Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

N. Korea Conducts Nuclear Test (Updated)

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While U.S. media initially reported an ‘earthquake’ had struck North Korea, foreign media including the BBC broke the news that North Korea had conducted an underground nuclear weapons test late yesterday. The reclusive totalitarian country conducted its first underground nuclear weapons test in 2006 and has conducted long range missile tests as recently as April of this year. Early reports indicate that this underground detonation was significantly more powerful than the 2006 test, and was comparable in its power to the U.S. weapons used during World War II in attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.

South Korean leaders have already met in emergency sessions and several countries including Japan have called for an emergency session of the U.N. Security Council, which will occur today. North Korea’s test has been denounced by President Barack Obama (D) as a threat to international peace and a violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions. It is unclear at this point what action, if any, will be taken by the world community against North Korea for its ongoing offensive weapons development programs.

Crazy, Busy Weekend

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I hope everybody is having a great Memorial Day weekend so far and, most of all, I hope you have taken some time to consider the sacrifices that our soldiers, airmen, and seamen have made in defense of American freedom.

My weekend has been abnormally busy, but it’s been good so far. The last few weeks have been very busy and stressful, so this weekend was my chance to get caught up on all the ‘like-to-dos’ that had been put to the wayside. On Friday I left work early and used the afternoon to get some general maintenance work done on my computers and get a couple remaining bugs quashed on my web site, before meeting with the folks at our church to volunteer to help out with their site.

Yesterday Melissa was working at the Dekka store downtown, so after dropping her off I embarked on a nice, long bike ride—ended up being about 41.5 miles. I rode the entire Mount Vernon Trail from Roosevelt Island in the north to Mount Vernon in the south, then back north to the Four Mile Run Trail. From there I headed west on the Four Mile Run Trail and connected to the Washington & Old Dominion Trail (through the new crossing under I-395 . . . nice!). I continued north-west on the W&OD to the Mary Custis Trail, then followed it west back to my starting point at Roosevelt Island. I’ve been neglecting my target of riding 30 miles per week, and it felt good to get back out there. That ended up eating a lot of my day though, since after the drive home from the ride and showering and so on it was late afternoon (and I was really tired). I ended up going to bed pretty soon after picking up Melissa and returning home.

Today I helped Melissa out with a photo shoot in the morning, we went to Mass, visited my Grandma, and then—in an exciting end to our Sunday—met with our Realtor and builder’s sales manager to go over the builder’s counter-offer.

Long-story-short, we put in all the paperwork to accept the counter-offer with a slightly higher down-payment and slightly-higher monthly payment than what we offered the other day, but it’s still a very good price for the house. Assuming the lawyers and so-on all review and approve (which is pretty much a sure-thing), the house is ours. Exciting times! We’re putting $10,000 down immediately, and the remaining $6,000-or-so will be paid in increments between now and the closing date (October/November).

Tomorrow, the schedule is pretty open. Really all we have firmly scheduled is that we’re going to (finally) see the new Star Trek movie. Being a big Star Trek fan, it’s been pretty excruciating to have not seen it yet but there’s been too much other stuff going on!

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Home Shopping: Offer Made!

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offerlettertownhouse-lot2townhouse-lot1I mentioned a few days ago that Melissa and I had found a yet-to-be-built townhouse that is in a reasonable price range (at least, by Northern Virginia standards) and were working with a Realtor and a sales manager with the builder to see if we could make it work with our finances. Well, things are proceeding. We have put in an offer to purchase the house for $300,000 (again, by NoVA standards, that’s very cheap for a new townhouse).

The offer, if accepted, would be very generous on the builder’s side. They would accept about 2/3 of the down-payment initially with the rest due at closing (which looks like it’ll be in October/November), would cover virtually all of the closing costs, and pay for our mortgage insurance. The monthly payment would work out to be roughly $1,800, which is only $400 more than our little two-bedroom apartment’s rent.

If the offer is accepted as-is, we’re committed. If the offer is not accepted, the builder would make a counter-offer and we would (hopefully) negotiate something we can all live with. Of course, if the builder won’t give enough for everything to work out with our finances, we’ll have the option to walk away. We’re only committed if the offer is accepted as-submitted.

The previous entry, of course, shows the artist’s conception of what the house will look like and a floor plan. The pictures here are the offer letter, the empty lot where the house will be, and the sign marking the property. We should know whether it’s ours within a week or so.

Firefox Add-on Roll-Call

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(Note: This is the third major revision of the Firefox Add-On Roll-Call, which originally appeared on this site on April 16, 2008.)

The web browser in which I do most of my web surfing is Mozilla Firefox. I find it to be a fast, stable browser and it works on all major operating systems (and even a bunch of non-major ones). Lately I’ve been running the Firefox 3.5 beta, which is stable, faster than its predecessors, works on almost every web site I ever visit, and does a good job of visually integrating with your chosen OS (whether Mac, Linux, or Windows).

One of the coolest things about Firefox though is its extensibility. There is a vibrant universe of browser add-ons for Firefox that change its look, enhance its functionality, and more. Most of these add-ons work on all operating systems that Firefox works on, so I can create a similar browsing environment quickly and easily on all the three major platforms (all of which I use nearly-daily). The list below is my ‘must have’ add-on list, so be sure to give these a look as you spec-out your own copy of Firefox.

Note that some of these add-ons might not be formally set up to work in test releases of Firefox, like the Firefox 3.5 beta I am using. As such, you may need to disable compatibility checking to use them in unreleased versions of the browser. I have had virtually no compatibility problems with these add-ons in Firefox 3.5 beta.

Read more . . .

Apple Drops the Ball, Again

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I am becoming increasingly unhappy with Apple. Don’t get me wrong, Mac OS X is still an excellent operating system, and Apple computers are still high quality machines. But with Linux distributions growing ever-more easy to use, and Microsoft coming to its senses with its upcoming Windows 7, and the average computer user becoming more knowledgeable, Apple could very easily lose all of the gains it has made in the last decade if they are not careful.

One way for Apple to lose support among one of its key user groups—nerdy power users like myself—is to drop the ball on major security vulnerabilities. No operating system is completely secure, but it is incumbent upon the creator of an operating system to repair identified security issues in a timely manner.

Last year, Apple was the only major operating system maker that failed to release a patch on a worldwide coordinated ‘patch day’ to resolve a major security hole that affected all platforms. Every major Linux distribution, every current Unix builder, and even Microsoft patched their systems against that DNS bug on the same day. Apple, though made aware of the issue at the same time as everybody else, left their users un-patched for well over a month against one of the most computer serious security issues since the advent of the Internet.

Now, word is coming out that a bug in Java technology that leaves computer users at risk from hackers remains un-patched by Apple in Mac OS X more than nine months after the issue was discovered, and long after the Java systems on every major Unix, Linux, and Windows system have been patched. Not cool.

It is only a matter of time before Apple’s inexplicable negligence with these kinds of security issues results in a major virus making the rounds in the Mac OS X user community, which will slaughter Apple’s reputation for security and stability. I hope the folks in Cupertino are taking note.

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.