planes crash sometimes

So I am scanning my news feeds this morning when I suddenly notice that there was been a DOMESTIC plane crash...yesterday...killing approximately 50 people.  The first thing that pops into my mind is: how did it take so long for me to hear about this?  I generally consider myself pretty well informed about the news so I head over to CNN to get more details.  Once again, I am shocked to find that this story isn't even the headline on their website.

I just have to wonder how much bigger this story would have been if some "terrorist" had decided to blow up the plane rather than whatever stupid mistake happened resulting in the plane taking off on the wrong runway.  Would the bombing had made air travel any less safe than this tragedy?  Just another example of how retarded the news industry has become.  Hopefully the Homeland Security people will effect an immediate ban on short runways to prevent this tragedy from ever happening again.  Might as well bulldoze a bunch of houses and make them all 10 miles long...can't be too "safe".

wireless is easy?

Just received a used Dell laptop as my official work laptop since I was too impatient to wait my turn to get a new one.  The official specs are Dell Latitude D610 with a high resolution (1400x1050) screen and built-in wireless.  There are a few issues running the latest version of Ubuntu (LTS) on it.  First of all, the display does not work at full resolution for the built-in monitor, or for my external monitor at work.  The best I can do at the moment is 1280x1024.  The second issue is the wireless card does not work out-of-the-box.  Since a network connection is far more important than fixing fuzzy fonts, I set out to get wireless working first.  Here is what I found...

Step 1:

Determine what kind of wireless device you have built into your sytem.  The easiest way to do this is look at the output of the command "lspci" and search for something wireless-ish.  On my system, I have the following line:

0000:03:03.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4318 [AirForce One 54g] 802.11g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 02)

Step 2:

Search google for detailed instructions from someone else who has already got this device working :)

A simple search directed me to this HOWTO with some very useful information:

http://bcm43xx.berlios.de/?go=Home
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/Driver/bcm43xx/Dapper

Step 3:

It appears that the Broadcom chip is already supported in the latest linux kernel provided by Ubuntu.  However, the firmware is proprietary and cant be distributed.  Therefore, you have to install a package called "bcm43xx-fwcutter" and manually download the firmware.  Once you do that, simply run the extraction tool:

sudo bcm43xx-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware <downloaded file>

and reboot.  Suddenly your wireless card is automatically working :)

Step 4:

Get a nice network connection tool like NetworkManager installed so that you can automagically switch between wireless and wired connections when appropriate.

sudo apt-get install network-manager-gnome

phily

Parents came, they saw and they left. The pic you see pretty much sums up my visit to this city...minus the sewage smell that meandered among the city streets.

Had a good time overall. My hosts were gracious and accomodating. My only real complaint is the horrible design of the turnpike systems. Has noone ever considered adding a turnaround area ever few miles? How about ever 5 miles?

Terrorization

How much longer will it take for people to realize that the real "Terrorists" in this world are news organizations and government officials who over-hype and sensationalize every issue they can get their hands on?  I'm not belittling the efforts of those who seek to inflict harm upon others, but when you stop and think about it, there has been more damage resulting from irrational and unprofessional behavior by news organizations than there ever was from real destruction of life and property (I have no solid proof of this...just speculation :P).  It might be nice if these organizations invested minimal effort to become less the tools of the criminally insane and more the purveyors of logic and reason.  Is there no money to be made in reporting facts?

While I am on the subject, why are Christians so afraid of dying?

Who needs electricity?

Another month, another night without power.  That makes 3 for the summer now.  With the last storm, I could understand because it brought ferocious winds that knocked down a number of trees in my neighborhood.  However, the storm last night was highly localized to the extent that the other side of my street never lost power at all and it didnt rain at APL, as evidenced by the brown cracked dirt and yellow grass.  Given that there were no widespread power outages, why did it take BGE until 6:30 a.m. to restore power to my apartment?  This is a reminder to myself to go buy some girly candles so I have enough light to read the next time this happens.

Long Time No Post

Its been a busy few weeks!  But on my flight home from Vancouver I ran across an intereting little brain-teaser I thought I would share.  Suppose a man with two children tells you one of them is a boy.  Given that the probability of a child being either male or female is equal (50%), what is the probability that the other child is a boy?  The answer is so easy it hurt my brain...