JDPFu.com 2025

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.

Sure I’m a little late, but I recently discovered the Panucci Resuming Player for Nokia N800/N810/N900 internet tablets. I’ve tried music playback programs and have always been disappointed since they didn’t support 30 second skip forward, backwards or resume after power off exactly where I was previously. Panucci does all these things.

Last week (4/12/11), Microsoft pushed out a bunch of patches. I didn’t really notice most of the changes, but one changed the way that the mouse snaps to an open window. Yuck. I alt-tab to change programs all the time – all the time – and even the alt-tab moves the mouse over the center of the screen where the program selection window is temporarily located. Some of my automatic scripts open and close new windows. When those windows are opened, the mouse is moved, but when they close, it doesn’t go back where it came from or set the focus back to the prior window. Not good.

Anyway, just typing “mouse” into the superbar under Windows7 offered Change how your mouse works with a checkbox to Activate by hovering …. Uncheck that choice and the mouse behavior works the way I need again.

Why would a patch need to alter this mouse behavior?
Perhaps some security issue with auto-focus?
I dunno. Perhaps it was just there to frustrate UNIX/Linux people who use focus follows mouse.

Gnome3 was released this week. I usually don’t try new releases, since I prefer to let others find the issues, report them and wait for the fixes. After reading an article over at LifeHacker and seeing all the unknown questions about gnome3, I decided to grab an ISO and give it a try. Below is a very short look.

With the release of Gnome 3 and pending next version of Ubuntu running Unity, there are many things changing in the Linux GUI world.

When you run a business, you will probably need to scan documents and store them into a document management system. Often, those document scans become completely unsearchable since the text is not included for the DMS to index. Entering metadata for each document becomes critical, especially keywords that someone else will likely use to find the document later.

Xsane for Scanning

I’ve been scanning using xsane on Ubuntu/Lubuntu for a few years. The Brother All-in-1 MFC-240C in my home office is used for faxing and scans. It was found and worked just as expected. It runs as a normal user, not root and no sudo needed. It is a great, home-use sheet fed scanner.

Improved Scanning + OCR With gscan2pdf

Installation was uneventful. The standard install method for Ubuntu/APT worked and brought in necessary dependencies.

sudo apt-get install gscan2pdf

Next I tried to run the application as a normal user – I wasn’t hopeful, since whenever you connect to hardware, there are probably group permissions that need to be worked out. Since I’d already been scanning with the same user using xsane, I was cautiously optimistic. It didn’t work – got stuck scanning for the scanner hardware and properties. Ok, so perhaps it needs the first run to setup the hardware as root –

sudo gscan2pdf

As each page was scanned, a thumbnail was displayed in the left border and the main page area showed the scan for page 1.

OCR – Optical Character Recognition

I don’t recall whether the OCR was a checkbox or automatically included in the job. I do recall there were choices for where the text would be placed inside the resulting PDF. I chose to place the text under the image for the page, other options were before or after. With that choice, text searches would locate the correct page. At the bottom of each scanned page is an area with the text results of the OCR process. For the first page, the word accuracy was about 90% with many consistent mistakes. 90% accuracy sounds better than it turns out to be. To correct 10% of the words on a page takes longer than I would have liked. There is no spell checker built into this tool, so I copied each page of text into LibreOffice and used that spell checker to correct the problems. Some of the OCR created words that are in the dictionary, but didn’t make any sense in context. This is a common issue for OCR. The good news is that the PDF file has the fairly high resolution scan which definitely shows the words just as you’d expect.

The Results

I’ve found a new scanning tool. It works and creates image-based PDF files. At this point, the only drawback is that running this tool without elevated privileges doesn’t work, at least not so far. For most home users, this is a minor issue.

I forgot to mention that I ran this program over an ssh -X connection. No issues.

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.

So I got this email today from TiVo. Relatively short and too the point. Definitely appreciated. I hope they fire that email service. There needs to be repercussions for unauthorized data leaks. The company reported to have the breach is Epsilon. If you are a client, time to get out of that contract.

I use a very specific email alias just for TiVo, so I’ll know if anything comes from this leak. Anyone knowing that address and my first name … oh well … lot’s of people know my first name. I’ll wait until spam starts before disabling this alias created for TiVo. This is the 2nd time that my TiVo specific alias has been released without my approval. Nice job selecting partners TiVo. I still use a TiVo Series2, but haven’t paid them any money since 2004 due to the prior breach. At least they told me about it this time – perhaps due to the California law which requires customer notification of unauthorized data releases?

================================================== 
TiVo Service Announcement
================================================== 
 
Dear TiVo Customer,

Today we were informed by our email service provider 
that your email address was exposed due to unauthorized 
access of their system. Our email service provider 
deploys emails on our behalf to customers who have 
opted into email-based communications from us.

We were advised by our email service provider 
that the information that was obtained was limited 
to first name and/or email addresses only. Your 
service and any other personally identifiable
information were not at risk and remain secure. 

Please note, it is possible you may receive spam 
email messages as a result.  We want to urge you 
to be cautious when opening links or attachments 
from unknown third parties. 

We regret this has taken place and apologize for any 
inconvenience this may have caused you. We take 
your privacy very seriously, and we will continue 
to work diligently to protect your 
personal information. 

If you have unsubscribed in the past, there is no 
need to unsubscribe again. Your preferences will 
remain in place.

Sincerely,
The TiVo Team

Here is what Epsilon says on their website

IRVING, TEXAS – April 1, 2011 - On March 30th, an incident was detected where a subset of Epsilon clients' customer data were exposed by an unauthorized entry into Epsilon's email system. The information that was obtained was limited to email addresses and/or customer names only. A rigorous assessment determined that no other personal identifiable information associated with those names was at risk. A full investigation is currently underway.

If this was an insider job, there isn’t much that could have been done to protect against the releases besides paying their people well and giving stock options to them so they have a financial reason to protect company assets.

Whether the Do Not Track settings have any legal support or not, it is worth enabling this for anyone who would like to tell websites not to track them. It may be a worthless effort, but thankfully, it doesn’t take much effort, so why not?

On my Linux system, running Firefox 4.0, the Tell web sites I do not want to be tracked setting, yes, that is the exact wording, is under the Advanced tab of the General tab in the Firefox Preferences.

Steps:

• Edit
•   Preferences
•     Advanced
•       General
• then under the Browsing heading, check box to Tell web sites I do not want to be tracked
  
  Simple.

On other operating systems, it should be easy to find.

KeePassX is my password manager of choice.
Enigmail is the GnuPG signature and encryption add-on for Thunderbird.
Pinentry is used by Enigmail to enable secure entry of PINs, passwords and pass phrases. It blocks copy/paste and forces all keyboard entry into the pinentry textfield. That’s great if you have trivial or easily typed pass phrases. I do not.

These are all fantastic, until you depend on KeePassX to hold non-trivial pass phrases to gain access to your certificates. Since pinentry doesn’t allow copy/paste, there is a major issue. If your passphrase is non-trivial and long, then manually entering them whenever you need to read or send a sensitive email is beyond a hassle. It sucks. pinentry also grabs both the keyboard and copy/paste events, so you are probably unable to alt-tab to the window you really need. Anything typed on the system gets placed into the pinentry text field. How rude.

Workaround

There is a workaround – it is a hassle, but better than trying to type 50 characters of assorted keys.

Use the Perform Autotype option by mousing for your specific KeePassX entry. Doing this means that the Userid needs to be empty and you need to already have KeePassX unlocked before you begin any encryption work. Using the mouse to cause the paste/autotype works.

You’ll probably want to setup gpg-agent to hold your keys for a while too. Anything to avoid going through this crap to retype pass phrases for certificate access.

I’m running Enigmail v1.1.2, Pinentry-gtk2 v0.7.6 and Thunderbird v3.1.8.