Fixing Java's Epic Fail

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ACT I
EXT. NIGHT
A Grand Torino is parked in a vacant lot.
A slim figure with a gun towers over strange penguin-like figure,
"working" over a certain car. 

I will speak with words of one sound.
I will not raise my tone.
I will not take this one more day.

We had high hopes for you.
Day and night, night and day.
But you are a punk.
We took it and took it.
We thought it would stop.
We thought it would change but it did not.

Here is where we are.
You can change or you can die.
It is up to you.
So what will you do punk,
now that you are five and ten?

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He was supposed to be objective, portable and secure.
"Leaks no more" they said. "Browser-ready".

We bought in and let you work with... with your GUI's, your API's, your IDE's. You took our days our nights AND our weekends.


You were slow. Twenty times slow.

Here's the lesson punk:

TRUST CANNOT BE AUTOMATED
 
Sometimes you need a person to MAKE A CHOICE.
Baseball has an umpire. There is a reason for that.

Here's your choice.


FIX THIS or the strange little man gets it:

1) Enable file I/O in any context, with MANNERS

MANNERS means ASK PERMISSION:
"Strange little man wants to write file X from author Y on your computer, is that okay?"

2) Eliminate security obstructions for developers on their own machines.

Deployment is a separate step, with MANNERS

3) Enable compilation to native code on all platforms.

Gnu fixed this, adopt it.

4) Enable pipes with MANNERS.

Got that Captcha?!

Radio Light -

I’ve got hamtrak, my communications monitoring program, running more reliably. It listens on my soft radio and plots pins in Google Earth as amateur radio contacts occur. I wanted to know if there was bias in the reception I was getting due to geographic, antenna or electronic factors. I let it run for 11 hours. Then I compared the picture it produced with US population as seen from space:




For this small sample, the visual correlation appears representative.

To Catch A Falling Star...

Using the light on one can see...

When any object reenters the earth’s atmosphere it gets hot. Orbital velocities are on the order of 17,000 feet per second, and much higher, and the angle of reentry determines the fate of the object. If it enters steeply, it gets hot more quickly, and the forces are much higher, on the order of hundreds of gees. These forces can break an object into smaller pieces which then proceed along their own paths. Peak heating (and deceleration) occur between 200,000 feet and 400,000 feet, the boundary of space. Objects in this region are supersonic, and become subsonic around 100,000 feet (give or take).

If an object enters at a shallow angle, it can skip off the atmosphere, much as a rock skips along a lake. It will often go back into orbit and reentry again, but at a slightly steeper angle until it encounters the fate of the first group. If it is going escape velocity, it can skip and then just go back out into another orbit, but this is not the most likely scenario.

When an object enters at an angle of between 2 and 8 degrees (give or take) it undergoes a smooth and controlled reentry, pulling only a few gees. All objects that encounter the atmosphere create a boundary layer of ionized gas. This does several things. First, it attempts to melt the skin of the object. Second it reflects RF internally. Third, and most importantly for us, the layer of ionized gas creates a streak in the sky that is an effective RF reflector. Because of the conical shape of this streak of ionized gas, the reflector does not reflect the same in all directions, the fancy word for this is anisotropic. It polarizes the RF, favoring some orientations and frequencies over others, just as your Polaroid sunglasses do.

Because this reflector is not the same size in all directions, it will favor some frequencies along its long axis and other frequencies along is short axis. One could (and may hams have) broadcast against this reflector and used it as a relay until the cloud of ionized gas cools and dissipates. But broadcasting against this reflector is not necessary, as the sky is full of signals that are already bouncing off of it, like VOR stations for example. When those signals are located using SDR, GPSDO and multilateration, they can be combined to create an image of the shape of the reflector.

This image of the shape of the reflector provides the trajectory of the reentering object. The size and frequency response of the reflector provides information about the size, position and velocity of the object. Combining this information can be used to determine where the object landed, by solving a differential equation called the initial value problem or IVP. IVP says find where the object is now, based on where you saw it last, and how it was moving.

This is how you catch a falling star.

An Extreme Soft Radio Adventure - 24 Hrs @ 7 Mhz

After some antenna simulations using 4Nec2 (by Arie Voors) I wrapped a wire around my townhouse to create a loop HF antenna. I was curious if it was working and how the actual propagation pattern compared to my predictions. So I left my software defined radio, a Softrock 6.2 (by Tony Parks and Bill Tracey), running for 24 hours. It turned out to be quite an adventure!
Results: 1138 stations made 4907 calls, illustrated as pins in a map below. The pins are colored by frequency, red for 6.9 MHz, blue for 7.1 MHz and spectral coloring in-between.

Mouse over the map to see calls from the Island of Midway to Puerto Rico in longitude, from Alaska to Florida in latitude.

You will need the Google Earth browser plug-in to view the map, and it takes a few seconds to load the data - about the time it takes to read this. If you don't use Google Earth, there is an image at the bottom of the page. - AE5CC

Antenna Gain

Gain patterns can be drawn for microphones, radio antennas and light reflecting from surfaces. They are both informative and beautiful. The following images show the gain of a certain "wideband" herringbone antenna as frequency increases. Gain is simply the sensitivity of the antenna to a signal in a given direction.

When you tune a radio, you are selecting which frequency you want to listen to. But your antenna has to be cooperating by being sensitive to both the frequency of that station, its location, and how the signal bounces off the sky, land, water, trees, mountains and buildings.

So to begin we tune to 1.0 megahertz on our radio dial. In the pictures that follow we will increase the frequency on our radio dial by a factor of ten with each click. That makes for pretty big jumps. I hope to animate the in-between's soon. There are so many variables one must decide what to show first. In the meantime here is a keyframe warm-up starting at the promised 1 MHz. Captions are below the images.

You Say Tomato

1 MHz - Radially symmetric pattern, more gain at top than bottom.

I Say Potato

10 MHz -More gain at the ends than the middle.


The Edges of Lambda

100 MHz -Nature is more beautiful than I can imagine.

Butterfly Spectacular

1000 MHz -Think about this next time you tune a radio.

The last picture is around the frequency of cellphones and some cordless phones. But their antennas actually have blobby radiation patterns like the first example. Can you think why that might be so?