I ran across this intriguing sentence in a GAO report on Los Alamos National Labs: LANL fabricates suites of sensors for Global Positioning System satellites that are used to monitor nuclear detonations. Interesting. Wonder what else GPS satellites do…

I’ve just (barely) beaten my self-imposed deadline of “before Christmas” for turning in my MSF application. They say that I should hear back from them in 3 or 4 weeks. The next step would be an interview. Don’t know how soon it would happen. I haven’t sent out an update in a while, so here’s where I am… I am visiting my parents in Roseburg, Oregon. While house-sitting in Redwood City during December, I worked a week and a half as a consultant. I also refinished the bathroom of the place I was staying. (Here’s where it gets complicated: it was actually the bathroom in a building I partly own, but I was there as a housesitter, not an owner. Get it?) I couldn’t mention in my updates that I have been refinishing a bathroom, because it was a surprise gift for Karl (my fellow owner). ...

Guys, here’s the real reason to do humanitarian aid work. Ladies, fear not, I’m on my way, as soon as I get around to putting my MSF application in, and they realize I’m the perfect candidate…

Today in addition to getting her shots, Kat got microchipped. I’m a little jealous; I figured my criminally invasive government or one of my evil employers would have chipped me before a pet I owned got it done. Anyway, in case you care (or happen to be searching the Internet for Kat’s number because you’ve found her), Kat’s number is 467B7B4F03.

Last night I made a video out of the random video clips I’d gathered with my and other people’s digital cameras. Instead of emailing the 45 megabyte movie to y’all (Bad Idea), I put the video on Google Video (Good Idea). The other nice thing is that instead of being in the stupid Windows-only movie format that Windows Movie Maker gave me (Bad Idea), Google translates it into a format that virtually any web browser can use (Good Idea). ...

I want a Firefox extension that lets me select some text on a webpage, right click, and get that HTML in a box to edit. Once I edit it, I want the extension to compute the diff between my edited copy and the copy in the web page, find an address to send it to the author of the page via e-mail, and send the diff to them. To find the e-mail address, it will look in the HTML for a hint via some standard HTML or some semi-standard HTML dealie that it defines itself. If it doesn’t find the e-mail address that way, then maybe something like trying to send e-mail to the technical contact for the domain name, according to Whois. Or maybe just “webmaster@$domain”. ...

I like the IRS. I’ve never really minded paying taxes, and though I have some complaints with the complexity of our tax code, I know that’s not the IRS’s fault. They do the best they can with the mess given to them each year by congress. I think the way the IRS does e-filing is stupid, but I suspect it’s one of those things that simply can’t be any better than it is, for a bunch of reasons out of control of the reasonable people at the IRS. (There are unreasonable people everywhere, even at the IRS.) ...

Info on Google’s proposal to the City of Mountain View to put in a WiFi network is publically available (490K PDF). There are some interesting things: It will be using mesh technology. There will be about 400 mesh nodes, and 3 uplinks to the Internet (which Google says will use fiber, as though the media really matters). The system will use a captive portal, requiring you to log in. The username and password will be a Google account (i.e. the same one as Gtalk, Gmail, customized homepage, etc.) The tinfoil-hat crowd will point out that this will allow Google to snoop all your packets and associate them will all of your e-mail and your chat logs. The installs will be on city-owned light poles. Parts of Mountain View will not get service immediately because their light poles are owned by PGE and Google and the city have to negotiate with PGE more. Don’t hold your breath on this, folks. PGE’s probably got some powerline Internet thing it wants to do instead. The equipment taps power to the light poles, and as such is unmetered. Google will pay $36 per pole per year for power. That’s $0.0041 per hour. If electricity costs the city 4 cents per kilowatt hour, that means the devices use 100 watts of power. Seems like a fair price. There is no mention of solar power or battery backup, which means that this system will be useless for disaster response. Also, because the equipment taps the utility power for the lights, it will not be possible to use generator power to fix some portion of the mesh. Finally, if street light circuits were de-prioritized for repair by the power company during an emergency (as seems likely), the Google wifi mesh would come back slower than other networking technologies. There is talk of running a VLAN over the network in the future for city services use. It is not going to be in 1.0. The security aspects of having city services data running over a wireless mesh would need to be thought about. I’m not saying it’s a bad idea, but it’s a sizable liability for Google to take on. There are grainy, useless pictures of the proposed hardware. No surprise, it looks like commodity stuff. Google’s value-add will be in software. There is no discussion of how the boxes will get installed. I suspect Google will contract that job out to someone with a fleet of boom trucks. Perhaps they will have Peek do it, who you see around town fixing traffic lights. This project is significant for more than the normal “Telcos Battle Municipal Wifi” reason. This is going to be a real mesh network. Mesh networking is one of those urban legends among networking people. Everyone says that they are nifty, but no one has ever seen one work. Perhaps Google will nail this like they have so many other things. ...

If you have a phone that can download Java games, and you know how to make it go visit URL’s outside the walled garden your provider desperately wants to keep you locked inside, you can go to this URL: http://google.com/glm to get Google Local for Mobiles. It will let you do everything that Google Maps can do on your phone. including satellite images! With my tiny screen, it’s probably mostly a geewhiz thing. With a hiptop it would be pretty neat, I bet. ...

I got back home to Redwood City on Friday. The drive was uneventful. The puppy dog seemed a little sad to leave Roseburg, where Mom had made a comfortable home for Kat, and had spoiled her rotten. But after a bit, she got back in the swing of being a traveling dog, and settled down in her crate in the car. When we arrived at my house on Arch Street, I excitedly told Kat that we were home and showed her around. She seemed scared and uncomfortable… afterall, this was just another place I was dumping her and (in her eyes) threatening to leave her again. After I set up a comfortable little temporary pen for her in the garage, she settled down a bit. We took a nice walk around the neighborhood yesterday and she liked that a lot. Everyone who saw her stopped to say hi. Everyone loves a puppy! ...