Quantum Levitation

Holy smokes! You have got to watch this demonstration using quantum superconductors locked in a magnetic field. Make sure you watch the entire video. It will blow your mind!

Positive Risks - An Oxymoron?

Sometimes I think people really over-think some things.

Since I have been working on my masters degree I have had the privilege of purchasing extremely over-priced books and reading page after page of theories and formulas on how I should act, and what I should do under every situation possible.

Now don’t get me wrong, I have learned a lot of great information, and I know it will definitely help in my future endeavours, but sometimes I run across things that appear to be way over the top.

Recently, my homework involved a chapter on risk management. One of the topics talked about negative and positive risks.

Positive risks? Really? This is an attempt to sound pretentious, because that’s the dumbest damn thing I have ever heard.

Throughout history, a risk is something that can potentially cause an undesirable result. By its very nature a risk is a negative thing that should be mitigated if possible.

While reading article after article on this so-called, “positive risk” crap, I found it amusing that almost every article slapped on the fact that a positive risk was an opportunity.

So why the heck don’t we just look at risks and opportunities, instead of negative risks and positive risks?

Reference SWOT analysis, which is an acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. This makes infinitely more sense then positive risks!

From my perspective, as someone who does not posses the lofty qualifications from professional project management associations, this is just an attempt to sound important by someone just making up their own definitions of words that clearly goes against any of the traditional definitions.

I have run across this numerous times at various jobs where one intelligent idiot comes up with something and everyone else just nods their head. Nobody has the stones to tell them that it’s an idiotic plan.

So I’m here, as an unprofessional observer of project management risk analisys, to tell the industry to resist continuing to follow the notion of a positive risk. Call it what it actually is, an opportunity.

Currently you are all taking an asinine journey into buffoonery by pretending that this is some new and exciting term. By embracing this nonsense you are just confusing a subject that is already bloated with charts, graphs, tables, and theories. Making up your own foolish definitions for existing words has hit a new level in mystification of the topic.

A Team Of Highly Trained Monkeys

I went to refresh my subscriptions on YouTube just now and received this message...

500 Internal Server Error

Sorry, something went wrong.

A team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation.

If you see them, show them this information:

It's not unusual to find funny error messages on websites, but this one was worth sharing.

If any of you see some funny server error messages, please share them as well.

Floppy music Duet - Imperial march

This was so cool when I saw it, I just had to share it on here with you all.

I am such a geek.

Enjoy!

Speed of Light - Law Broken?

Okay, before you get too excited, this has yet to be substantiated as fact. Here’s what we know so far.

A team of scientists from CERN have been conducting a series of experiments that apparently demonstrate that some subatomic particles travel faster then the speed of light.

Of course we all know that Albert Einstein created his theory of special relativity that states nothing in the universe can travel faster then the speed of light in a vacuum.

So, if the folks at CERN are correct, and after everything has been independently verified, what will this do to the laws of physics as we know them today?

I enjoy science fiction. One of the most important roles of science fiction, I believe, is to spark the imagination of future scientists. There have been documentaries showing that many of today’s inventors and scientists were encouraged from reading science fiction stories, or from the technology that appear in shows such as Star Trek.

Today there are scientists working on trying to create Holodecks and transporters. If science has finally proven that yes, the speed of light can be surpassed, will this open our minds to the viability of faster then light travel?

Granted we’re a long way off to start the construction of ships, but back in the 60’s when Captain Kirk first whipped out his communicator, I’m sure those watching were thinking, “Oh sure, like that will ever happen”.

Look at us now. The other day I had the entire family (five of us) in the car and I think every one of us was texting at the same time. If I had brought this up in the 60’s people would have thought me nutty.

The computer on the Starship Enterprise was stated to have the history of mankind in its database. Heck, with today’s technology a lot of what that Starship could do seems archaic to us now.

What’s my point for this latest ramble?

All I ask is that we should continue to keep an open mind when it comes to science. I tell my daughters that I don’t want to hear negative comments such as, “It can’t be done”, or “It’s impossible”.

I personally can’t wait to see what amazing inventions the future holds in store. It’s wild to see technology evolve right before our eyes.

Today most of us can’t imagine life without our smart-phones. Information and various devices at our fingertips.

In class last night I needed a calculator and the standard one on my phone could not do what I needed it to do. A few minutes later I had pulled down an awesome calculator from the app store that did everything I needed and looked fantastic! Un-freakin’ believable!

So stay-tuned for the verification of this discovery. Whether it proves to be true or not is irrelevant. The fact that for an instant we have all become open to the possibility that it could be true means that there is still hope.

Now if we can just figure out what the speed of dark is...

Dark Suckers

Picture from 66 Degrees

Bell Labs Proves Existence of Dark Suckers
For years it has been believed that electric bulbs emitted light. However,
recent information from Bell Labs has proven otherwise. Electric bulbs
don't emit light, they suck dark. Thus they now call these bulbs dark
suckers. The dark sucker theory, according to a Bell Labs spokesperson,
proves the existence of dark, that dark has mass heavier than that of
light, and that dark is faster than light.

The basis of the dark sucker theory is that electric bulbs suck dark. Take
for example, the dark suckers in the room where you are. There is less dark
right next to them than there is elsewhere. The larger the dark sucker, the
greater its capacity to suck dark. Dark suckers in a parking lot have a
much greater capacity than the ones in this room. As with all things, dark
suckers don't last forever. Once they are full of dark, they can no longer
suck. This is proven by the black spot on a full dark sucker. A candle is a
primitive dark sucker. lA new candle has a white wick. You will notice that
after the first use, the wick turns black, representing all the dark which
has been sucked into it. If you hold a pencil next to the wick of an
operating candle, the tip will turn black because it got in the path of the
dark flowing into the candle.

Unfortunately, these primitive dark suckers have a very limited range.
There are also portable dark suckers. The bulbs in these can't handle all
of the dark by themselves, and must be aided by a dark storage unit. When
the dark storage unit is full, it must be either emptied or replaced before
the portable dark sucker can operate again.

Dark has mass. When dark goes into a dark sucker, friction from this mass
generates heat. Thus it is not wise to touch an operating dark sucker.
Candles present a special problem, as the dark must travel in the solid
wick instead of through glass. This generates a great amount of heat. Thus
it can be very dangerous to touch an operating candle. Dark is also heavier
than light. If you swim deeper and deeper, you notice it gets slowly darker
and darker. When you reach a depth of approximately fifty feet, you are in
total darkness. This is because the heavier dark sinks to the bottom of the
lake and the lighter light floats to the top. The immense power of dark can
be utilized to mans advantage. We can collect the dark that has settled to
the bottom of lakes and push it through turbines, which generate
electricity and help push it to the ocean where it may be safely stored.
Prior to turbines, it was much more difficult to get dark from the rivers
and lakes to the ocean. The Indians recognized this problem, and tried to
solve it. When on a river in a canoe travelling in the same direction as
the flow of the dark, they paddled slowly, so as not to stop the flow of
dark, but when they traveled against the flow of dark, they paddled quickly
so as to help push the dark along its way.

Finally, we must prove that dark is faster than light. If you were to stand
in an illuminated room in front of a closed, dark closet, then slowly open
the closet door, you would see the light slowly enter the closet, but since
the dark is so fast, you would not be able to see the dark leave the
closet.

In conclusion, Bell Labs stated that dark suckers make all our lives much
easier. So the next time you look at an electric bulb remember that it is
indeed a dark sucker.

- Author Unknown

I'd like to start this by making sure the correct credit gets assigned to this post. This story was not written by me, but was found at The Daily WTF, and was posted there 18 December 2007. I highly recommend this site for some of your entertaining reading.

I wanted to post it here because so many times I link to a good article, or story, then years later it disappears never to be seen again.

This reminded me so much of how things are as a network administrator. Many times we are writing our own scripts, and "McGyver" our own systems, just to keep things running until we can get it fixed correctly. What admin has never written a "ping" script to keep an eye on an important machine?

Enjoy!

===============================

At the turn of the 21st century, Initrode Global's server infrastructure began showing cracks. Anyone that had been in the server room could immediately tell that its growth had been organic. Rackmounted servers sat next to recommissioned workstations, with cables barely secured by cable ties. Clearly there had been some effort to clean things up a bit, but whoever put forth that effort gave up halfway through.

It wasn't pretty, but it worked for years. As time passed, though, a proprietary gateway server to communicate with credit processing agencies would crash more and more frequently. And these were bad crashes, too — the kind of crashes where the server wouldn't respond to ping and would have to be restarted manually. It wasn't really a big deal for the admin, Erik, to hit the restart button on the server when he was there, but that was only 40 hours a week. The credit union needed it to be active 24/7, but was unwilling to hire 24 hour staff in the datacenter. The problem kept getting worse and worse, so the IT manager called up a meeting.

"OK guys, what can we do about this?" asked Laura, the IT manager. "Can you guys in dev fix this?"

"No," began Erik, before anyone in dev could respond. "The issue is with the server, not our software."

"Well, when does the support contract end?"

"Two years ago."

"Great. And we can't replace the unit while we're in a budget freeze..." Laura wasn't sure what to do. "Well, what's our workaround for now? What happens when it goes down?"

"Right now, I just hit the restart button."

"OK, well, we'll have to replace it once I get the budget approved. For now, though, what can we do? We need this online all the time." Laura sighed and began tapping her pen on the table. "No one has any other ideas?"

At this point the room fell silent and everyone tried to avoid making eye contact with Laura. Erik had a script running that would ping the server every few minutes and alert him if it didn't respond so he could halfway proactively keep things running. It had to be restarted manually whenever it crashed, so there was no easy way to fix it remotely.

"We could build an admin robot," Erik joked.

Hours later, Erik was in the datacenter, hitting the restart button again, disappointed that the meeting had ended without a workable solution. Laura walked into the room and greeted Erik.

"So, at our meeting earlier, you suggested building a robot." Laura had apparently taken his suggestion seriously. "Is that something we can really do?"

"Well, I was just ki... I mean, I don't know anything about circuitry, or how to build robots." Erik tried to keep his tone somewhere between serious and kidding, so he could gauge Laura's reaction.

It was then that he idly looked at his computer, which had just ejected a disk image DVD he'd burned.

It sparked an idea, but it was too absurd to say out loud. Still, he couldn't help but chuckle at the thought.

"What?" Laura asked.

"It's nothing," Erik responded. "It's stupid."

"We're desperate. Do you have an idea?"

"No, it was really stupid." Erik sighed. "I just had the idea that a CD ROM drive in an old system could eject and hit the reset button. It was a ridiculous idea."

"Wait," Laura began, "could you really do that?"

It was another uncomfortable moment for Erik, but she seemed serious, so he just went for it. "Uh, yeah, I could, but it's hardly the best solution... I mean, I'd have to position the servers just right, somehow get the heights and alignment correct, and update the polling script to eject the CD ROM drive any time it didn't respond to ping."

And that was exactly what Erik found himself spending the rest of the afternoon setting up. He found an old PC, updated his script to ping the server every two minutes and eject if there was no response, and with the help of a few phone books found the perfect height and position on the floor. At any point while he was setting it up, he expected Laura to jump out from a corner and yell "just kidding," but it never happened. Finally, Erik stood up, and ashamedly admired his work. He slapped a label on it that read "ITAPPMONROBOT," and another below with big underlined letters that read "DO NOT MOVE."

Years later, and long after Erik had left, the faulty server was taken offline and replaced with a new one working under a new IP address. During the swap, ITAPPMONROBOT was moved to a neglected corner of the server room, plugged back in, and promptly forgotten. It spent the last weeks of its life dutifully opening and closing its CD ROM drive every two minutes, reaching in vain for the restart button that it'd never touch again.

Biometrics - Who Are You Really?

Remember the movie, “Minority Report”? Tom Cruise walks through a mall and the displays along the wall scan him biometrically and adjust the advertisements to his character. This seems a bit futuristic, but our Internet experience is already following this paradigm. The only difference is that our systems are tracking us based on our likes and dislikes through software online. Soon this will all change.

The leap to being biometrically identified is not a large one from where we are now. There are already facial recognition systems installed in places where crowds gather that can identify people just by looking at them. Add to these systems a skin texture analysis system, and they can get close to telling who you are as you pass by. Throw in a few more variables, such as your posture, how you walk, weight, shape, etc... and they should be able to nail just about anyone down to 100%.

When I enter my server room my thumbprint is scanned before the door will unlock. Many security systems currently in use scan our digits, eyes, voice and faces. If you think these things invade your privacy, you’re right. You can either go along with this detailed tracking of your body parts, or get another job.

To a point we have a choice right now on what we give up for analysis. This is rapidly changing however. Remember the facial recognition systems discussed above? Many believe that as long as you’re in a public area you give up your right to privacy. People can video you, take your picture, and yes, even scan your face as you walk by.

I’m not sure if the government will ever start collecting biometric data from us at birth, although hospitals do take blood and check for all sorts of things when we’re born already. This final invasion of our bodies, if publicized much, would create a backlash of resistance.

The way biometric tracking will hook us in will be by providing easier use of services if we agree to be scanned and entered into a global database. Beware the cloud...

In the future when we approach our vehicles they will just know it’s us by scanning our features and unlock the doors and possibly even start up, change the radio station, adjust the seats and mirrors, and finally adjust the temperature to how we like it.

When we sit at any computer, the computer will already have scanned us and know who we are, then bring down our preferred desktop from the “cloud”. We will no longer require passwords, or have to adjust a strange computer to the environment we prefer, it will just provide what we like.

Our phones will also adjust to us. If I pick up a friends phone it may switch to my screens, show my contacts, and respond to my voice for dialing. All of our information will be cloud-based and accessible no matter what device we pick up to use. We’re not exactly there yet, but companies already offer services that come close to this.

With biometrics, our technology will more closely become one with us, an extension of who we are. It will seem like magic as we are able to control whatever machine we walk up to.

Some of you may think this a fantasy, but I believe this is where our future will lead us.

Loss of Spirit

Image: "Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech." An artist's concept portrays a NASA Mars Exploration Rover on the surface of Mars. Two rovers have been built for 2003 launches and January 2004 arrival at two sites on Mars. Each rover has the mobility and toolkit to function as a robotic geologist.

One of the most fascinating stories in space exploration has been the two little rovers on the surface of Mars. The rovers were named "Spirit" and "Opportunity", and were parachuted onto opposite sides of the red planet. Landing three weeks apart, Spirit touched down on January 3rd, 2004, while Opportunity arrived on January 25th, 2004.

The twins mission was to explore the surface of Mars and gather scientific data for three months. These rovers will go down in history as the little rovers that could!

I call them little rovers, but these mobile science labs are about 5.2 foot long, 4.9 foot tall and weighing in at 384 pounds!

Talk about your over-achievers. It has been over seven years since they landed, and Opportunity is still going strong. Each of these machines were only supposed to travel about a half mile in their original three-month mission, but as of today, their current odometry readings show that Spirit has traveled 4.8 miles, and Opportunity has traveled 18.46 miles!

Five and a half months after they landed, Spirit developed a problem with its right-front wheel. This wheel issue has caused the scientists and engineers at NASA to come up with some creative driving techniques. At times Spirit has been adjusting its remaining wheels to compensate for the injured wheel, and for a lot of the time it has had to drive backwards to drive forward.

In 2009 Spirit became stuck during a routine drive, it’s bum-wheel didn’t help matters any. This presented a problem for the rover because its solar panels need to be turned toward the sun to keep the on-board systems fully functional.

Despite the setback, Spirit continued to provide information from experiments it could do in its stationary predicament. Unfortunately, with the loss of ability to maneuver and keep its systems fully operational, which included the heaters to combat the extreme cold temperatures, Spirit lost contact with the Earth. It’s last communication was on March 22nd, 2010.

NASA has tried to reestablish contact, hoping that the warmth of the Martian Springtime would help energize it’s systems once more, but it seems now that Spirit might just be silent permanently.

Following is a letter that Mars Exploration Rover Project Manager, John Callas, sent to his team shortly after the final command was sent to the now unresponsive Spirit.

Dear Team,

Last night, just after midnight, the last recovery command was sent to Spirit. It would be an understatement to say that this was a significant moment. Since the last communication from Spirit on March 22, 2010 (Sol 2210), as she entered her fourth Martian winter, nothing has been heard from her. There is a continued silence from the Gusev site on Mars.

We must remember that we are at this point because we did what we said we would do, to wear the rovers out exploring. For Spirit, we have done that, and then some.

Spirit was designed as a 3-month mission with a kilometer of traverse capability. The rover lasted over 6 years and drove over 7.7 kilometers [4.8 miles] and returned over 124,000 images.

Importantly, it is not how long the rover lasted, but how much exploration and discovery Spirit has done.

This is a rover that faced continuous challenges and had to fight for every discovery. Nothing came easy for Spirit. When she landed, she had the Sol 18 flash memory anomaly that threatened her survival. Scientifically, Mars threw a curveball. What was to be a site for lakebed sediments at Gusev, turned out to be a plain of volcanic material as far as the rover eye could see. So Spirit dashed across the plains in an attempt to reach the distant Columbia Hills, believed to be more ancient than the plains.

Exceeding her prime mission duration and odometry, Spirit scrambled up the Columbia Hills, performing Martian mountaineering, something she was never designed to do. There Spirit found her first evidence of water-altered rocks, and later, carbonates.

The environment for Spirit was always harsher than for Opportunity. The winters are deeper and darker. And Gusev is much dustier than Meridiani. Spirit had an ever-increasing accumulation of dust on her arrays. Each winter became harder than the last.

It was after her second Earth year on Mars when Spirit descended down the other side of the Columbia Hills that she experienced the first major failure of the mission, her right-front wheel failed. Spirit had to re-learn to drive with just five wheels, driving mostly backwards dragging her failed wheel. It is out of this failure that Spirit made one of the most significant discoveries of the mission. Out of lemons, Spirit made lemonade.

Each winter was hard for Spirit. But with ever-accumulating dust and the failed wheel that limited the maximum achievable slope, Spirit had no options for surviving the looming fourth winter. So we made a hard push toward some high-value science to the south. But the first path there, up onto Home Plate, was not passable. So we went for Plan B, around to the northeast of Home Plate. That too was not passable and the clock was ticking. We were left with our last choice, the longest and most risky, to head around Home Plate to the west.

It was along this path that Spirit, with her degraded 5-wheel driving, broke through an unseen hazard and became embedded in unconsolidated fine material that trapped the rover. Even this unfortunate event turned into another exciting scientific discovery. We conducted a very ambitious extrication effort, but the extrication on Mars ran out of time with the fourth winter and was further complicated by another wheel failure.

With no favorable tilt and more dust on the arrays, Spirit likely ran out of energy and succumbed to the cold temperatures during the fourth winter. There was a plausible expectation that the rover might survive the cold and wake up in the spring, but a lack of response from the rover after more than 1,200 recovery commands were sent to rouse her indicates that Spirit will sleep forever.

But let’s remember the adventure we have had. Spirit has climbed mountains, survived rover-killing dust storms, rode out three cold, dark winters and made some of the most spectacular discoveries on Mars. She has told us that Mars was once like Earth. There was water and hot springs, the conditions that could have supported life. She has given us a foundation to further explore the Red Planet and to understand ourselves and our place in the universe.

But in addition to all the scientific discoveries Spirit has given us in her long, productive rover life, she has also given us a great intangible. Mars is no longer a strange, distant and unknown place. Mars is now our neighborhood. And we all go to work on Mars every day. Thank you, Spirit. Well done, little rover.

And to all of you, well done, too.

Sincerely,
John

Rest In Peace Spirit, I enjoyed following your exploits.

For more information on this fantastic journey please visit the Rover Mission Home Site

How to Synchronize Time on a Closed Network

Problem: We have a closed network at work but the machines on it should all be in sync and it is somewhat critical.

Solution: We found a product called, "ClockWatch Cell Sync" from Beagle Software that polls the CDMA time signal from cell towers. Pretty slick idea, and works great!

Basically we setup a workstation and attached the Cell Sync device on it (plugs into a serial port), and installed the ClockWatch software. Once configured the software polls the CDMA signal from the local cell towers, just like your cell phone does, and adjust the computer clock accordingly if needed. The software can also be configured as a time server and can "listen" to a port waiting for time requests to come in from other clients.

Trying to configure a Windows XP workstation to sync to the time server was turning out to be a problem (isn't anything when Windows is involved?). I found a nifty little program called, "Dimension 4" from Thinking Man Software that helps sync your computer to a time server. It worked right away without having to do anymore fussing with the registry.

It's up and running. We have one machine running Dimension 4 syncing with the time server and it works like it should. Now for the pain in the butt of getting our Windows 2003 server to use the time server as its external time source so the closed domain will have a nice stable time as well. I tried running Dimension 4 on the server, but for some reason it's not working like it did for the workstation.

The workstation and the time server are in the default workgroup, "WORKGROUP", but the other machines are in their own domain. I can "see" the time server from the domain if I ping it, but for some reason the Dimension 4 program can't sync to it.

This has been an all-day project so far setting this all up, and as usual, Windows is giving me fits! Why the heck they can't just make a simple admin tool to allow you to choose an external time source is beyond me. There's a lot of registry hacking going on, and so far what I have configured SHOULD work, but it does not seem like it is... Grrr...

I'll append this article once I get things ironed out.

Origin of a Blog...

This is my third blog.

It just seemed like I had a lot of scientific and geeky type of things that needed to be discussed, and my previous two sites didn't seem like a good fit to be laying down a lot of technological mumbo-jumbo.

Now that this outlet of mine has a home, whenever I get the urge to spew forth stuff that may be over the heads of some folks, or doesn't really fit into their reading enjoyment, the words can take form without worry.

For all of you who pass by here and stay a while because this is your cup of tea...Welcome.