Hackers in the sky

In my job, I learn a lot about how data communication is used on-board airplanes and ships. In a weekly AIAA newsletter, I picked up the story about the network on-board the Boeing 787.

In continuing coverage from yesterday's briefing, the AP (1/10, Gillespie) reports that Boeing "will have to prove that offering Internet access in the cabin" of its 787 Dreamliner "won't leave the flight controls vulnerable to hackers and hijackers." This stems from a "special condition" made by the FAA "requiring Boeing to show" that the Dreamliner's "new technology won't pose a safety threat." A BT Counterpane security services officer says that "[t]he odds of" Boeing's security measures "being perfect are zero," as no one has ever designed a completely secure Internet connection. Also, rival Airbus has argued that Boeing should "physically separate the passenger information and entertainment systems from all other systems on the plane." But the FAA "has been working closely with Boeing and is pleased so far," and Boeing also points out that the Dreamliner's "aviation electronics 'are not connected in any way to the Internet.'" The AP notes that "[s]pecial conditions are a normal part of the regulatory process" for aircraft certification."

This was also covered in an article in Wired magazine 'FAA: Boeing's New 787 May Be Vulnerable to Hacker Attack '. It smells like a bad idea to have passenger and entertainment networks connected with other networks on-board and have them only separated by a firewall. Firewalls are not what dragons used to be at the entrance of a castle. Sure, ARINC 664 specification defines a networking standard for the aviation industry. I am far more suspicious of the implementation of such standard.

Will we soon have to leave our laptops with our pocket knives? What's the point of adding internet in the sky then?

Alternative Workplace Settings

The first four years of my professional life I spent in a cubicle: four gray walls, while overhearing colleague's love life or even job search phone conversations. At Sun, I moved into a private office and on occasion the corner flexible office, overlooking the the courtyard and palm trees. Since RTI was subleasing from Sun, it felt as if I never had left Sun: the office furniture, the sliding door, even the conference room name tags were identical.

Several months ago, when we received the news that our company had signed a new lease for our new headquarters, I prepared a small presentation about different workplace settings. It turned out the new building was an empty shell which we needed to furnish.

Thanks to the new embeddable presentations feature of Google Docs, here is an abbreviated presentation.

Moving Day

On June 13, 2006, I moved into my office at Freedom Circle in Santa Clara. From the 6th floor, I had a great view of the Bay Area (see: new window of opportunity). In spring, my office became my green house. I have grown seedlings of tomatoes, basil, chard, sage, poppies and zinnia, which I later on transplanted to our garden.

As I left my office tonight, everything was boxed up. All my books, notebooks and clutter fitted nicely in four moving boxes. A monitor, computer peripherals, a fan, two chairs, a mobile file cabinet, and the trash can are all labeled. Tomorrow is moving day.

Did you know?

Having a six year old is a lot of fun, if you are a geek. There is the endless flow questions, the daily visits to Wikipedia to finally get the right answer. We watched YouTube videos about planes and ships over and over. Without further ado, here's my son's 2007 zeitgeist:

• The Airbus A380 is the biggest passenger plane in the world. It is made in Toulouse. You can find an amazing 7 minute video of the assembly of the plane on YouTube. 873 people can evacuate an A380 in 77 seconds.
  
• The Antonov An-225 "Mriya" is the biggest cargo plane in the world. It is bigger than the Lockheed C5 Galaxy. It has six engines. It takes of soo slow.
  
• The Spruce Goose (aka H4 Hercules) beats all of them. But it only flew once and is now stored in a museum in Oregon.
  
• The smallest plane in the world is the Bumble Bee II.
  

• The biggest ship in the world is the Knock Nevis, a Norwegian owned super tanker.
  
• The biggest container ship in the world is the Emma Maersk.
  
• The biggest passenger ship in the World is the RMS Queen Mary 2.
  
  
• The list of most populated cities in the world: Mumbai, Karachi, New Dehli, Sao Paolo. Although the list changes a bit when you include larger metropolian areas: Gran Buenos Aires metropolitan area is number 17 with over 13 million people. You can imagine what will happen if they make it to the World Cup final next time.
  
• The longest river in the world is the Nile (6650km) (list of rivers by length)
  
• When completed the Burj Dubai (598.6m) will be the tallest building in the world, dethroning the CN Tower (553.3m) in Toronto. Although the tallest structure is the KVLY TV Mast (628.8m) in (list of tallest structures and buildings)
  
• Our Volvo V70 can drive to Los Angeles (340 miles) in one tank of gas.

And I am leaving the questions about gas consumption of the different hybrids, the country with the most cities, the fastest car, the fastest production car, the fastest car by acceleration, the biggest of the rocky planets, etc etc etc etc etc etc but luckily no questions yet about Britney or Lindsay.

Where's the bacon?

When the world was still ruled by the tobacco companies, you could buy a pack of chocolate cigarettes at the candy store. My favorite candy was always original "coca-cola gummies". But you ain't seen nothing yet. My kids got over the Christmas break a pack of Uncle Oinker's gummy bacon. It is even packed the same way bacon is packed and contains four tick slices of bacon. Luckily it doesn't taste like bacon: it is strawberry flavored. The safe handling instructions advise you to keep in a cool, dry place and to "not attempt to fry or microwave". Made in China for Accoutrements :(

A picture every day

One of the best Simpson episodes aired last Sunday. I originally posted a link to the video on YouTube or DaiyMotion. Twentieth Century Fox kept going after them (Hey, Twentieth Century Fox, why do you keep taking the video...). How ironic, since the Simpsons got the idea from Noah Kalina's YouTube video: http://www.everyday.noahkalina.com/

Torture me!

For many months, I've been part of an advanced Toastmasters club, the Agile Articulators, both as a member and as the VP for Public Relations. Toastmasters is all about becoming a better public speaker. Our small club is an advanced club: it combines speech with debate. Every meeting there is a prepared speech, and either a short 1-on-1 debate or longer 2-on-2 debates. The debates are forensic style debates [1] [2]. The topics are current affairs and are voted upon by the members. Tonight's dabate: resolved, that no agency of the United States government should use torture during interogations of prisoners under its control. Unfortunately, I had to argue the affirmative. This was unfortunate not because I like torture but because 80% of the debates are won by the negative side. I really wanted a win this time. Tonight our team lost again against a USC forensic debate pro and his debate partner. Dear fellow Americans I hereby apologize, we lost the torture proposal. Get ready to be waterboarded!

• Agile Articulators
• Toastmasters
  
• PresentationZen
  

Suck on that, Belgium!

Mute!

At Sun, subscription to Sun internal/external aliases was managed using a centralized tool, which allowed you to enable, disable and select digests, control whether the alias was public or not.

Regularly email storms would erupt when a new employee or a clueless employee would email "subscribe" or "unsubscribe" to a large email alias (such as sun-all-employees). Many would respond to all with information on how to (un)subscribe. This would be followed by a storm about 'do not reply to all!" - flame - flame. The email thread would not die quietly.

Gmail added a nice feature recently, called "Mute":

If you're subscribed to a mailing list, you've no doubt been subjected to the 'thread that just won't die!' If you're part of a long message conversation that isn't relevant, you can 'mute' the conversation to keep all future additions out of your inbox.

So simple ... yet so useful.

Lightning + Gcal provider + Google Calendar

Almost all my events are tracked in Google Calendar: my personal events, my wife's appointments, the kids school schedule, the soccer games, tech events in the Bay Area, Google developer events and of course birthdays. Specific calendars are shared with my friends and family. Everybody is in-synch ;)

I like the Google Calendar interface. The most useful feature beyond sharing calendars is the SMS notification.

I also use Thunderbird and was looking to tie it all together. Using Lightning and the GCal provider, I now can synchronize my calendars (in an open way). The setup is very simple. Here are the pieces that make up the solution:

1. Mozilla Lightning for Mozilla Thunderbird 2
2. Provider for Google Calendar
3. Instructions on how to synchronize with Google Calendar or LifeHacker instructions
   

Alternatively, LifeHacker documents another solution, which looks much more complicated to set up.

Image: courtesy of LifeHacker