Category Archives: Musings

From today’s Secrecy News. This is way cooler than what I’m currently building in PowerPoint.

The extraction of an Iraqi MiG aircraft buried in the Iraqi desert
is documented in a July 2003 presentation prepared by the Defense
Intelligence Agency. A copy of the 1 MB PowerPoint DIA file, whimsically entitled “Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Lost Iraqi MiG,” is posted here.

I got a message today from a gentleman identifying himself as a colonel in the USMCR, currently attached to US Marine Corps Forces Europe. In the message, the colonel asked me to point out the existence of the Wounded Warrior Hospital Fund. From their site:

The Wounded Warrior Hospital Fund, was created to purchase  quality-of-life items for those Soldiers, Airmen, Sailors and Marines wounded or injured  in Iraq and Afghanistan and evacuated to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, Germany.

I haven’t done any deep background investigations, but their site appears legit, and I know the need is pressing, so I made a contribution. No matter your feelings toward the war, I ask that you at least drop by the site and see what they’re about.

On the one hand, my copy of Panther is here. Here’s what a geek I am: I stopped eating lunch so I could go start installing it on the Cube. After lunch, it’ll be time to slap it on my main machine. Arlene’s iMac will be Panther-free for a short while.
On the other hand, Maria the FedEx lady is going in for rotator cuff surgery on Monday, so we won’t see her again until after the new year. That’s a shame. At a company that is just bursting with friendly, helpful people, she’s really distinguished herself. The kids love to see her, and she reciprocates. I hope she gets well soon.

So, if engineers can revitalize the wetlands destroyed by Saddam Hussein in his long campaign against the Kurds, maybe the same approach would work in Louisiana.

Scoble made yesterday a one-post day in honor of the Office 2003 launch. That means his daily output today will probably be astonishing.

I haven’t blogged much because I’ve been busy. Between a rush project we’re doing to build some security labs and a longer, ongoing project to write a large document about enterprise messaging deployment, I haven’t had much time to do anything else. Part of the payoff came yesterday, though, when the Microsoft lead for the messaging project asked me to call her after a conference call we were finishing. Why? Two reasons: a) she wanted us to bill her immediately (instead of later), and b) she wanted to make us aware of two other groups within Microsoft that she thought we could get more work from. That’s the sign that we’re doing something right– when a customer is willing to make an internal referral like that, we must be on the right track.

Magnatune (motto: “We’re Not Evil”) is a new record label and music distribution system. Lots of other people have already blogged about them, but I’ve just gotten around to trying them.
One of their best features is that they offer streams of all of their music– classical, rock, electronic, etc.– so you can try before you buy. I just bought my first album from them, EPROMs from Belief Systems. For $8, it’s a great value, and the artist gets $4, which is, oh, about 25x what they would expect to receive from a major-label CD purchase. Rock on!

Yesterday the LA Times reported that the Israelis have submarines capable of firing the nuclear weapons that they won’t admit to having. (Note to readers: the Israelis have had nukes since the mid-60s, according to Sy Hersh, but they won’t admit it and none of the other members of the nuclear club have ever pressed them on it.) If this report were true, it would mean that Israel had a proper strategic triad, subs being the delivery system most difficult for an opponent to pre-emptively attack.
The LA Times report says that Israel modified Harpoons to carry nuclear warheads, which is a little odd. Harpoons are normally anti-shipping missiles, with a relatively small payload (220Kg) and short range (120Km). Of course, the Israelis promptly issued a denial of sorts, in which a former defense minister said that it was “impossible” to re-engineer the Harpoon to carry a nuclear warhead.
However, this statement doesn’t say a think about the homegrown Israeli Popeye SLCM, which is almost certainly the primary delivery system for those subs. The FAS has some other interesting reading, but I note that most of their cited sources are 2-3 years old.

So, I got a letter from the IRS asking me to resubmit a page (yes, one page, except they wrote “on page” in the letter, but I digress…) Here’s the best part: it was signed by one Robert L. Williams, Manager, Document Perfection. I feel just grand knowing that the IRS has a department dedicated to document perfection (I’m not the only one, either). That reminds me of part of the LDS Church‘s three-fold mission (see footnote 7), except with a government slant.

I can’t decide which job I’d prefer:

• Working for the French government’s publicity verification service (see this AP story on ads for thong underwear)
• the International Earth Rotation Service. (Didn’t know there was such a thing? Well, now you do.) I can just see the business cards now…

For some reason, Pair doesn’t make backups of user directories. Ooops.