Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

One of my classmates from MIT (i.e., an old guy who has been using Unix for nearly 20 years) thought that his personal Web/mail server had been hacked.  The GNU/Linux machine was behaving inexplicably and not doing any of the things that it had been configured to do.  Last night he finally figured out why.  Logged in as root he’d tried to list a tar file from another computer.  But he got one character of the incantation wrong and instead wrote the tar file over the existing file system.  Basically all of the files in /etc were replaced by /etc files from the old computer, which had a different set of users/passwords and was in a different network.

I’m not going to say who it is because he’d be embarrassed but perhaps the incident reveals something general:  people over the age of 25 shouldn’t use Unix/GNU/Linux/whatever, unless they are full-time professional Unix sysadmins.  The dialog boxes on WinXP are annoying but for those of us nearing 40 perhaps it would be nice to have the computer ask “Are you sure that you want to overwrite all the most critical files on this machine?”

My instrument instructor in Alaska was 77 years old at the time that I got my rating.  Tom Wardleigh had 33,000 hours of flying experience including 15,000 hours on floats and was considered perhaps the best flight instructor in the state of Alaska.  His son had refused to learn to fly, despite his proximity to such a renowned instructor and all of the freedom that flying brings in a state with substantially no roads.  One of the things that Tom’s son had noticed was how many times his father went out to search for pilots who had crashed.  His stated reason for never learning to fly:  “I don’t want to do something where the opposite of perfection is death.”

Being root on Unix is sort of like that.

Full post, including comments

By the end of 2003 Boeing will employ only half as many people as it employed in September 2001.  Today’s layoffs will leave 5,000 people out of work.  Boeing’s management blames the economy but perhaps there is an engineering angle worth examining.  Consider that Boeing’s commercial airplane products are much older designs than the Airbus series and therefore that they are more expensive to manufacture.  Where Airbus would use a modern technique such as molded plastic, reinforced with carbon fiber or fiberglass (cheap; this is how my Diamond DA40 is built), Boeing would use a labor-intensive pre-WWII technique of bending or machining aluminum.  Airbus’s lower costs give it the ability to undercut Boeing on prices.  This apparently didn’t hurt Boeing too badly when the airlines were making money like crazy but now that the airlines are pinched being the low-cost supplier is critical.

Imagine Boeing trying to sell a 747 against an Airbus A380.  The 747 was designed between 1963 and 1966 and first flew in 1969.  The A380 program was launched at the end of 2000 and will be flying customers in 2006.  The A380 incorporates nearly 40 years of new engineering ideas compared to the 747 (which of course has been improved incrementally, especially its engines and avionics, but never redone from a clean sheet).

Boeing was famous for being an engineering-driven company, headquartered right next to its factories in the Seattle area.  Boeing became a finance-driven company, run by guys in suits from a new headquarters in Chicago.  Instead of growing by creating new product designs the company grew by financial engineering, i.e., acquiring other companies.  Instead of competing in the commercial market, Boeing now concentrates its efforts on supplying the U.S. military, which is reluctant to buy foreign airplanes even if they are cheaper.

Investing in engineering has a bad reputation right now, perhaps because so many computer programmers built so many things in the 1990s that users did not want.  However, the alternative to spending money on engineering seems to be well illustrated by Boeing:  slowly losing market share to a competitor who has invested in engineering.

Full post, including comments

The July 7 New Yorker magazine carries an awe-inspiring story by Laura Hillenbrand, the author of the bestselling book about the racehorse Seabiscuit.

Anyone who is a writer and having trouble finishing a project will be inspired by this.

Full post, including comments

Had the second helicopter lesson yesterday.  Although I hadn’t learned anything it all seemed much easier and I was able to hover for 5 seconds before the machine went out of control.  Perhaps there is light at the end of the tunnel.

Full post, including comments

Just back from a second trip to Moosehead Lake, this time for five days with Alex, my friend Carey, and Carey’s 1.5-year-old daughter.  We packed ourselves, one bike, and baby gear into the minivan and drove.  It was 4.5 hours of driving time, just as Microsoft Map suggested.  Check back later for some more detail on the trip overall.  This entry is only about driving.

After a year of flying around New England the amount of traffic near Boston and on I-95 was shocking.  We were cut off twice, both times by SUV drivers.  We witnessed one fender bender:  the largest Ford SUV backed into the side of the largest GM SUV (parked).  Clash of the Titans.

Revelation:  I no longer wonder at people who pay $2000 for the optional rear-seat DVD system in a new minivans.  When a 1.5-year-old in the back seat is bored, it becomes everybody’s problem.

Full post, including comments

Finally got to take the controls of a helicopter (good weather and the part-time instructor’s schedule aligned).  Joris climbed us to 1500′ and handed over the controls.  Straight-and-level:  easy.  Climbs and descents:  move collective a bit.  Turns at 60 knots:  easy.  Apparently flying a Diamond fixed-wing airplane is good preparation for helicopter work because one flies with pressure on the stick rather than movement of the stick.  Then we went to Minuteman airport.  I descended to pattern altitude and entered a left downwind for 21.  Joris took the controls and brought us to a point 5′ above the unused grass 12-30 runway.

Joris suggested that I try one control at a time, while he worked the other two to compensate.  Pedal turns: doable.  Controlling altitude with the collective:  doable.  Controlling horizontal position with the cyclic:  fell apart into lethal oscillations within 2 seconds (literally; try after try after try).

I was apprehensive about getting into an unfamiliar machine but never felt scared when in flight, despite the fact that we’d removed the doors for a better view.  Before my pilot-induced oscillations got too dramatic I would hear “I have the controls” in my headset.  Joris is a great instructor so if you live in the Boston area and have some spare time (and $190/hour) on a Saturday or Sunday, a visit to East Coast Aero Club at Bedford (Hanscom) is highly recommended.

It looks so easy to hover a helicopter and yet it is impossible for 99.9% of beginners.

Food for thought (category: how much smarter people were way back):  Igor Sikorsky invented the helicopter and then taught himself to fly it.  Taught himself.

Full post, including comments

Development fever, the expansion of leisure time, and the buildup of our transportation infrastructure has turned formerly peaceful New England vacation spots into hectic places that are only relaxing if you like to sit in a traffic jam on your way to the 7-11.  Cape Cod has more traffic than Cambridge during the summer.  The islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard are heavily built up.  The lake district of New Hampshire, about 2 hours north of Boston, is similarly clogged.  I spent Sunday and Monday seeing what Maine was like.  The goal: see if there were some nice places to relax for a week or two, within a 5-mile drive from a public airport.

The coastline between Boston and Bar Harbor is extremely crowded with nearly every scrap of land containing a house.  The area around Bar Harbor is very impressive from the air due to a series of brand-new oceanfront mansions that are the size of small hotels.  Even if you had infinite money, which you’d need, these aren’t that desirable for a pilot because they are rather a long drive, esp. considering summer traffic, from any airport.

Beyond Bar Harbor the development thins out but sadly so do the airports.  Diamond Star N505WT touched down for the night at Eastport, Maine (KEPM), which is the last town on the coast before you reach New Brunswick, Canada.  Eastport is very scenic but not totally relaxing due to (a) houses packed fairly close together due to the fact that Eastport is basically a little island, (b) the place wants to be a working fishing town but mostly the fish have all been killed and therefore the town has a dispirited unemployed atmosphere.

On the way back toward Boston I headed inland.  Eastern Maine is logging, logging, logging, paper mills, and more logging.  Mostly, though, it is desolate.  You can fly for 15 minutes without seeing any vehicles, houses, or people–just trees, lakes, and deserted logging roads.  Northwestern Maine seemed to have some more recreational potential.  Boat docks and private airstrips began to appear around lakeshores.  I landed at Greenville (3b1, big enough to bring a light jet in), a stone’s throw from Moosehead Lake, the largest lake in New England.

A 5-minute ride on the folding Giant Halfway bike brought me into downtown Greenville, the only real town for miles in any direction.  This turned out to be a very pleasant spot with several good restaurants and cafes.  I sat down in http://www.theblackfrog.com and learned the following about the place:

• “it is like Lake Winnipesaukee was 30 years ago”
  
• the people who live here year-round are sort of like Alaskans, i.e., folks who didn’t like the crowding and regulation of life in the “mainland”
  
• there is infinite mountain biking available on the dirt logging roads and snowmobile trails
  
• you can drive to Boston in 4.5 hours
  
• you can moor a boat anywhere in the lake and stay overnight; it costs about $400 per season to keep a very large boat in a marina here
  
• you can rent land from the city-owned airport and build a hangar no problem
  
• the lake water temperature is in the low 70s at the height of summer
  
• the season is shorter by a couple of weeks than in New Hampshire
  
• there is a very outdated ski resort nearby
  
• the town hosts the world’s largest seaplane fly-in the 2nd weekend of September
  
• 
  

  Houses are fairly cheap ($100k to live, $200-250k to live fairly large, e.g., on the waterfront with a little boat dock).

In a slow airplane it is a 1.5-hour flight from Moosehead/Greenville to Boston or Montreal and less than 1 hour to Quebec City.

Is this where we should be renting and/or buying houses or setting up a houseboat?  Anyone spent some time up in Moosehead or have a better idea for a cool summer escape?

 

Full post, including comments

The latest book in the travel kit is Simon Singh’s Fermat’s Enigma, which talks about the mathematical knowledge that was in the library at Alexandria.  It seems that the modern MP3 craze has ancient roots:  “Even tourists to Alexandria could not escape the voracious appetite of the Library.  Upon entering the city, their books were confiscated and taken to the scribes.  The books were copied so that while the original was donated to the Library, a duplicate could graciously be given to the original owner.”

[The need for a good backup strategy also is highlighted by the travails of the old Library.  In 47 BC part of the collection caught fire accidentally because Julius Caesar was out in the adjacent harbor burning Cleopatra’s ships.  In AD 389 more books were destroyed because they were housed in the Temple of Serapis, a building that fell victim to a Christian assault on pagan monuments.  Singh writes about the final destruction, which occurred after the Arab conquest of Egypt:  “Then in 642 a Moslem attack succeeded where the Christians had failed.  When asked what should be done with the Library, the victorious Caliph Omar commanded that those books that were contrary to the Koran should be destroyed.  Furthermore, those books that conformed to the Koran were superfluous and they too must be destroyed.  The manuscripts were used to stoke the furnaces which heated the public baths and Greek mathematics went up in smoke.”]

Full post, including comments

George W. Bush today, the most powerful man in the world, directly addressed Iraqis who are sniping and firing grenades at American troops:  “bring them on”, he taunted, according to this NYT story.  As noted in my Boston-Alaska-Baja-Boston 2002 trip report, this seems like a bad idea.  What better way to make a guy with an AK-47 feel important than by challenging him through a televised speech?

And surely American boys will die as a result of this speech.  It sounds like W. mano a mano with a young Muslim.  But having been a passenger on an airplane that makes a carrier landing does not make our President into a front-line soldier.  It will be some kid from North Carolina that gets killed.

It wouldn’t bother me to hear that an American foot soldier in Iraq was challenging the local ruffians.  But to hear a guy sitting at a desk 6000 miles away doing it?  Why aren’t military families objecting to this?

Will a day come when we Americans can hear our leader talking about something other than kicking Third Worlders around?  Something that would result in technological innovation and economic growth?

Full post, including comments

Cash-strapped U.S. companies, devoid of management imagation, strive to cut costs by moving IT staff to India.  They’ll do the same things with computers that they were doing in the 1980s and 1990s but do them cheaper.

Microsoft was the exception.  Yahoo Finance shows that they’ve got a 30.6% profit margin and $46.2 billion in cash.  These are what economists call “supranormal monopoly returns”.  Yet what do we find in today’s Reuters:  “Microsoft Shifting Development, Support to India”.  Microsoft is firing American workers and hiring in India.

[The other half of the Wintel duopoly is doing the same thing.   A friend of ours had his little company acquired by Intel.  They’ve had a hiring freeze in the U.S. for more than a year but would be happy to give him 20 newly hired programmers for his product… in China.  He’s now living in Shanghai and loving it, managing a medium-sized cubicle farm of eager under-25ers all recently graduated with Computer Science degrees.]

In a slightly related story, the New York Times today reports that the U.S. unemployment rate is up to 6.4 percent, its highest in 9 years.  The stock market is basically okay, though.  Investors realize that American corporations can make plenty of money without necessarily hiring Americans…

Full post, including comments