Dreams of Monaco

This weekend is one of The Big Daddies in motorsport. I speak not of the IRL race in Indianapolis, but the Grand Prix of Monaco. I love motor racing, and Formula 1 is undoubtly the highest level of competition. And Monaco! A place full of history, tradition, charm and - snif, snif .. what's that smell? Oh yes - Money (Monaco has the highest concentration of millionaires of any other place).

But to race a 750 Hp car at 150+ mph in the tight two-lane streets through such a place, light going down in the tunnel under the hotel then blinding sunlight exiting the tunnel towards the chicane, deafening roar of the engines revving to 20,000 rpm, all in such a storied place is both absolute madness and incredible fun.

Hopefully I will make it there one year. Those of you who know me understand that I don't normally like gravitate towards such things, but this is an exception. Perhaps I'll make the trifecta motorsport tour of the Monaco GP, the 24 Hours of Le Mans and the Daytona 24. Maybe throw in the bizarrely fun rally-cum-roadtrip that is the Targa Newfoundland as well (now that looks like fun. Pete? Road trip? Let's take the Volvo).

Oh, and the price tag for Monaco? Figure $3,500 just for a few nights hotel, transportation and tickets for the race weekend. Perhaps staying home and enjoying it on DirecTV doesn't look so bad for this year (if only we could get SPEED in High-Def).

Justice is Served

Looks like Misters Lay and Skilling are getting a well deserved trip to PMITA prison.

Pete, is it time for the victory dance?

Aviation News for Today: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

The Good: Our airplane is in assembly at the factoy. It's scheduled to ship to the US in mid-June and will be delivered to us in late July or so, depending on the shipping schedule.


The Bad: N211LS (left, yellow), which I'm supposed to fly tomorrow, is down for maintenance. This is the second time that I've scrubbed a flight in this aircraft due to maintenance, but I guess you just have to have patience when flying.

The Ugly: I stumbled across a CVR transcript and recording of FedEx Flight 705 yesterday. A soon-to-be-fired employee decided that he was going to get a jump-seat ride on a flight from Memphis, whack the crew with a hammer and speargun, take over the aircraft, and fly it into the FedEx headquarters building, Tom Clancy / M. Atta style. The crew managed to put the smack down on the attacker and land the airplane. A key part of this was the captian performing a barrel roll, something that really isn't a good idea in a DC-10 (however, Tex Johnson did one in the first Boeing 707 demonstrator. Bob Hoover also was famous for performing aerobatics in a small business turboprop).

GhettoNet - Day 1

One of our clients called us on Monday with a seemingly impossible task - do some dispersion computer modeling runs that would take over 2,000 CPU hours on a P4-class machine. By this Friday.

WTF? How in the world can we get it done on time? Where are we going to get the CPU power?

No problem, we tell them, but you have to give us until Monday. Consultants work the weekends, you know

We quickly figured out that we couldn't build the necessary machines in time and buying pre-built machines wasn't going to work either (much too expensive). So, we decided to rent CPUs and buy gigabit switches and KVMs (you know that the client is going to pull this again someday).

So, four FedEx deliveries later, we have 20 rented and 10 borrowed PCs supplimenting our existing 12 CPUs. GhettoNet (TM) is born.

The biggest problem so far has been power. Many of the circuits are are daisy-chained from office to office. When you're talking about running 30 PCs, each drawing about 300W, you need to watch the total load on the circuit(s). It would suck trip the breaker in the middle of the night.

So, we've had to break them into units of 8 - handy, since the KVMs we have a 8-ports each. As the photo shows, 8 PCs, a switch, KVM and monitor fit nicely.

More to come as we get through the first day.

Going, going ....

Sadly, another PNW landmark is lost. Perhaps the difference is that this one was ugly, yet beloved.

Going Gonzo on the First Amendment

Oh dear. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has made the case that journalists can be prosecuted for publishing the existence of classified projects. In particular, he is referring to the phone call records collection program.

This begs the question: What is the limit of the press' power? Does the Executive Branch's right to protect the country trump the First Amendment? Slashdotter Mr. Z posted an excerpt to the Vietnam-era "New York Times Co. VS United States" Supreme Court case:

[The First Amendment] leaves, in my view, no room for governmental restraint on the press. There is, moreover, no statute barring the publication by the press of the material which the Times and Post seek to use... [I]t is apparent that Congress was capable of and did distinguish between publishing and communication in the various sections of the Espionage Act.

So any power that the Government possesses must come from its "inherent power." The power to wage war is "the power to wage war successfully." But the war power stems from a declaration of war. The Constitution by Article I, Section 8, gives Congress, not the President, power "to declare War." Nowhere are presidential wars authorized. We need not decide therefore what leveling effect the war power of Congress might have.

These disclosures may have a serious impact. But that is no basis for sanctioning a previous restraint on the press...The dominant purpose of the First Amendment was to prohibit the widespread practice of governmental sup-pression of embarrassing information. A debate of large proportions goes on in the Nation over our posture in Vietnam. Open debate and discussion of public issues are vital to our National Health. The stays in these cases that have been in effect for more than a week constitute a flouting of the principles of the First Amendment as interpreted in [Near v. Minnesota].

So there we have it sports fans. When we were fighting Communism 30 to 40 years ago, the court ruled that the Government can't suppress information just because it's embarrassing. I'd say that the phone records issue is embarrassing.

Fast forward to today, when we're fighting the "global struggle against violent extremism", arguably the new Comunism. The press reveals not only the existence of the phone records program, but now the existence of NSA "secret rooms" with sophisticated data collecting hardware inside AT&T.

Where will this wind up? Wired has indicated that they believe that they have the legal right to publish this information. How long will it take for the Feds to put the smack down on Wired?

I guess this begs the question: Where are we headed? Perhaos the above cartoon from the Christian Science Monitor says it best.

Now Playing

Random playlist to make work go faster: (yes, I'm working on a Saturday night. Sad.)

"Serial Thrilla", The Prodigy
"Sinner", Niel Finn
"Song for a Future Generation", The B-52s

Back to work...

Please, do not take photos of the Air Mashals

I find this article really interesting. I actually saw two air marshals for the first time on Tuesday while waiting in the security line at DFW (Ok, I may have seen others before, but this was the first time that I could confirm it). They were pretty discreet, biz casual dress, but they quickly showed their FAA IDs to the security screener ("underhand style" opening of the ID folio - neat trick) and had to wait at the metal detector for someone to let them through (bypassing said detector). This allowed me (and anyone else) to get a good look at them. They pretty much looked like any other business traveler, but actually had bags, etc. that didn't scream FEDS (one actually had iPod headphones coming out of his slim backpack).

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060520/ap_on_go_co/air_marshals