Category Archives: Link of the Day

Another try for a trans-Atlantic model airpline flight…

Last year a group tried to fly an 11 lb model airplane accross the Atlantic. In four attempt, they managed a maximum distance of 479 miles. They are going to try it again soon, so check out

TAM Homepage
to keep up to date.

If news is slow, you can waste some time reading about an
amateur launch of a high altitude weather balloon. It was equipped with a Linux computer from soekris, a Basic Stamp, a GPS, and a small camera. Cool stuff. Good photos!

When in Crete, do as the other Cretins do…

It’s amazing how sometimes surfing leads you to interesting ideas that you’ve never had before. Like the mention of slashdot of pykrete, a combination of 14% wood pulp and water, which is frozen together to make blocks. During WWII, the British had a bold plan to build aircraft carriers several thousand feet long and capable of carrying 200 Spitfires and long range bombers.

Anyway, I found this to be interesting, but of no real practical use.

Surprisingly though, while perusing comp.graphics.rendering.raytracing, somebody mentioned that they were experimenting with padobe. What’s padobe? A form of
adobe that utilizes waste paper. It turns out that people are making various
slurries of water, paper, and cement and using them as inexpensive building
materials for home construction. I’ve been interested in alternative home building techniques for a while, but hadn’t heard of this construction technique.
I rather like the idea of do-it-yourself home construction using renewable and/or
waste materials, and some of the resulting homes are pretty amazing.
Nifty stuff. If you start at papercrete.com, you’ll get some ideas.

Fun with Fingerprint Readers

Bruce Schneier is the author of Applied Cryptography, the incredibly useful encylopedia of modern cryptographic algorithms. He also publishes the Cryptogram, an electronic
bulletin involving computer security, privacy and cryptography. Today I received the latest issue, which includes an article on fooling biometric fingerprint scanners. Tsutomu Matsumoto tried several techniques to create phony fingers that the fingerprint scanner would accept as real. Nifty!

Addendum: You can click here
for some slides that Matsumoto did detailing his work.

Listen to the engineers…


CNN is running a story today entitled CNN.com – Shuttle engineers warned of burning wing – Feb. 27, 2003.
It appears that serious doubts about the original analysis of wing damage to the shuttle were made right up until reentry, including a recomendation that they examine the damage
prior to reentry via an EVA and to prepare for a potential bailout.

It appears that these exchanges amongst shuttle engineers weren’t forwarded up the chain of command. Sigh.

nntp//rss

I like to peruse sweetcode, a very nice website that contains pointers to interesting but perhaps not very well known software projects. During a recent browse, I noticed a link to a project called nntp//rss. Interestingly enough, it provided a gateway that allowed you to access RSS feeds via NNTP from your favorite newsreader. For a lark, I decided to give it a download.

On this website, I use Movable Type which allows the
publication of RSS feeds, and also has a plugin that allows you to merge other RSS feeds to your homepage. I use it to merge the feeds I use most (Slashdot, freshmeat, CNN, and Reuters Science) on my homepage, which keeps from having to use a different portal site. I’ve been toying with
expanding my knowledge and use of RSS feeds, as they seem an interesting way to combine information from many websites.

Originally, I didn’t think that nntp//rss would be all that useful. After all, I nearly always have a web browser open, and therefore I could always get my webfeeds by merely accessing this site. But I found out that I was wrong.

nntp//rss is nice because it capitalizes on one fact I hadn’t considered: I have my mailbox (via Netscape or Mozilla) open even more often than I have a web browser up. I can now
see if there are any new postings on slashdot or freshmeat by merely glancing at the overview.
I find that to be rather cool!

I exchanged a brief thank you to the author, Jason Brome, and made a couple of suggestions which seemed obvious: the ability to actually post to the weblog via the normal NNTP interface. This could be done by a XMLRPC<->NNTP gateway using the Blogger API. This has at least one
major advantage over the normal way of posting: I could use my normal nntp client (slrn, which
uses my normal Unix editor) to enter new messages, and not have to struggle with trying to
type and edit inside of HTML text boxes.

Anyway, you can see what this looks like by using https://brainwagon.org as an NNTP server. You’ll only get a couple of websites, but it will show what the idea is.

Nifty stuff!

Behind the Curtain of Java

INTERNALMEMOS.COM has a nifty article written by a colleciton of Sun Software engineers about the inappropriateness of Java on the Solaris platform. I think it illustrates how businesses fail to succeed because of their inability to prioritize properly on reliable rather than glitzy software. I rather like the Java language and would
almost certainly choose it for new projects if the implementations were up to par. I vow only to use languages which provide good implementations on a wide number of platforms, and by all accounts, Java isn’t quite their yet.

Cryptography Potpourri

I’ve also maintained a bit of an amateur interest in cryptography. While I understand a bit about modern ciphers such as DES, IDEAL and RC4, I find it more fun to play with older cryptosystems. When Simon Singh published his book The Code Book, I decided to work through the Cipher Challenge at the back. While I didn’t win the $10,000 prize, I did manage to crack 7 out of 10 ciphers, including the Playfair, ADGVX cipher and the German Enigma machine (which took the most work and was the most fun). I still am fascinated by old crypto machines. My friend Jeff actually owns an M209 field cipher machine, which I dug up a simulator for out of the old Version 6 Unix distribution.

Anyway, while scanning sci.crypt, I ran accross this interesting link to a paper simulation of the 3 rotor German Enigma machine. If
I had this while I was debugging my simulator, it probably would have shaved several weeks off my efforts. Much thanks to Michael Koss, who is a collector
of crypto machines, and to John Malley for putting some of the photos of his collection up on the net. I’m completely jealous.

Mantaining a Robotic Sense of Balance…

I’ve always been interested in robotics (particularly of the amateur variety) and
in the past few days I’ve discovered some excellent links. Slashdot ran an
article recently that highlighted the Legway, a lego version
of the Segway, built using the RCX controller from a Lego Mindstorms kit. It’s an
awesome achievement, and very, very spiffy. David Anderson has an incredible home built robot called nBot, which is a
self balancing two wheeled robot. His page is great, with links to a lot of great pictures, video and details about implementation. He also has a nice machine shot where he manufactures these cool robot parts. Truly inspirational.
Larry Barello has a nice page describing his Gyrobot which has a similar control mechanism. Very nice indeed. This page links to a number of MPEG movies of JOE, a self balancing radio controlled robot. They also have a nice paper describing the
implementation and I’m told it’s a subset of their thesis work, which is unfortunately in Italian.

Cool, cool stuff.

More on copyright

Lawrence Lessig has another nice short opinion piece entitled
Racing Against Time. If you’ve followed Lessig’s crusade against the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, you probably won’t learn anything new, but it is a nicely written and short article that extols the value of the Constitution’s rule for limited copyright terms. Worth reading!