perturbences, chines, etc.

whatching all these reporters at the daily NASA briefing asking again and again if the "tile damage" will cause any problem, and if the chine perturbances* might blow the shuttle to pieces, leaves me amazed. it's not that suddently everything goes wrong. my guess is that these kind of minor damages happened before, and were not a problem, and won't be a problem now either.

i know this is the kind of line of thought that eventually brought the Columbia down, but from what i see, the only reason reporters are asking about this is because now is the first time we can actually see them in orbit. in the past, we only saw the remains of the chimes  after landing, and the flight computer managed to get over the disturbances.

————–
* these chines or whatever they are spelled are small and thin pieces that are inserted in the gaps between the tiles on the shuttle. sometimes, some of them fall off, or partly fall off, and stick out. and when you travel at Mach 20, it starts to become a problem.

בקטגוריה general, space | תגים | להגיב

mozip.NET update

at first, i tought to use the existing mozip as a library, and call the relevant functions from the C# code. but since mozip is so command-line oriented, i reached a conclusion this won't be possible without serious modifications to the original code, that will in effect make it useless for the original mozip. so i decided to port mozip to C# entirely, and call all the Win32 API it uses from the C# code. this isn't so trivial, since the Win32 API is in C, but C# has a special syntax for accomplishing that, and that worked out nicely. i was even able to pass a C# function to the API C function to run.

so far i wrote the part that opens the installer and displays the moduls in it. now i have to clear the bugs from it so it actually works 🙂

while at it i found some problems in the original code, such as un-released memory, unused variables, what seems like insufficient memory allocation, one function that is never called from anywhere else, and terrible indentation. i'll sum this up and send it to piaip, the mozip creator.

בקטגוריה general, מחשבים | תגים , | להגיב

ג'יימס דוהאן הלך לעולמו

ג'יימס דוהאן, שגילם את סקוטי, מהנדס הספינה ב-star trek (הדור הראשון), הלך לעולמו ביום רביעי האחרון. לבקשתו, מעט מאפרו ישוגר על טיל לחלל, וישרף בעת חזרתו לאטמוספירה.

דוהאן מצטרף אל ג'ין רודנברי, יוצר הסדרה והיקום של סטאר טרק, ואל דה-פורסט קלי, שגילם את ליאונרד "בונז" מק'קוי, רופא הספינה, שנפטר ב-1999.

קישור לידיעה ב-space.com

בקטגוריה general, scifi | תגים | להגיב

they fooled you twice

dear oh dear londoners. suppose you weren't ready for an attack the first time, and didn't check at the entrances to the subway stations, so they managed to slip three bombs to the trains. but a second time? what are you, morons? what would it take you to take the steps to stop the terrorists before they act? how difficult is it to check in people's bags at entrances?

i hope it won't take you a week to get forensic evidence from the bus this time. over here, in two hours you wouldn't even notice there was a bomb.

בקטגוריה general | תגים | להגיב

source of terror 2

in his speech to the labour party, Tony Blair explained very well the source of the radical islamic terror. he realizes that there is nothing the western civilization can do to correct its ways, that will make them stop. that's a good sign. however, his conclusion is still wrong. he said the extremist threats can be fought with "the power of argument, debate, true religious faith, and true legitimate politics." that is so wrong. the only way to fight extremist thread is at the point of a gun, and a good bunch of challenger tanks. what kind of debate can you have with an ideology that promotes suicide bombings in order to kill as many civilians as possible? what arguments can you use to convince them that they are wrong? there are none. these are poeple who are sure they hear God's voice, and do his orders (as Blair notes himself), and no logic or other agrument can persuade them otherwise.

now, we still have to stop new people from joining them, and that, i think, should be the result of a democratic governance in every muslim country. it may take time, but in the long run, that is the solution.

בקטגוריה general, politics | תגים | להגיב

מה אני, פלסטיני?!

אתמול ראיתי בחדשות, באחד הדיווחים על ההתפרעויות במחסום כיסופים בכניסה לגוש קטיף, את אחד המתפרעים (אינני יודע אם הוא תושב הגוש בכלל) שואל בתמימות (אך בצעקה), משהו בסגנון "למה אני צריך להראות תעודה כדי להגיע לבית שלי? מה אני, פלסטיני?" ובעיתון באמצע השבוע ראיתי ציטוט של מתנחל או מתנחלת אחר/ת, שואל שאלה דומה. או, סוף סוף הם מתחילים לקלוט מה הפלסטינים צריכים לעבור כדי לאפשר להם את החיים הנוחים יחסית שלהם, לא כולל קסאמים.

בקטגוריה general, politics | תגים | להגיב

IZArc zip utility

when i installed windows again on my machine a few months ago, i decided to look for a free zip utility, instead of the world famous WinZip, which starts nagging you to pay for it after a month or so. i tried several programes, but they all had various bugs in them, the most common of which was that they sometimes didn't add files to an existing archive when i tried to. and that includes ZipGenius, if you think i missed this one. it has as many bugs as it has features.

eventually i found IZArc, a nice WinZip clone that works pretty good. the only thing missing here for me is sorting the files in each folder by name, once you sort the whole archive by folder. i already started translating it to hebrew, if anyone is interested.

בקטגוריה general, מחשבים | תגים | להגיב

source of terror

"The nation of Islam and the Arab nation rejoiced for the time to take revenge at the government of the Zionist British Crusaders has come…" These words open the Al-Qaeda message that take the responsibility for the 7/7 attacks in London.

But despite the clear message of the terror organization, and despite the killing spread by the bombs it operated in the name of Islam and for Islam, the so-called "enlightened" public opinion in Britain is investing great efforts in the last day to deny, blur and hide the connection between the terror attacks and radical Islam.

The baseless words of one of London's heads of police, proclaiming that "the words 'Islam' and 'terror' don't go together" are widely quoted. the daily Guardian publishes and article by a muslim publicist, Paust Bony, who writes: "the anger raised by the decision of Tony Blair to join Bush in his war in Iraq has put all of Britain in the line of fire". one of the heads of the Labour, David Clark, is prophesying: "we won't win the war against terror if we don't treat seriously the problems of the Arabs… we are not considerate enough regarding the rights of the Palestinians." Articles, commentaries, and headlines in this spirit flood the London media.

The bad spirit reached up to the office of the British prime minister Tony Blair, the most serious statesman in the world today, who said in an interview to the BBC: "The world needs to take care of the deepest roots of terror." And what are these roots? According to Blair, these are "poverty,… and the middle east conflict."

With all do respect, the British prime minister is wrong, as do the commentators who point a blaming finger not only at the terrorists but also at president Bush, at Israel, at "the rich" and the West itself, thereby clearing the terrorists from their crime.

The attempt to bury reality as it is under piles of empty words won't help. The following truths are clear to every person in his right mind looking at the terror waves of the 21st century: first, this is a Muslim terror. Not anarchist, not Zionist, and not conservative-right one. This is a terror of Islam radicals, believing in the need to open now a global jihad against infidels, Jews, Christian-Crusaders and moderate Muslims.

Second, this is a terror of wealthy and educated Muslims, not of the poor and mindless. the Islam countries are flooded by hundreds of billions of dollars they received from selling expensive oil. The terrorists who planned and executed the attacks in New York and Madrid where wealthy, know languages, know technology. This is also the socio-economic profile of the Hamas and Hisbulla leaders. There is no connection, not even remote, between fighting poverty and fighting terror.

Third, the jihadists opened a war of terror against the West because it is the West, and not in order to "advance" the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or cause the United States to take its troops out of Iraq. Their one and only motive was and is to undermine the foundations of the hated Western civilization and uncover its weaknesses. To spread demolition in order to spread demolition. That's why the Al-Qaeda terror would not have stopped – it would only strengthen – if the US reacted to the attacks by withdrawing it's troops from Iraq, and Israel withdrew to the 1967 lines. The jihadists aim at something else, much bigger: they want to set a new world order by the laws of radical Islam.

Forth, there is only one way to fight terror: fight it. hit it, terminate it with no mercy. the war against terror must be total, because terror is total. until victory, until the enemy is defeated. any compromise with Islamic terror, any attempt to understand it — that is to forgive it, at least partialy — means moving down the slippery slope that Churchill warned against in June 1940 when he refused to open negotiations with Hitler.

Shortly after the mass terror attacks and even before all the dead are identified, the self-deception machine started to work in Britain and throughout Europe. The blame started to role from the guilty to others. That's how the ground is cleared for the next attacks.


the above text is my translation of an article by Sevver Plotzker, chief economy editor of Israel's most wide-spread paper, Yedioth Aharonoth, published this Sunday. I believe it reflects the views of most Israelis, who have learned the nature of the Arab terrorism from up-close. The only "solution to the middle east conflict" the terrorists want is the removal of Israel.

בקטגוריה general, politics | תגים | להגיב

Farenheit 9/11

yesterday they showed Michael Moore's Farenheit 9/11 movie on the local cable channel. it's the first time i had a chance to see it, and since it did so much noise when it was released, i thought i'll see it.

so, is Bush a fool? so it seems. did he and his government plan to invade iraq before 9/11? probably. did iraq and saddam have nothing to do with 9/11 or al-qaida? most likely. i don't know why they wanted to invade iraq. was it because he wanted to complete his father's work, or was it connected to the oil, or some personal vendetta because saddam tried to kill his father (which, as the supreme commander of the armed forces, was a legitimate military target). the cause was wrong, but the result was just.

yes, many Iraqis died in the war. but i would argue that many iraqies would have died anyway by the hands of Saddam himself. you've all seen the graves of tens of thousands of Iraqis killed by Saddam and his men, and there's no reason to think he would not have continued do kill more Iraqis. so one may argue that the total number of civilians that died since 2003 wasn't much different with or without the war.

now, why go to war anyway? the arab world, and that included iraq, is ruled by dictators. all of them. egypt, Morocco, saudi-arabia, and all the rest. the result of this is a low income, and the result of this, is frustration at the success of western civilization while the arabs are left behind. and the result of this, is terror. the best way it seems to me to minimize the terrorist option for young arabs, is to release them from their dictators, give them democracy, and allow them to prosper. that won't prevent terrorism completely, but it will be allot more difficult for extremists to recruit people for their groups, when they have that much to loose.

furthermore, if the US wants to see itself as the promoter of democracy in the world, it just can't sit back and cooperate with anti-democratic regimes like those that exist in the middle east.

Moore, like many people, fails to see the big picture. he finds that the war was started for the wrong reasons, and comes to the conclusion that the war should never have started. he forgets that in the long run, toppling saddam and installing a democratic government in iraq, that will hopefully spread itself into other arab countries, is in the interest of the national security of the US and the rest of the world, not to mention the new markets that can be opened, once the oil money reaches the people, instead of for the rulers and their armies.

oh, after that they played Bowling for Colombine. having a constitutional right to carry a gun is nuts, and it also contradicts the principle that the government, any government, must have a monopoly on weapons.

בקטגוריה general, politics | תגים , , | להגיב

משוגעים, רדו מהגג!

נראה לי שאחרי שנתפנה מהשטחים, נצטרך לאשפז כמה מ"הגרעין הקשה" של המתנחלים בבתי החולים לבריאות הנפש. חלק מהם ממש מנותקים מהמציאות.

בקטגוריה general | תגים | להגיב