Dear Mister Jones

One of the blogs I enjoy reading when I have time is www.betterexplained.com.  The guy there is a math genius, most of what he talks about is over my head.  But what I appreciate is that he’s taking the time to try and explain stuff in a way that I would understand.  A while back he posted this about developing a sense of scale.  It’s a great article, but this blog post is about something he mentioned in passing in his article:

“Fun and interesting: occupy a geek for hours by asking how many TIE fighters would be needed to take out the Starship Enterprise.”

Well, that’s just too interesting of a question to go unanswered.  I don’t have the time to actually figure out how many TIE fighters would be needed to take out the Starship Enterprise - so I have to go with my gut on this one.  I think it would take around 463 TIE fighters to take out the Starship Enterprise.  The important thing to take away from this is that the TIE fighters *would* take out the Enterprise.  Don’t get me wrong - I’m a fan of the Star Trek multiverse.  However, on some deep level I just know that if the two worlds were to ever collide, Jedi’s with the Force would waste the crew of the Enterprise with their phasers.  The ability to beam around to different places would definitely be an advantage to the Trekkies, though.  Why didn’t the Star Wars universe ever think of that?!  I guess it’s because too much power makes a hero uninteresting over time.  Take Superman, for example - how many times can you take a storyline that involves the arch-nemesis being the same thing over and over: a green rock from some other planet.  Wolverine is a borderline almost-too-powerful superhero, since he can heal from just about anything.  But that’s what keeps you coming back for more in his case, you never know for sure whether he’ll heal from whatever wounded him.

Sorry, I digress.  Back to the question at hand - Star Wars would win over Star Trek, ’nuff said.  It’d be cool to see a Wookie versus Klingon match, though - that might be a toss-up.

Whether you’re buying a boat for the first time, or it’s just been a long while - you might benefit from a refresher on what types of boat are out there.  The boats that I’m going to cover here are mainly for day-use out on lakes and reservoirs.  Anything bigger than that and you’re starting to get out of my league (for now).  My wife grew up boating but I didn’t know much about any type of motor-driven boat until a couple of years ago.  This overview will help you get a handle on what’s out there and what might fit your style and budget.

Outboard

This type of boat has an outboard motor, meaning that the entire motor and drive unit (propeller) is external to the boat and is attached to the back.   You’ll find this most often used on fishing-type boats, but it’ll also appear on older water-ski boats.  In addition, I see a lot of speed boats using this configuration.  The benefits to an outboard boat are mainly in cost, and they’re a little simpler to maintain and operate than the others listed here.  You can use this type of boat for wakeboarding and other towable sports, but if you really get into it, you’ll probably want to graduate into one of the other types. Do NOT wakesurf behind this boat, though, due to danger of getting too close to the propeller.

Sterndrive, or I/O (Inboard/Outboard)

This is identical to an outboard boat in terms of the drive unit, it is external to the boat and contains the propeller and pivots with the steering wheel to turn the boat.  However, the engine is much larger and is inside the boat, at the stern, and is connected to the drive unit through the transom.  These make great waterskiing and wakeboarding boats.  You cannot wakesurf behind them, though, due to danger of getting too close to the propeller.  These are going to cost you more than the outboard boats, but will generally be less expensive than the inboard boats listed below.

Inboard Direct Drive

Inboard boats have a fixed propeller, meaning it is on a shaft that does not allow the propeller to pivot.  It simply spins and pushes the water straight back.  There is a rudder affixed to the boat a few inches behind the propeller and the steering wheel pivots this rudder left and right to direct the flow of water and thus steer the boat.  Inboard boats generally have a platform of some sort on the back of the boat.  A direct drive inboard boat has the engine located almost directly in the center of the boat.  These types of boats are for the die-hard water skier.  The location of the engine in the center means that the boat will sit very flat on the water, and create little to no wake behind it, leaving it nice and smooth for the skier.  In recent years, wake towers have been pretty common on these boats and they’re used more and more for wake boarding and wake surfing as well.  It is a little bit harder to create a nice wake for boarding and surfing behind these boats, but possible with additional weight placed in the right spot and the assistance of such devices as the wedge on a Malibu boat.  As soon as you cross over into the inboard boats, the cost goes up.  Direct drives are less expensive than a V-drive boat, though, and can usually be used for all of the same things, you just have to be a little more creative if you want a large wake.

Inboard V-Drive

The V-drive is identical to the direct drive, except that it has the engine placed at the back of the boat, to add more weight there and help create a larger wake.  This type of boat is designed for wakesurfing and wakeboarding.  A water skier can also be happy behind this type of boat, but you’ll never be able to match the flatness of a wake created by a direct drive boat.  V-drives are more expensive than direct drives.

Jet Boats

I don’t have an illustration of one, but I thought it would be good to include a description anyway.  A jet boat is generally a fisherman’s boat.  It is propelled by pulling water into the boat and forcing it out in a concentrated stream from the back of the boat via a ‘jet’.  The boat is steered by pivoting this jet to direct the stream in different directions.  The big advantage of this boat is that due to the absence of a propeller, it can be taken into very shallow water.  This leads to it being used on a lot of rivers to get to places that no other boat would be able to.  I don’t know how these rate in terms of cost to the other boats mentioned.

I don’t know how many other people out there might ever need to do something like this. Say you have a Linux web server using an SSL certificate, and you need to put that same certificate onto a Windows server for use with IIS. Here is how you would accomplish it.

You’ll need the openssl tool on your Linux node to do this.

• Put the contents of the public SSL cert and the private key into one file. Easiest way to do this would be to cat the public cert and append to a new file. Then cat the private key and append to that same file. For the purposes of the next steps, we’ll call this new file ‘newcert.crt’.
• Now, run: openssl pkcs12 -export -in newcert.crt -out iiscert.p12 -name “My Certificate”
  • Where ‘newcert.crt’ is the file that we created in the first step, and ‘iiscert.p12′ is the file that will be imported into IIS
• Securely (i.e. scp or something that won’t send the file in clear text - it contains your private key!) copy the iiscert.p12 file to the IIS server you’ll be using it on.
• Use the certificates MMC to import the iiscert.p12 file into the Personal certificate store for the computer object.
• Now use IIS to configure the default web page and replace the current certificate with the new one that was just imported.

Voila! Now you have a cross-platform SSL cert you can use.

About a year ago I bought a video game, Supreme Commander, to play on my PC.  I don’t buy new video games very often, which probably explains why I still think Pong totally rocks.  So needless to say, I was excited to play my new game.   My computer was relatively new and the game had been out for a while so I only glanced at the system requirements and made my purchase.  Of course, when I got home and installed it and tried to play, it didn’t work.  Upon closer inspection I realized that my video card didn’t have a ‘Vertex Shader / Pixel Shader’.  It was too late to return it at that point, of course, as I had already removed the shrink-wrap.  I considered selling it on ebay, but just depressed myself further when I searched and found that I could have purchased it myself there for about $20 less than I’d paid for it.  So … it sits on my shelf, and when I next upgrade my PC then I’ll finally have a chance to take it for a spin.  I’m sure the wait will be worth it - after all Gamespy said that it was “A game so immense that ’supreme’ might be too delicate a word”.

Since my impulse purchase of a year ago - I have learned that there is a web site you can go to which will scan your computer hardware and tell you whether it’ll be able to play that new video game you’re contemplating.  It is found here: http://www.systemrequirementslab.com/referrer/srtest.  Happy hunting.

Looks like Tige is willing to spend big cash to see people land the elusive 1080 trick (3 complete 360’s, for those of you who are not mathemagicians).  They’re offering $10,080 to whichever finalist can land the trick at the upcoming 2008 Tige Pro-Am Wakeboard Championships.

Me? I’m pretty good at a 180 (only one direction as of yet), and would be happy as a clam at high water if I could ever graduate to pulling a complete 360.

Have you ever had the unfortunate task of removing tree sap from your hands?

I was worried I would end up with the keys from my keyboard stuck to my fingers a few minutes ago, but luckily I picked up a tip here: http://www.ehow.com/how_10395_remove-tree-sap.html. Some helpful soul mentioned that smearing your sap soaked hands with butter and then washing with soap and water would free you. I gave it a try and it worked! Just thought I’d share with you all, in case you just happened to have a run-in with a weepy tree in the future.

 here's a CMD shell tip that works in W2K, WXP, and W2K3.

There is a BASIC MIDSTR function equivalent in batch files... use this syntax as a modifer:

~:start,end

e.g.

set foo=\\servername
@echo unretouched [%foo%]
@echo modified [%foo:~2,99%]

will output:

unretouched [\\servername]
modified [servername]
 

In a corporate network, this is a handy thing to have, for example, if you want to ping the server indicated in the LOGONSERVER variable, which is a UNC instead of just a host name:

ping %logonserver:~2,99%

Or let's say that you want the day of the week. This:

@echo unretouched [%date%]
@echo modified [%date:~0,3%]

will output:

unretouched [Tue 05/06/2008]
modified [Tue]

Nifty.
 

See the help at the end of “FOR /?” for other expansions to variables in file paths, some or all of which are repeated below.

See the Windows Help (no, seriously) and search for “using batch parameters” for lots of interesting expansions, e.g.

%~1 Expands %1 and removes any surrounding quotation marks (”").
%~f1 Expands %1 to a fully qualified path name.
%~d1 Expands %1 to a drive letter.
%~p1 Expands %1 to a path.
%~n1 Expands %1 to a file name.
%~x1 Expands %1 to a file extension.
%~s1 Expanded path contains short names only.
%~a1 Expands %1 to file attributes.
%~t1 Expands %1 to date and time of file.
%~z1 Expands %1 to size of file.
%~$PATH:1 Searches the directories listed in the PATH environment variable and expands %1 to the fully qualified name of the first one found. If the environment variable name is not defined or the file is not found, this modifier expands to the empty string.
Andrew.

What’s in a name?

At one point in my high school experience, we happened upon an old 2-door, beat-up Datsun B210 that my dad was able to purchase from the owner for a whopping $50. I remember taking pride (oddly) in the fact that I had to pay more for insurance than we had paid for the car. As guys often do, my friends and I gave the vehicle a name - calling it the ‘Nuclear Tomato‘.

It had been red at one time, but by the time I was its proud owner, the finish had long since disappeared and the paint had faded to sort of a burnt orange color. It had a chalky texture to it, and if you rubbed up against it with a white shirt, you’d come away looking like you’d just been hit with a well aimed shot of Tang. It had 4 white mag hubcaps.

For anyone that was lucky enough to witness its passage, it screamed that we were at the upper echelons of lower class teenage children. Its greatest feature was the fact that it was missing 3rd gear, so we’d drive around town with the engine RPMs nearing redline all the time in second gear, and occasionally we’d quick-shift into fourth gear while passing girls so they wouldn’t be overpowered by the high whine of the engine. I don’t remember what eventually happened to the car, but it had a very short life. I think it eventually lost fourth gear as well, and I believe we ended up selling it and still making a profit on it.

When my son’s old enough to drive, I’m looking for something similar to the Nuclear Tomato. It didn’t do much for my dating life (the passenger door only opened from the inside, I just remembered that), but it increased my coolness factor with my buddies in the way that only things like broken bones, belly button lint, and never-been-washed T-Shirts can.

As far as names go, I’ve always thought that we had dibs on the coolest name ever given to a car. Saying that you were heading out to go somewhere in the ‘Nuclear Tomato’ always elicited fun responses.

Can you identify these 11 famous cars?

Here are some nicknames given to some famous movie and television cars. How many can you identify just by their name? See if you can recall where they appear before clicking to find out. FYI - 8 of these are from movies, and 3 are from T.V.

• Chitty-chitty-bang-bang
• Greased Lightning
• Christine
• General Lee
• Lightning McQueen
• Ocho
  
• Kitt
• Bluesmobile
• Ecto-1
• Eleanor
• Dragula

What other famous car’s are out there with well-known names? What are some of your better nicknames you’ve had for your own cars?

It was Tuesday, August 24th, 2004 and I was watching the Olympics. I remember in particular the women’s 100m hurdles. The winner of the race, and of the gold medal, was Joanna Hayes of the U.S. It was quite a dramatic race; Perdita Felicien, the favorite and the world champion at the time, fell heavily at the first hurdle, leaving Joanna Hayes to carry on leading from start to finish. In the media coverage that followed, much was said about Perdita Felicien and Joanna Hayes. But in that race, there is one hurdler who was hardly mentioned at all, but to me, her race was the most poignant one of all. You see, when Perdita Felicien fell, in an attempt to cushion her fall, she threw out her right arm and caught Irina Shevchenko from Russia, causing her to fall down as well.

When I saw Irina Shevchenko go down, I could only imagine the heartache and mental anguish she would be feeling as the day wore on. Such thoughts as these would be going through her mind:

Read more »

There’s just something wrong about the fact that solar powered calculators do not have an off button. Even though it’s been this way for the several years that I’ve owned my Texas Instruments BA-35 Solar, I still check occasionally, just on the off chance that I’ve missed it all of these years. When I’m unable to turn it off I somehow feel like I’m wasting the sun’s energy. Someday someone is going to find out that the combined heat from all of the solar powered calculators on the earth was the tipping point that kicked off the whole global warming situation. Help save the earth, turn your solar powered calculator face-down when you’re not using it.

I wonder why they haven’t created a solar powered TV remote control yet? Sure, it’d still have to use batteries at night, but if we can harness the power of the sun to calculate the square root of pi, then why can’t we figure out how to use it to flip to the Daily Show?