No need to bicker about “off shoring” in IT, we’ve been over looking a PRIME resource right here at home that will work for naps and food!
I look like Kevin Mitnick…
This pleases me very much in a very sinister way…
For those not in the know here’s the Wikipedia article on Kevin Mitnick, old-school cracker of the early Internet.
The best quote of that entire article (emphasis mine): “Mitnick states that he compromised computers solely by using passwords and codes that he gained by social engineering. It is notable that Mitnick did not use software programs or hacking tools for cracking passwords or otherwise exploiting computer or phone security.”
People: beware.
Firefox is now my primary browser
As a geek-in-residence, I have about 5 different web browsers that I banter back and forth in my web surfing. Each one of them had advantages and weak spots.
So the Mozilla people released Firefox 3.0 with much fanfare this week, so of course I upgraded. I have used earlier versions and thought it was a competent browser, but wasn’t my favorite. Well, I got to give kudos — FF3, at least to me, seems so much more polished, faster and “ready”
The killer deal for me was a select set of “addons” that you can install within Firefox. These addons have become so important and complete that it’s almost like another operating system. I can do most things Internet-related within my web browser session. I use:
- Ad Blocker Plus
- All-in-one sidebar
- Sage-Too for RSS feeds
- Webmail notifier
- Download Statusbar
- IE Tab
IE Tab is what makes Firefox my primary browser now. Some of their sites just won’t work without it. IE Tab allows you to open a new tab/window within FF using the IE rendering engine so that all that stuff works. As a bonus you can write rules that look at URLs you click and open all such certain web addresses using IE Tab automatically. So now when I visit anything with “microsoft.com” in it, IE Tab takes over and the web pages work. Everything else Firefox handles. Nice!
Anyways, I encourage you all to give FF3 a try.
Live Seattle Air Traffic Control
Since I moved to Capitol Hill, I’m able to receive Air Traffic Control (ATC) frequencies into Seattle’s Sea-Tac airport. In fact, I live 1,420 Ft from the imaginary airspace “intersection” that marks the start of the final approach from the north to Seattle.
So I decided to sponsor a live Internet audio stream of Air Traffic Control. You can listen to it at http://www.liveatc.net/ (click the “listen to Live ATC feeds” in the sidebar and scroll-down to “SEA Final” — there are a number of SEA feeds, actually. I’m the one with 133.65 as the only frequency)
133.65 is the final approach sector for KSEA — Seattle-Tacoma International. Busiest times seem to be around noon, 4-6PM and 8-10PM.
Seattle has 2 (soon to be 3) close parallel runways oriented north-south — named runways 16/34. You can click on the chart to the right to see a bigger image of this. When landing and departing to the south 16C is used mostly for arrivals, with 16L used for departures. When the weather is really bad or foggy they switch to the Instrument Landing System (ILS) on 16L as the ILS for 16C appears to not support bad weather CAT2/3 operations anymore because of contruction of the third runway.
In the summer, and in better winter weather, Seattle usually lands the other way to the north, using runways 34C for arrivals and 34R for departures
After-hours this frequency can be combined with one or all of the feeder arrival sectors, so you’ll hear ATC, but not pilots. Also sometimes you’ll hear some bleed-over of a Seattle radio station in the background — their main broadcast antenna is only 1 mile from me, so with it’s huge power output sometimes you’ll be stuck listening to Seattle’s best smooth jazz — sorry! Could be worse…
Here are charts and info for KSEA
Here is an airspace illustration I created of major arrival and departure routes into SEA. The triangle symbols are the major intersections along the routes (Imaginary places in the air programmed into aircraft navigation databases) The hexigonal-type symbols are actual radio navigation stations on the ground. The 3-letter acronyms you see are the codes for other radio navigation stations outside of the chart
This is far from complete, but a good intro into how traffic is sent in/out of the Seattle area.
I’ve travelled 70% of the way to the moon!
Or at least that’s what this cool new website, flightmemory.com, says.
This is a website where you enter all the details of your travels and it then spits-out maps and statistics for you. I totally got into this just being lazy today. Spent hours putting in my flights and travels, all from memory.
Then you start to remember trips you forgot! Like I vividly remember flying on Delta Airlines through Cincinnati once, and Northwest via Detroit — but I can’t remember what for!
*Highly* entertaining for an aviation/travel nerd such as myself.
View my Flight memory maps and stats here!
Highlights (And I’m far from complete!):
In Miles 167,658
In Kilometer 269,821
Earth Circumnavigation 6.73 x
Distance to the Moon 0.702 x
Distance to the Sun 0.0018 x
Total Airports 53
Total Airlines 16
Total Aircraft type 28
Total Routes 106
Total Countries 8
A terabyte at gigabit speeds
OK, everyone and Heaven knows I’m a total dweeb. So I just got moved into my new condo (and all unpacked to boot!) and reviewed costs, finances…basically saw where the hell I was financially. Outlook was good, so I indulged and upgraded the home network. Bought a gigabit switch (nothing too terribly hip these days, but very nice) and also bought some new hard drives for my home server. I now have over a terabyte of storage, which is a moderately cool thing! I transferred a bunch of stuff from my PC to the server and…shaZAM! Wow. It copied to the server in like 5 minutes — about 200 gigs of stuff.
Me likey!
Oh, also bought some clothes for spring/summer. There are some articles of clothing I needed to retire. So I’m not a total technology hermit.
On my way home — early!
OK, this stinks. So Toronto was *great* — more on it later. I am now coming home early. Air Canada was late out of Toronto because, of all things, a panel in the loo would not latch. Took them an hour to “tape it up”! So that left me precious little time in Boston to connect to my Cape Air flight to Provincetown.
So it was a race…and I lost. It seems Air Canada changed places for it’s arrivals in Boston and is now on the other side of the airport from Cape Air (because, of cousre, I researched this with zeal while planning this adventure and found both airlines used to be in the same terminal — they changed just this month!!).
So I wheeze my way up to the Cape Air ticket counter — and find out the next they could get me out was tomorrow. Guess they are unusually heavily booked. The offered to pay may way via bus (which is more than I expected, but no thanks) and seemed nice, but no-go until tomorrow. So with my time in Provincetown only 2 days anyways– what’s the point? I called American, got a seat on the next flight, so now I’m a a big, hot mess from marching all over the place, at a bar in BOS writing to the 2-3 visitors I get every day (Hi Mom, Hi Dad! 🙂
Sigh. I was really looking forward to Ptown — it seemed really cool and relaxing. I guess it’s all good — I get a couple days at home to chill out with the boys — I’m sure they’ll love that!
Anyways, more about Toronto soon — perhaps in the next few hours as I wait for my new flights. Toronto — wow — it’s one of those cities I must go back to.
A New Vision for ColdFusion
ColdFusion master Hal Helms wrote an excellent article on the future directions of ColdFusion:
I could not agree with him more. Very rich article full of thought. I usually disagree with Hal as he’s usually so deeply technical it’s almost obscene. Not in this. Spot on, Hal!
ColdFusion programmers: read it now.
Adobe: Do it now!
And for you non-technically-aspirated the article offers some general marketing gems as well — still might be interesting.
New blog software, again!
Sorry if I ruined your links but I needed to get my blog under control. The old blog software worked well, but was a bit more complex than what I needed or desired and it still had some bugs I hadn’t been able to figure out. And it was kinda slow. And I’m a total technology dweeb, so I like to experiment — nuff said 🙂
I noticed that Ray Camden had made some changes to his BlogCFC program lately, which, of course, is programmed in ColdFusion which is my language of choice for web apps. So I decided to give it a try and viola! It works well, is very much faster than the old site, especially on your first visit. I lost some design control — the other blog had a great built-in rich HTML editor. But the simplicity and ease of BlogCFC captured me. Plus it’s pretty stable — not many bugs — Me likey!
So stay tuned as I tweak the format and design — and back-fill posts from the old system. For the huge masses of people who visit — Let me know how you like/don’t like. I’m sure this software can handle the 3 of you.
The iMac is a better “PC” than a PC
I’m so impressed. I am now a complete Apple fan.
Not that I ever was a detractor of Apple — when they came out with their new operating system, OS X, that was cool. I even bought a Mac Mini to try it out. But as a sysadmin and enterprise technology geek it had limited applications for me other than as a novelty. Well, that has changed.
You might not know that Apple switched processors (the heart of any computer) from the PowerPC chip to modern Intel chips. These are the same processors that any “PC” uses. This was an incredible move on Apple’s part. Now, insofar as all Macs come with OS X, which is very good on its own of course, the new Macs can also run Windows as their operating system! So with that in mind I finally made the plunge. I bought a decent iMac to check it out to see if the hype was worth it.
I am blown away. Apple has always been very good at designing hardware. This is no exception. The iMac is a beauty. The picture you see here is it — that’s it. No big “hard drive” case. It’s all it is. A gorgeous 20 inch widescreen that contains everything. And yes, it could not be easier to install Windows XP onto any computer — I downloaded the software that makes it happen from the Apple website and within 30 miniutes I was in business, completely. And if I so choose I can reboot the computer and go into Mac OS X and do Mac stuff.
And this thing is fast — it’s noticably faster than the PC I just got 3 months ago, by a significant margin even though that PC has, by the statistics, bettter hardware. This is running Windows on Mac hardware, folks. Apple’s software installed all the drivers and things that make the PC work pretty effortlessly. And it just works. I am doing this blog entry on my new iMac, in Windows, staring at the Apple logo just beneath my screen. I have yet to run any of my high performance games, such as flight simulator, on my new iMac. I think this is where some performance may be lost. But hell, for 90% of people this is never an issue.
an interesting side note: I think Microsoft loves that Apple switched to Intel chips. They can sell more copies of Windows to Apple lovers. It’s good for Apple, too, because they can sell hardware (which is where they make their money) and entice people to become Apple-addicted. Shrewd, shrewd move for Apple.
Anyways, my advice: Buy a Mac. And a copy of Windows. You will have the best of both worlds and never look back. I am astonished it was so easy and that I didn’t do this before.