Digital Apocrypha

17:30 CNN.com is reporting oil wells are burning on the Iraq/Kuwait border.

I’m listening to the BBC Radio 4 6 o’clock news over the net, but the feed keeps dropping. Their servers must be melting right now.

17:37 BBC reporting troops have started to move over the border into Iraq.

18:00 Yahoo Groups has a new group, gulfwar-2, to collate war news. Too early to say how good the quality of the information is, as it only started three hours ago.The osint (open source intelligence) group also has some good real-time information. In my experience this group is quite reliable.

Gulfwar-2 had a pointer to a blogger in Baghdad. Last post was 4:28 today. Hope he’s okay.

18:25 CNN reporting explosions heared around Baghdad. BBC news video feed seems to be better than Radio 4. Bigger bandwidth allocation, I suppose.

Going to eat now.

21:05 gulfwar-2 seems to have settled for a good ol’ flame war. Useful info coming out of osint, though.

21:33 Reuters is reporting that ricin has been detected in the Gare de Lyon station, Paris.

BBC reporters have a very good weblog here. Last post was 20 minutes ago.

22:47 The San Jose Mercury News has a good war blog. Iranian perspective at IRNA.com.

23:05 Just watched Tony Blair’s address to the country. A good, sincere performance – but, on the basis of what he said, I still don’t understand why Iraq? His central justification was that rogue states will sell WMDs to terrorists who will use them on us. If so, why Iraq? Why not an obvious supporter of terrorism like Iran or Syria, or even Libya? The pieces still don’t connect-up.

Enough! I’m away to my bed. Its a cold, still night here. I wonder what its like out there in the desert?

A few more articles on the coming war:

Just the Beginning: Is Iraq the opening salvo in a war to remake the world? (American Prospect). An interesting analysis of the possible policy agenda behind the coming war.

A Long, Winding Road to a Diplomatic Dead End (New York Times). How the hell the pols got us into this.

National Security Strategy of the United States of America. How its going to be…

Seven hours to go, now. I hope they can keep a lid on this thing once it starts.

Scary new flu-like disease, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, spreading in Asia. Reports from the BBC, New York Times, World Health Organisation, US CDC. ProMED has useful information, and a mailing list, on emergent diseases.

Rotisserie – an interesting approach to threaded discussion lists.

Another quiet week, blog-wise. I was up in the Lake District on a short pre-war backpacking trip. It rained almost continuously every day except Friday, which was warm and sunny with a completely cloudless blue sky. It was also the day I had to travel home. Still, an enjoyable and strenuous week. Photos should appear in the photos area soon. #

I spent the evenings simultaneously trying not to worry about the coming war, and re-reading a battered old copy of 1984. Consequently, I now have a solid grounding in the principles of doublethink. #

Some reading material to pass the time before the 24 hour rolling coverage starts:

Farewell to the old world (Guardian). “Momentous events and decisions, each weighty in its own terms, are tripping over each other. There is a sense of history suddenly speeding up, of a loss of control…“

The war of misinformation has begun, by Robert Fisk (Independent).

Project for the New American Century: Statement of Principles. Check out the names at the bottom of the page. Double-plus-scary.

George W. Queeg (New York Times). “But more and more people now realize that even if all goes well at first, it will have been the wrong war, fought for the wrong reasons ? and there will be a heavy price to pay.” (Confused about the title? I was. Try this).

America’s deep Christian faith (BBC). “It’s not uncommon to see White House functionaries hurrying down corridors carrying bibles.“

The Thirty-Year Itch (MotherJones.com). “Three decades ago, in the throes of the energy crisis, Washington’s hawks conceived of a strategy for US control of the Persian Gulf’s oil.“

The day the earth died (The Observer). Victims recall Japan’s WWII bio-weapons tests.

Off to bed now, to try to sleep.

www.boring.com – Is this real, or some kind of elaborate joke?

Much to my surprise, Its a month since I last posted anything to this blog. Blame moving house and all the associated life-trauma. Anyway, normal service has now been resumed. #

I’m currently having another try at using a news aggregator. This time its NewsGator, which runs as an add-in to Outlook. So far I really like it. Even better, its only $29! #

Don Box on XML, late night phone calls, and sleep. This is cool – like an extract from Microserfs. I haven’t done an all-night coding session for about ten years, and I think my eyeballs would probably drop out of my skull if I tried it now. Don, you’re my hero. #

Paul Thurrott has a fascinating series of articles on the development of Windows from NT 3.51 to Windows Server 2003. Well worth a read. #

Wired News has an article about a guy who claims to have developed software that can visually digitize a vinyl record. You scan the record using a flatbed scanner, and the program reconstructs the music from patterns of light and dark in the image. I’m skeptical about this: even if the record is clean and the scan resolution is good enough, I just can’t believe that the music quality is going to be any good. Since I don’t have a scanner or any records, my opinion is unlikely to change. Nice idea though. #

Look. The reason I haven’t installed Three Degrees is because I haven’t got Windows XP. Okay.  Its not because I’m too old to understand it, and its definitely not because my attention span isn’t short enough. Got that? Anyway, review here continues here. Check here for how this abomination came into existence. #

Interesting paper (PDF) from AT&T Research on counting hosts behind a NAT box. #

And this one was probably on slashdot too: Millennium Prize problems in mathematics.

We’re moving house on Friday. Gotta start packing today.

NASA TV is webcasting briefings at 1630 GMT from NASA HQ and  2130 GTM today from the Johnson space centre. My experience of the last couple of days is that their streaming video servers is give up when heavily loaded. Broadcast.com/Yahoo has alternative feeds, and they support Windows Media Player. #

A good example of a blog covering the Columbia disaster. CNN’s timeline. #

NASA has a couple of mailing lists that I’ve found useful. For press releases, email majordomo@lists.hq.nasa.gov with “subscribe press-release” in the message body. For human spaceflight news, email majordomo@listserver.jsc.nasa.gov with “subscribe hsfnews” in the message body.

We were out shopping for vegetables when the space shuttle broke up over Texas. I was buying onions and spinach, and they were dropping down from orbit at Mach 18 in their big white spacecraft, watching the wings glow red and the sky grow lighter. A normal Saturday afternoon for me, until the TV coverage kicks in and, just like the Challenger in ’86, we watch contrails in the sky over and over and over…

A lot has been written about what happened yesterday. As usual, many people are questioning the need for manned space flight – on the ground of cost, safety, and scientific effectiveness. Some are saying that know is the time to ground the shuttles and mothball the space station. I think that they miss the point. Human exploration of space is important for the scientific knowledge it brings now, for the economic benefits it may soon begin to produce, and for our long-term destiny as a species. But it’s also important for us, now.

As a child, I had a telescope and like many, I dreamed of space flight. Then I grew-up and, of course, filled my life with the things that adults do: like going to work and reading newspapers and shopping for veg on a Saturday afternoon. I’ll never see a sunrise from orbit, or watch the sea and land turn beneath me. Somewhere deep inside me, the child that I was feels sadness at that; at never going up there. As an adult, though, I’m happy enough that someone is doing it. As long as I know that some part of the human species is out there, doing the job on all our behalves, I don’t mind taking care of the little things.

The exploration of space is trancendant, powerful, heroic, mythic. It’s not just about a few individuals: its characteristic of us all as humans. They do it for us. For you and me.

And thats why we have to carry on doing this. And not ever stop.