Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

Major Winter Storm to Wallop DC Area

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A major winter storm appears on-track to wallop the Washington, DC, metropolitan area with heavy snow beginning late tonight and continuing through much of the weekend. The National Weather Service has issued a Winter Storm Warning for the DC metro area stating, in part, that ‘accumulations of 10 to 20 inches’ are expected.

The Capital Weather Gang, a group of weather bloggers with a solid, conservative [read: realistic] track record of accumulation predictions, estimate 8-16″ for much of the region with 10-18″ in some areas. They characterize this storm as a ‘Major Event’ for the DC area and predict widespread hazardous road conditions.

Those of us who have lived a long time in the DC area know that this area doesn’t handle snow very well. The various Departments of Transportation have an annoying tendency to spontaneously forget to treat major highways, and the MetroRail system was apparently designed to fail if exposed to winter precipitation (because they have exposed electronics [!] on train underbellies). Drivers in the region seem to fall into two camps: one, those that refuse to go anywhere at all even days after most of the roads are clear; and two: those (usually with SUVs) who believe you can drive on snow at full speed as if the road is perfectly clear. Reality, as usual, is in-between.

Off on a Tangent recommends the following: don’t be afraid of a little bit of snow, but don’t drive like an idiot either. 4WD and AWD vehicles are generally good in winter weather, but every car has 4-wheel braking and every car will take longer to stop than it would in clear conditions and any car can spin-out if you take a turn too fast on a slick highway. So, even in your 4WD and AWD cars, drive careful. If you don’t have to go anywhere, don’t. Make sure you have enough supplies at home to last you a couple of days.

Have fun and be safe!

Misusing the Word ‘Hacked’

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I read an interesting story over at CNN.com about how Iraqi insurgents figured out how to monitor the video feeds from our un-manned Predator drone aircraft. There are a couple things that bother me about this article—one about how it’s written, and one about the content itself.

First, despite the gripping headline, the insurgents ‘hacked’ nothing. The video feed they were watching was broadcast over the airwaves without encryption. They ‘hacked’ the feed in the same way I ‘hack’ a broadcast TV feed by turning on my television, or in the way I ‘hack’ air traffic control communication by turning on a scanner I get at Radio Shack. If an unintended recipient receives a broadcast sent ‘in the clear’, they’ve simply monitored open communication—which anybody can do and, in fact, has a right to do barring any specific laws prohibiting it.

(An example of a specific law is this: most jurisdictions in the United States legally prohibit the use of police scanners to evade the police, so if a bad guy uses one to get away he gets an additional charge on his rap sheet when he’s caught.)

Second, and much more troubling than run-of-the-mill journalistic exaggeration, is the fact that the United States Air Force broadcasts Predator drone video in the clear. Billions of dollars invested over decades in defense encryption technologies, and they can’t even apply a trivial cipher to put at least a speed-bump in the way of the bad guys? In the clear? Come on guys.

Website 21.1 In Development

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I took the weekend off from unpacking, got a lot of sleep, and worked on my website. It was a nice change of pace to work with code instead of cardboard, and I made a lot of progress on a minor update to the site (which, when done, will bring the version to 21.1). I’m doing a lot of experimentation with the jQuery JavaScript library, which will allow neat effects and dynamic stuff I haven’t done much of before. It also let me clean up the code for my existing dynamic stuff (like the pinned menu) to be a lot smaller and more efficient.

All-in-all, expect the site to start looking and acting a bit more like a ‘Web 2.0’ site from here on.

Obviously I’ll have a lot more detail when I actually finish the thing and launch it, but I wanted to let you all know that’s what I’m up to. Since a fair amount of the [limited] time I have for the web site is going to the next minor update, I’ll have a bit less time than usual for . . . you know . . . writing posts. I’ll try to keep up with it though.

The Babbage ‘Difference Engine’ Works

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Charles Babbage, long regarded as the father of modern computing, was not able to put his ideas into action during his lifetime. Faced with continual funding difficulty in building his ‘difference engine’ and, later, ‘analytical engine,’ his groundbreaking ideas were left unimplemented when he died in 1871.

Strangely enough, although Babbage has been well regarded for his ideas and is often listed among the ‘founding fathers’ of computing, nobody ever actually built his machines and nobody really knew for sure if they would work.

Well that’s changed. Almost 140 years after his death, we now know that Babbage’s ‘difference engine’ works. Using the original plans (correcting for a few minor errors) and using material and techniques that would have been available during Babbage’s lifetime, two ‘difference engines’ have been built and work exactly as intended.

Check out the video at the link. This thing is great.

Unlimited Means Unlimited

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According to several technology media outlets, AT&T is looking to ‘encourage’ high-usage wireless customer to rein-in their data usage. According to the company, 3 percent of smartphone users eat up 40 percent of AT&T network bandwidth.

Let me put this in plain English for AT&T: If your network can’t handle a minuscule 3 percent of your users utilizing something you call unlimited data service, then improve your network (preferred) or stop selling unlimited data service. As long as you sell unlimited data for your phones, some people will use it. You have no right to try and get them to stop. You sold it to them as unlimited. Unlimited means unlimited.

I haven’t had too much trouble with AT&T really, despite their being slaughtered in the media for various transgressions (real and imagined). I live in a 3G area and get pretty good 3G signal during most of my day-to-day activities. Granted, coverage isn’t as good as Verizon, but when I switched to AT&T [then-Cingular] they had a much better selection of available phones and other benefits over the competition. I’m giving consideration to switching back to Verizon or to another carrier when my contract is up, but haven’t yet made a decision.

If AT&T starts playing games with what unlimited means, or stops offering unlimited data plans, they’ll pretty much guarantee my next phone will be on a competitive carrier.

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.