Fear and Loathing on the Learning Curve: Observations on Life, Tech and Web Design from a Slightly Misanthropic Mind

New Orleans: Inside Story

To any­one who has been fol­low­ing the ter­rible events in New Orleans, this will make both inter­est­ing and con­cern­ing read­ing. Since Hurricane Katrina hit the area, its effects have been noth­ing less than cata­strophic, but now the winds have receded, the real prob­lem is a human one.

Michael Barnett, a.k.a. The Interdictor, works for DirectNIC, a large domain host­ing com­pany oper­at­ing out of New Orleans. He and his crew have been holed up in their 9^th-floor office suite, tasked with keep­ing the tens of thou­sands of hos­ted domains online. The build­ing the houses their data centre and office has its own diesel gen­er­at­ors, and as of today their Internet links are still up, and they are still online. His blog, now become the “Survival of New Orleans blog”, doc­u­ments the things he has done and wit­nessed since the hurricane’s impact.

From his office he and his crew broad­casts a web­cam feed (URL is a mir­ror and sub­ject to change) and takes pic­tures of what he can see below — loot­ing, mil­it­ary and police action, and the pro­gress of the flood­wa­ters. And a read of his blog shows things to be a lot worse than the main­stream media is reporting.

He reports police officers car­ry­ing out loot­ing of SUVs, ATMs and guns; emer­gency sup­plies being dropped off bridges by the National Guard, des­troy­ing most of them in the pro­cess; reports of armed civil­ians sur­round­ing police officers — one police source is quoted as saying,

“The people in the city are shoot­ing at the police. They’re upset that they’re not get­ting help quickly enough. The fire­men keep call­ing because they’re under fire. He doesn’t under­stand why the people are shoot­ing at the res­cuers. Here it is 5 days ago the Mayor said get out of town and nobody went and now they’re pissed.”

As he puts it,

“In case any­one in national secur­ity is read­ing this, get the word to President Bush that we need the mil­it­ary in here NOW. The Active Duty Armed Forces. Mr. President, we are los­ing this city. I don’t care what you’re hear­ing on the news. The city is being lost. It is the law of the jungle down here. The com­mand and con­trol struc­ture here is barely func­tion­ing. I’m not sure it’s anyone’s fault — I’m not sure it could be any other way at this point. We need the kind of logist­ical sup­port and infra­struc­ture only the Active Duty mil­it­ary can provide. The hos­pit­als are in dire straights. The police barely have any cap­ab­il­it­ies at this point. The National Guard is doing their best, but the situ­ation is not being con­tained. I’m here to help in any­way I can, but my cap­ab­il­it­ies are lim­ited and drop­ping. Please get the mil­it­ary here to main­tain order before this city is lost.”

The blog’s RSS feed is here.
Apparently it’s also pos­sible to listen to the National Guard radio chan­nel with Winamp here.

Update: I’ve been try­ing a bunch of dif­fer­ent feeds and this is the first I’ve found that works — it’s the Louisiana State Police radio chan­nel in Baton Rouge, the one cur­rently being tran­scribed on #interdictor-scanner (with occa­sional crosstalk on #interdictor-scanner2) on irc.freenode.net. Other feeds are lis­ted here.

Researchers Create Radio Controlled Humans

Reported by Forbes: Debuted at the SIGGRAPH com­puter graph­ics con­fer­ence in Los Angeles, research­ers have developed a gad­get designed to exploit the effects of Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation.

As the story explains, when a weak elec­trical pulse is delivered to the mast­oid behind your ear, your body responds by shift­ing your bal­ance towards it. If the cur­rent is strong enough, it not only throws you off bal­ance, but alters the course of your movement.

Check out the hil­ari­ous video that accom­pan­ies the story.

Hotel Hacking

This Wired art­icle showed up on Slashdot this morn­ing — about Adam Laurie, chief secur­ity officer of London secur­ity and net­work­ing firm ALD. Using a laptop, infrared trans­mit­ter and TV tuner, Laurie was able to access premium hotel TV con­tent for free, as well as a raft of other good­ies that he shouldn’t have been able to look at. Yay.

“Laurie first dis­covered the vul­ner­ab­il­ity when he was “muck­ing about with hotel TVs to get the porn chan­nel without pay­ing for it.” He was able to bypass TV billing menus by using his laptop to tune in to the premium con­tent being broad­cast from backend sys­tems. He didn’t have to pay for the con­tent, because the sys­tems didn’t know he was watch­ing it.”

The First Open-Source Beer

Back after a week’s hol­i­day, I bring happy news of beeeeer.

Wired ran this art­icle earlier today about recent events in the open-source world — a group of stu­dents who have pro­duced what they claim is the first open-source beer.

The beer isn’t “free” in mon­et­ary terms, but the recipe for brew­ing it has been released under the Creative Commons license. This means that any­one can use the recipe as they please — the only catch is that they must credit the ori­ginal authors if they make changes to the recipe, and release those changes under a sim­ilar license.

This licens­ing struc­ture has been used in the Open Source Software com­munity for some time, but this is pos­sibly the first time it has been applied to an “ana­log” object like a beer recipe.

The beer is also fairly unique in that it con­tains guar­ana — enough to be equi­val­ent to 35 mil­li­grammes of caf­fiene. The group hope this will counter the drowsy effects of the 6% alco­hol level.

Building a “Walltop” Electronic Picture Frame

An old laptop needn’t be a use­less lump of junk — it can be turned into a digital pic­ture frame!

This art­icle from GRYNX appeared earlier today on Slashdot, and explains step-by-step how the author turned an old Dell Latitude into an elite pic­ture frame, using the free­ware IrfanView pack­age to provide slideshows. The laptop didn’t have a hard disk, so the cun­ning fel­low moun­ted a net­work share over his wire­less net­work to provide the images.

Total cost? Apparently about 21¢.