There were a few more changes I wanted to make, but work has been really busy and I don’t know when I’ll have time to get around to making all the changes I have in mind.  So rather than keep a website that was mostly complete from going live indefinitely, I decided to just make it public as it is and deal with the additional fixes as I get the time.

I migrated a few of my old blog posts to this new site, but I didn’t copy over any of the comments.  I may one day, but for now, please feel free to leave comments or questions.   Photos have also been migrated over, and you can comment on those as well.  I still need to get around to allowing people to create accounts (not that many people have in the past, but it saves having to type in your name and email every time you comment).    The main navigation menu is on the top, and if you are curious why I broke down the site into these sections, you can take a look here.

Few things upset me more than greedy companies taking advantage of consumer ignorance. I own about 30 domain names, and therefore I get a lot of domain name spam– both emails and letters in the mail. Some of the letters in the mail attempt to pass themselves off as bills from the company that owns your domain. The wording makes it appear as if your domain is registered through them and will expire unless you pay them a fee (usually something like $30 for a 1 year renewal, which makes it even more ridiculous because the typical rate is around $10 per year). They make the letter look as official as possible, and while it does say in the (very) fine print that it isn’t really an invoice, a lot of gullible consumers aren’t going notice that, especially because they send these letters out a month or so before your domain is actually about to expire. (Publicly accessible whois records allow anyone to obtain the owner name and address, expiration date, and registrar of any public domain name.)

Now, when I receive these types of letters, I just rip them apart and toss them in the trash. However, I can imagine non-tech savvy people falling for this. My mom, for example, recently received one such letter but thankfully was smart enough to call me about it. I don’t remember exactly which company it was from, but if you google “domain renewal scam” you’ll come across a bunch of reported cases involving companies such as Domain Registry of America and Liberty Names of America.

That means I need to cut out unnecessary menu items like the Help, View, Edit, History, and Bookmarks. (I use the collapsible All-in-One Sidebar add-on for all that functionality.) Anyway, after installing FF3, the Bookmarks menu came back. I checked my userchrome.css file and it was the same as before. Then I had to google for a good 10 minutes before I found a user comment that mentioned FF3 had changed the CSS name for the Bookmarks menu from #bookmarks-menu to #bookmarksMenu. Ugh, why?

While Cryptonomicon has all the makings of a great high tech hacker thriller, there is one overall issue I had with the book. Although the author apparently knows a great deal about cryptanalysis (he provides satisfying details regarding the theories and mathematics behind various code schemes), some parts of the book come across like a story about hackers written by a non-hacker. For example, in one section, Randy Waterhouse– the modern day hacker– is tyring to anonymously wipe data from a server before the feds get to it. So, according to the book, he types in:

telnet laundry.org

(Laundry.org is an anonymous proxy.) The author then goes on to say:

[Randy] logs onto laundry.org using ssh– “secure shell”– a way of further encrypting communications between two computers.

Then, when logged into laundry.org, Randy types:

telnet crypt.kk

Okay, so who in their right mind would use telnet for security-sensitive activity? And the fact that the book says he types “telnet server.tld” and then “logs onto server.tld using ssh” simply does not make any sense. Randy, or any hacker worth two cents, would instead have typed:

ssh laundry.org
ssh crypt.kk

There are other incidents in the book that remind you, if you actually do work in some of the high tech fields discussed in the book, that this is written by someone outside said field. At least that was the case for me when it came down to topics on telecommunications and, to a lesser extent, “hacking” (I hate that term). That issue aside, however, this has got to be one of my favorite books in recent history– a worthy high tech intellectual thriller that makes The Da Vinci Code look like a third grade picture book.

As the Michelson-Morley experiment would later show, electromagnetic waves are indeed capable of propagating without a propagation medium (see explanation below). This in turn allowed Einstein to develop his special theory of relativity as we know it today. So, the “ether” coined by those early physicists was nothing more than an imaginary construct created to help people of that time understand electromagnetic phenomena. Fascinating, isn’t it?

The Michelson-Morley experiment didn’t explicitly disprove the existence of ether. It did, however, show that light travels at the same speed in perpendicular directions, which, assuming ether did exist, wouldn’t be possible unless the ether frame moved in sync with the Earth’s rotation, which would be a preposterous claim. (They believed the ether frame was rooted either in the solar system’s center of mass or in the center of the universe.) It was Einstein who later used these experimental results to assert that there is no ether frame, which means the velocity of light is only relative to the observer’s own frame, which would then result in the famous concept of a “constant speed of light, c.” Einstein then used this idea to arrive at his famous postulate:

The laws of electromagnetic phenomena, as well as the laws of mechanics, are the same in all inertial frames of reference, despite the fact that these frames move with respect to each other. Consequently, all inertial frames are completely equivalent for all phenomena.

This was an incredibly bold statement at the time, because it meant that Maxwell’s equations and Galilean transformations could not both be correct (one of them had to be wrong). Even bolder, Einstein chose to modify the Galilean transformation, which meant he was challenging the fundamental equations of Newtonian physics!

In all truthfulness, I do believe blogging has some value. It provides a sounding board for ideas and rants, and due to some strange psychological reason, unloading my thoughts, or at least a certain subset of them, onto a public webpage accessible by billions of people (with actual readership likely numbering in the low single digits) gives me a sense of relieved gratification. I see it as ‘talking to yourself in public’ taken into the 21st century. Add to this the fact that I’m posting this on my phone while on a train from New York to Philly, and I can almost convince myself that this is all somehow “cool.”

Anyway, what prompted this post is that I was just reading an article in the WSJ on recent job cuts in the financial sector and came across this quote

“[An attorney] filed an arbitration claim this week on behalf of a former mortgage backed securities salesman at Merrill Lynch & Co. Despite having his best year ever, the salesman’s pay plummeted to about $190,000 from $1.2 million. ‘He couldn’t make enough money to feed his family.’”

Poor guy.

The longest part of the install process was waiting for my tri-wing screwdriver to arrive in the mail. Why does Nintendo insist on using tri-wing screws in their devices? Anyway, once my $4 screwdriver ($5 shipping) arrived from Florida, I was able to finally take apart my Wii and isolate the DVD drive, which is where the WiiKey needs to be installed.

I used a 15 Watt soldering iron with rosin-core solder and 30 AWG kynar wires. I’m too cheap to buy flux, so the soldering itself took longer than expected. I haven’t soldered in quite a while, and modchip jobs make the soldering from Princeton’s ELE 302 look like toy LEGO projects (no disrespect to LEGOs; they’re awesome). I found it useful to cover up the area around the soldering points with electric tape. At least this was easier than the soldering for my PS2 modchip– that one was just insane.

After I finished soldering, testing connectivity with a multimeter, and putting the Wii back together, I popped in my Jap Bleach game and… nothing. It couldn’t read the disc. My first thought was, “Crap!” Then I popped in a normal US game, and it played, so I thought, “Whew! But still…” So, I moseyed on over to the Internets and asked my friend Google what was up, and found out that by default the WiiKey doesn’t have region unlocking enabled (I assume because of the danger of bricking a Wii with automatic foreign firmware updates). I then downloaded the WiiKey configuration ISO from mininova, burned it, used it to enable region unlocking, popped my Jap Bleach game into my Wii again, saw it play, and shouted, “Yatta!”