Students Locate Osama

Using a probabilistic model and a GIS, students predicted the likely location of Osama bin Laden. I think the real utility of this science and technology will be revealed when supplemented with traditional intelligence gathering. I continue to be amazed as we get larger and more complete data sets with which to work this magic.

Lesser of Two Evils

I have written before about my thoughts on guns and self-defense. In response to the celebrations after the announcement of bin Laden's death, Andrew Zirschky wrote an article on Youth Ministry Today. He introduces Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a pacifist German Lutheran pastor and theologian, and applies his philosophy to the events surrounding the death of Osama bin Laden.

Bonhoeffer knows that we may find ourselves deciding between evil or evil. In these situations, we must act, depending upon our own limited understanding of world, and knowing that the ultimate judgement will be God's. This same judgement will be applied to those responsible for the elimination of a terrorist like bin Laden and, I believe, to a father protecting his family by shooting an intruder. I need to think about this some more, but it allows for universal truths (murder is a sin) to apply consistently on earth while preserving hope that God will have mercy on one's soul in heaven.

Even this short article has piqued my curiosity about Bonhoeffer. One more for the reading list.



I'm a sucker for powerful quotes:

"The sword can never bring about the unity of the Church and of faith. Preaching can never govern nations."

“What is worse than doing evil is being evil.”

Fruit Server

We use a lot of RIM's Blackberry devices at work. From an enterprise IT perspective, they are great. They are simple to use and simple to manage. They don't have a lot of extra features and only a limited number of apps, but I can rule them with an iron fist using the Blackberry Enterprise or Express servers.

We rolled out a hand full of Droid Pro devices to my team. They are neat toys, but I would not want to give them to our user base. We've had a lot of problems out of them, which, as IT folks, we've worked our way through.

We also offer some "best effort" support to iPhones.

RIM has announced that they are releasing a cross platform that will support Blackberry, Apple, and Android. For lack of a better name, I will call it the Fruit Enterprise Server. We live in exciting times. (Yes, I'm a geek.)

Via Business Insider

Navy Seals - Winning.

After I heard that Navy Seals were involved in the operation to kill Osama bin Laden, I kept thinking about the movie. It is not a great movie, but definitely fits in my guilty pleasure category. I actually own it - I think I got a two disc set with Red Dawn for about $5 at Wally World. Winning squared.

KG-UV Commander Yahoo Group

Looks like a Yahoo Group for the KG-UV Commander has been started.

Bruce Schneier @ TEDX

I post stuff from Bruce occasionally as many of you might have noticed. For those of you who aren't familiar with him and his philosophy, this TED Talk is a good overview. He covers a lot of his basic views - security theater, security the feeling, security the reality, what a disconnect means between the two, trade-offs, how bad we are at evaluating security, our biases, etc.

Currently Reading

The Man Who Invented the Computer: The Biography of John Atanasoff, Digital Pioneer

KG-UV Commander

Ed announced on the KG-UVD1 Yahoo group that Jim Mitchell, KC8UNJ, has released the KG-UV Commander software for programming the Wouxun handhelds.



David added some background about how it came to be:

"I was aware that Jim had developed programming software for certain Yaesu and Icom radios, so I contacted Jim last August, asking whether he would be possibly be interested in porting his software to the Wouxun radios. I told Jim that I had already prepared memory maps for the "tw" files and for the internal memory space of the radios (which I was making available to all who are interested). I was so pleased when Jim responded and said that he would be interested in porting his software.

I then discussed this project with Ed Griffin, proprietor of wouxun.us, and Ed very generously contributed radios for Jim to use in developing the software.

For the last eight months Jim has been working on this project, and a small group of beta testers have been playing with interim versions of the software and providing feedback to Jim. On April 30 Jim released a version which he is making available to the public.

The KG-UV Commander software is a very impressive package. I believe that it empowers the user to program literally every programmable feature of the Wouxun radios (including modifying band limits, which until now has required the separate unlock program). The Commander software reads and writes TW files, and also reads and writes CSV files (which are easy for Excel programmers and others to read and write for any future special programming applicatoins). And the program even reads ARRL TravelPlus frequency files! Furthermore, the program has a great user interface, and includes the normal spreadsheet editing features such as Add, Edit, Move, Cut, Copy, Paste, Delete, and Sort."

I must say the software is a huge leap forward. I needed to add some frequencies to mine, so this was the perfect opportunity to try it out. I had an Excel spreadsheet with some data I wanted to copy over. It wouldn't let me do multiple rows at once - in fact, it was like the app wasn't taking the latest information from the Windows clipboard. I ended up adding the entires manually, but with the auto-offset feature enabled, it just took a minute to do it.

The sort works great - you can sort all the entries or just select a few rows. I used that feature to keep my favorites at the top of the list and independent of all the others that I just wanted sorted by frequency.

There is also a function to search for duplicates. The search is really slick. You can tell it to ignore duplicate frequencies if one entry has a tone configured while the other does not.

The software really levels the playing field with the big boys. It reminds me of the software I have for my VX-3R.

Jim did a great job and this is just another example of how Ed continues to support the community and why he will get my business/endorsement.

Vol Football Players Attacked by Police Dogs

Dooley continues to promote culture change by getting his players together with the police for a KPD training day. You can read the full story here.

Thumb Lock

For those that are concerned that the Serpa holsters may contribute to negligent discharges, Galco puts the shoe on the other digit - the thumb actually.

Full video below or click here to jump to the demo.



Via Say Uncle