Last week's Fish Market

Last week I bought a tuna steak and a red snapper filet.

I marinated the tuna steak in lime juice with salt and pepper. Perfectly seared, it was amazing. I ate it with a light salad with a vinaigrette, so it was basically just a hunk of tuna. Very good meal.

In another meal, I made the red snapper. I cut it up into chunks (that skin is strong stuff!). I chopped up an onion and caramelized it with some olive oil. While it was cooking I chopped up a green pepper and added that into the onions. Next came some lime juice, I think it was 1.5-2 limes. One chopped tomato, some water, ketchup, salt, black pepper, crushed red pepper, and a bit of texas pete went in next.

I added the red snapper, and let it cook for a while. As it was cooking, I was making some "spanish rice" from a packet. I broke both things into two portions and made one lunch for later. The other plate is shown:



it was amazing.

oh yeah. I was originally going to write a great post about the food from a different slant. Basically, it boiled down to the nike slogan "just do it". Many people are afraid of cooking, afraid that they will screw up the recipe or something. You can't really do that bad. Just throw random stuff into a pot, simmer, and bam. FOOD.

Binary Drivers... my experience

So, I was trying to get my laptop into a usable form for school. I figured that being able to "hibernate" would be very useful as I could see myself having to close up very quickly and not want to close all of my programs.

I ran into a problem. The nvidia binary drivers did not work with hibernate. I had installed the drivers to get acceptable 3D performance for a folight simulator. In the end, I didn't have a port for a joystick so I really didn't have anything that tied me to the binary drivers.

Quick uninstall of the binary drivers from nividia, and bam. Hibernate works. For some reason I have to bring down the wireless and bring it back up to get internet again, but I can make a script to handle that for me.

So, not knowing too much about all of the arguements between letting in "tainted" drivers into the kernel, I don't like the binary only ones. They make it so hibernate doesn't work. (easily, I saw a how-to online, but it looked like a pain in the ass and I would probably have to redo it if I upgrade)

On Interoperability...

Interoperability is an interesting beast.

In the Apache, one of the two crewmen flies wearing helmet-mounted night vision goggles to see things thermals do not, including, for example, wires and tracers. The second crewman flies with thermals and the 30mm chain gun slaved to his head-up display. When the sky "lit" up with tracers, the aviator with goggles could see them, but the aviator who had immediate control of the gun could not. Therefore, to add to their problems, one crewman had to talk the other on to the source of fire to suppress it.
-On Point: The United States Army in Operation Iraqi Freedom

Who would have thought that a system was not interoperable with itself?
and

Because US forces are very effective at destroying air defense radars that radiate and missile/gun systems, the Iraqis avoided using these as cornerstones in their network. Rather than using radar, the Iraqis appear to have relied on ground observers who reported on cellular phones and low-power radios. Finally, flickering the city lights warned the shooters to be prepared to engage. Rather than relying on easily targetable missile or gun systems, the Iraqis' main weapon systems were the small arms widely distributed among the general population.
-On Point: The United States Army in Operation Iraqi Freedom

Finally, an example of the types of behaviour that you can get out of a distributed system. Distinctions need to be made between interoperability and integration.Technology alone can not save us.

quick update: prompted by Adam

Quick update:

- I think I have a shin splint in my right leg due to the 5k I ran last Sunday. I did meet my goal of running the 5k in under 31 minutes (around 29:45).

-I need to learn how to read. I saw an invitation on a blog to a talk about nuclear proliferation in Washington,DC for Wed. Little did I realize that I only read the blog once a week, and it was for last Wed. The venue was fairly cool, and we did end up eating there. I got to walk through the non-tourist part of DC, so that was interesting.

-Still customizing wmii. I think I have my status bar the way I like it.

-Blog post about my recent cooking w/fish bought at the fish market is forthcoming.

-PEIX's CFO randomly retired after 6 wks. Earnings is around Aug 8th (as far as I can tell). That seems ominous.

-Taking part in a "Earnings Challenge" with my roommates. I'll announce the rules on the stock newsgroup.

-I still haven't shaved since the weekend.

Network centric warefare stream of conciousness

me: AN ANALYSIS OF DEGRADED COMMUNICATIONS IN THE
ARMY’S FUTURE FORCE
me: is the paper i am reading
me: do you wants cpu timing attack?
me wants to send file C:\downloads\to install\Cheat07Security.pdf.
andykerr1 received C:\downloads\to install\Cheat07Security.pdf.
andykerr1 is away at 12:56:35 PM.
me: man, this paper is good good! the communications one
andykerr1 returned at 12:57:05 PM.
me: finally, someone gets what i been saying
me: lol
andykerr1: heh, what have you been saying?
me: that you have to be very VERY careful with network centric warfare
me: its not the uber-thing that the "power to the EDGE!" guys say it is
me: power to the edge!
me: !!
me: lol
me: i need to finish that paper/book
me: ha, when does a paper become a book?
me: at 200 pages?
andykerr1: 100 pages.
me: maybe i missed the second in power to the edge
me: ha, then this thesis is not a paper, its a book
me: lol
me: anyway, i have been ranting the past few weeks about how it might not be smart to transform into a network centric force,
me: if the performance of the force is dependent on the network
me: like, its better to have a force that is capable without the network, with slightly lower performance with the network,
me: rather than a force that requires the network to function, so if you dont have it, you dont have anything
me: .. basically, single points of failure in military (or any) systems are bad
me: and they are doing too much with NCW toward it being required for the effectiveness.
me: SO! its bad
me: its like, what if our group of friends, we all didnt have cell phones for a week?
me: how effective would our hanging out be?
me: where would you be without the interwebs?
andykerr1: but there would have to be multiple points of failure for the network to be disabled severely. without cell phones we'd all use AIM.
me: ok, emp
me: i mean, the point is, its something to consider,
me: rather than not
me: you can design it so that faults dont occur,
me: but the effectiveness changes..
me: even in that example,
me: aim is not the same
me: you cant use it ont eh move
me: we can't swarm a restaurant like we do now
me: where you head out before you ave targeting data
me: in multiple cars to get to the objective (food)
me: (together getting food = objective)
me: the point is that they are making the system's performance dependent on the swarming type concepts like that
me: eh, it actually got me thinking about the most successful predator systems (organisms)
me: as far as,
me: there is a push now to make every part a separate system, like, sensors (eyes), processing (brain), and engagement (claws or teeth?) .. so like it would be a floating eyeball talking to brain talking to teeth, to eat something... but i don't know of any successful organisms like that... like, abstracting out, a wolfpack... they are all basically the same system,, they still use a network (howls) and coordinate actions
me: so, are there pack structures in the wild that use the sensor - processor - engage concept?
me: or is that a bad idea, and should everything be a hunter-killer, and not hunter and killer.

Update: Glasgow

Badass.

I hope thats true.

Alex McIlveen, 45, kicked the man, whose body was in flames, so hard that he tore a tendon in his foot.

That would be my reaction also.

WWYD? Man on fire

So, what would you do? Imagine some asshat drives through the doors of your local airport. He gets out a can of gas and light himself on fire. He tries to do the ninja thing while on fire until he collapses...

"I watched the guy burning. He still tried to attack a policeman. I was convinced he was trying to detonate something. "He was on fire and he was still desperately trying to get into the boot. There were another two explosions. "People all around were in tears and shouting and screaming at the man to lie down. An off-duty cop was hosing him down with a fire extinguisher and other people were shouting, 'let him burn.' "He wasn't interested in being saved - he wanted to die and take all of us with him."

I think I would be in the camp with the fire extinguisher. Just so I could kick him in the nuts and then light him on fire again.

Read the whole thing.

What would you do?