Not Uncle Same But Uncle Sam for Today

Uncle Sam and his image should be updated and I think there is now at least one sound revision.

Note on Scheuer's New Book

Michael Scheuer's latest book, Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq, has six points to make that are relevant for the upcoming election.

The six points are: our unqualified support for Israel; our presence on the Arabian peninsula, which is land Muslims deem holy; our military presence in other Islamic countries; our support of foreign states that oppress Muslims, especially Russia, China and India; our long-term policy of keeping oil prices artificially low to the benefit of Western consumers but to continuing detriment of the Arab peoples; and our support for Arab tyrannies who will repress Arabs and do just that.

These are the six points that the two major candidates are not discussing.

Fallujah's Double-Edge Sword

Graphic source: Wikileaks.org

The primary leak in the Fallujah media case is that the military lost in the information war. However, the public revelation of the loss is a two-edged sword. The fact that Al-Jazeera or other Arab sources were present, and the Western press did not report or gain access to the battle field is embarrassing but not only to the government. The liberties of the free press are hindered by news agencies who have let the American people down and failed us as citizens because we were not informed as we should have been. I view this leak not only as a breach of government information but it also points out how critical a free press really is. The fact that the Western press did not accurately report in Fallujah further increased the risk to our troops. The fighting capabilities of U.S. troops were hampered because our combat troops had to engage in battle sensitive to how Fallujah would be playing out before shoddy Arab journalistic standards. Americans need to wake up to the reality of war. War is brutal but we need to unleash American dogs of war so that they can create stability after the conflict and without regard to European elites or biased journalistic accounts. Not only is the government hiding behind a smokescreen but so too are our journalists.

Judge Bans Helpful Documents

Graphic source: Wikileaks.

I am simply one of the many rights advocates expressing dismay over a pair of decisions made by California District Court Judge Jeffrey White last week to shut down Wikileaks.org, a controversial Web site that allows whistle-blowers to anonymously post corporate and government documents online. At a time when insurgents are housing their bilge on American ISPs, I find it ironic that whistle-blowers, who may be able to help people, are banned. What is the judiciary thinking here?

The court's orders resulted in the wikileaks.org URL being promptly scrubbed from the Internet but I wanted to follow what happened to the site. Thereafter, the site remained accessible by typing in its IP numbers (88.80.13.160). As advertised, Wikileaks, which touts itself as an "uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking and public analysis," was also available via numerous mirror sites in several countries.

Microsoft Offers Students Free DreamSpark Tools

Microsoft has offered its development and design tools to students for free and in a move announced yesterday the company will open these tools to as many as many as 1 billion high school and college students.

The Microsoft tools, in the DreamSpark program, is available to 35 million college students in the U.S., China, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the U.K.

The tools are ones that young people can build a career around or they can just build fun software for themselves. The basics of good software architecture and the data structures have been consistent for the last 30 years and therefore the skills of design and recognizing good code, is a valuable skill to have for the 21st Century.

DreamSpark is available to students of technology, design, math science and engineering, and students can access Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition, Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition, and XNA Game Studio 2.0. As a part of the package students are also eligible for a free 12-month academic membership to the XNA Creators Club.

The program will also include Microsoft's Expression Studio design tools, including Expression Web, Expression Blend, Expression Design and Expression Media. Students also can access SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition and Windows Server Standard Edition for free.

The timetable for roll-out of the program is six months when Microsoft plans to expand DreamSpark to college students in Australia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Japan, Lithuania, Latvia, Slovakia, and more countries in the Americas, Asia and Europe. The program will be extended to high school students by the third quarter of 2008.

Microsoft works with academic institutions, governments, and student organizations, such as the International Student Identity Card Association, to ensure the necessary local student identity-verification technology infrastructure exists to provide access to DreamSpark.

Islamofascists Snooker Archbishop

If the Islamofascists have their way, they would eliminate those who disagree with them. Although saner heads will prevail, the call of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, for Islamic law to be recognized in Britain is ludicrous. Despite the evidence to the contrary, sharia contravenes Western legal precepts and is an egregious assault of Western notions of liberty. With all the shortcomings and short sightedness of Western political leaders, sharia has more in common with frontier justice, the Ku Klux Klan, and liminal Western examples.

Islamofascists Deny the Danish Their Liberties

During Kristallnacht, the Nazis sought to disabuse people of their liberty, today in Europe, the Islamofascists seek to do the same and deny Westeners their liberties. Liberties that are precious in the Western legal tradition are the right to discuss, provoke, debate, and to engage in any activity such as satire or expressions intended to foster thought. Europe is on the road to find its liberties disabused by those who seek to end such freedoms.

Peaches and Cream, Less Than a: DreamSys Server Monitor

I don't know where my servers are all the time or I mean when they are up and running or not but with DreamSys Server Monitor I can. If they are down, there are a number of actions that will remedy the situation. At a scheduled time, it will check the servers to see if they're still running and you can manually check the servers at any time.

The range of actions in response to a problem server include sending an e-mail as a notification, rebooting the machine, starting a service, or playing a sound or running a command.

The GUI is a bit problematic but with a bit of patience it can be overcome if this looks like a useful tool.

Library Thing

Library Thing is a really useful site because it allows me to easily catalog my library. I would never have the time to add my books in without some of the simple click-in features and recommendations which allow you to find and easily click on books to add to your library.

Cute Insurgent

Another youngster prepares to meet Americans.

Look Out, ANT!

Advanced Net Tools (ANT) is a really versatile set of network utilities. There are port scans, DNS lookups, pings, scanning for network shares, and checking on routing tables among other things.

The security modules are quick-and-dirty, that is, easy network scans. There's a network port scanner that can scan all computers on your network and discover any open ports, and a share scanner that reports on all the shared drives on your network.

With the information modules you can examine your routing table and add and delete entries in it. You can also find out what IP addresses are available to be assigned on your network. Other modules do advanced DNS lookups, let you view all the network adapters connected to computers on the network and add and remove their IP addresses.

As I've been reviewing the free tools, I'll have to go back and rate them, one by one.

Latest in the Series of Free Utilities: Advanced IP Scanner

I use What's Running a great deal so I can know what is going on within my box but here is a small free utility which is a handy way to get a quick list of all the devices connected to your network. They are listed by IP address, along with information about each device. It quickly scans all IP addresses in a range that you specify, then specifies whether a device is present at each address. For each device, it lists the status, the machine name, NetBIOS information, ping information, and MAC address. I usually have difficulty keeping track so this can be useful.

Moreover, the program not only scans your network but it also gives you a set of tools that lets you shut down PCs remotely, use the "Wake on LAN" feature for any PC whose network card supports that capability, and connect to remote PCs via Radmin, if it's installed. I have used another remote site so this would allow an opportunity to combine functions in one use. You can also apply some operations, such as shutting down remote PCs, to a group of computers, not just individual ones.

This tool could be effectively used and handy.

Virtualization Trend

One of the biggest developments of the year will be in virtualization so I'll be reviewing topics along these lines.

Al Qaeda on the Run

Graphic source: Fred W. Baker

The combination of military operations and local population support in northern Iraq has forced quite a few al Qaeda fighters out of urban areas in order to flee to the desert, or even out of the country.

The northern division is about the size of Pennsylvania and includes Diyala, Salahuddin, Ninevah and Tamim provinces.

Some insurgents are hiding out in abandoned mud huts, canals or caves in the desert.

The desert hideaways are targets under six-week-long Operation Iron Harvest, part of the countrywide Operation Phantom Phoenix.

The insurgents are most likely thinking that the military if after them: a sound thought, because they are.

Note on Red River

Graphic source: http://www.filmsite.org/index.html.

I didn't know Red River was shot on location near Elgin, in Arizona and Mexico, but having Netflixed it recently I was curious about its background. The film realistically portrays the code and harshness of the West, and the journey, as in The Odyssey or in the Old Testament Exodus, is an epic yarn related to the audience with the vehicle of the Old West. John Wayne actually acted in this movie, thus Howard Hawks, the producer quipped, "the old lug can act." Wayne plays the hard bitten surrogate father to Montgomery Clift, in his first film, and hard-driving trail boss. The film appears over as the younger Clift mutinies, as in Mutiny On the Bounty, but he then successfully takes the herd to Topeka, of course, all is not well and he must still face the wrath of the soon-to-arrive, Wayne.

Chaotic State of Iraqi Executive Branch

The fragmented state of the Iraqi Executive branch is contrasted in this graphic with the U.S. We have a long, long way to go if democracy is ever to survive in Iraq.

Chinese Spies

The Chinese are at it again, or at least four more are allegedly spying. The U.S. Department of Justice announced two separate espionage cases for allegedly passing information to the Chinese government.

One case involves a former Boeing Company employee who was charged with economic espionage and other crimes, and the other includes three individuals who are charged with conspiracy to disclose national defense information.

In the Boeing incidnet, the DOJ claimed that Dongfan Chung, a 72-year-old, stole trade secrets related to the Space Shuttle, the C-17 military transport plane and the Delta IV rocket while working at Rockwell International Corporation, and then again once Boeing bought Rockwell's defense and space unit.

The alleged espionage stretched back for years and he also allegedly used Chi Mak to transmit information. Mak and four of his family members were convicted last year on charges of passing defense information to the Chinese government.

In the other case the DOJ arrested a U.S. Department of Defense employee and two New Orleans residents for an alleged espionage scheme.

Tai Shen Kuo, 58, and Yu Xin Kang, 33, both of New Orleans, were indicted for conspiring to disclose national defense information to a foreign government, while Gregg William Bergersen, a 51-year-old resident of Alexandria, Va., who works as a weapons systems policy analyst at the DOD's Defense Security Cooperation Agency, was charged with conspiracy to disclose national defense information to persons not entitled to receive it.

Kuo and Kang both face life in prison if convicted. Bergersen faces up to 10 years in prison.

The Chinese connection seems to proliferate as China seeks to re-engineer American products.

Scrappy Chinese Entrepreneur

One fascinating story in the rise of Chinese entrepreneurship is that of Zhang Yin, owner of the Nine Dragon Paper Company. In the 1990s, she cashed in on China’s paper shortage by collecting scrap and shipping it to mainland China for recycling. She astutely saw a bigger opportunity in the empty container ships that returned to the U.S. and Europe after unloading their full loads of goods in China. She filled those empty ships with wastepaper collected in the U.S. and Europe to recycle the contents in China into cardboard boxes to be used for shipping Chinese goods back to the American and European markets. The shipping continues so she has a steady stream to recycle. In seemingly no time at all, according to the Hurun Report’s 2006 China Rich List, Zhang has become the wealthiest person in China and one of the richest female entrepreneurs in the world. Her wealth is not unconnected with simply taking a sound, simple, but profitable idea and creating wealth: from scrap of all things.

Network Notepad Diagrams Live

My network site actually allowing me access to my network has limitations so Network Notepad may ease in the designing of a network. I don't really have an adequate tool so this tool will be easy for creating a network diagram.

Not only can I design my network and draw schematics but they are live and include links so that I can Telnet or employ other networking tasks to access any device on the network simply by clicking on a button on the diagram.

The palette is equipped with icons for routers, servers, printers, boxes, hubs, modems, and other network devices. The way to do this is by simply dragging and dropping them onto a diagram, and then connect the devices using a set of drawing tools. You add names and IP addresses. You can also import a host file, and Network Notepad will automatically populate the devices with the right IP addresses.

This method seems quite handy because the diagram becomes a live, interactive drawing.

Spiceworks IT Desktop, Better than Network Magic

Another free tool that may be helpful to a small network or business is the Spiceworks IT Desktop. It is a bit difficult to navigate for just a home network so be forewarned although it does includes a significant number of features for a free tool: it does perform as an all-in-one network inventory and management tool.

Spiceworks IT Desktop provides a substantial bit of information about each PC connected to your network. The program will inventory a network and provide information about each device on it and I found it deeper than Network Magic. The types of information it provides about each PC and device, is free and used disk space, anti-virus software being used, and problems on the device (such as server connection errors). It will even provide an inventory of the software installed on each PC, in quite a bit of detail.

There are other features as well, such as, easy access to ping and traceroute functions. And it attempts to be a help desk application as well. You can create help tickets with it, assign the ticket to others or yourself, and include due dates, priorities and so on. For someone like me with simple home network needs it is sufficient.