Betrayal of trust

Like rats scurrying from a sinking (sunken?) ship, President Bush's erstwhile comrades desert him. I'm no fan of the President and the havoc he's brought upon this nation (and the world). But the betrayal of Bush by his past Press Secretary Scott McClellan (and others before him) almost makes me feel sorry for Bush ... almost.

McClennan has written a book in which he tells of the dissembling, ineptitude, and political crassness of the White House before and during the Iraq civil war (and dealing with Hurricane Katrina).

If McClellan had had such strong concerns while at the White House, he should have done his patriotic duty at that time and resigned. "It's time to spend more time with my family", etc., etc.

I experience no schadenfreude, merely pity.

Politico.com: McClellan whacks Bush, White House

Phoenix rises

Another reason to celebrate on this Memorial Day:

This image shows a polygonal pattern in the ground near NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander, similar in appearance to icy ground in the arctic regions of Earth.

Phoenix touched down on the Red Planet at 4:53 p.m. Pacific Time (7:53 p.m. Eastern Time), May 25, 2008, in an arctic region called Vastitas Borealis, at 68 degrees north latitude, 234 degrees east longitude.

This is an approximate-color image taken shortly after landing by the spacecraft's Surface Stereo Imager, inferred from two color filters, a violet, 450-nanometer filter and an infrared, 750-nanometer filter.

The Phoenix Mission is led by the University of Arizona, Tucson, on behalf of NASA. Project management of the mission is by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. Spacecraft development is by Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

That's a picture on the surface of Mars and transmitted 147 million miles back to Earth. The Phoenix craft slowed in 7 minutes from 12,500+ miles per hour to 5 mph, its heat shield heated in excess of 2500 °F, plopped a parachute, fired small retro rockets, and landed with a mere bump.

It's enough to give one širpuliai (say it, Anglicized: shirples), Lithuanian for goosebumps. Proud to be an American, proud to be a citizen of planet Earth!

Commemorate Memorial Day.

Twitter's utility

Twitter is a messaging service, limited to 160 140 characters, accessed on mobile phones and the web, and whose raison d'etre is "What are you doing?" I began as an unbeliever, and if not now a believer, I have become a regular user.

Dan Farber of CNet has a good take on its relative usefulness.

I first learned of the recent tragic earthquake in China via Twitter messages from people I follow on the service. To be clear, Twitter is not the Holy Grail of communications services--it's an extension of instant messaging and technologies such as RSS. Nor are the 140 characters in a Twitter message a substitute for a blog post or news article. But a "tweet" can be a network amplifier, providing a brief snapshot [emphasis mine], innervated by followers and the followed, that can be broadcast around the world in near real time.

Twitter and related services are currently noisy, spammy, unwieldy, overrated and often unreliable. But over time, the core concepts will become an integral part of the Internet's communications fabric.

Here's how I use Twitter.

• It's a useful business tool. I alert customers to brewery and beer-related events in which I'm participating. And quick beer business updates.
• Succinct beer reviews, particularly at beer tastings or festivals.
• I link the Tweets —as the updates are called— to my blog, website, and FaceBook account.
• Public access to tweets can be controlled. Mine are public, but I limit their personal content.

Here's an example of an established medium using the service to report news: Covering the news with Twitter

But Twitter does not seem ready now to be a replacement tool for the mobile phone, text messaging, or Instant Messaging. There have been all too frequent crashes of the system, incidents of which have seemed to have been increasing as the service's popularity has risen. For example, Twitter is at reduced functioning today.

More about Twitter at Twitter.

No April emails

When you submit a public comment here on the blog, it usually will be posted.

But in April, any private messages sent to me via the Feedback/Guestbook Form may have been lost.

There apparently had been problems with the feedback hosting page. I apologize if I failed to respond to any emails.

The problem has been, I hope, corrected. Try again!

Spam gotcha

Those wavy wierd letters that one is required to type into many website forms to verify that one is a human? They have a name: CAPTCHA, that is, Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart.

Unfortunately, the HALs of our word have recently cracked the code.

Microsoft and other Web companies say that they are interested in creating human verification tests that are harder for computers to crack. But there's an inherent difficulty.

Making the tests harder for the computer makes them harder for humans, too.

Unfortunately , because we'll be getting a lot more spam email until a newer, better spamtrap CAPTCHA can be developed.

The Turing reference in the acronym is to Alan Turing, a British mathematician, who defined a computer as thinking when it would be able to conduct a conversation as if a human, undetected as a computer.