Chad's News

Walt Disney World is hosting several Star Wars Weekends this year and has been promoting them with the ads in the linked article. The Darth Maul poster is hilarious!

Link: http://www.starwars.com/…

Despite my college classes in electrical engineering, I’d never heard of memristance. First theorized in 1971 and only recently actualized, a memristor essentially has a variable resistance dependent upon the amount of charge that has passed through it.

At this point you may be asking, “And how does this relate to me?” Scientists at Hewlett-Packard have created memristors that act as persistent memory, much like the flash memory used in USB drives, iPods, smart phones, etc., but with improvements. The memristors created by HP match the speed of flash but can pack more memory into the same space. So depending on how this technology is marketed and licensed, we may actually see a successor to flash.

Another feature of HP’s memristors is that it’s possible to juxtapose the CPU and memory, where they use the same memristors for both functions. In addition, memristor-based logic circuits are capable of reprogramming themselves in a way that’s reminiscent of the human brain. These abilities don’t have an immediate market but are full of potential. And we all know that real programmers write self-modifying code.

Link #1: http://www.nytimes.com/…
(via engadget)

Link #2: http://arstechnica.com/…

Link #3: http://news.bbc.co.uk/…
(via Kim Komando)

It’s normal to think of hackers as highly-talented individuals working from a basement in some foreign country. The reality, as indicated in the linked article, can be much different. Innovative Marketing Ukraine was a business—with a human resources department, holiday parties, and call center—that created malicious programs for use by hackers. The majority of the software was scareware, where it infects your computer, disables your anti-virus software, makes it almost impossible to use the internet or run programs, tells you that you have a virus, and offers to remove the virus for a fee. But it gets worse. For the people who actually pay, there’s a good chance that someone will sell the credit card information.

Thanks to Josh for this topic.

Link: http://www.reuters.com/…

The nice thing about Apple products is that they’re easy to use. Apple is the master of user interface design. The bad thing about Apple products is when you need to do something they don’t expect you to do. Case in point: I moved my iTunes directory to a different hard drive, removed the old hard drive, and then expected everything to work.

I was able to change the directory in iTunes, no problem, but my library still thought most of the songs were on the old hard drive. I figured I could export the library, make changes, and then import it, but I was wrong. You can export via iTunes, but you can’t import—go figure…. After some investigation, I found the “iTunes Music Library.xml” file (a text file) and changed its entries to reference the new drive. That didn’t work either. After launching iTunes, it un-did the changes.

I learned that iTunes stores the library information in a file named “iTunes Library.itl”, which uses a proprietary binary format and cannot be easily edited. The XML file is generated from the library.

A web search found the linked article, which discusses how to restore an iTunes library from the XML file. The secret is to replace “iTunes Library.itl” with an empty file. iTunes will then recreate the library from “iTunes Music Library.xml”.

Link: http://hifiblog.com/…

Last month I filled out the census form sent by the US government. Mandated by the Constitution and used to determine things like the number of Congressional members for each state and the division of federal funds, it’s important to get as many people counted as possible. (In fact, based on the 2000 census, my home state of Colorado qualified for an extra House member, bringing our total up to nine.)

But some people refused to fill out the form, citing privacy concerns. The requested information was minimal, but it still goes beyond the “Enumeration” required by the Constitution, asking for such things as your name and ethnicity. When responding to privacy issues, census officials always refer to the laws prohibiting release of census data until 70 years have passed. But these officials seem to forget it’s the government that made those laws, and the government can always change them should the need arise. The Constitution has no provisions for the privacy of census data.

In fact, something along these lines occurred in 1941. Four days after the Pearl Harbor attack, the government used Census data to help round up Americans of Japanese descent, who were placed in internment camps. More recently, the Census Bureau compiled reports of Americans of Arab descent for use by Homeland Security. (They gave population by city and ZIP code.)

So the net result is that census privacy can be broken, given sufficient cause. Does this mean you shouldn’t fill out the form? You’ll have to determine the answer for that one yourself.

Link: http://yro.slashdot.org/…

Here’s an alternative to burying nuclear waste in the ground for thousands of years. Scientists in France and Texas are developing technologies to destroy the the radioactive by-products of nuclear power plants. The article isn’t clear about the method used by the French scientists, but the researchers in Texas are working on a hybrid fusion/fission reactor.

Link: http://business.timesonline.co.uk/…
(via Slashdot)

Here are some really neat pictures of the recent eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano. Brings back memories of Mount St. Helens, although I don’t remember the US shutting down its airspace like Europe has done.

Thanks to Josh for the link.

Link: http://www.boston.com/…

I’ve never put much thought into what it take to repossess commercial airplanes. The linked article is about Nick Popovich and his repo company, Sage-Popovich, Inc. Some of the repossessions require significant planning and a large team of people.

Link: http://www.airspacemag.com/…
(via Neatorama)

For those of us who haven’t been involved in warfare, the video in the linked article shows details of an actual combat operation in Iraq. Note that although the video is heavily slanted toward a certain point of view, Chad’s News has no opinion on the matter and is only posting this link because it gives insight into a world hidden from most people.

Link: http://collateralmurder.com/
(via Slashdot)

Can’t figure out what to buy for the geek in your life? Consider this wall hanger that looks like an 8-bit pointer.

Link: http://www.meninos.us/…
(via engadget)

The linked article explains how to replace the firmware in your low-cost router, transforming it into a full-featured device. The author used DD-WRT, which supports Linksys and many other brands.

Link: http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/…

Here’s an interesting trick. Many web browsers support the entry of IP addresses as hexadecimal or octal numbers with or without the dots. For instance, the cloman.com server (normally 75.127.110.43) can be entered as 0x4B7F6E2B, and Google is 0x4A7D9B6A in hex or 011237315552 in octal.

Link: http://www.securelist.com/…
(via Slashdot)