Brooks

Grumble.

2008-06-26T18:35:19Z

This is where the fires and resultant smoke are, relative to the San Francisco Bay Area.

Winds are going to be consistently from the North through Sunday, Weather Underground says.

Conclusion: This smoke isn't going away any time soon. Bleah.

I want to build something like this someday.

2008-06-14T17:07:29Z

(via micheinnz and Gizmodo blog.)

As written in the NY Times, referring to an architect hired to remodel a New York apartment:

That got Mr. Clough, who is the sort of person who has a brainstorm on a daily basis, thinking about children and inspiration and how the latter strikes the former. “I’d just read something about Einstein being inspired by a compass he’d been given as a child,” he said. The Einstein story set Mr. Clough off, and he began to ponder ways to spark a child’s mind. “I was thinking that maybe there could be a game or a scavenger hunt embedded in the apartment -- that was the beginning,” he said.

And so he built a puzzle trail into the apartment. There's also this gallery of pictures.

I've wanted to build a house with those sorts of puzzles and things that fit together in entertaining and obscure ways, pretty much ever since I played the first game of Myst, years and years ago. This is definitely going in my idea file for how to do that.

It is very very nifty. Why are you still here? Go, look!

Sequential thoughts on a 1966 "Cooking with Cheese" cookbook.

2008-06-10T06:43:02Z

1.) This recipe is ... wow. No, wait, I missed that; it gets worse. And that. With every ingredient it gets worse; it's probably the most disturbing recipe I've seen using mundane ingredients.

Appetizer Cheese Mousse: Soften 2t unflavored gelatin in 1/4 cup cold water; heat over double boiler until gelatin dissolves. Stir into 2 cups sour crea, Add 2t Italian salad-dressing mix, 1/4 cup crumbled blue cheese, 1 cup cottage cheese. Blend until well blended. Pour into ring mold, chill until set.

It's blue cheese aspic. It's actually, really, honestly, blue cheese aspic.

[Note: In the dessert section, they have a similar recipe that takes out the Italian dressing mix and sour cream, and adds limeade concentrate and candied pecans -- and doubles the blue cheese.]

2.) Hmm. The idea of hot cheese dip for apples and pears sounds good. The idea of one that starts with American cheese (in equal amounts with Swiss), and then mustard, Worcestershire sauce, and canned pimentos ... not so much.

[Note: Later, I noticed that I'd missed the evaporated milk, in quantity equal to that of the cheeses.]

3.) "French Fried Camembert".

[Note: No, it's exactly what you think. Battered, and fried.]

4.) Oh, dear. My brother and I have been looking for this recipe for a decade and a half. There's something in this cookbook that I actually want to make, and not as a "is this really as weird as I think it is" sort of for-science! type of way. I am now really quite disturbed.

[Note: The recipe is for what they call "Angel Food Cheesecake". It's cheesecake, but you separate the eggs, beat the whites, and fold them in. It's cheesecake but light and fluffy. My mom made this once, and decided it was rather too much work to do again, and we never could find the recipe.]

LJ election endorsements, update

2008-05-27T00:39:26Z

As novalis pointed out in comments, my understanding of the voting rules was wrong in a detail, and that means the analysis I posted yesterday wasn't quite right.

Here's an updated version of the original post, explaining why the instant runoff isn't as broken as I thought. Given that, I'm now recommending voting for rm and legomymalfoy in whatever rank-positions best reflect your preferences. Personally, I've seen several strong personal recommendations for rm, so I've given her my top vote.

LJ election endorsements.

2008-05-26T18:20:19Z

So, there's currently an election going on for LiveJournal's "user advocate". Nearly all of you all are eligible to vote. Candidate's position statements are here.

Important edit: As novalis pointed out in comments, the documentation of the voting protocol is unclear, and I interpreted some of it a bit differently than what the actual LJ source code implements. This revises my analysis considerably! What follows is the revised analysis.

Note that this is somewhat of an interesting election. Nominally, it's one of the "instant runoff" votes where voters rank the candidates, and the candidates who have fewest first-rank votes are eliminated and "their" voters have their second-rank votes taken as first-rank votes. If a voter has all three of their candidates eliminated, their ballot is discarded; when a candidate ends up with more than 50% of the top-rank votes on remaining ballots, they're declared the winner.

What's interesting is that it's not a closed-tally election. Anyone who has voted can (a) immediately see the current totals, and (b) change their vote. It's not currently possible to see exactly what will happen in the runoffs, but we can make some reasonable guesses on the bounds.

Meanwhile, regardless of how the runoff goes, it's currently a three-way race between legomymalfoy, jameth, and rm, in that order. Unless things swing dramatically, votes for anyone else are likely to only serve as endorsements of their position statements, which isn't likely to mean much.

Thus, unless things change notably, the only votes that are likely to matter are votes for legomymalfoy, rm, or jameth.

Personally, from a quick look through the position statements, I suspect that I would prefer rm to legomymalfoy (and I have seen several strong endorsements agreeing with that position), but I'm pretty sure either would do well, while it's clear that jameth would not be an effective user representative, to say the least. Given the current totals, it seems pretty clear that rm won't catch legomymalfoy in the first-rank votes; their votes are running about 2.5:1 between them. There is some danger that jameth will catch up, though; that ratio is about 1.5:1.

However, rm may not be that far behind legomymalfoy in the runoff, since she's got quite a lot of second-rank votes; there's a reasonable chance she could catch legomymalfoy once those are counted. (Of course, if a lot of those are from the people who have legomymalfoy as their first choice, then they'll never count.)

Old, erroneous analysis:

What's interesting is that it's not a closed-tally election. Anyone who has voted can (a) immediately see the current totals, and (b) change their vote. It's not currently possible to see exactly what will happen in the runoffs, but we can tell that it doesn't matter; there's nobody who is currently on the ballots of 50% of the voters (the leader's a bit over 40%), so the instant runoff can't pick a winner.

Thus, unless things change notably, the only vote that is likely to matter is your first-rank vote.

Meanwhile, looking at the first-rank votes, it's currently a three-way race between legomymalfoy, jameth, and rm, in that order. Unless things swing dramatically, votes for anyone else are likely to only serve as endorsements of their position statements, which isn't likely to mean much.

Thus, unless things change notably, the only vote that is likely to matter is a vote for legomymalfoy, rm, or jameth.

Personally, from a quick look through the position statements, I suspect that I would prefer rm to legomymalfoy, but I'm pretty sure either would do well, while it's clear that jameth would not be an effective user representative, to say the least. Given the current totals, it seems pretty clear that rm won't catch legomymalfoy; their votes are running about 2.5:1 between them. There is some danger that jameth will catch up, though; that ratio is about 1.5:1.

Also, I'll note that rm is not that far behind legomymalfoy in the runoff, since she's got quite a lot of second-rank votes; there's a very outside chance she could catch legomymalfoy there and have more than 50% of the vote, if things do change a lot. This is not a likely scenario at all, but it's the most plausible way that a second-rank vote might matter at all.

Therefore, my practical endorsement is this: Vote legomymalfoy at first-rank, rm at second-rank, and put your third-rank vote on someone you like.

Therefore, my practical endorsement is this: Vote rm at first-rank, legomymalfoy at second-rank, and put your third-rank vote on someone you like. If you've already voted, go here to change your vote.

(See, this is much easier than trying to pick among the at-least-a-half-dozen really good candidates who are running!)

That looks like some impressive mission planning....

2008-05-23T03:50:31Z

teinedreugan and wcg, I don't know if this bit of satellite control is actually as impressive as it looks or not, but it looks pretty impressive to my untrained eye. The first picture on this blog post shows the positions of the three Mars orbiters at the time the Pheonix lander goes through final descent on Mars this Sunday. Not only is the Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter directly on top of the landing spot when it lands, but the other two are also within line-of-sight to record and relay signals from it.

Here's hoping that what they relay is a nice perfect landing!

Really, now.

2008-05-16T04:06:19Z

Just how hard would it be to write a Thunderbird plugin that checks outgoing emails for phrases such as "attached is" or "I have attached" or whatnot in unquoted text, and if it finds them checks the email to see if there actually is an attachment -- and, if the phrases are present but no attachments, pops up a dialog box saying, "Did you mean to add an attachment?"

Sigh. It couldn't be harder than fixing the part of my brain that's always forgetting the attachments.

For rosefox and other New Yorkers.

2008-05-14T20:27:19Z

This is rather interesting -- a high-resolution photo of a random New York street (166ish Mott Street, currently in Chinatown) from 1910, with a link to the Google street view from about the same location. It's nifty to see just how much is still there, a hundred years later.

Random niftiness

2008-05-10T20:37:19Z

Following a somewhat random set of links, as one does, I came across this gallery of photos of trains and trams in various parts of the UK around 1950, with a few photo sets from other places in Europe. Lots and lots of photos, a significant fraction of which are in color, showing the trains and the places they went through, all taken by one person (who's now, sixty years later, creating the website).

Just as some random examples, here's the beach in Swansea (1951), the Charing Cross Tube station (1950), and a sightseeing monorail in Barcelona (1956).

(Oh, kightp, you might also find these stage props he's made interesting.)

In which Windows earns my respect, and I need to upgrade my computer.

2008-05-02T06:57:31Z

So, I was poking about on the internet this evening, as one does, and my computer had a bit of a glitch where the browser locked up for a half-minute or so. I found this a bit distressing, and wondered if there was some sort of software issue. And then the whole computer froze for a moment, which seemed a bit more ominous. "I wonder why my Windows installation is getting this flaky," I thought, "it didn't do this ever until just recently."

And then it spun up a disk, and went back to acting normally.

And a little message box popped up, saying, "You've just lost a disk."

Slightly perturbed, I went into the Disk Manager utility to investigate, and discovered that that wasn't entirely the extent of it; both disks attached to IDE0 had little yellow exclamation-point icons and "unreachable" notations, and the partitions on them were listed as "Failed Mirror". And it occurred to me that there was perhaps some pleasant luck in that all of my software RAID-0 arrays were set up across two controllers.

Suddenly, the idea of the system dealing with this with merely a half-minute of inaccessable filesystem and five seconds of minor lockup didn't seem like an unreasonable thing at all.

Anyhow, it seemed like it was probably not a good state to be continuing to run the system in, given the sudden lack of backups of a lot of my data and the sudden evidence of why backups are useful, so I shut it down and power-cycled it to see if that helped. Which just provided evidence that the problem was repeatable, and a reminder that the BIOS kind of needed to read one of those disks to get to a boot sector. So it's currently not rebooting.

Still, I'm rather impressed at how well Windows dealt with that.

And I guess that means that it's really time to go ahead with the motherboard upgrade I've been meaning to get around to doing for about a year. Sigh; I really wasn't looking forward to all the reinstalls that I need to do for that.

(Hmm. Okay, maybe I'm still a little annoyed at Windows, given that I've been swapping a FreeBSD install around between several different computers and it's been perfectly happy with the hardware changed.)

Anyhow, internet access is likely to be a little spotty for a while until I get a chance to do something to deal with this. I'm currently using my laptop with a Google wifi connection, but those tend to be flaky when the sun's up.

AKICILJ: Is the "Clean Water Action" organization worth contributing to?

2008-04-30T00:56:25Z

I just got a door-to-door canvasser who was asking people to sign up for Clean Water Action. From his pitch, it sounds like a good political lobby group, and reasonably sane (though there is the use of "chemicals" to mean "nasty stuff" rather indiscriminately in some of their materials).

Anyhow, I said that I preferred to check out organizations via independent sources before signing up for them, so: Do any of you have any experience with this organization, or know if they're a reasonable group that does good work? If they are, I'd like to support them, but I'm wary of all the groups that have good intentions but poor implementation, not to mention the groups that don't even have good intentions.

Fourth Street Fantasy Convention

2008-04-29T06:11:50Z

Because elisem said to, as follows:

So here's the problem: yesterday I heard somebody say, "Fourth Street Fantasy Convention? Oh, yeah, I heard something about... oh, wait, isn't that convention invitational?" Which, you know, it is so very not. Although it's been a little quiet on the publicity end, this revival of the legendary Minneapolis-based fantasy convention of decades back is cheerfully open to everybody who wants to get a membership, and I hope lots of people do, because I'm throwing this big party on Friday night, and Bear and Sarah and some other folks are going to read necklace challenge stories and other Artists' Challenge works, and the more people who are there, the better it'll be.

So here's the offer: if you publicise the convention in your LJ or anywhere else on-line, and link to the Fourth Street website or to my post about my party, and you send me a link (or post it here), I will put you in a drawing for a $50 gift certificate, to be drawn during the convention. Winner need not be present. If you like, you can go ahead and tell people you're posting this because I am bribing you with this because I want lots of people at my party to celebrate and to hear Bear and Sarah and everybody read cool challenge stuff... and tell them that if they put up the link too, I will bribe them with a similar chance.

I wouldn't normally do a copy-and-paste post, but Elise's shinies are very shiny indeed. And also it really does sound like a particularly nifty convention that ought to be promoted. Links as follows:

Official convention website.

Elise's aforementioned party invite post.

Steve Brust's post about what he is trying to do with the programming, which he is in charge of.

So, this is how it goes, eh?

2008-04-28T23:44:55Z

I just wrote my very first multithreaded program using pthreads. A very simple "Hello World" that creates a short array of thread numbers, and then creates a thread for each element in that array; each thread then loads its respective number from the array and prints out, "Hello, I am thread %d!"

Shortly thereafter, I debugged my first race condition in a multithreaded program.

I suppose this is the way of things, then?

brooksmoses @ 2008-04-09T22:01:00

2008-04-10T05:05:18Z

People are strange.

No, seriously. A screed about the importance of memorable domain names, posted across the front page of a how-to-grow-potatoes website (with actual content on breeding potatoes, mind you!) replicated across 95 different domain names? Does this make sense in your universe?

(Also, did you know that 2008 is the International Year of the Potato?)

April Fools jokes

2008-04-01T17:23:23Z

(Aside: Y'all know the difference between a joke and a malicious prank, and don't need to be told not to do the latter, right?)

A friend's post (pointing out his displeasure with malicious pranks on the day) got me thinking about April Fools jokes that I've enjoyed. I particularly like the spoofs that hobby magazines used to do in years past. The "ClearView 3000" article that Scale Auto Enthusiast printed in the early 1990s was legendary -- a spray paint that would turn any plastic parts transparent, complete with photos of samples. (Especially funny to those of us who knew our model-car history -- yup, there's the hood from the '68 Firebird kit that inexplicably had a clear hood, and the body from the extra-rare clear-body MPC Charger kit, and....) Sadly, it had the unfortunate side effect that it didn't completely deactivate once the parts were clear, and after they sat for a month or two, they'd turn completely invisible. The April issue of their much smaller competitor, Plastic Fanatic (which had a short lead time, and in those days SAE had their April magazines printed and delivered to subscribers by late February) featured an answering spoof -- a product that you could spray around the room like an air freshener, and it would make your irretrievably-lost invisible model car parts visible again.

And then there was the Model Railroader article in their "No, really, the real railroads do this too!" column (generally about things like sectional track, which model railroads have had since a decade after the dawn of time, and which is of course entirely unprototypical, except that now real railroads have flatcars of it for emergency repairs), about magnetic uncouplers. On model railroads, a common way of uncoupling the cars in a train without having to handle them is a magnetic uncoupler; a bar magnet set up under the tracks in such a way that if you stop a train with the coupling between the cars over the magnet, the metal bits in the couplers will be pulled apart and the car decoupled. As the story went, this small industrial railroad decided that would be a good idea to save labor in running their trains, and bought a bunch of large magnets sufficient to do that on a real railroad. The article described their travails in obtaining these -- the special all-wooden railcars that needed to be built for the transport, the selection of routes without metal bridges, the accident that occurred when they were transporting the magnets under a stone bridge at the same time that a small car was driving over it, and the time that it pulled the railroad manager's pants down by his belt buckle when he was riding on a caboose over one of the magnets.

The things that I like best are the ones that don't involve telling tales at all, though. Some of them are just visual jokes; for instance, I'm fond of things like Coding Horror's new site design, which is clearly an April-1st-only redo to look like an old BBS login screen on a green monochrome terminal. But what I really like are the stories that sometimes accompanied the April-Fools jokes in the magazines; the ones where someone had done something that seemed entirely implausible or absurd, but had in fact done it and so the story was entirely true.

Activism link.

2008-03-30T04:08:23Z

So, Amazon has recently decided that they will only carry books printed by small presses that use print-on-demand technology if they use Amazon's print-on-demand service; if the small presses continue to use the print-on-demand services that have served them well and provided good quality product for them in the past, Amazon won't carry their books.

This blog post on The World on a Slant explains why you should care.

This is a pretty big thing. Print-on-demand isn't just a vanity-press these things; a lot of reputable small presses use them, because carrying back stock is expensive when you're publishing for a niche market.

Just a small random observation....

2008-03-29T08:02:16Z

It's pretty easy to make a round hole; a rotating drill does it nicely. Making a square hole generally means making a round hole and then cutting it out with chisels.

It's also pretty easy to make a square peg; just cut the sides down with a knife or saw until it's the right size. Making round pegs requires a lathe, and those are heavy and not very portable.

Fitting a round peg in a round hole isn't easy. Either it's too big, and it won't go in, or it's too small and falls out, or you've spent a lot of time and care making it just right -- and then the humidity changes and it shrinks in different ways than the surrounding wood and falls out anyway.

Square pegs aren't any easier, and there's the additional problem that either the hole or the peg might be a little out of square, so even if it's the right size it might not fit well.

On the other hand, if you take a slightly-tapered square peg and put it up next to a round hole, and give it a good bop with a mallet, the corners of the peg will push into the edges of the hole -- and, because it's only interfering in a few points rather than all the way around, it will squeeze into shape and fit together tightly, and then it will hold fast and not fall out.

So, if you're putting together a barn frame with wooden pegs in holes, there's a pretty clear right way to do it. And that is, indeed, how a lot of barns were framed.

Funny about the idiom, though.

Random electronica.

2008-03-28T08:12:04Z

I picked up a couple of things at the computer surplus store on the way home today. First was a network card for my new 486 computer. Yes, it's actually (mostly) new -- a new-old-stock single-board motherboard with built-in video controller and new enough IDE controller to support large disks, but oddly enough no onboard network card. And it only has one card slot, for an ISA-bus card. The only ISA-bus network cards the store had were some odd four-port ones from a company that's long since gone out of business, but I figured it was worth a shot.

And, indeed, it turned out that FreeBSD's standard drivers work quite happily with it, though it took a bit of looking in documentation from two different network driver files to figure out why -- the controller chip on it is a clone of a fairly standard one. Unfortunately, though, I couldn't get a connection; it would ping itself, but not the rest of the world, and the "connection" lights didn't come on.

Eventually, I figured out why. It's an ethernet card, and a hub, on a single board. And so the ports on it are "hub" ports -- and so, to connect it to my real network hub, I needed to use a crossover cable. For some reason, this seemed rather amusing; I'm not sure why. (Sadly, it's only a 10Mbps connection, so it's not actually much use as a hub.)

Also, I picked up a couple of game controllers to play with. I'm a bit confused by them, though -- they're standard original Playstation controllers, down to the "Sony Playstation" logo and the SCPH-1080 part number. But, instead of having Playstation (nine-conductor) cables, they've got flat six-conductor flat cables that look like heavyish-grade phone cables and terminate in an ethernet-style plug. Anyone have an idea what those might go to?

They're also rather interesting on the inside; I hadn't realized just how little electronic circuitry was required to convert fourteen buttons of input into a serial data stream. It's just a couple of tiny 8-bit shift registers (half a square cm each) and some resistors.

Oh, hey, LJ changed something.

2008-03-20T22:34:32Z

On a post I make that's locked to a set of custom friends groups, my view of it now contains a nice list at the top of the groups that it's locked to, and a different "two-lock" microicon in place of the single lock for normal friendslock.

That's really very convenient indeed. I like that change.

Oh, my.

2008-03-14T08:34:09Z

For various and sundry reasons, only some of which are poor advance planning, I found myself preparing a duck for roasting at 11:00 this evening. (To be roasted tomorrow morning, not tonight.)

I decided, on a whim, to try doing some spices on it, inspired by desperance's recipe for duck confit and by the fact that I do have some juniper berries on hand.

So, I took some peppercorns (1.5t, or thereabouts; I'm guessing since I didn't measure) and some juniper berries (3t) and put them in our spice-mortar, along with a good bit of salt (1.5t). And I tossed in some whole mustard seeds (0.5t) that I noticed in the cabinet, along with the leaves off a couple of 12" branches of rosemary. And I ground this up, which took a bit of work since the mortar really wasn't meant for quite that much at once, and so I poured it through a small wire strainer into a bowl, and ground up the dregs in small batches (except for the rosemary leaves, which don't grind up but just get bruised into the other bits).

And then, curious, I tried a small taste of it. Just a touch, on the tip of a finger.

Oh, my.

It is entirely possible that this is the best taste I have ever tasted in my life.

It's this complex mix of the rosiny evergreen depth of the juniper and rosemary, and just a bit of bite from the peppercorns and mustard and the sharp-edged salt, and it just melts and the flavors change as the various notes come in and fade out, and it's all this combined flavor rather than being really distinguishable bits. And it is absolutely marvelously glorious.

Yes, of course, that makes perfect sense. Riiiight.

2008-03-13T05:48:15Z

So, we've got this relatively modern oven, with electronic controls and lots of buttons. To turn it on, you turn one rotary switch to "Oven On", push the "Bake" button, and turn the "Set" dial until the LCD shows the temperature you want. And then, after a moment, the LCD switches to showing the actual temperature in the oven.

The LCD also, of course, has a clock on it. I suspect there is a federal law that all home appliances that have multi-digit LCD displays must use them to display a clock.

So, as is a timely question right about now, how do you set this clock?

Well, in the row of buttons like "Bake" and "Broil" and "Deep Fat Fry", there is one labeled "Clock". So the obvious thing to do is to push the "Clock" button and then turn the "Set" dial.

I tried that. It didn't do anything.

Well, almost nothing; it helpfully noted on the LCD screen that the oven was off. Which I knew.

I tried holding the "Clock" button and turning the "Set" dial, which of course also did nothing.

Then, I was enlightened, and proceeded to set the clock.

You see, there is no "Oven Off" / "Oven On" switch. There is an "Input Disabled" / "Input Enabled" switch, which is helpfully mislabeled as a switch to turn the oven on and off. This mislabeling is, of course, obvious because it does not in fact turn the oven on.

And so, to set the clock on the oven, you first turn the switch to "Oven On" to enable input, push the "Clock" button, turn the "Set" dial to the correct time, and then (because it seems like the thing one does) turn the switch back to "Oven Off" once it's set.

This is, of course, exactly the opposite of our car radio, which one must first turn off in order to set the clock.

Having fun, 1920s edition.

2008-03-13T04:05:57Z

I thought this was pretty nifty....

The Krazy Kat club, Washington, D.C., 1921

Five photos, here, here, here, here, here, and a sixth in comments on the first.

Also, from the same photoblog, auto shop class, 1927.

Two photos, here and here.

A bad pun, which I must share.

2008-02-29T21:57:54Z

I apologize because this is a really bad pun, as well as being a bit dated, but it won't leave my head. So I inflict it on you, my loyal readers.

So, in the beginning, the Lord created the heavens and the Earth, and the plants and the animals. And the Lord said unto the animals, "GO FORTH AND MULTIPLY."

And lo, the animals went forth and multiplied, and there were many Cute Baby Animals.

The Lord looked down on all of this, and saw that it was good.

Well, almost all good. There were only two adders, looking somewhat uncomfortable under His gaze, who were not going forth and reproducing.

And the Lord said unto Samuel L. Jackson, "GO DOWN THERE AND SOLVE THAT PROBLEM."

So Samuel went down to the adders, and they said, "Well, it's muddy down here, and lumpy, and uncomfortable, and we're kind of picky about bedding...."

And Samuel looked up at the Lord, and the Lord looked down and said to him, "NO, YOU DON'T GET TO SMITE THEM. THAT'S MY JOB"

So, he took his mighty hand and felled some trees, and built from their trunks a large smooth platform above the ground, on which the adders might be comfortable. And the adders saw it, and it was Good, and once nobody was looking, they were well on their way to producing cute baby adders.

...

Now, the moral of the story is, There are SNAKES ON A PLANE!

(What? You were expecting something about adders being able to multiply with log tables?)

Email out, Houseboat mush out, etc.

2008-02-29T03:42:56Z

So, the server on which half my life is hosted seems to be having problems. As I understand it, the relevant support people have been pinged, but there's not as yet a prognosis or expected time of restoration.

Thus, at the moment, I am not receiving email. If you want to email me, send it to first-initial-last-name at speakeasy dot net, and that will detour it around the blockage.

Also, the "Houseboat" not-really-a-MUSH that I use to keep in touch with various of you is down, as a result of this. (Yes, I have local backups of the database, all 95 objects of it, if it comes to that.) My apologies to you all for the outage.

Finally, anything hosted off dpdx.net, which is my research page and various little bits of software I've got for download, mostly, is also offline.

Further reports as events warrant....

Edit: Seems to be back now. No idea what the problem was yet, though.

Quote of the week.

2008-02-26T20:12:54Z

It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that's the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water---with which it reacts explosively. It can be kept in some of the ordinary structural metals---steel, copper, aluminium, etc.---because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride which protects the bulk of the metal, just as the invisible coat of oxide on aluminium keeps it from burning up in the atmosphere. If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes.

—John Clark, describing chlorine trifluoride in Ignition! An informal history of liquid rocket propellants, quoted by Derek Lowe in "Sand Won't Save You This Time".