The Apollo moon landings were all fake. If you believe that, I imagine you also believe that Santa lives at the North Pole, and all Politicians are always scrupulously honest.

Not to be dissuaded by facts or logic, there are still a surprising number of people, most of whom have not had lobotomies and aren’t permanent residents of mental institutions, who believe that the moon landings are fake. But, I suppose they are welcome to have their stupid, pathetically innane, and completely wrong theories. Continue reading Moon Landing Conspiracy! →

The last couple of years I’ve been blessed to have an opportunity to rediscover my “roots” at work. More specifically, I’ve been able to return to programming after spending many years in infrastructure support and design. Continue reading What makes a great hacker? →

I am a programmer. I wouldn’t consider myself to be a “master” programmer, but I think I write pretty decent stuff when I get going. I also occasionally cut corners and write quick and dirty “hacks” to solve a particular problem or to test something out. I sometimes feel guilty about this, but then I read findings from interviews with master programmers, and I discover that they often write ugly but useful hacks as well…

I used to be a procedural programmer, with languages like C and Pascal. Now I’m migrating to object oriented languages. And I stumbled across a little article about the the bad side of code folding.

 Code folding is a really simple concept with a mysterious sounding name. Basically, it allows you to group a section of code together in an editor and “collapse” it, hiding all the nasty bits. I discovered code folding in the Visual Studio .Net integrated development environment…

Continue reading Code Folding… →

On June 21st of this year, Scaled Composites plans to launch the first privately funded passenger carrying craft to enter “space”. The ship, named SpaceShipOne, will climb to an altitude of 100 km (62 miles), the official boundary where “space” begins. For the first time, someone outside the circles of large, government funded projects will be able to call themselves an astronaut. Continue reading First private Astronaut… →

Popular Science has an article regarding various weapons platforms being considered for the future. Most of them are old hat: rail guns, laser cannons, that kind of thing. But one sort of got my attention: a million round per minute machine cannon. Continue reading Boy Toys… →

This site was down most of today. I apologize for that. I spent most of today, probably 6 or more hours, fixing up this server after one of my web sites here was “hacked”.

The hacking itself was pretty minor- someone just altered the contents of a couple of pages to include their names and indicate their amazing credentials. The way they did it was also fairly simple- they took advantage of a known flaw in some software I was running. Continue reading Semi-annual hacking… →

I have often pondered why most of my website’s pages don’t show up in Google searches. I thought it must have something to do with using a content management portal (PHPNuke), and/or with how the URLs are formed. Well, I was right… Continue reading Experiment underway… →

I completed my 2004 computer upgrade last weekend, and finally got around to documenting it all. You may enjoy reading my “journal” of the process and the results.

I’ve started my semi-annual computer upgrade process. I’ve opted for an AMD 64 configuration this time, the first time that I’ve selected a non-Intel processor for my main computer gaming rig.

 I’ll eventually be writing a little article on the topic, but for now you can check out some pictures I’ve taken during the initial assembly..

Continue reading Computer Upgrade 2004 begins… →

Sir Bill, Knight of Realm….has a nice ring to it. And apparently its going to happen. Continue reading Sir Bill… →