JDPFu.com 2025

Almost everyone likes Facebook and Twitter. We reconnect with our friends, they connect with us. People we don’t even know want to know us – that’s pretty cool, until it isn’t.

This will be old news for some folks. Keep reading … Here’s a story about someone named Wigginbottom who tweeted just a few too many details.

It seems just like yesterday when the Space Shuttle Endeavour had her first mission in space. That was 1992. Those of you who know me, know that I worked as a NASA contractor from ’89 – ’96 writing GN&C software for the space shuttle fleet, writing applications for the mission control centers around the world and laptops used onboard the shuttles and space station. Thousands of other people have similar, if not closer, connections to Endeavour.

Endeavour was the first shuttle to fly with an upgraded nose-wheel steering. This is particularly personal for me, having spent about 9 months implementing the software to take advantage of those upgrades. Many thousands of lines of code and some Karnaugh mapping to speed the boolean decisions. Many thanks to Henry for pointing this dumb ASE to that logic simplification technique. I recall during the code review at IBM-FS that nobody had checked those lines of code for 100% accuracy due to the complexity. They announced it. A peer on my team had validated it by creating exactly the same equation himself (thanks BW!) and we tested every possible combination of inputs to validate we met requirements 100%. It passed. Running that many tests was a major team effort with all the other coders jumping in to save me from missing the deadline for weeks. I doubt anyone has touched that code ever since.

I have fond memories of walking around building 30, working on the FCR computers, servers and working with the different flight controllers. This week, I found myself re-watching the HBO From the Earth to the Moon series. It brought back more memories even if some of the places aren’t 100% accurate. I also recall watching the Apollo 13 movie on opening day, surrounded by NASA flight controllers at a local movie theater on NASA Rd 1 in Webster, Tx. Yes, we saw it during work hours. Together, we changed the world for the better.

Anyway, Godspeed Endeavour. Here’s wishing that you only exercise the nose-wheel steering and elevon flight control code that I implemented for smooth landings and none of the other code – mostly for when really bad things are happening.

The launch is scheduled for around 3:47 pm today. I always hold my breath (not really) during a launch. Going into space is a dangerous business the way we currently do it.

Sometimes you’d like to learn a little about a subject but not have to search and search and search for the information. That’s where the Khan Academy comes in. It began as a way to help family and grew and GREW.

It contains a wide range of subjects, but traditional school learning is what is mainly covered. From Algebra to Venture Capital and Capital Markets – I guess there is no Zoology presentation available. ;)
There are over 2,100 videos are available. Each is a bite sized piece of learning.

Here’s the website: http://www.khanacademy.org/ Definitely bookmark it. I’ll be in the accounting fundamentals section for the next few days.

There are exercises and videos, so the concepts you are supposed to understand are verified through the exercises until you demonstrate mastery.

The depth and breadth of subjects is pretty impressive.

Ok, not really 101 uses for a Password Manager, but many more than you thought, about 30.

Use A Password Manager

For the last few years, I’ve been trying to get anyone with more than 5 passwords to remember to start using a password manager, PM, as part of increasing your desktop security. Below I’ll go into a few alternate uses for that password database beyond just storing computer and website passwords.

Big, centralized, services like Facebook and Twitter are great when all your friends are there … until there is an outage. If you update or tweet constantly, you can notice when those tools are down. There are alternatives that are not centralized.

Identi.ca, A Twitter Alternative

The guys over at status.net have a free micro-blogging site (i.e. twitter clone) that is both centralized, but also supports federation. Federated services work like email does. Lots and lots of servers communicating using a standard protocol. If any single server goes down, that doesn’t matter, the exchange of ideas keep flowing.

Federation Is Good for Freedom

Had to reflash my Nokia N800 last week due to some sort of error. That fixed everything, however, it meant that I needed to reload all the applications – which is fine. It never hurts to reload the apps and wipe the trial’ed software off.

• Map Sources
• GPS Routes
• POI DBs
• Turn by Turn Voice Prompts

Maemo Mapper Sources

Anyway, the main app on this portable to me is Maemo Mapper a GPS tool. Previously, it was pre-configured to provide VE Maps, OpenStreet Maps, Yahoo! and Google Maps for street, satellite and hybrid maps. This time, only OpenStreet Maps was provided. I need to find how to add these other views.

• OpenStreetMap – Traditional “Mapnik” “http://tile.openstreetmap.org/%0d/%d/%d.png”
• Google Maps (street) “http://mt.google.com/vt/v=w2.95&x=%d&y=%d&zoom=%d”
  I hear that Google changes this from time to time.

Layers

Layers are maps which have transparency so they can overlay the map you are using and add additional information. For example to add Road and city names on Google Satellite or Google Terrain maps.

• Google Traffic “http://mt.google.com/mapstt?zoom=%0d&x=%d&y=%d”
• Google Labels “http://mt.google.com/mt?v=w2t.88&&z=%0d&x=%d&y=%d” (use with Google Satellite or Google Terrain for labels for cities, roads, etc., i.e. “Hybrid” maps.)

Download GPS Routes

There is good news. In my search to find those old map sources, I uncovered a fix to the routing by address. I never had this working before. It is really simple .

Maemo Mapper configuration as follows: Menu → Route → Download… and change the domain portion of the Source URL to http://gpx.geotags.com/ Leave the cgi-bin/gpx.cgi?saddr=%s&daddr=%s portion remains the same. It was good to see it work. Very nice.

POI Databases

Over the years, I’ve added a few Points Of Interest databases to the device. Chains of cheaper gasoline stations, my preferred fast food chains and Walmarts. You never know when you’ll need to buy something at a Walmart on a trip. I also have a list of over 1,000 waterfall locations. If I’m near a waterfall, it is nice to know it and stop when in the area. I need to build a list of hiking trailheads and parking areas.

Turn by Turn

flite is needed for a Synthesized Voice telling you to turn left. There are lots of dependencies that may not be easily achieved.

I hike a few times every week. I prefer 3.5-8 mile hikes. Anything longer is a little too rough on my knees. The hillier the hike, the shorter so a very hilly Pine Mountain Recreation Area hike of 3.5 miles is very satisfying just like an 8 mile hike at FDR State Park. Almost all of these hikes will require hydration. In the summer, even when getting started very early in the morning, I’ve needed 3 quarts of water for some of these hikes, but most only need 1-1.5 quarts.

The List – Google Map Links

These are links to the trailheads and/or parking for each trail. Handy if you have a GPS.

We’ve all lost something in our travels. Last fall I was out hiking on a local trail and feeling good enough to jog down it after about 90 minutes of strenuous up/down hiking. Well, my legs couldn’t keep up with my mind and I took a spill off the trail and lost my sunglasses. I’ve been back on that same trail at least 3 times since that spill and always searched for a few minutes for the missing sunglasses, but never found them.

Until yesterday.

I haven’t been very active the last 2 months, so I took the reverse route on this trail thinking it was easier (that is debatable), anyway, as I was going up in the place where I had tripped previously, I stopped for about 2 minutes and searched. This time the glare of the sun off the frames was just perfect and I saw the lenses. Leaned over, picked them up and they appear to be no worse for being outdoors through 2 major snowfalls and sub-20 degF temperatures multiple times. Actually, they didn’t look bad at all.

Now if I could only get on the same airplane where I’ve left lots and lots of sunglasses in the seat backs. ;)

Anyway, it was a beautiful day for a hike, the sun was shining, temps in the mid 50s, the views from the peak were fantastic AND I found something I’d lost months ago. I couldn’t imagine any way it could have been better. I’m easily amused, but you know that already.

Stolen from my comment over at LH …

1. Launch a Distributed Denial Of Service attack, DDoS
2. Setup your own botnet
3. Spread spyware
4. Release huge password databases
5. Release hacks for PS3s

Most of the time, Cloud Computing = Careless Computing.

Just because something is free and easy, doesn’t mean you should actually use it.

OTOH, there are times where using the Cloud makes perfect sense. When you want the widest distribution of data/info possible. In that case, remote, carefree computing is perfect.

When in doubt, don’t put it into the cloud because you can never get it back regardless of what the ToS say. IT security professionals are split on whether anything can be secured in the cloud. Certainly there are ways to accomplish it, but those methods are probably out of reach for individuals. I would have zero expectation of any real security on shared hosts or shared storage, but many people consider me paranoid. If it were your corporate data in the cloud, wouldn’t you want someone who is paranoid validating the security architecture?

By some standards, my 10,000+ digital photo collection is either very large or trivial. I suspect that professional photographers probably have hundreds of thousands of photos. Many of those will have different post-processing.

Organizing, backing up and archiving digital photos and images doesn’t have to be complicated to do well.

Organization

As you take the photos, place them into your organization. If you delay more than a week after returning from that once-in-a-lifetime vacation to Africa, then you probably will never perform any useful organization. Below are 8 steps to help you organize your photos efficiently.