Laugh out loud funny stuff

SomaliNet

The United States (US) President George W. Bush was on Wednesday accused by Hizbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah of creating chaos in Lebanon.

The Hizbollah leader rejected President Bush’s charge that the militant group and its allies were causing the violence[...]

Pelosi backs the surge?

al-Sabaah

MP Hassan Sinead stressed that US Congress Speaker Nancy Pelosi showed her liking of Prime Minister Noori Maliki and his programs for security and democracy in Iraq

While he said that Maliki would surprise outlaws by swoop down them at accurate, exact and complete plan.Maliki offered to Pelosi who visited Baghdad details about Government tasks especially security plan and she stressed support Democratic Party to PM and focused on that some disputes with Republican Party wouldn’t affect US support to Iraq.These signs stressed shifting the plan to wide activate stage especially with political escalation from White House against sides affect negative on security situation in Iraq, and what have been said that US Defense Minister Robert Gates began speedup timetable of entering added troops

H/T ITM

Also of interest: Qazanyia dam goes online. Major benefits to Iraqi agriculture expected to occur in the region as a result.

Citizens suggest one week amnesty for insurgents to turn over weapons before major operations begin.

[MY NOTE]
This would be in keeping with the Koran's requirement to offer repentance/redemption to miscreants before dropping the hammer on them hard. The implication of course, is that the citizenry are willing to have the hammer dropped HARD if they're extending this sort of offer. This is not a good time to be a bad guy in Iraq.

Remembering the pioneers of space

It was 40 years ago that Virgil Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee died in the Apollo launchpad fire (and many test pilots before and after them).

Many have stood on all their shoulders since - this is the way of engineering progress. Mistakes are made, unaccounted for situations occur, systems fail and people die as a result. We add new data points, make our notes and pray we learn something from the errors. One of the worst things for an engineer is the mystery failure - the one you can't explain.

As a young whelp engineer at Rockwell working on the Space Shuttle I had the honor of working with one of cockpit flight computer systems (the DEU's that control the screens and keypads) that exhibited just such a "mystery failure" with disturbing regularity. For a number of years before I got there, the machines were just locking up randomly. No particular pattern of events or sequence led to it. Nobody could figure out why. It was being written off as cosmic rays, gremlins, etc. No matter what was causing it, we were losing one about once a month to this issue. With only about 20 units in existence in the whole Shuttle program (in labs and orbiters combined), the chances of losing one on a flight was significantly greater than zero.

I resolved to find that bug and explain it, even if it couldn't be fixed (there was only 20 words of patch space left in the box, so a repair might not be possible). However, an explained failure is far preferable to NASA and flight crews than mystery failures. Known devils are OK. Unknown devils are scary.

After several days of sliding a mental window over the assembler code(I suspected it was a vulnerability window interrupt related issue), I did find the cause - there was indeed a ~43 microsecond window in which the thing would go nuts if an interrupt occurred during that small window of vulnerability. The DEU is a really slow machine, so a 43 microsecond window on it was only a few instructions.

Essentially, the issue was a classic mutual exclusion problem one would solve with a semaphore or similar mechanism. Problem was, the CPU was very primitive and didn't have any low level hardware capability for implementing a semaphore the way modern CPU's do. i.e. it had no notion of an exchange instruction. There's always Bankers algorithn, but that wasn't going to fit in 20 words of patch space, so we lived with it for STS-1/2/3, and I don't know what happend after that. But at least it was explained now. Knowledge had been increased. The unknown, had become known.

Gifts for morons: Electric Forks

For decades now I've used an "electric fork" as a jest for a device that is completely worthless. Now I learn that someone has in fact patented the electric fork. In fact the electric fork is targeted directly at the moron market, which of course makes it interesting. This is a fork designed to tell people too stupid to know they're still hungry when to eat the next mouth full of food with an audible beep. OK, lemurs and even rats had this difficult decision process figured out millions of years ago, but hey - they don't use forks and don't file patents so they're screwed. It took a human to invent and patent the electric fork!

Kerry: US is "international pariah"

Will someone please tell all the illegal aliens that we're a pariah so they'll stop coming.

Pelosi: 110,000+ African AIDS deaths "fiscally responsible"

I guess this is part of the Democrat's "new direction". With the non-stroke of a pen, the Democrats will kill more people in one year via neglect than Bush ever could in two wars during the same year.

Smart. Tough. Homicidally "compassionate". Time to start the Pelosi Death Clock™, so we can keep track of the "grim milestones".

San Francisco Chronicle

[...]As a result, 350,000 HIV-positive people slated to start AIDS drug treatment, most of them in Africa, won't get their medicine. Dybul estimated that 110,000 to 175,000 of them will die[...]

[...]President Bush's PEPFAR program had targeted 2007 for a major scale-up of the drug treatment program, and he had requested that spending for the year grow to $4 billion from $3.2 billion in 2006[...]

[...]Democrat leaders decided that, rather than renew the contentious budget debates that went nowhere in the fall, they would pass one more continuing resolution to keep nearly all federal spending levels flat until October[...]

[...]Drew Hammill, a spokesman for Pelosi, said she is fully aware of the problem. "She staunchly supports these programs, but we are also trying to achieve fiscal responsibility," he said[...]

The law of unintended consequences: "green" == hungry

Squeeze the world corn market with high demands for Ethanol, and there will obviously be less corn making its way into the food pipeline and corn based food product prices will spike. Econ 101.

Al Gore don't like poor Mexicans ;->

WaPo

[...]Tortilla prices have tripled or quadrupled in some parts of Mexico since last summer[...]

Chickens coming home to roost - Pali's bomb Saudi media office

I'm constantly reminded of the parable of the scorpion and the frog. You simply can't make deals with scorpions. Eventually, they'll run true to their nature. Its just a matter of time.

YNETNEWS

A bomb exploded in the Gaza Strip offices of a leading Arabic-language news channel late Monday evening, Palestinian eyewitnesses said, causing severe property damage but no injuries.

It is widely believed that the Saudi-owned TV channel al-Arabiya was targeted over a report aired last week in which it was claimed that Palestinian Prime Minister and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh cursed God[...]

So you want a pocket knife eh?

Only $1,200. Cheap at twice the price.

WENGER

H/T Engineering Johnson

Terror mastermind's greatest concern? Lack of good help

Everyone knows it hard to find good help these days. This apparently is a problem for terrorists too. Terrorist masterminds must be pulling their out over the low quality and sub-par intelligence of recruits these days.

ABC

[...]"He kept saying he wanted a HAZMAT license, and he wanted it quickly and that he did not want to learn to back the truck up, only to be able to drive it forward,"[...]

H/T Ace

If you read the comments section at the Blotter, you'll see one of Ace's long time trolls "Ryan" leaping to this idiot's defense too.

Where spam comes from

Good designs, bad designs

I've written some previously about the OBJ hacking programming project I've got going on. Mostly I've written about issues encountered with various tools, compilers etc, but not much about architecture and design.

The guts of the project - its core architecture and original code base - date back to around 1984. The amazing thing as its been expanded to include 32 bit records and a many new OBJ record types is that the core has remained stable. New capabilities, features, and workaround for certain bugs in vendor generated OBJ's haven't required any significant design changes at all. Where all the new stuff would plug in was readily apparent and straight forward. The code base today has probably grown by about 3X since the 1984 vintage original, yet new pieces are still dropping right in without any special hoopla. Much of the new code falls into the category of a "code museum" where all the dirty laundry various compiler vendors ever hid gets exposed and dealt with. Its sort of a "living history" of compiler back ends, and their code generation quirks, over the past 22 years. Yet the code is still (relatively) easy to understand and maintain, even though it deals with some of the most horrible hacks ever perpetrated over the last quarter century.

Why? Good design and architecture. Reasonable data structures, and distinct phases of processing were chosen back in 1984. The thing converts OBJ's into a linked list of internal records. Those internal records turned out to be flexible enough to represent both 16 and 32 bit flavors of various things. I can shuffle them like a deck of cards, move'em around, insert new ones, delete others and change anything I like with ease and the OBJ generator phase just takes the list and spits out a new OBJ module. The linked list was the right way to represent this particular class of data.

I C++ programmer would look at this architecture and code and declare it to be essentially "object oriented" even though its plain ANSI C. All the syntactic trinkets of C++ are missing, but the ideas are there. Heck, in this regard I've been writing OOP assembler code for 25 years too. Object oriented isn't about tools, its about how you approach a task.

The tools, as in the case of C++, are actually quite horrific in their design, promote arcane problems, and foster confusion. There are some conveniences of course, but the whole gestalt of C++ itself was forged in the darkest of Torquemada's torture chambers. I will be avoiding it for this OBJ hacking project.

How does one tell a good design from a bad? Its not always apparent. If you can add new features a year later without whining about how crappy the code is, you probably have design that isn't horrible. If the code base can survive for 5 years or so, and still be readily maintainable, it was probably a good design to begin with. If the code can transition to different platforms without major rewrites all over the place, its probably not too bad.

I know I could wrap a fairly functional Windows or Motif front end around this OBJ hacking tool in a matter of days because of the way its designed. The code bases for many command line apps had a real hard time making that kind of platform transition. Lotus and Ashton Tate struggled with their code bases years ago. Lotus struggled for years getting the "new" Lotus v3.0 product out the door, and ultimately wound up producing another rev of the Lotus 2.x product when the 3.0 stuff faltered in the market place because of performance issues.

I suppose good designs are as Rehnquist said, kinda like porn - hard to quantify, but you know them when you see them. The real test is in their durability over the years. If the maintenance programmers are always whining about crap and wanting to rewrite stuff, you probably don't have a good design. In fact you may not even have an actual design, rather just a collection of code blobs stitched together with bubble gum and bailing wire.

Armored Humvee's causing fatalities in Iraq

I-MEF

One of the top killers of Soldiers in Iraq isn't necessarily combat-related.
Since operations began in March of 2003, many Soldiers have been killed when they can't escape a Humvee - often because it has rolled into one of Iraq"s numerous irrigation canals.

When an armored truck is upside-down or on its side, it can take three Soldiers to push a door open enough to get out, and if the doors are sunken into the mud, it can be nearly impossible[...]

There are pics at the I-MEF link of a field expedient device that has been devised to assist with this issue. That is probably about as good as they'll get in dealing with units in the field.

Now I put on my engineer hat and take a look at this problem from a mechanical design POV. There's a couple of design issues here.

1) The jamming doors
2) The balky "combat locks"

We can see from the pics of the humvee that #1 is probably being exacerbated by the Humvee door frame/door design. There are sharp edges at the front of the door. When you want to avoid jamming of mechanical parts during distortions, you want to avoid sharp edges like that. Rounded corners should be the rule. Rounded corners distribute stress, square corners concentrate it. A good layman's explanation of why rounded is better than square can be found in Carroll Smith's outstanding Engineer to Win book on race car design. Specifically in the chapter on "why things break". Smith writes well, and that book is about a whole lot more than just "race cars". Most of what he talks about is an outstanding guide for the general design of mechanical things you don't want to fail. The principles apply as well to Microwave ovens, bicycles and Humvees as well as they do high performance race cars.

The door hinge design itself is obviously part of the problem. Traditional hinges bind when distorted. We need to accept that and find a way around it. The problem as I see it, is that the door/hinge mechanism is basically bolted together (or may as well be when a door is closed/jammed. This is not a solution that anticipates getting wrecked - its a solution that presumes not getting wrecked. That's fine for the front door on your house or your fridge door, but its not so fine for a combat vehicle. What we need is a sturdy hinge that can be cutaway on a moments notice.

This ties in with the balky combat locks. You got difficult hinges on one side, and a difficult lock on the other - a fixed 2-point retaining system. If either the hinges or lock (preferably both) could be quickly released, the door could be kicked out when a bind-free door/frame design is present.

How to solve the hinge problem? I believe we need to look to the most successful parachute release design on the market today - Bill Booth's 3-ring system. The 3-ring provides massive mechanical leverage advantage in a very compact "bind free" design. Booth's 3-ring release has saved my life 3 times during parachute malfunctions. I will personally attest to its simplicity and tendency to "just work".

I believe a door hinge attachment pivot based on a simple locating cone scheme attached with a variation of the 3-ring will solve both hinge binding and quick release issues. As you can see from the 3-ring pull force chart at the link above, there can be 2,000lb of pressure on a standard 3-ring and it will still release with only 9lb of pressure. With a locating cone scheme on the hinge pivots, the hinge side of the door will WANT to pop out when there's distortion - that's a good thing.

The balky combat lock issue could be solved with the same locating cone and 3-ring scheme so the whole lock mechanism itself could be released from the vehicle frame by a passenger inside. If you can release the hinges, and the combat lock, and the door frame has tapered steps and rounded edges to avoid binding it'll pop right off when you yank the 3-ring releases.

With some added Cypres Cutter type hardware, an external rescue option wouldn't be too hard to add. That would be an externally operated pyrotechnic type cutter head added to the 3-ring release locking loop. Fire the cutter(s) and the 3-ring would release.

Confessions...

I liked Waterworld and The Postman

Defending the rights of......garbage

Why SWA executives and lawyers already on payroll, or Palm Beach County's own reps to the state legislature simply can't represent the county's crucial garbage interests in Tallahassee themselves remains unanswered. Its not like Critical Garbage-Centric Legislation™ is being debated every day in those distinguished halls.

Pravda In Paradise

Four firms are vying for a lobbying contract that Palm Beach County commissioners will award next month to represent the county's Solid Waste Authority in Tallahassee. The firm that's received more than $200,000 for SWA lobbying during the last six years - Lewis, Longman & Walker - had better not count on Commission Chairwoman Addie Greene's vote...

Palm Beach County dems play loose with election cash

Pravda In Paradise

The people who received the cash in $50, $20 and $5 bills weren't listed when the party filed a report last week on its activities for November and December. Florida law requires a party or candidate to list the full name and address of each person to whom a campaign expenditure is made.

County Democratic Chairman Wahid Mahmood [yes, he's a muslim] said he didn't know about the cash payments [yea right] until the Politics column started asking questions last week. Mahmood said the party would get the names of the cash recipients and file an amended report detailing who was paid[...]

[...]The $4,900 check from the party, Enright said, was given to her with Mahmood's blessing for the specific purpose of getting cash to pay Election Day workers. Enright said the typical worker got $75 in an envelope that contained a $50 bill, a $20 bill and a $5 bill. When the $4,900 turned out to be not quite enough, Enright said, Mahmood approved the $225 check three days later so she could pay additional workers.

Associated Press - definitively proven liars

Anyone who didn't have their head up their ass knew it, but now Malkin has posted actual video evidence...as opposed to AP assertions.

AP is working for the enemy. It is about time Centcom recognizes this sad fact and booted the whole lot of them out of theater.

HOT AIR

Normally I would bash the French...but

This Renault Logan car looks like something interesting. Emphasis on CHEAP, with a reasonable level of crash protection.

I would like to see it with a small turbo-Diesel engine though. One problem - they've gone wild with options and models. K.I.S.S. This served VW well for decades during the air cooled era.

Reliability is also an unknown. Renault's have a rep as hanger queens. If its a Lada, I'm not interested.

Of course they're going to need a LOT of these to replace all that are being destroyed by the nightly Paris Car-b-ques ;->

PETA meets Jack's mom

Bottom line - mom maces the PETA creep.

All You Need is Jack!: PETA gets faced...by my Mom.

Go to prison -- live longer

Pardon me while I step out and rob a bank...strictly for therapeutic reasons of course.

DOJ(PDF document)

[...]From 2001 to 2004, 99% of State prisoners were between
ages 15 and 64. When compared to mortality rates for U.S. residents in this age group, the overall mortality rate of State prisoners was 19% lower during this period[...]