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RFID, endgame, and paranoia

Look what I found surreptitiously glued inside the cover of my copy of Derrick Jensen's endgame:

Yeah, it's an RFID tracking tag.

Somehow I don't think Jensen would be surprised.

If the sauce is not too blue

I've always wondered if the Mt. Elden Lookout Tower with all those radio, cell, and TV transmitters clustered so tightly around it was a very healthy place to be hanging out. Well, apparently it's not because yesterday I noticed that this scary looking notice had gone up sometime since my last Elden hike three weeks ago:

The jpeg's a little blurry so here's the text:

CAUTION

RADIO FREQUENCY ENVIRONMENT AREA

Authorized personnel only beyond this point! Radio frequency emissions at this site may exceed the federal occupational controlled exposure limits.

Personnel proceeding beyond this point must obey all posted signs, site guidelines and Federal Regulations for working in radio frequency environments.

Pretty scary stuff. The sign pretty much screams out Stay the Hell Away!

Well, inquiring minds wanted to know more. Some googling quickly turned up the FCC's Office of Engineering and Technology Radio Frequency Safety web site. It's filled with all sorts of interesting rocket science stuff like RF fields, Non-Ionizing Radiation, and Effective Radiating Power (ERP). The most applicable document appears to be Information On Human Exposure To Radiofrequency Fields From Cellular and PCS Radio Transmitters which has information on the maximum allowed microwatts per square centimeter from different transmitter types and powers. It seems to go well out of its way to reassure the reader that the amount of RF radiation you're likely to be exposed to at ground level under the average cellular base station is very low and not dangerous.

The picture changes a bit if you're not at ground level. From the document:

[...] Calculations corresponding to a "worst-case" situation (all transmitters operating simultaneously and continuously at the maximum licensed power) show that in order to be exposed to levels near the FCC's limits for cellular frequencies, an individual would essentially have to remain in the main transmitting beam (at the height of the antenna) and within a few feet from the antenna. [...]

[...] When cellular and PCS antennas are mounted at rooftop locations it is possible that RF levels greater than 1 µW/cm2 could be present on the rooftop itself. This might become an issue if the rooftop were accessible to maintenance personnel or others. However, exposures approaching or exceeding the safety guidelines are only likely to be encountered very close to and directly in front of the antennas. Even if RF levels were to be higher than desirable on a rooftop, appropriate restrictions could be placed on access.

I've emphasized the important pieces. Bottom line: if you're spending a lot of time up there at the same level as the transmitters then you're likely going to be exposed to potentially unsafe levels of RF radiation. This goes a long ways towards explaining why you hardly ever see anyone from the Forest Service manning the Elden Lookout tower and why the entrance is always locked, even when there is someone up there.

Here's a picture of the Elden Lookout complex with the Forest Service lookout tower just visible behind the tallest structure in the center:

The lookout tower isn't directly behind the transmitters but it's close enough. And there are a LOT of transmitters and receivers and who-the-hell-knows-what-all clustered around there.

Will I stop hiking Elden Lookout because of this? No. Will I forgo eating my energy bar on the cement block just down the hill from the transmitters? Probably!

By the way - did anyone get the obscure 80's reference in this post's title? Extra nostalgia points if you didn't have to google for it!

We've come a long way, baby

Way back in the '80s I took a couple of high school computer programming classes. They were taught using old Apple II computers and BASIC. Even though I was a total n00b and had no prior exposure to other computing platforms or environments, I intuitively knew that the whole process of writing software on those machines was really complicated and awful. Just to print out some text, write branching constructs, and do simple loops meant jumping through all kinds of syntactic loops.

To enter a BASIC program in Apple's DOS you'd have to literally type the program at the DOS prompt, entering each line of code into the computer's memory, complete with line numbers. If you needed to change the program you could LIST it out to the screen and retype the code lines but there was really no editing in the modern sense:

In the above Virtual ][ screenshot I entered a two line Applesoft BASIC program that simply prints the string "HELLO, WORLD." To make sure my program was actually there I LIST'ed my two lines of source code to the screen. I then decided to change the "HELLO, WORLD" string to "HELLO, APPLE II HERE" by retyping that line. Finally, I LISTed the modified program and ran it. As expected, the string "HELLO, APPLE II HERE" appeared on the console.

Archaic, huh? But in a nostalgic sort of way it's kinda cool nonetheless.

For simple programs it was okay but it got unwieldy for really big BASIC programs. And god help you if you needed to insert more lines of code than you had numbers for, i.e. you needed to insert six new lines of code between lines 5 and 10 of your program. There were programs you could use to redo the line numbers in your program but it still sucked.

The editing environment was bad but the BASIC language at that time was simply awful. Whereas in modern Visual Basic.NET you can do something like this

        For counter As Integer = 1 To 10
            If counter Mod 2 = 0 Then
                Console.WriteLine(counter & " EVEN")
            Else
                Console.WriteLine(counter & " ODD")
            End If
        Next

in Applesoft BASIC you had to do this:

        10 FOR C = 1 TO 10 STEP 1
        20 LET R = C = INT (C / 2) * 2
        30 IF R = 0 THEN PRINT C,"EVEN": GOTO 50
        40 IF R = 1 THEN PRINT C,"ODD": GOTO 50
        50 NEXT C
        60 END

Yuck.

They do the same thing (print if an integer between 1 and 10 is odd or even) and in about the same number of source lines but one is a whole lot more readable. Note the lack of a Modulus operator in the Applesoft version!

It gets worse. If you wanted to interface with the operating system - what little there was of it - then you had to resort to PEEK'ing and POKE'ing values into and out of arcane memory locations. Any non-trivial program's source code would be littered with hardcoded memory locations, making them all but impossible to understand. So, in one sense you were working in a high level language (BASIC) but if you needed to do anything with the machine then you immediately found yourself working very close to the "metal" as they say.

Fortunately, back in the later half of the '80s our programming teacher must've realized that learning the guts of a decade old personal computer was a pointless waste of time and I never learned what all those PEEK and POKE addresses were for. I suspect that the only reason we were still using Apple IIs and not IBM PCs was budgetary problems. The school probably got a big technology grant a few years before and someone filled the classroom full of good old Apple IIs.

Okay, so that's your trip down memory lane for this Sunday morning.

Through a glass smeared vaseline darkly

John Brownlee over at boingboing describes the iPhone's camera perfectly in a single sentence:

The iPhone's camera is execrable, like taking a photograph of saturated picture hell through a glass smeared vaseline darkly.

Execrable. That simple word says so much. Execrable. Perhaps it's the similarity to that other word - excrement - that makes it so pertinent to this device's camera functionality.

Here's another pic taken with the iPhone, this time of some Grackles going after spilled birdseed at a local Safeway store:

Sweet Jesus get a load of that distortion. Grackles are cool birds and deserve much better than to be reduced to barely recognizable silhouettes. I think one of those keychain cameras they sell for twenty bucks at the Wal-Mart checkout stand could do better.

Oh, and before anyone gets the wrong idea I should probably state that I don't hate my iPhone. It's actually a pretty decent phone and the e-mail and web functionality absolutely makes up for the limitations in the other aspects. Despite the awful camera I'd buy it again.

Fully automatic unintended consequences

The awful iPhone camera got me thinking seriously about buying a better camera. On a sort of whim I bought one of these babies at BestBuy for $179+tax:

It's a Canon SD790 IS fully automatic sub-compact camera:

• 10 megapixels
• Big, bright 3" LCD
• Optical Image Stabilizer (hence the 'IS' in the name)
• 3x optical zoom
• Up to ISO 1600
• Fully automatic point-n-shoot
• Super small

Its small size and light weight makes it extremely portable, which is a big plus for me. The larger or heavier a gadget is the more likely it is to be "forgotten" at home. You can throw this little job in your jacket pocket or fanny pack and it's like it's not even there. I was afraid the tiny size and lack of any sort of manual settings would be a drawback but I'm finding that it's not a problem. In fact, I really like this little camera.

Here are a few samples I took over the past few days:

Not too bad. Not bad at all. I love how it captured the play of light across the old Brigham City storage building in the middle pic. I just squatted down and waited for the sun to peak between the clouds. As soon as I clicked the shutter I knew I'd caught a decent picture because, well, it was right there on the LCD display.

And now for the "unintended consequences" I mentioned in the post title:

After going on a veritable shooting spree of hundreds of huge, high resolution ten megapixel images I realized that my iMac's hard drive was filling up! My already large iPhoto library had more than tripled in size in less than three days. I have a hunch that the $179 camera, which cost me less than half what my old Canon PowerShot A70 did, will ultimately drive me to purchase an expensive (and scary) internal hard drive replacement for the iMac and an even larger external backup drive.

Oh, well. I guess that's the cost of progress!

iPhone camera ineptness

Yesterday we went snowshoeing out by lower Lake Mary. It was great fun but also hard work -- snowshoeing is TOUGH! Like always, I forgot the good camera at home and was left with only the camera in my first generation iPhone. I snapped a bunch of pics and thought it would be interesting to illustrate just how awful the built-in iPhone camera really is. Note that all of this was in bright afternoon sunlight with no clouds or anything.

Some look pretty good, especially when you take in to account it's coming from a phone camera:

but most were seriously underexposed, coming out looking like night shots taken under a full moon:

[ Except for shrinking them down for web viewing I left the brightness and color alone. ]

The second and third picture above of the boulderfield were taken at the same spot; I just pivoted about 20 degrees to the left hoping to be able to capture more of the scene.

I guess you can't expect too much from a device that's packing so much gadgetry into such a tiny package. Still, the autoexposure on this device leaves a lot to be desired. It pretty consistently chooses to underexpose by a wide margin. Granted, you can fix some of this in post but the dynamic range in these pics don't leave you much room. I'm finding that most are not salvageable.

Is it better than no camera at all? Yes. But not by much...

My new favorite gadget

This is my new favorite gadget:

In case you don't recognize it, it's a P3 Kill A Watt, a nifty little doodad for measuring how much power a device is using. You plug it into an electric outlet and then plug your devices into it and it displays interesting info like voltage, frequency, amperage, and power usage. I picked one up on Amazon and it's the coolest thing ever (or at least it is today).

With the Kill A Watt I was able to determine that:

• My home FrankenPC + 20" LCD monitor uses 150W when it's doing nothing (80W if you turn off the monitor). If you work the processor cores and the 3D card to their maximum that number grows to 234W.
• My DSL modem and LinkSys router draw a total of 15W. That doesn't sound like much, but these things are on 24/7 so that measly 15W can add up over time.
• My 13" MacBook uses 30W when it's powered on and the battery is charging.
• My 24" aluminum iMac draws 112W when it's on. That drops to 50W when the display is sleeping. Unfortunately I forgot to measure it with the processor cores maxed out.

I found it especially interesting that the 24" iMac uses about the same power as the MacBook when the big display is powered down. This sort of confirms my suspicion that the iMac is basically a laptop core with a big ol' LCD monitor glued to it.

Before the Kill A Watt I was thinking about putting Linux on the FrankenPC and using it as a home file, database, backup, and web server. The dent that it would put in the electric bill puts the kibosh on that idea, though. It'd be far better to add an external 2.5" USB or firewire drive on the iMac and run everything from there.

The more ya know, I guess.

Beating the dead Vista

I'm a pretty agnostic sort of guy when it comes to software: I mostly see operating systems, compilers, and applications as tools to use towards accomplishing some goal. At work that goal is generally to run Visual Studio and PowerShell for systems and web programming. At home it's usually Safari, blogging tools, photoshop, and a game or two to break up the monotony. Whichever flavor of OS or application helps me to reach my goal is what I settle on.

At work I have a Core 2 Duo based Dell with four gigabytes of memory and a bunch of development and windows domain administration software installed on it. It runs Vista Ultimate 64-bit and from day one its performance has been.. shall we say... inconsistent for such a supposedly fast machine. Sometimes it's down right snappy. Other times it's sluggish and balky. The system will inexplicably pause and sputter for five or ten seconds at a time while trying to save a simple notepad text files.

At home I have an even faster quad-core Intel Q9300 processor based FrankenPC with four gigabytes of memory, a big SATA drive, and a fast ATI video card with 512MB of ram. It runs (ran) Vista Enterprise 64-bit and from day one it's been sputtery and sluggish. The system would inexplicably pause for long periods while loading applications, saving documents, or switching between running applications. You tended to see the busy cursor a lot even though not much of anything was running. And the hard drive just would not stop hammering away.

At first I thought the sputtery performance might be caused by Vista's advanced caching and content indexing stealing IOPS from foreground tasks. Several times the system monitor utility showed the indexing agent futzing around with files down in Flight Simulator's texture and content directories. It was like it was trying to index and cache up all those many gigabytes of game files. I tried excluding the folders from the index but it didn't seem to help; it just picked some other huge folder to mess with. Finally, in a throw-the-baby-out-with-the-bath-water moment I just disabled the services. No dice. Disk I/O was still randomly sluggish, although a lot of the disk chatter stopped.

At that point I started thinking something had gotten corrupted with the Vista installation or my drive was going south so I decided to try reinstalling the OS. And then something interesting happened: During the reinstall I discovered that I'd left my notes with the Vista Enterprise license key at work and couldn't finish. So just for the hell of it I put a copy of Windows XP Professional on the system.

It was at that point that I discovered that hidden in that glossy black Antec tower case was a speed demon capable of running all my Windows applications and games at lightning speed. Not just a little faster. But a lot faster. There are no random pauses in desktop interactivity, no busy cursors, and above all, the hard drive actually goes to sleep after a while! The endless disk chatter is gone.

All of this leads me to believe that something is wrong with Vista's disk I/O subsystem. I don't know what exactly, but two completely different PCs exhibited the same sluggish, erratic disk performance while running totally separate types of applications. Maybe it's all that DRM that Microsoft was forced to build into Vista so they could play BlueRay disks or something. I dunno. All I know is that something is definitely not up to par with Vista.

Enough ranting about the shortcomings of Microsoft's stillborn desktop OS. I'm going to go play Flight Simulator and World in Conflict until my hands cramp up. Life is too short to put up with bad software or slow computers!

Sadistic, Intelligent, and Dangerous

Before he got famous playing gladiators and mathematicians Russell Crowe played an evil AI program named SID 6.7 (Sadistic, Intelligent, Dangerous) in the 1995 sci-fi movie Virtuosity. In the movie SID is a software agent evolved using advanced genetic algorithms to emulate serial killers. The police use him as part of a sophisticated virtual reality training simulation.

Until things go horribly and predictably awry and SID escapes from the simulation into the real world he can be regarded as simply another computer program - albeit a very advanced one. Once he's out of the computer and committing real-life atrocities he takes on a much more sinister, and arguably evil persona. Throughout the movie SID performs more and more dastardly acts until Denzel Washington eventually kills him at the end.

Despite the cheesiness of the overall movie the idea that a computer program could be evil struck me as an interesting concept. We have evil people, evil organizations, and even evil countries (axis of evil anyone?) but objects are generally not regarded as evil themselves. A gun, for example, can be used to further a malicious goal, but the gun itself is neither good nor bad. It's just a tool. Software, even when it's controlling a physical entity like an automotive assembly plant robot, is also just a tool.

But at what point does software become evil? When did SID cease to be a simple non-player character in a virtual reality game and become evil?

I think the quality "evil", at least in SID's situation, requires three things. The first is intelligence, the second is the motive to harm, and the third the ability to harm. Without all of these qualities SID couldn't have been evil.

For example, if SID had not been artificially intelligent and had simply been blindly executing preprogrammed instructions like a clock then he would have lacked the ability to understand what he was doing. Without that understanding, without the knowledge that what he was doing was wrong, SID would simply not be evil.

Also, if SID had not had the motive to harm others then he also would not have been evil, much as buggy guidance software that causes a fatal plane crash cannot be evil. The same thing goes for careless kids who set fire to a house while playing with matches. Dangerous? Yes. Evil? No. The intent must be there in order for something to take on a malicious quality.

And finally, SID needed the ability to harm others before he could be truly evil. Just as thinking about robbing a store is not wrong until one acts upon those thoughts, SID didn't become evil until he actually began to hurt real people. The non-player characters in the simulations didn't count.

Apparently, others have thought about this as well because today I read that researcher Selmer Bringsjord in New York has been trying to build a software agent that is "evil." Sci-Am has a two page article describing it at Are You Evil? That Which Is Truly Wicked.

To be truly evil, someone must have sought to do harm by planning to commit some morally wrong action with no prompting from others (whether this person successfully executes his or her plan is beside the point). The evil person must have tried to carry out this plan with the hope of "causing considerable harm to others," Bringsjord says. Finally, "and most importantly," he adds, if this evil person were willing to analyze his or her reasons for wanting to commit this morally wrong action, these reasons would either prove to be incoherent, or they would reveal that the evil person knew he or she was doing something wrong and regarded the harm caused as a good thing.

My definition of an evil software agent and Bringsjord's general definition are generally the same. The one difference is that I don't make a distinction between prompted evil and self-concocted evil. Who cares if you thought of the idea yourself or copied someone else? If you did it, understood what you were doing, and wanted to do it, then it's evil.

In any case, the research is a fascinating exploration of the boundaries between Philosophy and Artificial Intelligence. Reminds me a little of Kenneth Colby's "Parry" program.

When upgrading the drive in your MacBook...

... you should keep the following rules in mind:

• If Apple says you should have a Phillips #1 screwdriver with a long handle then you should ensure that you have a Phillips #1 screwdriver with a long handle. A stubby little slot-tip jeweler's screwdriver won't work and if you insist on using it then you get what you deserve.
• You should pay very close attention to the orientation of the old drive while you're removing it. When you install the new drive your goal is to put it in the same way as the old one. If when you get to the reinsertion step you can't remember which way it went then you should stop, do research, and proceed only when you're sure which way the drive is supposed to go in. Remember: The 50-50 gamble only works half the time.
• If while you're inserting the new drive you feel a lot more resistance then you did when you removed the old drive then it's a clue you've got the bloody thing in upside down!
• If the new drive does somehow get into the bay upside down your first step should not be to void the MacBook's warranty by attempting to remove the laptop's back cover.
• The rubber vibration dampeners that help to hold the hard drive in place should not be bunched up like crumpled rubber-bands at the back of the drive bay. If you notice this then it means you've fucked up big-time and you're either going to get acquainted with a pair of long-handled tweezers or drive to the nearest Apple Store.

And above all:

• Read the instructions on Apple's web site before starting!

[ The MacBook's okay, but the five minute drive replacement turned into an evening-long exercise in fiddly little screws and sticky rubber slot guide thingies. Lesson learned: laptops - especially Apple laptops - aren't like big old desktop tower PCs. No matter how many drives you've replaced in servers and desktops, flying by the seat of your pants inside a laptop is probably going to end in tears. ]