arrested in Mpls/St. Paul International, pleads guilty to illicit, lewd behavior

Go undercover cops, go!

An Academic Promotion

Tue, 21 Aug 2007 17:35:00 -0500

After more than four months of hard work, writing, data analysis, and untold stress, today, I did it.

I successfully wrote a very long research proposal, and defended it in a 90 minute talk.

The end result: I now have earned the right to be called "PhD Dissertator."

In the words of several of my colleagues, "Huzzah!" Huzzah, indeed. :)

A seventeen-year quest ended this evening for me...

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 21:30:21 -0500

... when I finally beat Castlevania for the NES. That has to be one of the hardest games ever made.

In other news, it turns out writing research proposals are rather time-consuming. I've been working on mine since March. And it will end on August 21. Until then, I get to go back to my office, papers, and equations. Wish me luck!

Who would have thought...

Sun, 25 Mar 2007 15:09:22 -0500

... that when a computer's processor is hot enough to boil water that it stops working right? :P

Ah, the joys of fan replacement. Fortunately, the computer in question, which hosts kravlor.com, is back up and running once again, with no apparent damage to the CPU.

Also, a DNS tweak should hopefully re-propagate the DNS settings within sixty seconds in the event of an IP address change, versus the previous six hours. (Amazing how those services work, when you're paying for them...)

Wedding update: Website -- currently quite crappy, but hopefully some work soon.

Goin' to the Chapel, 'Cause I'm... Gonna Get Married

Sun, 25 Feb 2007 15:59:13 -0600

I asked Kristen to marry me on Friday. She enthusiastically said yes!

A few Pictures

We're still on Cloud 9; more information on practical things like: 'When will you get married,' 'Where will you get married,' and 'when can I expect an invitation' will all be addressed in due time. We think we'll make a website or something to help us organize.

What we do know is that we'd love to have the ceremony in Madison.

The Wonderful Joys of XP Recovery -- Plus Dell Hard Drive Secrets!

Thu, 22 Feb 2007 00:09:28 -0600

For those of you who aren't tech nerds, please happily disregard this (lengthy) posting. However, it's time for me to vent after a full two days worth of effort.

The Problem

The task is one which can be seemingly accomplished by a low-level administrator with a few simple tools; that is, upgrade the hard disk in a laptop computer, running only Windows XP, and keep its contents in-place.

There are additional constraints:

You can only fit one hard disk in the laptop at a time
There is NFS and SMBFS access to a disk array which can easily absorb a full disk image
There is a USB 2.0 disk of sufficient size to absorb a full disk image
There is not a USB/FireWire adapter for the 2.5" drive, because you forgot that the one you did buy was for a PATA interface, not the shiny new SATA interface

So, the standard approach: make an image of the hard drive onto one (or more for backup) of the larger disks; install the new drive, and image back. Simple, straightforward, and easy, especially with commercial products like Ghost and PartitionMagic available for the process, right?

Wrong.

The Windows Approach

My version of Ghost (admittedly from 2003) was unable to read my USB disk in the DOS mode which needs to be dropped into for the actual imaging operation; similarly, network access under DOS (always sketchy, back in the day) proved impossible due to the non-existence of appropriate Gigabit ethernet drivers for my onboard card (also not suprising).

At this point, a Windows guy with my limited subset of equipment would go and fork over some more money for a shiny new USB adapter that hopefully Ghost could recognize, allowing for direct disk-to-disk transfer overnight. I, however, needed to get this thing going today to keep doing plasma physics research!

So, with the traditional Windows tools exhausted, it's Linux to the rescue! The problem has now officially been promoted to a More Difficult, but Not Impossible task. After all, if Linux can't do it, it's not worth doing; and with more than five years' worth of Linux experience, I should be up to the task -- and with stereotypical Linux snobbery, do it faster and better than Windows could have. :)

The Linux Approach -- Take 1

My approach was the same: make an image of the source disk and restore onto the new one after a hard disk swap. My latest on-hand Fedora Core 5 Rescue CD didn't have the appropriate network drivers for my network card, either; fortunately, the Fedora Core 6 DVD did. By booting into rescue mode (boot: linux rescue) I was able to manually activate my network devices for my home network, create virtual mountpoints in the rescue-mode created ramdisk and attach to my NFS ~1 TB megastore.

My first Dell-specific surprise when using Linux (and fdisk) was that my disk had some hidden partitions on it!

$ cat fdisk.txt

Disk /dev/sda: 38.5 GB, 38502535680 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4681 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1           5       40131   de  Dell Utility
/dev/sda2   *           6        4074    32684242+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3            4075        4680     4867695   db  CP/M / CTOS / ...

Well, with those guys lying around, it appeared that it was a small diagnostic partition, coupled with a sizable (DVD-sized!) restore partition hanging around, too! No wonder my purportedly 40 GB drive was clocking in near 30 GB in Windows!

Since I figured it'd be good to keep them around to start, the imaging itself was a snap; using dd:

#dd if=/dev/sda of=/path/to/nfs/mount/raw_disk_image

After the image was written, I swapped disks and repeated the process:

#dd if=/path/to/nfs/mount/raw_disk_image of=/dev/sda

Again, after the imaging took, I rebooted; Windows booted normally. I was done -- or so I thought. (Did you see my mistake? Hint: the partition table was copied literally.) Since this was a bit-for-bit raw copy of the source, the new hard disk reported itself as an identically-sized drive. I figured that PartitionMagic could do the trick, as it was designed for just these wacky partitioning schemes.

Unfortunately, both PartitionMagic as well as Windows reported the maximum hard drive size as that of the source, and not of the actual capability of the drive. My next thought was to confirm that the laptop recognized the new drive in its entirety. Strangely enough, the BIOS reported the old disk size as well! This was starting to smell like a Master Boot Record (MBR) problem, since dd happily brought the old one over for the ride.

At this point, I had to do some digging; by visiting my hard disk manufacturer's website, I was able to obtain a bootable CD containing yet another spiffy DOS-based utility to probe the hard drive. Among the tweaks possible was to re-define the capacity of the drive! It took -- at least the BIOS said so -- but Windows and PartitionMagic disagreed; afterward, they had somehow reset the original, incorrect data too. This led to a prolonged sequence of reboots while properly resetting the MBR and trying other tricks.

The problem seemed to stem from inappropriate drive geometry (cylinder, head, sectors) information stored in the MBR. fdisk should be able to take care of that, but for whatever reason, was not being saved properly. D'oh! (Of course, this took several reboot/re-tweak HD size/Windows boot cycles.)

I then turned to a Linux LiveCD to help me out -- the latest version of Knoppix. (After all, a Fedora Rescue CD is rather bare-bones when it comes to the increasingly difficult task I'd set it to do.) Specifically, I was after easy access to try and tweak the partition table using fdisk and gparted, the latter only which runs in an X environment. (gparted is a PartitionMagic clone.) It appeared to work, since I could re-define the partitions, resize the NTFS (!) and go on my merry way.

Until I rebooted, and got a wonderful Windows XP BSOD and a stop code (0x0000007b) which corresponded to a bad boot drive. D'oh!

A bit of googling turned up a problem with gparted, the NTFS toolkit package, and the 2.6.19 kernel used on my Knoppix CD; supposedly the latest, greatest gparted LiveCD using the 2.6.20 kernel fixes the problem.

So, after burning yet another LiveCD, I was able to shrink and un-move the partitions back to under the original 40 GB boundary. Windows booted -- hooray! However, after 6 hours worth of grow/resize/move tricks with gparted (PartitionMagic and Windows continued to refuse to recognize the true drive size) I had to give up.

The Linux Approach -- Take 2 [Works!]

Since dd imaging worked so well, and the MBR squarely identified as the offending culprit, I took the (considerable) time to do my imaging better -- i.e. partition-by-partition, again to the NFS megastore:

#dd if=/dev/sda1 of=./sda1
#dd if=/dev/sda2 of=./sda2
#dd if=/dev/sda3 of=./sda3

Then, I manually zeroed the partition table with fdisk and manually created the necessary partitions of exactly the same size and filesystem type as from the original, except without the 4.6 GB Dell restore partition. (After all, I now had its contents safely pulled out into backup image sda3. Re-imaging:

#dd if=sda1 of=/dev/sda1
#dd if=sda2 of=/dev/sda2

And with a reboot: a nice blinky cursor. My job was not yet finished!

The trick: since the MBR was created from scratch, even though the NTFS partition was toggled to be bootable, there wasn't actually a boot loader to do it!

The solution for that problem is to use the Windows XP Recovery Console, off a trusty Windows XP installation disc (and even more reboots!). Not a big deal; one just needs to run fixmbr under it. That is, until I discovered that Dell had set an Administrator password on my machine that I did not know!

So, I had to hack into my own machine, crack the Administrator password, and then reset it to a new one using yet another Linux LiveCD, this one being custom-tailored to Windows password cracking/resetting.

Following the hack, the Recovery Console fixmbr fix worked like magic; the system booted and PartitionMagic properly recognized the additional hard disk space. One last round of NTFS resizing to claim the 120-ish GB free on the replacement drive and I was successful!

Final Thoughts

If you find yoruself in my position, the right thing to do is to manually re-create the partition table -- don't bring it over via dd! You'll be happier after you do it. Also, Dell steals your hard disk space to leave DVD restoration images -- and leaves secret recovery passwords on the working Windows partition so you can't easily fix things when they go wrong!

Grr

Thu, 15 Feb 2007 13:45:02 -0600

I'm not surprised -- rather, disgusted:

Iraq planning 'delusional' (BBC -- why isn't the American press digging into this?)

With such unrealistic assumptions in military planning used for justifying the war, why didn't Congress -- who authorized the use of force in Iraq, and is responsible for oversight of the funds used for its execution -- question these plans?

Oh, that's right -- the balance of power shifted only in January 2007.

Let's hope that Congress actually flexes its oversight authority and deeply investigates all aspects of the war, from the faulty intelligence to the despicable underfunding of the troops.

You Know You're In Love When...

Tue, 13 Feb 2007 21:36:49 -0600

... you hear the following from your significant other:

"Well, if I go crazy, just give me a duck that quacks like a whale and put me in a padded room. I think I'd still love you."

The scary thing is, I've already heard the duck. It quacks like a whale.

Open Season

Sun, 11 Feb 2007 12:09:33 -0600

I know it's been a while since I've last written; things have been busy. In no particular order, the following things have occurred since October:

Re-derived the principles of fast ion current drive created by neutral beam injection in a tokamak
Determined that the sun will not be ejected from the galaxy via cumulative small pitch-angle scattering due to gravitational interactions with all the other stars in the galaxy within several ages of the Universe
Earned a Master's Degree in Nuclear Engineering and Engineering Physics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison
Grew and lost a beard over a bet with my girlfriend (and stubbornness)
Renovated my office; now with red walls, optimized desk, and a tri-story hedgehog cage
Visited Door County for the first time over New Year's
Renovated by bedroom; now with light blue walls, a solid wood bedframe, and curtains
Begun the process of moving in with my girlfriend, Kristen
Installed lighting fixtures
Deduced how to hotwire lighting fixtures when the included Chinese instructions turned out to be wrong using only a trusty multimeter and a screwdriver
Learned how to hotwire a furnace
Learned how much a replacement furnace blower motor costs
Learned why one needs to reprogram a furnace control system when a new blower motor is installed
Continued to procrastinate about writing a PhD Preliminary Examination

I'll do my best to write more regularly. For instance, it would now appear that oversized muskrats are being mistaken for divers -- earning gunshot to the face! Let this be a caution to all divers out there...

TV Link

Sun, 29 Oct 2006 14:47:12 -0600

Through the wonders of MythTV, I was able to capture the short news segment featuring yours truly. There's nothing like being the subject of not-so-witty local news anchorman banter. So, without further ado, the "odd little kicker:"

Mike on TV (28 MB)

I'm the one in the yellow mask. You also have to love the cheese references at the end. I'm also the one that made the front page of the student newspaper the next day! Looks like it's going more towards 1.5 minutes of fame!

For now, I'm off to Philadelphia, PA for the APS 2006 DPP meeting. The horrendous work weeks are now over -- now to catch up on the world of US fusion and plasma physics research.

Mike -- Now on TV!

Thu, 26 Oct 2006 22:53:08 -0500

As a brief reprieve from the pre-APS meeting pressure, my friend Soren and I decided to go for a bit of Halloween fun. Being a multitasker, we decided to do so while underwater. (It's not November yet -- and recall I once went diving in Lake Superior even then!)

Under a slight drizzle, we joined about ten others from the UW SCUBA club and carved pumpkins underwater. The local news station was there for the festivities, and took a long look at my buddy and myself while we were preparing for the dive, as well as while descending. It turns out I was the one to make the cut for the 10 PM news reel!

It may be more like 15 seconds of fame, but I'll take what I can get.

Only in Wisconsin

Tue, 10 Oct 2006 21:14:49 -0500

Isn't it great when the state in which you live gets 'interesting' press coverage?

It would seem that the Republican candidate for Wisconsin Secretary of State is using her affairs with Packers players in the 60's as a campaign tactic.

Wow. Just -- wow.

Going Pink

Sun, 01 Oct 2006 21:03:22 -0500

October is National Breast Cancer Awareness month. As a part of an effort to raise awareness about the campaign, the Pink for October group has led a rally for websites to change to a pink-based color theme for the month. (For those of you reading an aggregate: kravlor.com)

Being slashdotted doesn't hurt one's awareness, either.

My mother was afflicted with breast cancer -- and was one of its survivors. It changed my life, and that of my family instantly. Hopefully, with enough resources and research the battle against cancer can eventually be won.

A Breath of Air

Thu, 21 Sep 2006 19:42:20 -0500

Now that fall is upon me, I realize that summer flew by very, very fast. Partially this was because I was working a tremendous amount. But, I now know rudimentary French, having learned a year's worth in a scant eight weeks. Will I remember it? Likely not -- but that's what happens when you cram that much vocabulary in too fast; unused words fall off the end of the list as you put in new ones!

Fortunately this will be my last semester of academic work. After 6.5 years of maximized higher-education courseloads, this will be a welcome change. Plus, a MS degree is going to be a nice Christmas present. Aside from getting back into the swing of things with coursework, research at Pegasus is continuing to go well. I've supervised several undergraduate research projects, and am continuing to do so. My research in plasma control is going well too, although at times it seems more like excess debugging than actual science.

The summer and fall also seem to be prime wedding season, with friends and family lining up at the altar at a (seemingly) ever-increasing rate! Soon, I'll be up there by default. :)

Finally, to relate to the title: Kristen is taking a SCUBA class! By the end of October, we'll be able to do underwater pumpkin carving together with the UW Scuba club. Hooray for diving!

Soaked!

Thu, 27 Jul 2006 20:11:38 -0500

You'd think that by living far, far away from dangerous things like rivers one would be less prone to casual flooding events. However, just that happened today.

I was isolated snugly in the basement of my building during a meeting, when one of my coworkers poked his head into the room. He was dripping water head to toe, and proclaimed that it was raining cats and dogs outside. Shortly thereafter, our vacuum technician reported flooding in our basement floor and led a team of undergraduates to circumvent the problem.

Downtown Madison and the areas near my lab were hit hardest. My girlfriend was trapped in her car as the roads were flooding. Fortunately, she was able to get off the roads safely. Afterward, she took pictures to show just how bad things were. (These were taken after the water had receded by eight inches!)

A local newspaper reporter also got a chance to snap a picture of her, too!

Yikes!

LVM Is Fun

Sun, 28 May 2006 00:32:26 -0500

There's nothing like starting a long weekend with Linux nerdery. To wit: the main server at kravlor.com now has an aggregate shared storage block of .8 TB, providing on average 1 TB of storage to machines on the network! (It turns out that MythTV eats a lot of storage, especially when one gets a chance to watch TV every few months or so!)

Niftier is that hard disks in the set can be reshuffled in and out with little repercussion. (On production-scale servers, for instance, drives can even be hot-swapped, avoiding a reboot!)

Also, the photo gallery has been provisionally fixed. It has been on the fritz since I nuked the kravlor.com server following a compromise. (Moral of the story: mod_rewrite is difficult to debug.)

(Fun - Sun) + Work in San Diego

Fri, 12 May 2006 00:26:38 -0500

Bullseye!

That was where my conference was held today, on the General Atomics campus. I've been attending a conference on active control of plasmas in today's modern tokamaks, and otherwise getting in touch with a lot of people actively involved in the research community that I am particularly interested for my work on Pegasus. (It's pretty nifty to be in a spot that is so clearly distinguishable from space. Ok, pretty super spiffy.)

It being my first time in a higher-security DOE facility, let's just say it was impressive. Very impressive. The control room was laced with many, many operator/data visualization stations; several large-screen projectors with machine status information, etc.; cool blinking lights; and more.

It would appear that people from MIT are interested in the work that I've been doing to make interfacing C, LabView, and Igor programs with their data acquisition/storage/retrieval system, MDSplus.

I look forward to seeing what the final day of the conference brings -- as well as my return for a week-long stay in early June.

You Know You're In Graduate School...

Thu, 04 May 2006 16:05:48 -0500

... when your pen runs out of ink as a result of working on the math for your magnetohydrodynamics final. :)

As a followup to my last post, there has been an amazing response at a blog set up to thank Colbert for his performance. With more than 45,000 comments (the vast majority compliments/thank yous) in less than a week -- and growing rapidly -- it would seem that his performance struck a resonance with the American people!

A Newfound Appreciation For Stephen Colbert

Mon, 01 May 2006 20:01:17 -0500

Stephen Colbert made a great speech at the White House Correspondents' dinner on Saturday.

All I can say is that if you haven't seen this routine, you need to. My particular favorite zinger:

"I mean, nothing satisfies [the White House Correspondents]. Everybody asks for personnel changes. So the White House has personnel changes. Then you write, 'Oh, they're just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.' First of all, that is a terrible metaphor. This administration is not sinking. This administration is soaring -- if anything, they are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg!"

Colbert certainly has... guts... to be able to give the delivery he did with President Bush less than six feet away.

And perhaps of more interesting note, the New York Times completely omitted Colbert's sharp performance at the event, which also included a performance by a Bush lookalike. Perhaps Colbert was hitting too close to home with certain lapdogs of the Administration?

Laptops are Fun

Sat, 01 Apr 2006 15:00:02 -0600

I've been enjoying the use of my new laptop computer. I finally decided to bite the bullet and obtain a machine that will be helpful while I travel and make increasing numbers of professional presentations. And, of course, play games.

In particular, this post is coming from the waiting area of my local area Car-X, where I will unfortunately soon pay a rather large sum to make sure my car can stop safely. (Brakes, it turns out, are an important safety feature of a motor vehicle these days.)

Work is continuing to go well. I've been versing myself in the art of Igor Pro XOP programming, which is essentially grafting the codes I've developed over the last several months into a different package that can then be accessed through Igor, a program that our research group uses extensively to view, manipulate, and otherwise look at data from our experiments.

With things starting to warm up these days, it's just about time for a BBQ!

Hacked Again!

Sun, 26 Mar 2006 16:16:32 -0600

There's nothing like finding out that your web server has been compromised by some Romanian kiddiez. And then kicking yourself because it's clearly your own fault.

At least it's forced me to upgrade my server OS -- something that really, really needed to be done. Unfortunately, it seems my CMS, Drupal, doesn't play nice with the latest versions of PHP and MYSQL. So, things may look craptacular for a while until I get it fixed. :)

Let this be a lesson -- MythTV users should not be allowed SSH login!

This is NOT Funny

Tue, 14 Mar 2006 21:33:03 -0600

Miss Deaf Texas Killed by Freight Train

She never heard it coming...

Is it wrong to laugh (at first) to this terrible tradgedy? It is unfortunately ironic.

Two Losses (one real)

Mon, 06 Mar 2006 22:52:36 -0600

Today Kirby Puckett died following complications from a stroke. I remember going to Twins games as a kid and hearing the Metrodome roar when the announcer called his name. He was a role model to many Minnesotans, myself included. It's a shame for things to end this way.

... and although I probably shouldn't mention these in the same posting, Fox killed off Edgar Stiles (along with tons of other agents) (CTRL+SHIFT+F5!) on 24 tonight. (How could they release the nerve gas in the headquarters? Damn them!)

Ok, back to solving linearized magnetohydrodynamics. I've had my night of TV for the week. It's a shame when it brings bad news, real or otherwise.

A Chance to Defeat Discrimination

Thu, 02 Mar 2006 01:06:28 -0600

Today the Republican-controlled Wisconsin Legislature approved a measure that will place an amendment to the Wisconsin Constitution before voters in November with the following text:

"Only a marriage between one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as a marriage in this state. A legal status identical or substantially similar to that of marriage for unmarried individuals shall not be valid or recognized in this state."

In essence, gay marriage will be prohibited -- and so will all forms of civil unions or other domestic partnerships that have been endorsed by other states.

While I'm not the person that would be directly discriminated against by this amendment -- and it is discrimination in my book -- we should all take pause and examine the situation that the Legislature has put before Wisconsin residents, namely, the very real possibility that the Constitution will be used to discriminate and segregate a portion of our population and specifically deny them rights.

This legal move is fundamentally wrong in and of itself, regardless of one's perspective on homosexuality. The Constitution of the US or its states should be used to protect rights of citizens, not banish them.

To that end, I look forward to voting against this measure. More information is available here.

On a completely different topic, my promised MythTV update has come around, including new information about how to export stored video to DVD!

Minnesota Republicans -- Now Phoning Home!

Tue, 28 Feb 2006 21:00:56 -0600

Yes, I'm mirroring a /. story, but this is something that really hits home for me, since I grew up in Minnesota.

It turns out that the Minnesota GOP has been distributing a CD that contains a Flash-based poll system. However, what they don't tell you is that should you run the CD, it phones home to the GOP, along with your name, address, and political opinions! And, to make things worse, this is done without any type of notice in the packaging or the program itself.

Clearly, this is Not A Good Idea. As for myself, I'd put it in the same bin as all the spyware and malware that is floating around the Internet and otherwise infesting Windows machines. (As an aside, I wonder whether an outbound-blocking firewall such as ZoneAlarm would be capable of detecting this mothership-signaling behavior?) Let's hope that this is treated with the same type of legal classification (illegal) that malware deserves.

Knocked Offline

Tue, 28 Feb 2006 07:16:14 -0600

Things have been very busy lately, largely due to my work at Pegasus. I've been in the process of establishing a link between the DIII-D PCS, the Pegasus data archive system, written primarily in LabVIEW, and MDSplus. Substantial progress has been made in the last few days, so I'm glad to almost be done at this point! I've certainly learned a lot about LabVIEW programming, and how to interface it to external libraries in C -- and will be glad to be done with passing data types between one another shortly!

I have been trying to write, but unfortunately my Internet access which provides access to this site has been very spotty over the last few weeks. With any luck a technician will be fixing things early tomorrow morning. And, with further luck, I'll be continuing to write sporadic updates, mixed with technical updates on some of the features I've been working on. First up on the list of things to write about: I've figured out a way to export recorded programs from my MythTV box to DVD, in a straightforward manner. (With a GUI, too!)

For now though, it's back to circuit analysis and MHD. At least I got a chance to go swing dancing this weekend!

Checking In

Sat, 04 Feb 2006 17:57:27 -0600

It's probably been a bit longer than it should have been between my last post and now. However, the life of a graduate student often precludes the mythical 'free time' you need to write these entries!

I had the good fortune to spend the Christmas holiday with my family. Over New Years, I drove from Minnesota to Chicago to see my cousin get married. (Kristen and I took advantage of the weekend as well; she came into town via an Amtrak commuter train the day my family flew out, and we spend the day on the town, ending up at her family's place outside Milwaukee.) Aside from that, there isn't really much else going on.

I'm still working hard, most recently on a project that only true computer programming types can appreciate: creating an interface library to pass data types between different programming languages. Specifically, between LabView and MDSplus, a data storage and retrieval system that has become the de facto standard in the fusion science research community. It turns out that MDSplus is a requisite component of the PCS system I will be using for my Ph.D thesis research. It's been straightforward, and exceedingly dull, work.

To make things more fun at home, I've been working on my homebrew PVR as well. I am working on a way to export the TV shows I record to DVD's playable on any player. It's been a fun challenge, and when I have a solution I like, I'll write more about it in my PVR section.

For now, it's back to my new theory course of the semester -- Magnetohydrodynamics. (It's fun to say, not to do!)

1984 in 2002-5?

Fri, 16 Dec 2005 08:39:28 -0600

Those that know me also know that while I may be left-leaning in the political spectrum, I am also a pragmatist when it comes to getting things done in Washington. However, any patriotic American should be very, very concerned about a Presidential order (originally reported at the NYT) allowing the NSA to spy on US citizens inside the United States, without a warrant or other judicial oversight.

That's right: the agency involved with spying on foreign communications has been turned on US citizens -- without requiring judicial approval.

At least 500, if not thousands, of US citizens have been subject to this spying at any time since the order took effect. Citizens guaranteed protection against such actions by our Constitution (since 1791 no less) -- which the President has sworn to uphold and defend. In fact, members of the NSA were so concerned about the blatant illegality of the program that they refused to participate.

Ostensibly this intrusive, illegal domestic spying is to fight terrorism. (We all know the slogan "fight them there so we don't have to fight them at home.") Perhaps instead of shredding the Constitution, more so one of the most straightforward clauses, we should be focusing our attention on our foreign spying and occupation of Iraq. After all, we still haven't caught Bin Laden, and Al-Zarqawi himself was caught and subsequently released by Iraqi security forces last year!

If these charges prove to be true, perhaps we should all write our Representatives to call for impeachment proceedings. Certainly a blagrant refusal to uphold the duties of the Office of the President -- in fact, acting against everything America stands for -- is a much more serious offense than, say, a blowjob.

Today seems to be the day to make your contributions to the ACLU.

A Look into the Mind of a Parking Cop

Tue, 13 Dec 2005 08:23:14 -0600

I'm not sure whether this is just a Midwest thing, but my local newspaper has provided a quick little insight into the daily life of a Madison parking meter reader.

It goes to show that it takes special people to become what most of us despise. :)

A Landmark, Steps Forward and Back

Thu, 08 Dec 2005 22:29:55 -0600

Today the nurses at the Red Cross told me that I had passed the two gallon mark! Those sixteen pints of blood have gone to help forty-eight people, which is in itself its own reward.

Of course, the spiffy two-gallon gold pin doesn't hurt.

Seriously though, if you can, consider giving blood. I saw the difference that it made in my mom's life when she was fighting leukemia -- like night and day. I suppose it's harder to see in those who recover from surgery. The fact that the nation's supply of blood can run low in the holiday season makes it that much more important to give if you can! (And to all those savvy world-travelers and others otherwise on deferral lists, I can end my preaching now. No offense intended. :) )

In other events, it's been interesting to be a resident of Wisconsin these past few weeks. The Democratic attorney general has recently asked, and today received, permission of the Democratic governor to sue the federal government regarding the FDA's refusal to certify Plan B emergency contraception for sale over-the-counter, despite independent scientific analysis proving it safe and effective, as well as internal review boards approving the move. The lawsuit purportedly will claim that political pressure is the reason behind the foot-dragging. (I am one among many who have also talked about that angle.) It will be a landmark suit that will, with luck, enable much greater access to a medication whose effectiveness critically depends on the time with which it is taken following unprotected sex.

At the same time, the Republican controlled Legislature have been busy pushing their agenda, including an attempt to place a ban on gay marriage into the state constitution (which recently passed the Senate the second year in a row) and dramatically expanding conceal-and-carry laws for handguns.

Sometimes it's just hard to know how to feel about the state government. I had almost forgotten how it felt good to know that people in power were not only looking out for the average American, but were doing the right things because they were the right things to be done. At the same time, seeing people deliberately writing discrimination into other state constitutions (and even trying to write it into the US Constitution!) seems to fundamentally against what the US has traditionally stood for that it's scary to see their success.

The Components, they are Gathered...

Wed, 07 Dec 2005 12:06:51 -0600

It's been a while, mainly because things have been going crazy at school and work. Despite working long hours (I am a grad student, after all) I have been able to devote some more time to my pet project at Pegasus -- the Plasma Control System.

Essentially, what we would like to do is to enable real-time detection and correction of plasma physics parameters such as plasma current, plasma position, shape, etc. By real-time, I mean "fast on a timescale relative to the discharge length." In Pegasus, for instance, we can only keep plasmas around for a few thousandths of a second; my first ballpark correction rate will be on the order of tens of millionths of a second. I'll be doing this with a state-of-the-art acquisition and control unit coupled with software based on that used on DIII-D, one of the major research facilities in fusion research.

My job has been to assemble the hardware, get the software components up and running, and then somehow turn this PCS into a working tool for Pegasus!

This summer, I was able to get the hardware up and running, which in and of itself involves a bit of geek factor -- an embedded Linux system (the digitizer), linked as a virtual PCI card in another Linux system, itself controlled by -- wait for it -- another Linux system! The software is written in bits and pieces of four programming languages I've found so far (C, IDL, stitched together with serious bash and csh scripting). On top of that, it interfaces with an independent data acquisition, storage, and retrieval solution, MDSplus, the de facto standard of the fusion community. (It works well, but is very poorly documented.) After I get that working, I just need to patch it into our existing bunch of independent LabView codes! (A programmers nightmare/delight, depending on your point of view.)

Recently I was able to get an MDSplus system up and running, so all the pieces are now on the proverbial table. Now I "only" need to get them to all talk to each other correctly, when not doing real plasma physics or finding vacuum leaks. :)

Thanksgiving was good -- lots of food, friends, and family. I'm looking forward to Christmas, however, since by then I'll be done with this semester! Since I've passed my qualifying exam, I only need to wrap up my courses before I start serious, in-depth research on my thesis, which will likely be coming from using the completed PCS system to study physics issues on Pegasus. The upside: only a year to go, entailing much lighter semesters than I've been pulling in the past while at UW-Madison.

Yes, it's a meme. It's still fun.

Thu, 24 Nov 2005 02:09:00 -0600

You scored as James Bond, Agent 007. James Bond is MI6's best agent, a suave, sophisticated super spy with charm, cunning, and a license's to kill. He doesn't care about rules or regulations and somewhat amoral. He does care about saving humanity though, as well as the beautiful women who fill his world. Bond has expensive tastes, a wide knowledge of many subjects, and his usually armed with a clever gadget and an appropriate one-liner.

James Bond, Agent 007

67%

William Wallace

67%

El Zorro

67%

Neo, the "One"

67%

Maximus

63%

Indiana Jones

63%

Captain Jack Sparrow

54%

The Terminator

50%

Batman, the Dark Knight

50%

The Amazing Spider-Man

50%

Lara Croft

42%

Which Action Hero Would You Be? v. 2.0
created with QuizFarm.com

First Snow!

Tue, 15 Nov 2005 22:23:51 -0600

The title says it all. I live too far south for this -- my Minnesota bones have been aching for lots and lots of snow since before Halloween! At least we'll hopefully have a white Thanksgiving! :P

Some Technical Musings (with Job Offer Potential!)

Tue, 15 Nov 2005 19:23:17 -0600

I took a break from my regular busy grad-student life to attend a seminar today hosted by National Instruments regarding their new LabView software revisions. As Pegasus uses LabView for nearly every aspect of data acquisition and control (at one level or another), it seems well worth my while to learn about the subject from the people who make it!

While the experience was what I expected -- marketing hype mixed with real engineering tidbits thrown in -- a conversation with the presenter at the end was not. I had asked a question regarding some of the finer points of his talk, when he abruptly changed topic, asking me about my background and job prospects! He seemed disappointed when I told him I was in for the long haul with the Ph.D, but wanted to emphasize how my "significant" (I would have chosen "meager") understanding of LabView makes me much more marketable in today's job market.

I suppose that makes sense, given that lots of Big Companies are now using LabView to automate very large production systems, etc. Still, it's fun to know that I have a fall-back skill to sell to industry -- even to the point where I get an easy crack at a job just by attending their seminar!

On another note, I've been reading with disgust about the new Sony Rootkit technology that has been secretly corrupting the Windows OS for the express purpose of enforcing its DRM -- to the point where one is prevented from ripping the tracks from the raw audio data for use on an iPod! (Before I go off the deep end in techno-babble, you can find out more about rootkits and how to find them, as well as more on the Sony rootkit here.) On top of the flagrant breaches in computer security and trampling of consumer fair use rights, the uninstall program that was initially published by Sony after an uproar of public anger -- which requires use of an ActiveX controller using Internet Explorer -- turns out to allow arbitrary code to be run by any subsequent website that a victim of this rootkit may visit!

Let's hope that Sony gets slapped with some huge civil and criminal suits as a result of this massive attack on computers worldwide. (It is a Federal crime, after all, to knowingly and maliciously alter computer systems without owner consent!) Heck, there's even been reports that it may contain LGPL software components without redistribution of source and object code modules -- meaning we may see yet another trial of the GPL in court!

Putting Money Alongside the Mouth

Tue, 08 Nov 2005 21:05:42 -0600

The few frequent readers of this blog know by now that I have a rather strong affliction for the civil liberties that I enjoy as a US citizen. I've even joined the EFF, an ACLU-like group for Internet and digital freedoms.

This past weekend I had a chance to clear off my desk and take care of other miscellaneous stuff. When I was done, I sat down and immediately realized that I wasn't done. There was something that had been quietly nagging me in the back of my mind for some time that was suddenly becoming louder. Whether it was from reading another article about incompetence in Washington (both sides of the aisle!), corruption, or blatant misinformation campaigns regarding AIDS and sexuality by Bush cronies, I decided to start contributing to organizations that I have favored for some time now.

You can now count me among the card-carrying members of the ACLU, and an official Planned Parenthood supporter. In that vein, the ACLU is coming out with a new TV show, The ACLU Freedom Files. It should be on Court TV, as of November 10^th. With luck, it will be interesting!

Doublespeak in the Media

Fri, 04 Nov 2005 11:48:11 -0600

Since the American public instated and re-affirmed the current Republican leadership in Congress and the Presidency, I am not surprised at all about the recent passage of measures to allow for oil drilling in the ANWR national wildlife reserve. (Facts have yet to phase these politicians; rather, lucrative oil contract profit-sharing (kickback?) contracts seem to have been driving some senators.)

That topic aside -- we were asking for it -- I am appalled at the poor reporting that Congress is getting from CNN today. Note their article on a recent budget bill that would "slash spending" through $35 billion in discrestionary funding. Some of the cuts seem quite reasonable, such as subsidies to insurance companies. However, one quote made me really wonder whether he's in touch with reality:

"Bush didn't make too much of the veto threat issued in his name, instead thanking the Senate for the cuts to health care programs for the elderly, poor and disabled while leaving food stamps untouched." (emphasis added)

By the end of the article about Republican fiscal irresponsibility, the bombshell: countering the $35 billion in cuts is an additional $35 billion in new spending.

So, we see that this is not a deficit reduction bill at all! Why then is this bill being lauded by Congressional Republicans and being described by the media as a deficit-fighting measure?

Hopefully they'll be able to start cutting out most of the fluff with their improved Newspeak.

MythTV, the PVR-150, and DISH Control via IR Blaster!

Mon, 31 Oct 2005 23:29:17 -0600

I have recently returned from the 2005 APS-DPP conference on plasma physics. While not my first scientific conference, it was the first of my graduate career! I presented a poster on the adaptation of the DIII-D plasma control system (PCS) to the Pegasus Toroidal Experiment. (Pictures Here)

With APS over with, I can get back to regular life, like schoolwork (ack), dating, and Linux hacking! Yes, I am a nerd. :) As such, I've put together a MythTV Guide, as I alluded to earlier, which will be evolving along with my Myth expertise. So far, I've been able to get a Hauppauge PVR-150 unit working with Myth on my Fedora Core 3 box, in the sense that I can watch television, record it and use the built-in IR blaster to control my DISH network satellite receiver! (Truly a dangerous development.)

And, since it's Halloween, have a look at the jack-o-lanterns we made this year -- Tux and The Cheat included!

Behold the Power of Linux -- and my Dorkiness

Sun, 09 Oct 2005 12:30:16 -0500

Yesterday after working for more than twelve hours on plasma theory (still not done today!) I took a break to tinker with my MythTV box. I had gotten to the point where I could record a program via my hardware TV tuner card, but couldn't change channels, etc. due to the fact that I use a satellite box.

Well it turns out there's been a devoted bunch of hackers that have written experimental drivers for my card's infrared remote. Moreover, it's kind of two remotes in one -- one for receiving commands, another to send commands to an external box. Yesterday, I got the IR sending (aka channel changing) to work. (Yes, I had to write a shell script to do this -- but hey, it's experimental for a reason!)

When that power button first flashed on and off by hitting the Enter key at 1:47 AM, I'll admit it: I giggled like a schoolgirl. There's nothing better than controlling blinking lights with a keyboard. :P

I'll write up a MythTV guide when I get things settled down and I get some free time. I earnestly recommend building one of these things!

Middleton School Referendum

Sat, 08 Oct 2005 12:01:28 -0500

One of the most important things I remember about growing up was when my local school district failed to pass a referendum which would have helped to maintain the elementary and middle schools I had attended. As a result, my parents had been so angry at the local population that they had to leave. A little over a year later, our family moved outside Mahtomedi, MN which had a more progressive (read: well-maintained) district.

The difference in quality of education was simply amazing. I had gone from class sizes approaching fifty to twenty-five. Teachers were less stressed-out. There were extra-curricular activities through which I could get involved both in my school and my community. (The academic coursework was more challenging, to boot -- we were expected to learn, not just pass State proficiency tests.)

Fast forward to now. I'm living in Middleton, WI, a town that was recently rated as one of the most livable cities in the US. (Hooray!) The entire Madison area has been exploding, and as a result, the school system is getting population pressure. At issue: a new K-8 school and funds to renovate heating and air conditioning systems in elementary schools from the fifties. If all of the four measures were to pass, property taxes would increase on the order of low hundreds of dollars per year depending on property value.

The situation is eerily similar to that which faced my parents when I was growing up. And just this morning I was interrupted in my plasma theory work by a pre-recorded phone message from a bigoted anti-school Republican backed PAC that asserted that my property taxes would go up $500/year for no good reason. Of course, this same group has been shown to intentionally air false ads before.

The venom in the lady's voice was difficult to hear. Why should we be arguing about building a school or maintaining existing properties?

I know the school has my vote. Hopefully this kind of nonsense will be ignored by the city. After all, investing in the education of children (and adults!) is a very good thing for the children -- and our future.

Politics Trounces Science at the FDA -- And Needs to Stop

Fri, 07 Oct 2005 00:14:14 -0500

Now that I'm done with Ph.D qualifying exams, I can get back to politically-loaded issues and commentary on techie stuff! In the works: a MythTV box, the alluded-to Nintendo modification, and maybe some more handy Windows tricks that I've been using recently.

But tech takes time, which is in short supply for now. So, it's back to the usual. This particular topic resonates with me both as a concerned American and as a scientist. Specifically, the FDA is caving to what can only be conceived as political pressure to keep a medication known as 'Plan B' from becoming an over-the-counter drug, despite overwhelming scientific evidence of both the safety and efficacy of the medicine, which is very effective at preventing pregnancy within 72 hours of sex. (Of course, earlier is better.) It works like regular oral contraceptives, but with a higher dosage; if a woman takes it too late (after implantation of a fertilized egg) it will not prevent the pregnancy or harm the embryo.

After an advisory panel voted 23-4 in favor of making Plan B over-the-counter, internal FDA scientists reviewed the recommendation and also independently agreed.

In response, FDA leadership delayed a decision for more than a year. After political pressure from Congressional Democrats, the FDA promised a decision -- but ended up deciding 'not to decide' and instead opening a public comment period of 60 days. As a result, multiple internal staff scientists have resigned in protest. (And recently the embattled FDA Commissioner resigned -- coincidence?)

After listening to a podcast from NPR's Science Friday on the subject, I was so angry that politics is trumping both science and women's health that I have written my Congressional representatives. I urge you to do the same.

Dear Senator Feingold, Senator Kohl, and Representative Baldwin,

I am writing to you to express my concern about the Food and Drug Administration's handling of a request to make a brand of emergency oral contraceptive, commonly known as 'Plan B,' available over-the-counter. This single pill, if taken within 72 hours of unprotected intercourse, can effectively and safely prevent pregnancy. However, the sooner the medication is taken the more effective it is -- and if a fertilized egg has implanted itself in the uterus before the medication is taken, it will not work.

The FDA has evaluated the scientific evidence for the safety and efficacy of this medicine and overwhelmingly supported the decision (in a 23-4 vote of advisory panel experts) to make it available over-the-counter. This recommendation was based on an exemplary safety record and to make accessibility to the medication dramatically greater due to the narrow window of time that the medication is effective at preventing pregnancy. Following the recommendation, the FDA's internal scientists reviewed the application and agreed with the findings of the advisory panel.

However, the FDA has chosen to defer making a definitive decision on the subject repeatedly. Prominent scientists in the FDA have resigned in protest. As a scientist myself, I am deeply dismayed by what appears to be a politically motivated decision on behalf of the FDA leadership to keep this medication from women that can already be in a terrible situation.

There are some positions in the government that should be immune from partisan politics -- and the FDA should certainly be one of them. When politics trumps sound science, all Americans lose.

Please take whatever steps are necessary to bring this problem to the attention of the {Senate | House} and to swiftly address the issue.

Very Truly Yours,
Michael Bongard

The Verdict: Part Two

Tue, 27 Sep 2005 22:31:13 -0500

Late last week I was able to obtain graded copies of my qualifying exam. (I swear, this will be the last post about the Quals ever.) It turned out that one of the problems on the Modern Physics exam, which I had failed, was very harshly graded -- despite a perfect solution!

It turns out that a vague question wording had me plug in an incorrect number in the beginning. Aside from that, my physics was correct. I was able to contest the grading of that particular problem successfully -- meaning that I eked through the exam!

Yes, that's right -- I passed all the qualifying exams! That means that the largest academic hurdle to getting the degree is now behind me -- and as long as I can pass my classes and be willing to slave away in the lab, I can confidently say that I will graduate with a Ph.D from UW-Madison.

It also means that I can actually be a real scientist for a living! Hooray!

The Verdict

Sat, 17 Sep 2005 12:18:10 -0500

Mathematics: PASS
Classical Physics: PASS
Modern Physics: FAIL
Oral: PASS

Well, three out of four isn't too bad. Most of the people I was studying with this time around only got 2/4 last time. I'll be able to see my graded test results later this week, which should be interesting -- I considered Modern to be my greatest strength, physics-wise, so we'll just have to see where I went wrong!

It's good to know the results, even if they aren't entirely what I wanted. I'll have to repeat the Ordeal of the Qualifiers once more, albeit only with a single exam. The stakes will just be a little higher -- if I fail again, I need to consider alternative career paths.

So, that chapter detailing the last few months of my life is now (almost) closed. Now I can focus on my research, which has been on the back burner while I crammed so much physics into my head!

Qual Update

Sat, 10 Sep 2005 15:22:06 -0500

No, I don't quite know how I did at this point, but suffice to say, the Fall 2005 Qualifying Exams are behind me.

Of the three written exams I took, I feel best about math, less good (but still OK) on modern physics, and it's questionable whether I passed classical physics. After working through one of those exams, you can almost hear your brain popping and sizzling!

For my oral examination, I was grilled on radiation interactions with matter; dependence of atomic number Z and number density on gamma-matter interaction cross-sections; central-field orbital potentials; quantum mechanical tunneling; wave scattering at potential barriers; resonance and absorptive effects; complex contour integration; solving ODE's via variation of parameters, Fourier analysis, and Laplace transformations; the theory of inverting Laplace transforms via use of the residue theorem; and driven harmonic oscillators.

The faculty panel sure kept me on my toes for the whole experience, and except for some glaring algebra mistakes, I thought I knew what I was doing. It was almost fun -- except for the long periods of silence from them when I was trying to find where I missed a minus sign! (And for those of us like myself who can't do messy algebra correctly on the first try on the fly, doing it in front of your adviser and a former math instructor can only be worse!) Hopefully the remaining two oral exams I'll take (for proposing and defending my thesis research) will go as well.

So, at this point I'm in the weird limbo between finishing the exam and waiting to hear how I did. Nominally I'll know on the 16^th. In the meantime, I'll get back to working on my research, which is much, much better than doing Qual problems!

Madison's Smoking Ban

Wed, 31 Aug 2005 23:24:50 -0500

Madison recently enacted a mandatory smoking ban in all public places, such as bars and restaurants. Naturally, the bar owners are screaming bloody murder about the whole proposition. Some have even gone to such lengths as to lay off bartenders and blame it solely on depressed attendance. (Of course, the month of July is typically some 'dead time' for Madison, with ~40,000 party- and bar-prone students absent over the summer.) Recent polls have had conflicting results about public support for the initiative. City leaders' resolve is waffling and they are proposing that the public decide the issue on a referendum in a few months.

Now, I'm all for admitting that there very well may be depressed attendance from chain smokers. But you know what? I think that it's a better deal for everyone else in that bar, especially employees that secondhand-smoke a few packs a day. It seems that doctors at the UW agree. Also, from driving through town on Friday and Saturday nights, I'm still seeing popular bars get flooded with people; so much so that lines spill out for more than half a block.

All I have to say is that it's well worth revisiting a great Bloom County strip on the issue. And maybe in a month, after the buildings have had three months to let their air clear out, I'll be able to go bowling again without having a terrible allergic reactions.

Today's Job: Mind Blanks!

Wed, 31 Aug 2005 21:20:20 -0500

There's nothing like putting your whole future into (several) two-hour exams. Today, I suffered a defeat that every physicist dreads.

I was unable to figure out a problem with a bowling ball rotating down a bowling alley.

The best is still to come -- I knew the problem, because I read it a month ago during my preparation for the exam. Verbatim. I even had the picture of the problem printed in the book in my head while I was sweating in that room. I was able to turn to the page it was printed on immediately when I got home. And, of course, after I got home today and out of the test situation, I was able to solve it in about ten minutes.

Ack! With luck, the grading gods and the Patron Saint of Partial Credit be merciful, eking me through the Classical Physics portion of the Qualifier. Otherwise, I get to do all of this preparation again -- with the added bonus of getting kicked out of school if I fail.

But, on an upward note, the math portion left me with a good feeling. It's a rare occasion that I leave a math exam feeling good, but thinking that you won't have to ever do that again leaves me with a warm, fuzzy feeling.

Also interesting is that I now fully and completely understand my fellow coworkers' desire to get very, very drunk after completion of the full set of exams. I will not have that opportunity until Friday night. Until then, back to the books!

Katrina

Tue, 30 Aug 2005 21:49:29 -0500

Most of us know by now how absolutely devastating the effects of hurricane Katrina have been. My heart goes out to all of the victims of the disaster. It's times like this that make you glad of the existence of our National Guard.

If you haven't already, please strongly consider donating to the Red Cross. Money does help.

On another note, tomorrow I endure Round I of my Ph.D Qualifying Examinations. Here's hoping that the last 1.5 months of pure studying pay off. Round II on Friday, with results coming in mid-September.

Robertson: Yet Another Example of Hypocrisy

Tue, 23 Aug 2005 09:05:48 -0500

I thought that I was used to radical right-wing Christian conservatives going way off the deep end. Well, today I was unfortunately proved wrong again.

Pat Robertson, creator of the nationally televised "The 700 Club," has now publicly advocated that the United States assassinate Venezeulan President Hugo Chavez. The purported justification of the deliberate murder? He's "a dangerous enemy to our south, controlling a huge pool of oil, that could hurt us badly." The fact that he's chummy with our good friends the Cubans irks him too, I'm sure.

If Robertson was just another right-wing extremist, that'd be fine; I could just ignore his rants as hateful rage against one of the many groups of people he thinks will be going to Hell. The difference here is that we have a Christian minister advocating murder -- and then for the reason that he has *gasp* OIL!

Perhaps Robertson needs to be reminded of the Second Commandment: "Thou shalt not kill." Or perhaps the single most important Commandment imparted by Jesus: "Love your neighbor as you love yourself."

Hopefully remarks like these will cause Robertson's viewers who actually care about their faith and its implications to turn away from him. This type of behavior only serves to further drag the name of Christianity -- and all that it stands for -- through the mud.

A Fitting Quote

Mon, 22 Aug 2005 20:33:27 -0500

"Do not worry about your difficulties in mathematics. I can assure you that mine are still greater."
-- Albert Einstein

Funny that I should run into that one while preparing for my mathematics qualifier! Now, back to work...

New Dive Ratings

Sun, 21 Aug 2005 23:40:28 -0500

It's been a long weekend. -- not because I've been studying for my quals like I should have been, but rather because I spent it at a private quarry outside Watertown, WI obtaining my PADI Advanced Open Water SCUBA dive certification! The lake-like structure on the satellite map is where we were diving, near an abandoned cement factory.

It's been something that I wanted to do for a couple years now, having gotten my original Open Water certification in the spring of 2001. We did courses on underwater naturalism, navigation, a typical night dive, a deep dive, and a dive geared towards underwater search and recovery techniques.

Still, it was pretty intense. We were on the move from 8 AM to midnight on Saturday, and from 8 AM until 6:30 today. After your second dive of a day, hauling on that cold, sloppy wetsuit one more time becomes a mental as well as a physical challenge!

Ah, Wisconsin...

Fri, 19 Aug 2005 11:34:23 -0500

Yesterday afternoon a slew of tornadoes tore through Stoughton, just a few miles southeast of Madison. One touched down in a golf course; another levelled homes. Only one person was killed despite the severity of damage in the area.

The great thing is listening to people's eyewitness accounts. While Kristen and I were in her basement listening to the radio, we played 'tornado bingo.' I called for a reference to a 'freight train,' while she was going for 'roar.' I ended up winning that round -- but the best one I heard is from a group of people taking shelter in the golf course:

"We were ... hiding behind the bar. We had beer, anyway."

And that is why I love this town!

More Evidence Trickles Out

Thu, 18 Aug 2005 10:51:01 -0500

As if the Downing Street Memo wasn't enough of an indication about the Administration's poor war planning practices (according to Britain's MI-6), it looks like officials at the State Department thought that post-war planning was also lacking.

Interestingly enough, State Department officials were not just pointing fingers at the military planners; rather, they offered their expert assistance in crafting a post-war strategy that could have helped address what turned out to be a US-created hotbed of terrorism. They were ignored -- and we all know what happened.

How many more documents like this will it take for the general public to actually look at the evidence and ask the Administration why such a poor job was allowed to take place?

Arrogance? No -- Hypocrisy

Sun, 14 Aug 2005 23:54:48 -0500

A rally of conservative Christians, including House Majority Leader Tom DeLay as an honored speaker, blasted judges for being arrogant and activists. One idea lofted at the convention: a Constitutional amendment that would prevent the judiciary from overturning laws created by Congress without a unanimous vote.

There are some great quotes, too:

"The [Supreme] court [sic] is trying to 'take the hearts and souls of our culture.'"
"The framers of our great nation did not intend for the courts to have absolute and final power over us."
"Activist justices -- we're trying to find out what we can do to stop that activity. Our laws are based on the Ten Commandments."

A rudimentary knowledge of civics reassures us that, in fact, the framers of our nation provided for a wonderful system of checks and balances, including the power for the judiciary to strike down laws that are unconstitutional. So, in that sense, they certainly do have absolute power -- when it comes to striking down illegal laws.

It's rallies like that -- along with the hate that is common with many of these radical right-wingers -- that besmirch the name of Christians everywhere, myself included. I think that the counter-demonstrations that were set up to coincide with the rally have a legitimate point: these people (and their organizations) want a theocracy, not a democracy.

The scary thing, of course, is that we can elect leaders who can write ourselves into one (Constitutional amendments, etc.) if we so choose. I certainly enjoy the current separation of Church and State, and sincerely hope that it remains so indefinitely here in the US.

Tinkering and NES Repair

Fri, 12 Aug 2005 09:47:00 -0500

My girlfriend's next-door neighbor was preparing to move out of his apartment and kindly offered Kristen a chance to scavenge stuff he was going to throw away before the rest of Madison did. I indirectly benefitted from this, as the fool was throwing away a NES!

Fortunately, Kristen just took the thing, along with games like Contra, and gave them to me!

Despite having the words "STILL WORKS!!" scrawled on it with a Sharpie, it does not in fact work -- the dreaded grey screen of death, or the blinking grey screens abound. I've experienced this phenomenon with my older NES system, and was able to have it corrected by some guys in the local used game store. This time, I'll do the repair myself, with help from The Nintendo Repair Shop. A $3.95 part, and I'm set to hack away! (Although still not as much as this guy did.)

Kansas: No Evolution Here!

Thu, 11 Aug 2005 10:00:58 -0500

Some people may remember the scientific uprorar caused in 2001 after the Kansas state board of education cut teaching of evolutionary theory in the classroom. As a result, several conservative school board members were displaced by more science-literate individuals in the subsequent election and evolution was placed back on the curriculum.

Well, come 2004 conservatives were put back on the board -- and history is repeating itself. This time, the twist is to de-emphasize evolution, and allow for teaching of alternative propositions -- albeit non-scientific propositions -- such as Intelligent Design. The board ended up staging debates reminiscent of the Scopes monkey trial, so much so that there was debate amongst the scientific community as whether to even show up and lend credence to the opposition! Simply put, there is no debate about evolution's validity in the scientific community; it's a good model of the available data that has been fueling many of our biological advances (and even advances in computer algorithms) this century.

A common theme that I pick out from these types of debacles is the fear amongst the anti-evolutionists (who tend to be very religious) that children will be somehow corrupted and turn away from their faith as a result of study of biology -- that it is impossible to be scientifically literate and a religious person simultaneously. In a poignant address (PDF) delivered to the St. Olaf Honor's Day members by my undergraduate research adviser Jim Cederberg presents a different perspective -- namely, that scientists can be, and are, faithful and capable of the persuit of scientific knowledge.

It seems fitting, especially since he grew up in Kansas facing the concerns and stigma of evolutionary theory that are still being espoused by those in power today.

Republicans Feeling the Heat?

Thu, 11 Aug 2005 09:31:03 -0500

It seems that a smattering of Republican US Senators don't want legislation authorizing oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge sneaked through early next session via a budget authorization bill.

Why, you ask, would something like drilling oil be in the budget authorization bill? Because under Senate rules, such legislation is immune to a filibuster and thus would be capable of passage with a 51-member vote instead of the requisite 60 needed to invoke cloture (i.e. end a filibuster). With a 55-member Republican base, ANWR oil drilling could make it to the President's desk via this technique. (The House has passed authorization provisions for several years at this point, but the measure has died in the Senate under filibusters.)

Personally, I think that kind of parlimentary maneuver is underhanded and sneaky. I wouldn't be surprised if the Dems have pulled stuff like that in the past as well. Still, it's good to read about some forms of dissent in the Republican ranks; perhaps they will start getting out of the massive group-think that they've been in for the past several years!

With luck, we'll be seeing some turnover in 2006 -- especially if the public keeps hearing about stuff like this.

Hacked!

Tue, 09 Aug 2005 14:23:08 -0500

I hate to say this since I'm a rather security conscious guy -- but the old incarnation of Kravlor.com was exploited via an insecurity in the Coppermine photo gallery software on top of the old PHP-Nuke CMS. No user account compromise or password cracking (thank God), but the attacker was able to install an IRC chatbot.

It looks like they compromised it on July 17; I'm just glad I caught it at this point rather than later. Grr!

This made me take extra time to accelerate the transition from the old version to the new; I've now scrapped all prior content and ported over all the old photos that were in the gallery. 301 Redirects abound; I've kept around the old Quotes page and backported other content like the Ultima guide and the Windows Tips to my new Drupal system.

Ultima VIII Guide Remade

Sat, 06 Aug 2005 14:35:51 -0500

Well, I finally got around to re-implementing the Ultima VIII: Pagan guide that I made several years ago.

It was almost painful to look at the gawd-awful HTML that FrontPage had generated. But then again, it got the job done when I didn't know (or care) much about HTML standards, CSS wasn't working correctly in (m)any browsers, and people were just looking for information about Ultima.

Recasting these old pages into stories here took more than a bit of hand-editing; a cursory glance at the output looks like things are OK in general. Perhaps in time I'll go back and really do it right; however, it should be in pretty good shape for now.

The only thing that I should probably take care of next is making HTTP 301 redirects to let Google, et. al. know about the changes!

More Updates

Fri, 05 Aug 2005 12:05:54 -0500

What's more fun: updating your spiffy-new site or studying Frobenius analysis and inverting Laplace transformations? I thought so too.

So... the non-LJ'd news posts I had put on the old version of Kravlor.com have now been backported here (again manually). Perhaps one of these days I'll muck about in the database to correct the posted times, etc.

After I get the old photo gallery ported over properly, I'll shut down the old site for good, and give the old server a well-earned break!

Car Repairs

Thu, 04 Aug 2005 17:50:01 -0500

I decided to bite the bullet today and perform auto maintenence on my '94 Buick LeSabre. I ended up getting four new tires, an alignment, and a recharge on the AC system. (Things are now blessedly cool in the August heat!)

Still, I have this sneaking suspicion that I'm putting the mechanic's kids through college...

In other news, my garage door broke yesterday night. While I had never thought that the door itself would be the problem (rather, the opener machine) I was proved wrong. Apparently a torsion spring responsible for assisting the open/close operation hit its maximal lifetime and snapped.

Ah, the joys of auto and home ownership! :)

Bush and Intelligent Design

Wed, 03 Aug 2005 11:24:06 -0500

Well, it was bound to happen one of these days. Today, President Bush presented his views on Intelligent Design -- namely, that it should be taught to biology students.

For those who don't know, intelligent design proposes that some biological features are so complex that they could not have possibly arisen from chance (i.e. evolved); therefore, they must have been designed by some other entity. Note I avoid 'created' in the description, as Creationism has already been declared illegal to evangelize in the public schools by the Supreme Court.

I see intelligent design as thinly-veiled Creationism. The fact of the matter is that the scientific community overwhelmingly rejects intelligent design and embraces evolution. Shouldn't we have scientists write science books?

Frankly, any theory that purports to replace Darwinian evolution would need to explain the overwhelming evidence of its existence -- that is, a replacement would need to incorporate the current, scientifically accepted form.

With this kind of debate going on (amongst politicians; scientists have considered the case closed for many decades by this point), it's no wonder why America is (rapidly) losing its leadership in science and technology.

Drupal Importing Fun

Mon, 01 Aug 2005 21:57:04 -0500

Ack.

Let's just say that the act of pulling a LiveJournal's entries into a static file and then importing them back into a fresh Drupal site isn't easy.

After a couple day's worth of Googling, I decided to bite the bullet and manually transfer over all my LJ/old Kravlor.com posts. Grr.

If I had some spare time, I'd be interested in figuring out how to get said LJ-rip-Drupal-dump functionality working. It shouldn't be altogether hard; I'd just need to learn some PHP and maybe a bit o' Perl. :) But no -- now it's time to be studying math. (The Linear Algebra book is finished as of this evening!)

Website Progress

Mon, 01 Aug 2005 21:53:38 -0500

I'm making progress in my trek to move Kravlor.com from my old PII, 300MHz box on a slow DSL connection to a faster (1.2 GHz Athlon) box that has a faster pipe. This will mean that things like the photo gallery will actually work on a usable level!

Another nifty little thing: I figured out how Apache VirtualHost directives work. Now, by re-structuring my web content area a bit, I was able to get www.kravlor.com, gallery.kravlor.com, and the prior kravlor.dyndns.org all living happily together on the same machine, acting as independent sites.

I like it -- I like it a lot! :)

Miscellaneous Nifty Stuff

Mon, 01 Aug 2005 21:33:23 -0500

1) Following zandera82ole's lead...

[Blog Quiz:
I am nerdier than 95% of all people. Are you nerdier?]

... oh yeah! That's what physics and engineering graduate school will do to you!

2) As a follow-up to (1), I was browsing through my webserver logs the other day (if only there was a way to sort of nonchalantly say that) and happened to see that Google was giving high referral rates. I think I now know why.

3) I don't watch much television, except for 24 these days. (Freaking addictive TV shows...) Does anyone else think that it's ironic that Kentucky Fried Chicken is using the theme from 'Sweet Home Alabama' in their television advertising? I'm sure I'm not the first one to notice this, but it's been bugging me more each time I see the commercials!

Back in Space

Tue, 26 Jul 2005 00:00:00 -0500

I, for one, am glad to see that the launch of Discovery went well this morning. I can't remember the last time I was so nervous in front of the television. (And considering that strong thunderstorms knocked my sattelite dish out of alignment last night [no CNN], I was happy to be watching it live at all!) It was amazing to watch the shuttle separate from the external fuel tank -- especially since I went to a talk given by the engineering research firm that helped re-design the tank's support structures (the triangle-shaped mount) which attach the tank to the shuttle.

Here's hoping to a successful mission and safe re-entry. It'll be good to have construction work on the ISS continue. Maybe we'll even get some science out of the thing!

News from 'Down Periscope'

Mon, 25 Jul 2005 00:00:00 -0500

I'm now a little over two weeks into Qualifier-preparation mode, and feel like poking my head up above the water to both take a break and let my friends know what's going on!

The days are starting to blend together as I continue my preparation. I've gone through my entire modern physics text form college, and am in the middle of a more meaty nuclear physics one for the moment. Still on the docket: classical physics, electrodynamics, differential equations, linear algebra, and quantum mechanics -- oh my! ;) I still have a little over a month to get those topics all in my head, so it's not quite time to push the big red panic button. After reading all that physics I get to solve really tough problems from the past 10 years of qualifiers as a break. (Or better -- something else, like writing up a little thing on the blog.)

Madison, like many other cities around the nation, has been the unlucky recipient of 100+ degree weather recently. In an attempt to combat this, a group of my fellow researchers and friends decided that it would be a good idea to have a BBQ featuring a Batman Slip-n-Slide. (Recommended users: children ages 5-10, height less than 5', weight less than 110 lb; average grad student: nowhere near that!) A good time was had by all -- even those of us like me who got a fast trip over a cement sidewalk.

I'm also considering some technical revamping of Kravlor.com. Specifically, after the ancient P-II 300 MHz machine running in my parent's closet needed a reboot today, knocking out my email, etc. for several hours while I thought about the problem off and on, I decided to make a more robust system by shelling out some cash to Dyndns.org and use their redundant networks to host my DNS resolution and provide email backup service. The upside: no lost emails, and the ability to use my faster, dynamic-IP DSL link as the primary host.

That means I can use a more up-to-date machine with actual amounts of RAM and hard disk space (and a current Linux distro) to do things like host a shared photo gallery, as well as migrate my blog there. (While I like the aggregator features of Livejournal, I'd rather run the server myself; I'm a Linux dork.) I'm taking a look at using Drupal as the main CMS.

And, for the usual interesting/funny/concerning news story I post occasionally, try this one that demonstrates the US Army propaganda machine being a bit too careless with the quotes they're manufacturing.

Just Desserts

Fri, 01 Jul 2005 00:00:00 -0500

While I may be a plasma physicist, I also enjoy playing armchair lawyer from time to time. :) In that spirit, I was unsettled by the recent Supreme Court decision that would effectively allow local governments to exercise their powers of eminent domain to take land from private owners not just for public projects like roads, but also private venues, based on things like increased tax revenue for the municipality. (Madison, for instance, is looking to bulldoze several homes near the State Street area in order to expand a parking lot (public) and establish a new condominium unit (private).) After all, what's the point of owning private property if you can be kicked out of your home in order for McDonalds to erect yet another set of the Golden Arches?

Well, in a supreme fit of irony, it seems like Justice Souter, who was a supporting member of the 5-4 decision, may be getting a taste of his own medicine. A private developer has started "the application process to build a hotel on 34 Cilley Hill Road. This is the present location of Mr. Souter's home."

I, for one, hope that "The Lost Liberty Hotel," "Just Desserts Cafe," and museum dedicated to the loss of freedoms in America is successfully built. After all, the developer just needs to convince three of the five local board members to go forward!

Shining Goodness

Mon, 27 Jun 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Those of you that know me also know that I am a rather big fan of RPG's. My brother is too. It all got started with a rental (and later purchase) of Shining Force II. It's a strategic, turn based game which has spawned many imitators, e.g. Final Fantasy Tactics.

Well, tonight I close a chapter in the RPG nerdiness of my experience, just in time to start studying for my qualifier in August. Tonight I beat SFII on Ouch! difficulty. And it feels great! Let's just say that Zeon was tough. :)

[brag]To make things sweeter, the bonus fight also fell to my party. For those of us who don't remember, that's situated in the Ancient Tunnels between Grans Island and the Parmecian continent, reached after the endgame has played out by waiting ~5 mins on the "Fin" screen. The enemies: Zeon, King Galam, Odd Eye, Geshp, Red Baron, Cameela, Zalbard, the Chess King, Willard the Rat, Prism flowers, and a posessing ghost from the first battle. All at once. And on Ouch![/brag]

Let us Destroy our Freedom!

Wed, 22 Jun 2005 00:00:00 -0500

It would seem that the US House has again approved a proposed Constitutional amendment which would add a single sentence:

"The Congress shall have power to prohibit the physical desecration of the flag of the United States."

Republican representatives are quoted as evoking images of the WTC disaster while it was under debate. The Senate, which has quashed similar amendments in the past, will take it under consideration after July 4.

Personally, I think this amendment flies against the face of everything that America stands for -- especially that first amendment which our younger generations now hold in disdain. Seriously, what is the harm of burning a piece of cloth? The flag certainly is a powerful symbol -- but it represents the freedom to dissent as well.

If the Congress can Constitutionally ban a form of currently protected free speech, what's to stop them from adding additional one-liners that will enable them to censor which political topics we may discuss without risk of jail? (Hell, let's get rid of that whole "due process" thing and protections against "cruel and unusual punishment" while we're at it, since we're already making a mockery of the Justice system with our base in Guantanamo -- never mind the policy of flying high level prisoners out of the US to torture them.)

Seriously, why throw people in jail for burning the flag when Congress and the President are willing to shred the Constitution already?

Digital Activism

Tue, 21 Jun 2005 00:00:00 -0500

I was dismayed to see today (on /. no less) that the Hollywood *AA types are working to sneak the Broadcast Flag back into our airwaves and into our electronics by tacking on legislation to an appropriations bill.

Personally, I think this kind of underhanded political action needs to be avoided. Major thanks to the EFF for pointing out this move. This type of behavior, and the fact that EFF caught it, pushed me over the edge. EFF needs people to support them financially in order to keep their vigilance against these sneaky lobbyists. I'm now a card-carrying member -- and I invite you to do so as well.

An Update

Thu, 09 Jun 2005 00:00:00 -0500

It's been a while since I last wrote any form of an update, so here goes...

The first year of graduate school is now behind me. It's nice to be working a regular 40 hour/week job again! Things have been very busy despite being finished with classes. (Jackson is successfully behind me forever!) My research group has been preparing for a submission of a renewed project proposal to the Department of Energy, which has been keeping most of us poor grad students working like crazy to get data, references to papers, and fix things when they break. My adviser should emerge from the black hole of the proposal sometime within the next week; with luck, he'll be able to clue me in on the progress we're making with my (eventual) collaboration with General Atomics. At the moment, it looks like I won't be heading out to San Diego any time soon; we're caught up in red tape at the moment.

I've decided that it's time for me to bite the bullet and submit myself as a candidate for the Nuclear Engineering and Engineering Physics Qualifying Examination to be conducted at the end of August. It's the first of three Big Exams that I'll face in my PhD program at UW-Madison. Six hours of closed book exams which test mastery of undergraduate mathematics, classical physics, and modern physics (my choice of topics which are suited to a physics background), plus an oral exam that's a grabbag of concepts. (Ugh!) I'll be disappearing from work in July in order to be adequately prepared by the exam. In the meantime, I'm enjoying what I have left of June!

For instance: RotS was awesome. So are sci-fi books by Robert A. Heinlein. And of course the fantastic Square RPG Chrono Trigger! (That one caught my obsession for a fun-filled week...) I've also been able to spend some time cooking nicer meals, as well as take a few more nights on the town with Kristen. It's great to remember how nights and weekends should be really spent.

And, as a last note: congrats to the class of '05! I wish you the best of luck in the real world. :)

Premeditated War?

Wed, 11 May 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Now I may be preaching to the choir at this point, but regardless of what you think of our miserable failure of a President, an article I saw at CNN today raised my eyebrows.

Apparently there's evidence from Britain's MI6 that shows that the US was intent on invading Iraq and deposing Saddam Hussein well before Congress was briefed on the issue; moreover, the blatant lies of WMD as justification were being shored up by the Administration and their cronies in the intelligence community. Among the damning quotes:

"Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.

"The NSC had no patience with the U.N. route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action."

While I don't have my tinfoil hat on too tightly, if true (and the British haven't refuted its authenticity) you might want to ask your Congressional representatives to join in on the inquiry that is being presented to Bush to explain his actions.

Jackson's Last Push

Tue, 10 May 2005 00:00:00 -0500

It's hour twenty-something in my review of my electrodynamics notes. 100+ pages of solid math. Then the problems. There is no way I can possibly remember all of it on Thursday -- or likely important parts of it.

The important thing is that Jackson and his Relatavistic Electrodynamics will be behind me forever! Maybe then I can stop waking up with spherical harmonic expansions of potentials dancing around in my head...

Also of import: I learned that I won't be spending a week in sunny San Diego working at General Atomics this summer. I'll be spending two. :)

Cabin! Almost!

Fri, 06 May 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Now that my final exams are getting close to completion, my mind is starting to look forward to the existence of free time once again! I was wondering if people in and around MN/WI would like to join me up at my cabin at some undetermined weekend this summer.

What are people's thoughts? Something like this will require a bit of planning on my part, so if you're interested, head on over to the Kravlor.com forums and let's discuss it. (Plus you can get directions to the lake from there too.)

Ok, back to work! At least I'm not working from 8:30 AM to 12:30 AM in the lab, like I did yesterday -- now I can work on a theoretical plasma physics final from those same timescales on the weekend! (Sigh) One more week...

PS I had a great birthday, albeit marred by finals. Thanks to everyone that sent nice notes, etc!

... and the dust settles...

Thu, 21 Apr 2005 00:00:00 -0500

The engineering expo brought more than 2700 people through my lab over the course of three days this weekend. Managing the throng of humanity (much less a bunch of snotty middle-schoolers (or mischievous fifth graders) proved to be an exhausting -- but rewarding -- task. [Snotty middle-schoolers give you more respect when you warn them about how the warning tape they've been casually flaunting around is there for a reason. ;)]

All in all, it was pretty fun. We had a helium glow plasma running inside the vacuum vessel, so people could go up and poke their heads right up to the machine and see a real live plasma (at a relatively cool 20,000 degrees Celsius). I ended up talking myself hoarse, but it was worth it. I remember taking tours of nifty science stuff when I was in grade school and thinking it was the coolest thing ever. Now I get to work in such a place! Not fun, however, was the button making. We made over 3,000 buttons (personal favorite: "Cheeseheads for Fusion") but were out before closing. That was time-consuming! ;)

I ended up poking my head around our basement lab hallway ceiling this evening. Despite working from 7 AM to 7 PM, I successfully ran about a mile of cable for my new toy at work -- the Plasma Control System. I've been designing it since November, and all the parts are finally here; the fun part of assembling them has arrived! (What could be niftier than a Linux box with dual processors -- except one that has another Linux box running inside of it as an embedded processor system? I'm still geeking out about that!)

Congress to Vouch for Women's Rights?

Thu, 14 Apr 2005 00:00:00 -0500

According to this CNN story, Congress is going to be considering a bill that would mandate that pharmacists fill legally-prescribed birth control (including the so-called 'morning after' pill) for women presenting said prescriptions. While one would think that the practice of providing medically necessary medications to patients on a doctor's orders would be standard fare for a pharmacist, it sadly isn't the case for many in this country.

Unfortunately Wisconsin is one of many states where incidents involving pharmacists refusing to provide rape victims with emergency contractption pills ordered by their doctors have occurred -- sometimes even confiscating the prescription to prevent them from filling it elsewhere! Why do they do this? The argument is that it violates their consience; birth control pills are a form of abortion, which they do not condone.

Such actions by pharmacists are unconscionable. While I believe it's fine (although utterly backward) for them to be morally offended over rape victims' refusal to bear their attacker's child, they should not be allowed to force their personal beliefs on the victims -- especially when oftentimes there is only a single pharmacy in an area capable of filling the prescription.

I'm glad to see that Congress is taking this action. It's a sad day to be in where we have to consider such legislation (and get the mini-civics lesson about how a Federal law can preempt a State law), but it's a Good Idea. I wonder about its chances for survival in today's Republican-dominated Federal government. I recommend writing your representatives about the issue if you feel strongly about it.

Expo Fun!

Wed, 13 Apr 2005 00:00:00 -0500

So, after 14 hours of work (plus classes too) today, the Pegasus Toroidal Experiment is ready (or as ready as it will get) for public viewing these next three days. I alone made more than four hundred buttons.

We're planning on having more than four thousand people tour our lab. There are five grad students, including myself. Yikes! We'll be doing our best though; we may be getting a couple of high-profile visitors including US Representatives from WI (Tammy Baldwin) and NJ. Did I mention that Pegasus was up for a DOE grant this spring? The life of the whole project is in a high-stakes competition... just a little pressure! Ah... graduate student life at it's best.

For now, sleep. For the next three days: thousands and thousands of visitors.

Easter

Sun, 27 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0600

This weekend has been full of milestones, paired with some timely coincidences.

Good Friday marked the third anniversary of my mother's death; Easter fell on what would have been her fiftieth birthday. While I don't put any faith in numerology or believe there's any extra-special significance to those alignments of dates, it did serve to remind me of the meaning of the Easter holiday.

Eating a phenomenal meal with many family members doesn't hurt, either. :)

Congressional Shenanigans

Fri, 18 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0600

Ever since the Republicans have effectively controlled all three branches of the Federal government, I've been waiting for progressively backhanded, shady-closed-door activities to take place. (The Cheney Energy Task Force meetings, ANWR oil drilling provisions (recently passed, dammit), Enron, squashing the CAFE auto efficiency standards, and more come to mind.) Following the actual election of Bush for a second round, and an improved majority in Congress, I expected more of our backwards, corrupt steps. I figure that it will take some egregious actions on the part of our Republican leaders to convince the nation that they don't deserve their positions of power.

While one would think that the actions of the House regarding Tom DeLay would be such an event, most Americans don't care. (Or likely know who Tom DeLay is.) Today, however, I've become exasparated with Congress much more than I ever have in the past -- keeping in mind that policies that I consider dangerous and harmful to the US are being implemented, by design, by the Republicans.

Today the House and Senate issued subpoenas to interfere with an exhaustive court battle in Terry Schiavo's right-to-die case. This is along the same lines where the Florida's Republican Legislature passed a law (which was quickly struck down as unconstitutional) enabling the Florida Executive branch (Jeb Bush) to overturn the court's decision. Now we're seeing Congress interfering with the sovereignty of the courts. Regardless of one's personal opinions on the case, this meddling should raise serious concerns among US citizenry. It certainly does for me.

For the Love of God, please let this poor, severely brain-damaged woman's wishes be carried out. The US Congress has much more important things to be working on (like balancing the $400+ billion defecit for this year alone) than holding publicity hearings with Major League Baseball stars and wasting time (and money) by holding Congressional hearings where the severely brain-damaged Schiavo, herself, [source] is expected to testify.

I Fart In Your General Direction!

Tue, 15 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0600

I was hastily interrupted at work today by an announcement from a co-worker that "there was a problem with grounding on SPRED." (It's the diagnostic I'm most responsible for on PEGASUS.) It turns out that today was spent ferreting out ground loops in our experiment.

The idea's that we have one giant experimental electrical grounding point (the same thing as the third prong in home electrical sockets). With big honking currents going through, say, our vacuum vessel, we'd like discharges to ground to go through the vacuum vessel straight to that single ground and not (for example) through a circuitous route through our expensive diagnostic equipment. This means that we have several ground paths: through the vessel; instrumentation; our data acquisition room; and the building itself. Each path should stay separated from the others. Essentially, we can't have electrical contact between two grounding paths -- which can be a huge difficulty to find should there be a problem! (Think two signal cables brushing against the machine -- then multiply by ~5000. That's just the cables.)

Enter the loopbuster. When clipped onto our 'main' ground point, this handy homemade gadget dumps a strong, modulated current to ground. Should a ground loop exist, the current will also seek its way through to the place where the unwanted contact is taking place. We probe for where the current is going with a wand that has an antenna at the tip; near the presence of the modulated current, it will render the current modulation into audio. While this is very cool in and of itself, even cooler is the message that is being broadcast: "I fart in your general direction!"

There's something to be said for being able to make your own gadgets -- and exploit programmable EEPROM's. :)

A Few Things

Mon, 14 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0600

It's been nearly a month since I made an update. Tonight I can rectify the situation and procrastinate at the same time! Things are getting to be rather crazy in my line of work. Midterms are coming up this week (hence the non-study procrastination) and officially Spring Break is coming up next week. Unfortunately, it turns out that graduate students are expected to be working through the week. (The Real World rears its ugly head a few years earlier than I had expected!) At least there won't be the 800-lb gorilla of J.D. Jackson's electrodynamics weighing in on things over that week...

Work is also yielding some interesting prospects. I will likely need to make a trip out to General Atomics outside San Diego in the near future to work with the fusion group's plasma control system designers. Not bad for an after-finals trip, huh?

I also got something rather interesting in the mail today -- my first international Nigerian-419 scam delivered to my postal address. How they received my name and address is making me wonder... Anybody that would like to claim my $615,000 can simply provide me with all their banking information and a signiture, and I'll be sure to split things 60/40. ;) It's nice to see that the scammers threw away .78 euros trying to con me!

I've run across a hilarious web comic, which I will now be reading daily: Ctrl-Alt-Del. Two years of archives in two days. Pretty damn funny. (Did I mention procrastination?)

And, last but not least, should you not have enough blogtastic readings, you can check out one more: my girlfriend Kristen's. :)

Triumph!

Mon, 14 Feb 2005 00:00:00 -0600

I finished another marathon 26-odd hour relatavistic electrodynamics assignment (antennas, symmetric energy-momentum stress tensors, and relativstic radiation, oh my!) late this evening. (THANK YOU SIR, MAY I HAVE ANOTHER?? ;)) After finishing writing up the twelve pages of solid math (and 2 square inches of diagram on one problem), the my brain had a bit of a short-circuit, thinking along the following lines:

Finished! I can finally get around to enjoying my weekend!
(Checks watch -- quarter past midnight)
... oh... that was the weekend...

Let's just say that I'm already waiting for finals to start; it'll be very good to have Jackson done with forevermore. Until then, I'm coming to the conclusion that I have absolutely no social life on the weekends this semester.

And, by now it's Valentine's Day. I with you all a good one!

V-Day Copycat

Mon, 14 Feb 2005 00:00:00 -0600

Following Joel's lead...

[Blog quiz: Your Seduction Style: Ideal Lover; You seduce people by tapping into their dreams and desires. And because of this sensitivity, you can be the ideal lover for anyone you seek. You are a shapeshifter - bringing romance, adventure, spirituality to relationships. It all depends on who you're with, and what their vision of a perfect relationship is.]

I won't complain with that rating. :) Still, it has to say something when you have a computer telling you this!

Driving Nuclear Weapons Cross-Country for Fun and Profit

Sat, 05 Feb 2005 00:00:00 -0600

"In today's security-obsessed, post-9/11 era, one might think that it would be difficult to haul a convincing replica of an atomic bomb across the country. Not so, as John Coster-Mullen inadvertently proved in October 2004."

It looks like we have some more training in store for those atomic-minded police and DHS officers!

The Media and the Energy Department

Tue, 01 Feb 2005 00:00:00 -0600

It would seem that CNN has very little faith in the new DOE leader, recently appointed by President Bush and confirmed earlier this week by the Senate. After a mainly boilerplate article about how the leader of my funding agency wants to drill for oil in wildlife preserves, you get this great explanation about the DOE:

"The Energy Department, with a $23 billion budget, runs a network of nuclear weapons research laboratories and has over 100,000 employees and contractors." (True; the lions share goes to maintaining the nuclear stockpile.)

In the 'Your E-Mail Alerts' section, there's a nice reminder on the topic of 'Nuclear Warfare!' Yikes! ;)

The First Amendment and High Schoolers

Mon, 31 Jan 2005 00:00:00 -0600

Well, I happened across this alarming article on CNN from Slashdot today. It would seem that a growing and non-trivial percentage of the high school population does not understand nor particularly endorse the First Amendment.

Some of the misconceptions involve believing flag burning is illegal, that the government has the ability to (legally) censor Internet sites, and that it's worthwhile to give up freedoms for security.

Two comments:
1) "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin
2) When I was in high school, I had a civics course. While taught by the football coach, it actually required some study of the Constitution and a basic comprehension of the US government. Perhaps civics education should be beefed up a bit? What were your experiences like in this regard?

Certainly, having a populace that doesn't understand their Constitutional rights makes it easier for the government to take them away. Witness the PATRIOT Act, which is getting knocked down bit-by-bit in the courts... Remember the massive protests, and the razor-thin vote to pass it? Oh, wait...

At least my senator cast the lone vote against it! Thank goodness he's back for another 6 years.

Freaking Jackson

Sun, 30 Jan 2005 00:00:00 -0600

No, not the child molesting pop singer that everyone likes to ridicule. (It'd be great to see him behind bars IMHO -- seducing young boys is NOT cool, even when you pay millions of dollars for it later to keep the family quiet.)

My bane of the past four days has been J. D. Jackson, author of Classical Electrodynamics, the physics/engineering student's dreaded book. Not only did it cost a lot (although not nearly as much as the book Tokamaks for my magnetic plasma confinement class), but it's more of a reference for people who already know the material, as opposed to being a book read for actually picking it up in the first place. Now, the book has a very lofty reputation amongst physicists and engineers, because practically everyone these days holding professorships took "the Jackson" course, suffered greatly, and, more often than not, is happy to see other students go though the same pain. Combine that with the fact that the book is outdated, inconsistent in notation with today's standards (and even itself at times), and that my class is starting at the end of the book instead of the beginning: not fun times for me.

I have begun to see why everyone dreads Jackson; this weeks assignment (4 problems) took me a little over 22 hours to do, with the assistance of available online solutions proffered by good-hearted souls who've been there before. (As my advisor quipped, "those problems are good for your health," followed by general shock when he learned about starting at the end of the book. "F------ physicists!" was his next exclamation. :))

If this is what graduate school for physicists is like, then boy I'm glad I'm in plasma physics -- in the good old department of Nuclear Engineering and Engineering Physics. (Somehow, classes about building giant magnetic traps and confining stuff that's 100,000 times hotter than the temperature of tungsten [the best material at withstanding heat as a solid] is more interesting than doing abstract algebra and tensor manipulations. :))

BTW the Pegasus Group got together for a group photo! I've got one of them hosted here for those of you who haven't seen the scale of the machine I work on!

A Classic Simpsons Ripoff?

Thu, 27 Jan 2005 00:00:00 -0600

One of my favorite episodes of The Simpsons is where Homer becomes Public Sanitation Comissioner and sings "The Garbage Man Can," with a guest appearance of U2.

Well, in reading my daily dose of Bloom County, this cartoon showed up:

Could this be what sparked the writers' interests? It certainly is similar!

Phan-tastic

Tue, 25 Jan 2005 00:00:00 -0600

I was able to catch a showing of Phantom of the Opera this evening. What a show! I highly recommend it to anybody who gets the chance. The neat thing is that despite being on Broadway for n years, this month was Madison's premiere debut of the show. In our brand new Overture Center for the Performing Arts, it found a good home.

Of course, whenever you make plans for a big night more than a month in advance, Murphy's law has to kick in somehow. Much like my last major musical attendance (Mozart's The Magic Flute in May) my date wasn't feeling well. :( Fortunately, she was well enough to enjoy dinner and the show, even if there was the occasional cough or sniffle.

Now, I get to pay for the night -- graduate students don't get 'free evenings' to go on 'dates.' No, they have to work in 'labs' and do mountains of homework. Oh well -- it was worth it. Relatavistic electrodynamics, here I come!

A Victory Against the Creationists

Thu, 13 Jan 2005 00:00:00 -0600

In Georgia today a federal judge forced school districts to remove stickers that were being placed on biology textbooks that WARNED students that evolution was discussed inside, and was "a theory, not a fact."

Now, in my book, the warning was clearly written in a manner that used 'theory' in a manner unbefitting that of evolution or the Standard Model of physics; that is, one that can explain phenomena, make predictions, is self-consistent, and explains available data sets. (Both of these theories are so resoundingly successful that any replacement to them will have to incorporate the existing theory as a subset!) Instead, the warning cast evolution as something that we should be very, very skeptical of; a sham.

It's good to see that our judicial system is still capable of respecting the Constitutional separation of Church and State in all its forms. That separation is a Good Idea. Besides, when it comes to science, phenomena must be accounted for without resorting to God or other supernatural effects. Sheer ignorance of this concept is demonstrated by an attorney for the school district, who said "[s]cience and religion are related and they're not mutually exclusive."

Nope, sorry, they are. That said, it doesn't overturn religion; science simply cannot confront God by definition. Good for the justice system today; hopefully this can be seen as a precedent for other states that are battling fundamentalist Creationist (or the modern-day Intelligent Design) influence in our public schools.

... And the Shoe Drops

Wed, 12 Jan 2005 00:00:00 -0600

Well, I had a bit of a revelation today at work. I've been given the not-so-fun task of renovating and updating my research group's website. Since the URL for the site had changed, I found ways to redirect traffic from the old site(s) that were pointing to the old location. However, there were several human-edited databases that also needed updating, ranging from the Open Directory to the Internet Directory of Nuclear Resources, run by none other than the IAEA.

These are the nuclear watchdogs that you keep reading about on CNN. (They do lots of other nuclear physics things, too; but the non-proliferation activities are what most people hear about.)

Now that's cool. I don't think I've ever had a direct link to one of my websites from a UN agency! Now then, perhaps I should be hacking together a bit of a better-looking website! (I like the Fusion Portal that my advisor provided some of the text for and I whipped together a bit earlier...) With my attention increasingly focusing on a plasma control system for PEGASUS, a spiffy new website will probably languish. At least I gave it a facelift after 2+ years!

An Amazing Day

Sun, 09 Jan 2005 00:00:00 -0600

Well, a cold wind must be blowing through Hell right about now, because the Minnesota Vikings trounced the Green Bay Packers at Lambeau, in the playoffs!

I must admit, I was going into the game thinking that the Pack would win once again, but boy, today is a Good Day for all Vikings believers!

Tomorrow, I will be wearing Vikings purple into work and downtown Madison to flaunt the in-your-face-Farve victory. With luck, I'll survive. It'll be worth it!

A Handy Guide to Migrate from Evolution to Thunderbird

Tue, 04 Jan 2005 00:00:00 -0600

After making the plunge to Linux earlier this year, I also decided (for good or ill) to migrate to Ximian (later Novell) Evolution, the integrated Outlook clone that is now even more tightly bound to GNOME. With Fedora Core 3, I even got an upgrade to the latest 2.0 branch.

Unfortunately, the results were not too spectacular. Common features such as saving images in emails were absent. (I even filed a bug report on the issue!) Evolution wouldn't play nice with email servers that were being accessed by multiple clients simultaneously, causing me untold grief when I would forget to close my email client at work! Add random crashes to the mix (I even wrote a little script to kill all the miscellaneous Evolution processes) and that was enough for me to dump it.

Hello, Thunderbird! Being a big fan of the Mozilla suite, it's nice to be working with the latest standalone client. (I also use it at work.) Migrating from Evolution to Thunderbird wasn't the easiest, but I succeeded. Here's how:

Mail messages: Evolution and Thunderbird both save their local mail in a common format; a simple copy operation is then all that is neded. (They're located in ~/.evolution/local/*; look for files without file extensions.) Copy them to your new Thunderbird profile, at ~.thunderbird/*random dir name*/Mail/Local Folders, and restart Thunderbird. They're all there, albeit unread. A small price to pay, and easily remedied with a click of the mouse. :)

The address book is somewhat more tricky, since there's no common format that Evolution and Thunderbird share between the numerous export/import filters available. Here's how I got my Evolution Contacts ported over into the Thunderbird Address book. First, export all the Contacts by selecting all of them within Evolution with CTRL+A and a right-click popup menu option 'Save as VCard...' Then, with the help of a little perl script, the exported VCF file can be turned into an LDIF file that Thunderbird can then import.

Nifty, huh?

A Totally Awesome Remake

Fri, 31 Dec 2004 00:00:00 -0600

After many, many hours of gaming with good friemds, I must put a glowing reference to the remake of Doom that has kept us going for so long.

Witness ZDaemon, a multiplayer client/server port of Doom, with capture-the-flag mods available. It includes features such as auto-WAD find/download, as well as an Internet game-finder.

Add cross-platform compatibility to the list of growing features, and you have an excellent combination of modern-era Doomage!

(Things sure have progressed since the days of SuperSer serial-cable networks...)

Linux Gaming: Just Not There Yet

Sun, 26 Dec 2004 00:00:00 -0600

I'd like to think that I'm a relatively competent Linux geek. I can admit it by now. I even did my part to contribute and test out the forefront of Linux gaming, through a subscription to Transgaming, a company that specializes with a product that builds off the non-Windows-emulator WINE.

The verdict: we're not there yet. The final straw came for me when the much-advertised Half-Life 2 utterly failed to work out of the box as advertised. (Heck, they even came out with a special release of the software specifically for the game!

My opinion: emulation simply isn't going to work in the long run. We need games that run natively on Linux, period -- as sad as that makes me to write. I suppose my Windows partition can get dusted off to play the latest and greatest that I've gotten my hands on this season -- but from now on, my wallet is going to be voting for Linux-compatible games, such as Id's Doom 3.

Note to Self: Buy Good Power Supplies

Tue, 14 Dec 2004 00:00:00 -0600

Fires can be fun, but not when they are from computers -- or when said computers are spewing smoke into your bedroom! I'm just glad I was around this evening right by the computer when it happened -- so as to catch it before it became much, much worse. After airing out the place, I performed an autopsy of my recently rebuilt gateway machine. Diagnosis: power supply melting down, vaporizing a plastic inductor sheath.

Let this be a lesson: buy high-quality power supplies for when you're rebuilding a computer from spare parts. Don't just use "that one I've got in my closet." That, and have a fire extinguisher on hand if you need it.

Is random stuff blowing up / catching on fire the curse of the graduate student? I don't mind it when it happens in the lab, but I do mind when it follows me home from work!

Retro Gaming + Assembly + Spare time = ...

Tue, 07 Dec 2004 00:00:00 -0600

I'm a big fan of the good old-fashioned 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System. I enjoy the fun of playing the classics with a real Nintendo controller, as opposed to on emulators. That's why I built an interface to my computer to do just that.

However, I've been one-upped by many people who have taken further steps. People such as those who are writing the emulators we all enjoy. People such as those who are devoted hardware hackers.

I was so impressed by one of them that I had to give it a glowing review -- meet the Devtendo! Who wouldn't want to couple their PC to the NES through its controller port?

High on my wishlist is a programmable flash-ROM based NES cartridge... and it seems like people are working on it.

More Bush Science

Fri, 03 Dec 2004 00:00:00 -0600

Ok, even though we have a majority in the federal government that frowns upon sex in general, under any circumstances (except when it's for making babies, when it's less sinful), I'd at least expect Congress to support measures to reduce teen pregnancy and STD transmission.

Heck, morals aside, it can be seen as a pragmatic position! Teen pregnancy and STD's are bad things for the US.

That said, it seems like the radical right have been up to it again. I'm sick of seeing deliberate misinformation being propagated in textbooks designed for children -- especially ones who have been demonstrating that they desparately need simple facts that could save their lives!

Who would have thought that saying something like the following would be so controversial: "Condoms are not foolproof. Abstinence from _all_ sexual activity is the only 100% sure way to avoid pregnancy. But, condoms are proven to reduce the chances of pregnancy and STD transmission." Getting basic biology facts wrong at this point should be near criminal.

I suppose it's just the first of many examples to come in the next for years to blur religion, school, science, and politics in a move that gets Congress and the Administration short-term political gains at an untold cost to an entire generation of American children.

Energy Policy and ANWR Oil

Thu, 11 Nov 2004 00:00:00 -0600

With the newfound Republican majority in the Senate, President Bush's new energy policy will focus on a contentious issue: drilling oil in Alaska's ANWR wildlife reserve. The theory: there's 11 billion barrels of oil out in there. We can then extract the oil. The realistic argument: There's lots and lots of wildlife that has already been disturbed by previous drilling. Plus, we'd need to build a new pipeline for the oil anyway. But the pipelines aren't an issue. There's support for $20 billion for that. For $20 billion, the US could build two ITER's for itself! I suppose the prospect of environmentally safe fusion power isn't worth funding on a reasonable level. After all, fusion would last humanity the rest of its existence, while oil can last us (depending on who you ask) 50-150 years.

The Wonders of Electronic Voting and Ohio

Fri, 05 Nov 2004 00:00:00 -0600

Well, now that Kerry has conceded the race, the AP (and CNN) have reported that electronic voting machines gave Bush thousands of extra votes.

Granted, this has only ben proven in one county. Who's to say that it didn't happen elsewhere? It's not like there's a voter-verifiable paper trail or anything like that. This is just another story that really gets to me -- electronic voting is a Bad Idea in its current implementation.

When the computer scientists and electrical engineers building the voting machines are giving them a thumbs up (and better yet, the software that they're running is open source, for interested persons to inspect), THEN I'll consider the prospect of e-voting.

Bush Wins 2nd Term

Wed, 03 Nov 2004 00:00:00 -0600

I, like millions of other Americans, have stared at the newspapers and television reports with disbelief at the state of the Presidential election.

When we see the Supreme Court stacked with conservatives willing to overturn Roe v. Wade, privitization of Social Security, polluters continuing to write our environmental protection laws, science committee members disappearing from Presidential teams because the facts they advocated ran counter to Administration policy, it's not because I supported it! No, sir -- I can proudly say that I opposed all of these things Nov. 2.

How bad to things need to get before the average American will actually open their eyes to the world? Do we need to write discrimination into the Constitution? ("All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others," to quote Orwell.) Maybe with an _informed_ electorate things would have been different. But our crappy schools don't produce (on average) citizens of the world -- or even of the US.

I'm sad. Sad for the state of the Nation, sad for the state of science in the country, and sad for the millions of people in the middle class that are continuing to be stomped on by the Good Ole' Boys in Washington.

At least MN and WI both made the right choices...

Exile Not Dead!

Tue, 26 Oct 2004 00:00:00 -0500

I am pleasantly surprised to find that the Exile team has actually resurfaced from the depths of DNS on a new web host.

Let's see what becomes of the project now; I'm still waiting to see their demo release!

Lost Hydrogen Bomb Found

Tue, 14 Sep 2004 00:00:00 -0500

Over at CNN I found a disturbing story about a hydrogen bomb that was lost off the coast of Georgia (yes, the USA Georgia) in the height of the Cold War.

Well, we found it. While the Air Force insists that the bomb has no plutonium trigger (so that it can't go thermonuclear) and should remain 'irretrivably lost.'

I don't suppose it's too bad in this case (some of the others cited at the end of the article are far worse) -- but it reminds me of a quote from Broken Arrow: "I don't know what scares me more. The fact that we've lost a nuclear weapon, or that it happens so often you have a name for it!"

Exile Project Dead?

Mon, 06 Sep 2004 00:00:00 -0500

Well, after a little over two weeks of DNS bounces, it would appear that the Ultima VIII:Exile project has closed up shop after several years.

The idea was a great one -- re-create Pagan with the assistance of the Neverwinter Nights game engine. To fix lingering plot holes (and discuss them at great length).

The Exile project was what made me excited about Ultima again, and was repsonsible for motivating me to create my Ultima 8 guide. It's a shame to see it go.

Fun with Plasma

Thu, 26 Aug 2004 00:00:00 -0500

I figured it'd be a good idea to update the main page, since I haven't done so in quite some time! The main reason behind this has been my new position as a grad student at UW-Madison researching plasma physics with the Pegasus Toroidal Experiment research group (website here).

I've been doing all sorts of stuff, from computer programming to plumbing. It's been fun playing with things like plasma guns! (Nope, no Doom-esque destruction -- thankfully -- but pretty cool nonetheless.)

I suppose I'll just have to see how my rosy opinion of the job changes when classes start, although I think it'd be pretty hard to change my opinion that doing fusion research is both cool and fun at the same time.

This Land...

Sun, 18 Jul 2004 00:00:00 -0500

A family member referred me to this wonderful flash parody that I think is worth the 3.7 MB download!

Rare Quick and Good Action in Washington

Sat, 26 Jun 2004 00:00:00 -0500

It seems like President Bush will be signing a new bill soon -- and it's one that just about everyone can agree on: reforming the school lunch program so that it's easier for hungry, poor kids can get free lunches. (This is S.2507 for those who are interested.) Not bad for a bill introduced on June 7th. If only this nonpartisan action could be more regular on the hill! (Then again, it is an election year... who wouldn't vote for this bill?)

Story on CNN here.

Nuclear Arms Control, right from the Bush Campaign

Wed, 02 Jun 2004 00:00:00 -0500

I read a very scary quote today from Rep. Porter Goss, R-FL, Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, from an article on CNN, in reference to a Kerry speech claiming the Bush administration has reduced funding for accounting of nuclear materials that are capable for building nuclear weapons:

"I also think it's unrealistic and dangerously naive to assume that we're going to get all the nukes in a lockbox somehow," Goss said.

"I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon. The effort is worthwhile, but I don't think you're ever going to get 100 percent."

I think it's great that something as important as keeping tabs on nuclear weapons is such a high priority.

What about that bomb that slips through the cracks?

A Bit of Social Commentary

Tue, 01 Jun 2004 00:00:00 -0500

I was alerted to the existence of an educational and fun game the other day regarding our President, George W. Bush.

It is a bit crude at times, but I believe that it is well worth playing through at least once.

Give it a look: http://www.emogame.com/bushgame.html

!Fun With System Crashes

Mon, 03 May 2004 00:00:00 -0500

After approximately 18 months of service, my expleteve deleted Maxtor 96147H8 hard drive began randomly failing on sector read/writes.

A Maxtor representative arrogantly blamed me for the hard drive failure, accusing me of dropping the drive. When given a hardware diagnostic code from Maxtor scanning software, the representative confirmed that the drive was defective.

Of course, the stated minimum lifetime of the drive is five years. While the warranty on the drive expired last November. Which means I am out of a POS hard drive.

Linux was able to warn me that the drive was on fire and falling from the heavens. Windows just crashed. Fortunately, I was able to recover much of the (important) data on the drive and save to a local NTFS partition.

When I removed the defective drive (and unfortunately my new Linux partition), Windows happily told me that I had a pirated copy and refused to boot. So -- I get to nuke my Windows partition too!

So, I've spent more than 6 hours today messing around with my machines, getting angry at Maxtor for making such crappy products -- and then blaming me for their failure. ("Total Customer Satisfaction" my ass.)

Moral of the story: Maxtor and Microsoft both suck.

20 More Reasons to Dislike Microsoft

Wed, 14 Apr 2004 00:00:00 -0500

Well, it looks like we get to patch away some 20-odd new complete security vulnerabilities with the latest patches from Microsoft. I, for one, am sick of the whole process! I don't like having complete remote exploits on systems that are facing the Internet. So, I'm working on Making the Switch to Fedora Linux, the latest incarnation of Red Hat's old desktop distribution. Things have been going well so far! For those without the requisite free time to learn a new (and really fun) OS, I guess it's time to visit Windows Update again...