Brad Ideas Robocars & More

Every time I take an RV trip (ie. each Burning Man) I come up with more observations. The biggest one is that it cost $360 in gasoline to go from the bay area to the black rock desert, about 800 miles. And that's at a price still well below world price. The RV owner said he was planning to get out of the business, people no longer want to pay the gas price.

If you noticed a long break in the blogging, it's because I was at Burning Man. And while people do blog from Burning Man, it's not what you want to spend your time doing. I will have more entries in the future, but let me relate some stories of the network and the phone booth first.

Last year, we erected a free phone booth in the desert to great results. This year, it was going to be even better because of a plan for a new internet connection. In the past, John Gilmore had brought his satellite dish, which had all the latency and bandwidth limits of satellite. This year he splurged on getting a microwave link in, which will be even faster next year. Sadly, much of that money was wasted because we never got the "first mile" -- the on-playa 802.11 network -- operating at a satisfactory level. There was huge packet loss and jitter in most places, when it was up at all. Next time some of the money will go into better equipment and planning for the local network.

As such, the phone booth, located in our camp on 7:30, only worked intermittently and rarely with great voice quality. We eventually decided to sacrifice the aesthetic purity of a booth sitting in the desert, connected to nothing, and moved it on its wagon by trike to the center camp, home of the incoming microwave link. The we set it up on the street, with an ethernet wire snaking in. We were no longer wireless, but the voice quality was top notch. I wasn't able to spend much time with it but reports were that the line got very long at times.

In our own camp, you could tell if it was working or not based on whether there was a line. Even waiting for it to work was better than the 2-3 hour time investment of taking the bus to the phone booth in Gerlach.

Last year, I recounted the emotional experience people had using an unexpected and impossible phone to hear the voices of loved ones. This year, this was magnified by Katrina. I learned of Katrina, in fact, when people came to ask to use the phone to contact their relatives in NOLA. (Read on...)

You are probably familiar with Google adsense, which is providing the ads you see on the right hand side of this page. Adsense code examines the text of pages, and tries to match Google adwords bids against it. The publisher of the page gets some undisclosed share of the Google revenue.

A mantra in the security community, at least among some, has been that crypto that isn't really strong is worse than having no crypto at all. The feeling is that a false sense of security can be worse than having no security as long as you know you have none. The bad examples include of course truly weak systems (like 40 bit SSL and even DES), systems that appear strong but have not been independently verified, and perhaps the greatest villian, "security through obscurity" where the details of the security are kept secret -- and thus unverified by 3rd parties -- in a hope that might make them safer from attack.

On the surface, all of these arguments are valid. From a cryptographer's standpoint, since we know how to design good cryptography, why would we use anything less?

However, the problem is more complex than that, for it is not simply a problem of cryptography, but of business models, user interface and deployment. I fear that the attitude of "do it perfectly or not at all" has left the public with "not at all" far more than it should have.

An interesting illustration of the conflict is Skype. Skype encrypts all its calls as a matter of course. The user is unaware it's even happening, and does nothing to turn it on. It just works. However, Skype is proprietary. They have not allowed independent parties to study the quality of their encryption. They advertise they use AES-256, which is a well trusted cypher, but they haven't let people see if they've made mistakes in how they set it up.

This has caused criticism from the security community. And again, there is nothing wrong with the criticism in an academic sense. It certainly would be better if Skype laid bare their protocol and let people verify it. You could trust it more. Read on...

Just back from a day at Bar Camp which was quickly put together as a tongue-in-cheek response to Tim O'Reilly's Foo Camp and folks who had not been invited. Foo Camp is great fun, and Tim does it all for free, so it's not suprising he has to turn people away -- even me :-) -- but Bar Camp was surprisingly good for something thrown together at the last minute with no costs.

I've called before for a system of Universal DC Power and I still want it, but there is a partial step we could take.

I have a laptop power supply that comes with a variety of tips. The tips tell (through something as simple as a resistor) the power supply how much voltage and current to supply for the laptop they are designed for. I bought mine for use in an airplane, others are sold that do both 12v and AC power.

Hot in the blogosphere these days, as a result of the Creationism/ID vs. Evolution debate is Pastafarianism, the worship of the Giant Flying Spaghetti Monster. The idea is to show that something as made up as the GFSM is as consistent as ID.

One of the scourages of urban areas is the requirement (I presume) that heavy equipment make a loud beeping noise when it's backing up. It's meant to warn anybody standing behind the vehicle, presumably because the driver doesn't have the same field of vision to see you, and because people are more wary of standing in front of a moving vehicle than behind it.

As some will know, I got heavily into the Hugo awards 13 years ago during my efforts at becoming an eBook publisher in the SF field. The Hugo award is voted on by the fans who attend the annual World Science Fiction Convention, or Worldcon, a moderately small voting pool (under 1000 of the typical 4000 to 7000 attendees will vote.)

The most important award and 2nd most voted on is the one for best Novel. The least important, but most voted on award is the one for best movie.

But still, for a long time, though both SF and Fantasy qualified for the award, the best Novel went exclusively to Science Fiction (with one dab into alternate history by Phillip K. Dick) and usually to hard, ideas-based SF. This went on until 2000 when the superb hard-SF novel "A Deepness in the Sky" won. The drama award was also heavily into SF, though it had some deviations, such as the coverage of Apollo XI and a few films in the 80s.

But in 2001, for the first time, a Fantasy novel won the best novel Hugo. Not just any fantasy novel, but a children's novel, Harry Potter 4. Of course, the Harry Potter series is the most remarkable success not just in fantasy, but in publishing, so this is not too shocking. What's surprising is that in 2002, 2004 and 2005 a fantasy novel would win best novel. At the same time, fantasies won all the best movie awards and all of the new best TV episode award until 2005. (Read on...)

I recently picked up a surplus battery-powered motor assist for a bicycle, and it's a lot of fun. Due to lower power you have to start peddling to 3mph and then it can run the bike for 10 miles at 10mph (for normal weight people, not me.)

Newspapers won't like this idea, but the truth is that most of the funnies aren't funny, certainly not every day. There are some talented people doing comic strips, but it's hard to do on a 7 days a week schedule, so they are almost all inconsistent.

A lot of older computers that people are ready to throw away can be decent linux boxes, in schools or in other charitable locations.

I'm not the first to think about it, since I see a bunch of patent filings related to it, but how hard would it be to have a sensor for windshield fog. Seems to me you could bounce light (UV perhaps which water scatters, though other colours might work) off the windshield to detect if there's fog on the inside and use that to control the defogger.

In this new category, "What a great idea" I will document interesting ideas I have seen in my travels. Things that make you go "why didn't I think of that?" Some may be new, others just new to me.

At a recent symphony concert, I came out at intermission to see a table laid out with drinks and snacks, each with a little numbered placard. People had placed and prepaid orders before the show, and thus could get their drink without any line.

Recently, Joel on Software wrote an essay on good programmers and how they are qualitatively different from average ones. This is not a new realization, and he knows it and references sources like "The Mythical Man Month." It was accepted wisdom decades ago that a small team of really brilliant programmers would make a better product than a giant team of lesser ones.

Mapping programs, and fancy GPSs come with map databases that will, among other things, plot routes for you and estimate the time to travel them. That's great, but they are often wrong in a number of ways. Sometimes the streets are wrong (missing, really just a trail, etc.) and they just do a rough estimation of travel time.

Recently there was a big fuss (including denouncements from many I know) over a U.S. effort to do away with the leap second. People claimed this was like trying to legislate PI to be 3.I am amazed at the leap the the defense of the leap second. I would be glad to see it go. All our computers keep track of time internally as a number of seconds since some epoch, typically Jan 1 1970 or 1980. They go through various contortions to turn that absolute time into the local time. This includes knowing all the leap-day calculations

This is a tricky puzzle question I thought up some time ago, but I figured I would blog it.

As people who study physics know, the acceleration a falling body undergoes if dropped (in a vacuum) at the surface of the earth is known as "g", or 9.8 meters per second per second.

This is so close to 10 that most students and people doing back of envelope calculations often use 10 as the value of a "g". It's easy. Fall for one second and you're going 10 meters/second.

Ok, this idea will make no sense to those who have not gone RV camping. RVs have 3 water tanks -- one for fresh water, one for the toilet sewage (known as "black water") and one for the other drains (shower, sinks) known as "grey water." When you camp in unserviced campsites for a while you become very aware of the capacities of your tanks.

However, the RV uses the fresh water tank to "flush" the toilet. It seems to me that with a small extra water pump, one could use the grey water, or a mixture -- grey with a final spurt of fresh to rinse the bowl.

RVs don't really flush the toilet, that would use way too much water. You rinse the bowl after #1 and you pre-fill the bowl before #2 and rinse later.

The EFF is holding a Blog-a-thon on our 15th anniversary inviting people to describe things that made them decide to fight for freedom.