Preston L. Bannister { random memes }

what you dont know can indeed hurt you

China Space Mission Said Planned for Oct.
The military-backed space program is a major prestige project for the communist government. China has announced plans to land an unmanned probe on the moon by 2010 as well as operate a space station.

While I would like to believe China has nothing but peaceful intentions, we should not forget that a rocket capable of putting a man into orbit is also capable of delivering a large payload of nuclear weapons anywhere on the planet.

China to clamp down on Web sites’ news content
Online dissidents who post items critical of the government, or those expressing opinions in chat rooms, are regularly arrested and charged under vaguely worded national security laws.

China is still a centrally controlled repressive regime whose aims are unclear. This fact combined with increasing economic and military power is at least disquieting.

Schneier on Security: Secure Flight News
Remember what the no-fly list is. It’s a list of people who are so dangerous that they can’t be allowed to board an airplane under any circumstances, yet so innocent that they can’t be arrested — even under the provisions of the PATRIOT Act.

Assuming this story is true (and I suspect that it is) then we have further proof that secrets of a commercial sort inside the voting process is a bad idea.

A DIEBOLD INSIDER SPEAKS!”

As part of the rituals when opening the polling place (as I will do twice in the next two months), we show the empty ballot box and (reported) voting machine totals to the first voter in the door. All the poll workers are required to verify and witness any totals at the end of the day. Before the use of voting machines I was sure that any ballots cast at my voting place were safely delivered to the central collection (though I have no means of knowing if the collected votes were counted accurately).

With the use of voting machines, I have no way of knowing if the results reported by the machine are accurate. In fact, I suspect the results returned by the voting machines in the polling place are accurate. If you are able it is likely far easier to subvert the vote-counting at the central collection point.

While I do believe that voting machines are a good idea, I also believe that the process used to collect and tabulate votes must be open. That means the software and hardware designs used in any machines that collect must be open to inspection. Anything else invites abuse.

Something amusing in the fact that I really believe Sun has a good story, but that my luck trying out new work from Sun is less than successful.

Not meaningful really, but …. does it have to go wrong on the first things I try??

BTW – I get quite a few hits (~20-100/month – and another in today’s log) from folks searching on “solaris cannot find boot.bin” or the like, so it’s not just me.

For no obvious reason an old memory – a vivid image and smell – came to mind along with a name “Jetex”.

As a kid I had acquired an interest in model airplanes from my father.

Now this wasn’t a very fulfilling hobby in dense-suburban southern California. Lack of nearby open fields meant that models that flew well were generally lost, and most models died in unfortunate encounters with hard surfaces (streets, houses, power poles). Lots of time spent in fabrication, and not much time flying…

One of my more successful models was a simple balsa glider powered by a small Jetex rocket motor. I did manage to recover the model and make an unusual number of flights (and a few repairs). Eventually – as with all the other successful efforts – this model too was lost when it flew off out of sight.

Found via Google Video.

Been working on a web application that tries to present a relatively rich user interface. As a target I am aiming at the current and near/mid future population of browsers. That means IE 6 (and later), Mozilla/Firefox, and trying to stick as much as possible with the W3C standards (HTML 4.01, CSS 2, Javascript 1.5). This does not mean Netscape 4.x support, and I am not testing with Opera or Safari.

So far I have covered some fairly exacting layouts, resizable dialogs (with layout changes), Java/Javascript integration, tooltips, and other interesting bits, all without explicit browser detection, using fairly minimal, clean, largely standards-compliant code.

In the process of implementing drag and drop, I got hung up trying to make some sort of coherent sense of mouse tracking. In fact I already had code that worked (derived from various samples on the net), or at least seemed to work, but … I am not at all sure that this indeed covers all cases.

Put up an example page with mouse tracking over a variety of positioned elements.

The core bit of code is pretty simple.

    document.onmousemove = function(e) {
        e = e || event
        var o = e.srcElement || e.target
        var x = e.clientX
        var y = e.clientY
        while (null != o.scrollTop) {
            x += o.scrollLeft
            y += o.scrollTop
            o = o.parentNode
        }
        window.track.style.left = x + "px"
        window.track.style.top  = y + "px"
    }

This code seems to work correctly with IE6 and Firefox. It would be nice to know if this code works in Safari and Opera. It would be useful to know if there are cases were this code does not work.