April 2008 Archive of engeniusBLOG

Like many places in the world, water quality is an issue here in northern New England. Our ocean beaches and rivers are a source of tourist revenue and recreation for locals, so we have town Conservation Commission volunteers taking water samples a few times every week, trying to pinpoint sources of pollution into our streams and onto our seashore.

The water samples are sent to a local lab for analysis, then plans of action are drawn up. Oftentimes, a strategy for abatement involves a homeowner, local farmer, or horse rancher. Farm runoff from animals and defective septic systems are sometimes pinpointed as culprits where high bacterial counts are found.

One of the techniques used to determine if a septic system or treatment plant is polluting a watercourse is the detection of so-called optical brighteners. These dyes are found in water that contains effluent from a home laundry. The optical...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

My first hands-on experience with Soviet-era engineering was in 1978. The company I was working for had a large contract for the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games, connecting all the sites with video from all the other sites (23, if I remember correctly), so a commentator at one site could watch all the events taking place. As I have observed before, we got paid before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan when the Games, under American pressure (and the then love of Osama Bin Laden), ended up being a rather heavily Eastern Block affair.

The Soviets had already been to our plant in West London for acceptance tests – three engineers plus a communist minder – and we had gotten very friendly with one another. We had shocked them with the contents of Western supermarkets; taken them to spectacular box seats to watch a Tchaikovsky ballet; wined and dined them on luxurious, ethnic food from the rest of Europe; left them speechless when I didn’t take the windshield wipers off m...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

I was reviewing a book this week (An Analog Electronics Companion: Basic Circuit Design for Engineers and Scientists, by Scott Hamilton) and it reminded me, very forcefully, why it was that I wanted to be an engineer.

Far from being one of those people who go to college to “find themselves” and start on one track and then move to another, I knew from age maybe 11 that I wanted to be an electronics engineer and that I wanted to work in the BBC. At that age I was taking TVs apart – and putting them back together again – and I started building projects from scratch, including power supplies with lethal output voltages for my valve (tube) radios.

By the time I was 17 I held the third amateur TV license issued in the UK (G6AAC/T) and I was still determined to go the techie route.

I didn’t lie abo...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

A former employer once demanded that I scrap my timeworn landline telephone and fax. He insisted that I convert my home office to VoIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) and PC-hosted faxing. The cost savings would be substantial, he promised, reminding me that he was footing the bills.

Indicating to my boss that Internet service in my neck of the woods wasn't entirely satisfactory and reliable, I declined, and he ultimately agreed. Thankfully I'm still a POTS (plain old telephone system) user.

I digress. The proposed VoIP scheme would have involved the company VPN (virtual private network), making my telephone service entirely dependent on what had already proven to be a poorly managed corporate IT department. Not a pretty picture. Besides, with unlimited POTS calling service already in place in my home office, I could use my landlines for personal and private use after business hours. There were also times when I would field calls, both business and personal, after...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

Regardless of who wins the quadrennial slow-motion train wreck we call the US presidential election this November (2008), any responsible leader is going to have to bring our energy policy in line with the environmental and economic realities that we’ve spent the last eight years desperately trying to ignore. If there is any good news here, it’s that the private sector has been awake nights thinking about these matters and has lots of very useful information ready to share with a leader willing to listen. Some of the best of this thinking has appeared in the form of three highly-readable books that provide some excellent insights into the historic and economic factors that led to our dependence on fossil fuels, as well as the technologies and polices that could end it.

Whether you’re the next occupant of the Oval Office, or just one of the folks that puts him or her there, I’d consider these three very different books to be required reading before the...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

Back in the days when the city of Sunnyvale (in the Bay area) was full of defense contractors in hundreds of specialty buildings - some with hidden rooms, some with strangely equipped basements, others with tunnels that connected buildings together and also led on to military base areas - there were also lots of Soviet spies. They hung around the area’s lounges, in particular, and they must have garnered a lot of after-work chatter because their bosses kept paying their bar bills. It was always amazing to me how many state secrets were out in the open, but these guys didn’t have the technical background to recognize them for what they were.

Today it is no different, except that the majority of the baddies are from China. The Chinese-Americans who are in positions of influence in the US are regarded by the FBI as easy targets for the industrial spy, and can be fairly carefully vetted. One of my past bosses, of Chinese origin, was actually visited by the FBI and qu...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

There’s an adage that says if you want to know what's going on, follow the money. A good way to do that is to go to the Maplight web site. Maplight provides a unique window into the connection between money and politics. It provides figures on campaign contributions, and matches those donations with how elected folks in Washington vote.

Here's one example: The telecom industry gave, on average, $10,600 to members of the House of Representatives who voted no, as opposed to just $7,000 to members who voted yes on the House amendment to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. In case you didn't make the connection, the FISA amendment passed on March 14, rejecting retroactive immunity for phone carriers who helped the National Security Agency carry out wiretapping without warrants.

If you find Maplight useful, you'll appreciate Click Here to Read More >>

The chilly April wind rippled the grass and the edges of the canopy that had been erected at the end of Runway 12 where the crowd of dignitaries, curiosity-seekers and a bunch of mostly-gray-headed men congregated. Rather than deal with the solemn speechifying by the town mayor and several state officials, I hunkered down behind the grill that my flying club had set up nearby and proceeded to make hot dogs for the crowd. Our club had been grilling hot dogs at every fly-in and kids-fly-free day we’d held, so it felt only right to offer up a final sacrament of charred tube steak in memory of the place that had been home to so many of our adventures and dreams. The day we’d all been long dreading had finally arrived as the little grass strip airport that we all loved was finally being closed to make room for a soccer field.

Twin Pines Airport (known on aeronautical charts as N75) was ...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

The rest of the United States could learn a lot from my home state of New Jersey as it’s gone through its series of ups and downs in the process of coming up with a workable electronic voting system. Recent evidence that our new voting machines, manufactured by Sequoia Voting Systems, seem to have trouble keeping track of how many people actually voted is only the latest in a series of problems that, at best, are a textbook example of poor hardware, software and user interface design practices.

Powered by Bronze Age (actually 1970s) Z80 processors and lacking modern Flash technology to store critical permanent information (they use easy-to-tamper battery-backed CMOS), about the only good news about these $5000 machines is that their design flaws and security holes are so obvious and ill-conceived that it’s tough to imagine they are the result of some shadowy conspiracy to rig votes. Sequoia’s recent ...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

In his 1970 book Future Shock, futurist author Alvin Toffler espoused the idea that someday, when almost everyone would be using credit cards instead of cash, muggers and robbers would likely prey on poor people constrained to paper currency.

What Toffler failed to envision was the PC and ubiquitous networked computing. How could he have foreseen ATMs on street corners, PayPal, on-line banking, and credit card scanners at virtually every retail establishment, restaurant, and gas pump? Toffler thought he hit the nail on the head when he claimed it would be safer to carry plastic than a wad of cash.

Is it safer? In February of last year, discount stores TJ Maxx and Marshall's reported that customer information from some 46 million credit cards and debit cards was stol...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

I don’t remember when I received my first Nigerian scam letter – it certainly wasn’t while I was living there – but once the first had arrived, they flew by air mail fast and furious.

Now, of course, you don’t get to collect new Nigerian stamps as the method of delivery has gotten so much faster: by e-mail. As the scam, and all its wonderful lottery derivatives, is basically a numbers game, e-mail could not be a more perfect delivery scheme. That people still fall for them is quite unbelievable to me: it shows that there is an innate greed in humans.

How do I know people still fall for it? Because the e-mails would stop coming if they were failing to work on some tiny percentage of returns. There is even a site listing 542 different scam letters that have been found over the years! It doesn’t seem to matter which country the hostaged millions of dollars are supposed to be i...  -- Click Here to Read More >>