Vacuum

Collected Articles on Code Reconstruction, Katharine Swift, 1976, as announced in CRYPTOLOG

The National Security Agency has declassified a number of issues of CRYPTOLOG, their in-house magazine. Here's an example from 1977, announcing the publication (for anyone with a Top Secret Codeword clearance) of Katharine Swift's "Collected Articles on Code Reconstruction".  "It is hoped that managers as well as book-breakers and programmers, and senior analysts as well as neophytes, will find material that will help each in making his individual contribution on the job."

Michigan 87, Kansas 85 (OT)

Michigan goes on to the Elite 8 in the 2013 NCAA March Madness tournament.

I was watching Twitter and saw this

 

zomg zomg zomg

— netmeg (@netmeg) March 30, 2013

so I tuned in using TuneIn with just a little bit of overtime left. It helped of course that #goblue was trending on Twitter.

Michigan 87, Kansas 85 -- final

— The Detroit News (@detroitnews) March 30, 2013

MGoBlog's postgame "Elite Eight Muppets" celebrates the victory.

March 28, 2013 North Quad flood

North Quad at the U of Michigan had a flood today, causing classes to be cancelled and students to be evacuated from their rooms. There is no estimate of the damage at this time, but it's extensive.

The University of Michigan School of Information has a flood information page with reschedule and relocate information for classes and talks.

All media inquires about the flooding should be directed to Kelly Cunningham in the UM Public Affairs Office: kecunham@umich.edu, 734-936-5190.

 

North Quad installs new water feature: the Ehrlicher Room stairs. twitter.com/umsi/status/31…

— UM SI (@umsi) March 28, 2013

Photo by Heidi Skrzypek, UMSI staff

From the Michigan Daily "Flooding forces cancellation of classes in North Quad":

According to Ken Campbell, North Quad’s maintenance mechanic, a broken joint pipe on the building’s fire suppression system was responsible for the flooding. The break occurred in the East Stairwell on the fourth floor of the building, he said. When the pipe lost pressure, the system automatically turned the water pump on to add pressure, exacerbating the flow from the three-inch pipe.

Campbell estimated that “thousands and thousands” of gallons poured from the pipe before it was turned off 20 minutes later.

From the AnnArbor.com: Nearly 100 students displaced by flooding at University of Michigan's North Quad

Jeff MacKie-Mason, dean of the U-M School of Information, sent an email to the school community stating that the The Ehrlicher Room in North Quad sustained major damage in the flooding.

"We will not be able to use it for some time, perhaps several months (the ceilings may need to be replaced, walls may need repair, the carpet and our extensive electronics equipment may need replacement)," MacKie-Mason wrote in the email.

From the Ann Arbor Chronicle: nothing.

From the Ann Arbor Journal: nothing.

2 of of 4 isn't bad.

 

Related articles

North Quad Community Open House, Thursday March 31, 2011, 3p-6p

And This is Why Ann Arbor Is Obsessed With Itself

Living With Floods: How you can minimize the damage

A slow moving version of Twitter: always hand write your tweets before sending them.

A slow moving version of Twitter: always hand write your tweets before sending them.

Bright idea? Write it down, photograph it, transcribe it, then (and only then) post to the network.

It's OK to wait quite a long time between initial idea and eventual posting. This also works for blog postings, or at least it should. Twitter happens to make it easy to do in one step for short posts.

Questions:

How will lunch work on Thursday at a new place? (A2B3 lost its regular restaurant, Eastern Accents, and we're meeting at Conor O'Neill's instead.) Caroline is manager.

What do you want to have stored up so that you can respond quickly to something new after having already thought through it at leisure?

How important is the drawing? (Very.)

Can you focus on something long enough to make it worthwhile to construct a lengthy effort to assemble media to support it?

Marginalia:

Adam Grant's book Give and Take. Jerry Davis is interviewed. Look in the March 31 NY Times Magazine.

Suggest it at the Ann Arbor District Library once I get online. It's too hard to fill out the suggestion form from my teeny tiny phone screen.

Jerry Michalski suggesting a similar piece on "bursting vs plodding" and the benefits of each, written by Steve Pavlina.

I'm listening to electronica by Valdis Krebs.

 

Afterword

"I think Buddha is one line of work."

From Phys.org: ephemeral vacuum particles and the fluctuating speed of light

Do I understand this? No. But this is a blog called Vacuum, and this is my service to that task.

Two forthcoming European Physical Journal D papers challenge established wisdom about the nature of vacuum. In one paper, Marcel Urban from the University of Paris-Sud, located in Orsay, France and his colleagues identified a quantum level mechanism for interpreting vacuum as being filled with pairs of virtual particles with fluctuating energy values. As a result, the inherent characteristics of vacuum, like the speed of light, may not be a constant after all, but fluctuate. Meanwhile, in another study, Gerd Leuchs and Luis L. Sánchez-Soto, from the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Light in Erlangen, Germany, suggest that physical constants, such as the speed of light and the so-called impedance of free space, are indications of the total number of elementary particles in nature. 

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-03-ephemeral-vacuum-particles-speed-of-light-fluctuations.html#jCp

Open every tab, close every tab

I'm testing a new theory of work within a tabbed browser, using OneTab to help manage things.

The thought is that at some times I'll be working and opening a lot of tabs to do that work, and that another time I'll be finishing up things and closing tabs down.

The goal of a tab-closing session then is to type something meaningful into every open tab (or to pinboard that tab) and then close it out. When I'm done, there will be no open tabs, and everything will have moved forward just a little bit.

Worth a try!

Outages, cable failures, and postmortems: sources for information

If you, like me, are interested in how systems work and when they fail, here are three good sources to look at from the internet persective on global network behavior.

The outages mailing list (outages at outages.org) describes itself as follows:

The primary goal of this mailing list ("outages") is for outages-reporting that would apply to failures of major communications infrastructure components having significant traffic-carrying capacity, similar to what FCC provided prior to 9/11 days but they seem to have pulled back due to terrorism concerns. Some also believe that LEC's and IXC's also like this model as they no longer have to air their dirty laundry. Then again, this mailing list is not about making anyone look bad, its all about information sharing and keeping network operators & end users abreast on the situation as close to real-time information as possible in order to assess and respond to major outage such as routing voice/data via different carriers which may directly or indirectly impact us and our customers. A reliable communications network is essential in times of crisis. 

There's always good information about bad news to be found here, with a typical exchange being "I lost some circuits to city X" and the reply "Company Y has a fiber cut in city Z". 

A second excellent source of global routing information about failures and reconfigurations of the global internet is the weblog that's written by the company Renesys. The Renesys Blog has as of this writing details about network connectivity problems to North and South Korea, a fiber cut in the Black Sea that disrupted traffic as far away as Oman (3000+ km away), and details of a submarine cable landing in Cuba. 

Finally - though there is not really a finally in this world where part of the Internet is always under repair - there is a "Postmortems" discussion group on Google Plus where reports come in after the fact of people describing just what went wrong with their complex system and (usually) what they plan to do next to avoid the next round of similar failures. From squirrel-induced cascading power failures to denial of service attacks to runaway email systems, there's a new lesson to be learned from each after-action review of failure.

All of these groups overlap somewhat with the RISKS Digest, one of the oldest mailing lists still around on the internet, that covers risks to the public from computing technology.

Being partially online is worse than either being online or being offline

There's nothing more frustrating to me than being almost but not quite on the Internet, as I discovered today when going to a cafe (unnamed, but linked) which advertised free wifi. My connections were slow and unreliable and frustrating to use. It looks like you're online but any applications that depend on always-on Internet for their well being work out badly.

The best reaction that I have for this state of interrupted connectivity is to go offline and write in my little notebook. I've written before about Pocket Twitter; there's also a very effective Pocket Issue Tracker where you write down things to do and then re-sync them with your online issue tracker once you are online again.

There is technology that will help this state of interrupted connectivity, and I use it when I can. Of all of the applications that I use, Gmail and Evernote are the two that have the best developed clients that can intelligently buffer things when you're offline. If I have my laptop and no connectivity, I can also use "git" and "vim" to work on my writing projects, knowing that a "git push origin master" command will resync when I'm ready to update changes.

Once upon a time there was no internet and every application worked well offline. Netnews was delivered one batch at a time, and you'd read it while the modem was quiet; email, if it was important enough, might warrant a long distance call to deliver. Now, when the net is down or flaky you should still be able to get work done. And yes, I should really get a data plan for my new phone so that I don't have to rely on the quality of random coffee shops for personal productivity.

Related articles

Pocket Twitter - a suitable replacement for the Internet when offline

Pretending to be on an airplane

Online Vs. Offline: Which Rules in Brazil?

Digital dualism denialism

Mobile Workspace in offline mode

Two sleep tracker applications for Android: SleepBot and SleepTime

I'm going to try to review two different applications for Android that are designed to track your sleeping habits and improve your ability to wake up on time.

Both SleepBot (http://mysleepbot.com/) and SleepTime (http://www.azumio.com/apps/sleep-time/) have the same basic strategy. You put your phone under your pillow and go to sleep. The phone's accelerometer notices your tossing and turning or your deeply quiet snoozing, and keeps track of same overnight. When it comes to be time to wake up, they look for a time window when you're not in deep sleep in order to maximize the chance that you wake up refreshed.

I haven't used SleepTime yet, but SleepBot seemed to work this morning. That is to say, it did wake me up at 7:00 alert enough to notice that I was awake, but since I didn't have anything else planned for that early hour I caught some more sleep.

The only hitch I really see is that overnight is when I like to charge the phone, and by keeping the phone under the pillow it gets in the way of starting the next day with a full battery.

I'd be happy to hear any reviews or recommendations from anyone who's tried these over a longer period of time. I have a faint goal of getting to bed earlier and getting up earlier, and if this can be accomplished with the help of a tiny habit to put my phone under my pillow before bedtime, let's try that out and see what works.

Related articles

These Apps Will Make Your ZZZ's That Much Better

Looking for a better night's sleep? Try these sleep and relaxation apps for BlackBerry smartphones and PlayBook

Strange Sleep Problems, Efficient Packing, Janky Yet Awesome Life Hacks, and Google Keep

The Secret to Getting More (and Better) Sleep

note to self on the writing for the day

One cup of coffee generated about 1400 words. Of those, I needed about 1000. It took three hours to write the 1400 words, and two hours more to remove 400 of them. I hope I removed the right ones.

It only took forty five words to summarize the day.