And I though LA Traffic was bad...

I was following up on a recent article on an open source project that builds Windows Installer packages (.msi and .msn files) called WiX and wandered off to its lead developer Rob Mensching's blog where he had this post about driving in India: Its like Frogger!

That post links to this video at YouTube.  All I can say is that I'm surprised the 2 minute clip doesn't include at least one fatal injury ;-)

Aside from that digression, WiX looks like an interesting way to build reliable installation kits for both large and small tools without being obligated to buy yet another developer tool or distort the build process. Being command line based, it should integrate nicely with traditional Makefile builds, and comes with task definitions to fit with the new class of build tools (in particular Ant and MSBuild) that describe projects in XML.

I am currently using Inno Setup as my installation creation tool of choice, but it doesn't always play well with others since it creates executable installers rather than MSI packages. It too is open source, free, and it does integrate with Makefiles, so I don't have that much incentive to change tools.

More ad hominem attacks on skeptics

Today, the Boston Globe published an article by Ellen Goodman: No change in political climate. In it, she repeats an ad hominem attack that I am seeing used increasingly. She writes:

I would like to say we're at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Let's just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future.

My problem is with the phrase "global warming deniers" which has been gaining currency lately and was clearly coined to evoke images of Holocaust deniers such as the deranged person who attacked Elie Weisel today. Worse, she makes the comparison explicit and even states that they "are now on a par with Holocaust deniers".

That is the worst kind of ad hominem statement. Hurling personal insults at those who disagree with your position does not make your argument correct. In the eyes of some people, it actually weakens your argument by damaging your credibility.

In addition, it is hugely offensive to many people to misuse the memory of the Holocaust in this way.

Science is properly about debate, skepticism, questioning, and explanation. Science is not about consensus. Labeling those who are skeptical about the extraordinary claims about anthropogenic climate change as "deniers" serves only to silence debate through intimidation, not to advance the cause of science.

My Favorite Professor

Dr. Ron Ayres passed away earlier this month. Ron was among the top three teachers I was fortunate enough to take classes from at Caltech, and a good friend. The Los Angeles Times carried the notice last week, and my good friend and classmate Rod Van Meter has a copy of it on his blog.

Ron's work was influential in the early development of silicon compilation, and he helped create the MOSIS service to provide foundry services to individuals, research groups, and small companies. He was also a cellist, a beach bum, and a good friend.

As Rod notes, Ron was the very first person to receive a PhD in Computer Science from Caltech.

Ron's sense of humor was unique: When I first met him in about 1986, he was driving a Renault Le Car, with a vanity license plate that read LA CDR. Extra credit if you can name the language in which this was funny...

Ron will be sorely missed by all of us whose lives he touched.

How not to salt your popcorn!

Apparently someone thought it would be fun to synthesize NaCl (Table Salt) directly from a bowl of molten Sodium bubbled with Chlorine gas. Imagining that this would be photogenic, they decided to have both still and video cameras at hand for the demonstration. The link is to the story at PopSci.com, the web version of Popular Science Magazine.

Lots of white smoke consisting almost entirely of NaCl evolved, engulfing a net full of popcorn and presumably salting them nicely.

Then the net holding the popcorn melted...

The photo they got for the mag is impressive enough, but the video is scary.

Now you are going to wonder how I found this... I was looking for a source of interesting looking math puzzles and found www.mathpuzzle.com, where a recent posting mentioned this exercise in absurdity. Lots of good stuff to be found on line ;-)

Just don't even think about trying to duplicate this at home!

More RFID Madness

I noticed this on the MAKE blog... Johnathon Westhues has designed an inexpensive device based on a PIC microcontroller that implements everything needed to clone a VeriChip. As built, he needs to get the antenna into close proximity, but that is just a matter of social engineering; the sort of social engineering that pickpockets have been good at for as longer than pockets have been common.

VeriChip Corporation is pushing for adoption of their implantable RFID technology in hospitals (if every victim had a chip, the ER could have their medical records as the gurney arrives), for child protection (some blue-sky idea about tracking lost or kidnapped kids), for elder protection (similar to the kid tracking, but for the elderly with a tendancy to wander away).

Their web site says: "And unlike conventional forms of identification, the VeriChip™ cannot be lost, stolen, misplaced, or counterfeited. It is safe, secure, reversible, and always with you."

Right. It has been successfully cloned (read "stolen") by under $30 of commonly available parts. There are companies (and an agency of the Mexican government!) out there that are using these things as a security token... but they contain nothing more secure than a 16-digit unencrypted identifier. Publish the identifier belonging to a specific individual and what security it had is now lost.

They even claim that their readers work up to 10 feet away. That means that chipped individuals can be logged at public locations by simply requiring that the general public pass through a choke point (say a door or hallway) no more than 10 feet across. And if a 10 foot range was commercially viable, then it is obvious that a hacker with a nose for antenna design can build a suitably sensitive device to read the chip at 100 feet or more.