I was entertained looking at "spud guns". That is, guns that shoot potatoes. My thoughts went from potatoes to more interesting, and regular sized objects.

    I found a site talking about piercing a solid wood door (by mistake) with a tennis ball. Oops. :) I was thinking more life golf balls.

    One site I found claimed that with propane and atmospheric air, they achieved double the speed of sound (680 m/s or 1522 mph). That sounded unrealistic.

    So I was wondering, what are the combustion expansion rates of various available gasses. I figured with the intelligent people on here, someone may know.

    Propane and atmospheric air doesn't seem ideal. Most of the information I read pointed out a problem. After a single shot, the had to vent the combustion chamber, or it wouldn't fire again (not enough oxygen).

    So, here's my theoretical ideas.

    Propane/Oxygen, like from a small torch set available at any hardware store.

    MAPP gas/Oxygen

    Hydrogen/Oxygen, electrolyzed from water.

    Atomized gasoline and atmospheric air.

    Atomized aviation fuel (110LL) and NOS. :) Ok, I'm going a little overboard, and would probably blow the combustion chamber.

    Any are easily accessible, and could have good results, without the need to vent the chamber after each shot.

    I guess the other obvious question would be about the volume of expansion of the gas before combustion is complete. I saw some pictures of people using hair spray with an 8' barrel. I can't imagine the combustion created enough expansion to utilize that space, so it would actually slow it down towards the end of the barrel. I know properly sized firearms use the right size barrel, so the combustion is just almost finished by the time the bullet leaves the end of the barrel. Too much flash means there was still fuel to burn. No flash means the barrel was too long.

    This is all theoretical. I live in a lovely deed restricted residential community. I know any will go "BOOM" really nicely, so the neighbors may just complain a little. I'm just bothered that I couldn't find the combustion expansion properties of the gases.

    But someday, it may be fun to make one. :) I liked model rocketry and miniature blackpowder cannons as a kid, so this is just an extension of that. How can I make something go fast. :)

I took advantage of the fact that my VoIP provider makes the call log available, so I made a report of all the calls that are coming in. All of these had hits on whocalled.us .

    Of the 545 calls I got, 153 didn't provide any caller information (no number or caller id string). The 151 I list below are listed as telemarketers or bill collectors, even though when I do answer, I usually don't get anyone, or they're asking for someone other than me. I am on the DNC registry, but that doesn't help.

    So, 304 (55.7%) of the calls that are blatantly abusive and against FTC rules.

+++ Inst: 35 Num: 8663850277
+++ Inst: 30 Num: 6153152669
+++ Inst: 24 Num: 8668496441
+++ Inst: 16 Num: 8007523916
+++ Inst: 15 Num: 8016182068
+++ Inst: 10 Num: 8778859695
+++ Inst: 9 Num: 8774805110
+++ Inst: 5 Num: 8882031294
+++ Inst: 5 Num: 8132737802
+++ Inst: 3 Num: 8009558094
+++ Inst: 3 Num: 8002793480
+++ Inst: 2 Num: 8668972756
+++ Inst: 2 Num: 8012901042
+++ Inst: 1 Num: 8662097845
+++ Inst: 1 Num: 8007412183

    I've tried all kinds of tactics with them. I ask who they're calling from. They're usually amazingly vague. I ask for their name (first name is fine), and they'll refuse. I ask for their company address, and they refuse. I'll even ask the simple "in what is this in regards to", and they'll refuse. These are all questions the FTC wants answers to, to be able to file a complaint.

      I'm to the point where I won't admit nor deny my identity. They ask "Are you JW Smythe", and I won't say yes. I simply keep asking for who they are, and what it is in regards to. Usually that makes them hang up. But, when they calls come in from 6am until 11pm, I'm really stuck.

    At one point, I was really really rude. As soon as I recognized that it wasn't for me, I'd go off on a little pre-scripted (in my head) speech, that they are not authorized to call this phone number, and they are hereby notified that they are forbidden from ever calling me again. That doesn't help.

    I could hire a lawyer, if I could afford one. The research time itself would cost more than I'd ever want.

    I know the economy sucks, and companies are trying to recover every penny they can, but really, if it's not me, why keep calling me? And yes, I know the warranty ran out on my car. I bought it used, so I believe I had a 1 year warranty (it was years ago). Even if I had bought it new, it was out of factory warranty 3 years or 30,000 miles ago.

    I'm to the point of, if the number isn't stored in my phone (my VoIP forwards to my cell phone), I don't answer. Every day I have to clear out my voicemails because of them. I hope I haven't lost any work calls because of it, but really there isn't much I can do. I can't change my number, too many people have it, and last time I did that, I had people finally tracking me down after a year or two, who had work for me.

    People look at me like I'm nuts, because I'll glance down at the phone, hit the hangup button, and then put it back down. Sometimes I don't even look, because there's a better than 50% chance it's not a person who wants to talk to me.

    For a while, if I recognized the number as abusive, I would put the phone in the server room, so all they'd hear was static (fan noise), but that didn't slow them down at all.

    Ok, enough of my rant. I hope these numbers help others out too. Block them. Ignore them. Just don't answer them.

Here's a question that was posed to me, so I pose it to everyone else. :)

    A friend of mine was going to a small college. She recently received her degree, so all is fine and dandy. Well, the school also went out of business since she got her degree.

    From what I've understood from others, when a school has changed names or ownership, they still keep the records, and you can call the campus during normal working hours to confirm credentials. What if the school simply goes out of business?

    When she applies for a new job, with her well earned degree, how can a future employer confirm that degree, or is it now only worth the paper it's printed on?

I'm very disappointed that no one has cracked my encrypted tagline.

    For a while now, my tagline has been:

Encrypted Message Follows: dm2vjzMEuDLZep+TCPVPZ6dmqvdiD9p4nAJPnpgdbPlMlyLlFWR0yt8oOI1GU3/m http://cryptmsg.com

    That should be the beginning to a fun game. No one (or not enough someone's) saw it as a challenge, or maybe it just looked like garbage and was baiting a site. A few people asked, but no one sent me the encrypted string. {sigh} I thought I made it easy enough.

    Well, if you took the encrypted message, and went to cryptmsg.com, you could use the demo. Strip off the "Encrypted Message Follows: " part, and paste the message into the demo box. You can even leave the trailing URL on it. Since it isn't part of the valid encrypted data, it's ignored. :)

    Click the "Decrypt" button (since, like, that's what you're trying to do).

    Now, you have to figure out what algorithms and keys I used. Since I wanted it to be cracked, I only used one. I figured make it easy. I allow the use of 22 alogrithms up to 15 times with different keys.

    If I wanted someone to brute force something, but I still wanted to make it "strong enough", what would I do? Well, AES-256 is strong. That's also known as rijndael-256. What would I set the key to be. Well, a simple brute force would be a dictionary attack, but they would use some of the most common passwords first (hopefully). How about "password"

    So, Algorithm "rijndael-256" and Key "password" return:

"some things are better left unread"

    Which is oddly enough the same plaintext message as the RC5-64 challenge that was broken in 2002. :) Ya, I picked it on purpose.

    So, with that said, I've changed my tagline. Lets see who can break it this time. :)

    The new message is:

UevPaTEUUYNxhu2yiZa3R/r4UOFTuMYAXDsoMWtLpf4=

So I set my computer off on a quest. The quest was, calculate pi. I found a chunk of PHP code that would do it.

3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510582097494459230781640628620899862803482534211706798214808651328230664709384460955058223172535940812848111745028410270193852110555964462294895493038196442881097566593344612847564823378678316527120190914564856692346034861045432664821339360726024914127372458700660631558817488152092096282925409171536436789259036001133053054882046652138414695194151160943305727036575959195309218611738193261179310511854807446237996274956735188575272489122793818301194912983367336244065664308602139494639522473719070217986094370277053921717629317675238467481846766940513200056812714526356082778577134275778960917363717872146844090122495343014654958537105079227968925892354201995611212902196086403441815981362977477130996051870721134999999837297804995105973173281609631859502445945534690830264252230825334468503526193118817101000313783875288658753320838142061717766914730359825349042875546873115956286388235378759375195778185778053217122680661300192787661119590921642002

    I'm not sure the code is optimal. I'm also not sure I want to have it keep doing circles. :) Primes sounds like fun.

Being that Slashdot is the biggest audience of computer geeks that I know, this should be the right place to ask a question that stumps me. :)

    Some of you know that I am the owner/publisher/programmer of freeinternetpress.com. I was playing with the "tag cloud" idea, but it doesn't quite satisfy what I want.

    I wrote a script that looks at the 100 most recent news stories, pulls all of the words from the text and subject, splits it on spaces (and other delimiting characters), and gives me a nice list of words by frequency on the page. The rough equivalent from the command line would be:

cat story.txt | sed -e s/\ /\\\n/g | sort | uniq -c | sort -r -n -k 1 | head -20

    It then shows them in tag cloud format, sized for frequency. Each word is linked to a script that finds the most recent story with that word in it, and send you directly to that.

    Mine is all done with SQL queries and a little array magic in PHP, not shell commands, I swear.

    What I can't quite figure out is, how do I do the same thing for phrases? If John Smith made the news, there may be plenty of people with the first name "John" making the news, so John may show up frequently. Smith may also show up with some sort of frequency (in an obscure world where there are only 4 common last names). But, if John Smith goes on a shooting rampage, it would be reasonable to think that "John Smith kills" would show up in multiple news stories. They may say "John Smith kills 14 in mystery rampage" or "John Smith kills coworkers at super spook spy shack". You never know what will come up, but it would be amazingly advantageous to have that phrase.

    While I can't think that we'll cover every breaking news story, I can think that the hundreds of RSS feeds that we're aggregating would. If this was applied to the RSS feeds, we would then have a beautiful resource. Think Google News automated and unfiltered. Yes, Google News filters their news, and does adjust what is shown based on who it thinks are "good" sources, and some big news simply doesn't show up.

    In thinking about this, I thought about the brute force method. Find every word, go back and find the word before and check that against the database. go back and find the word after and check against the database. Continue this to up to 5 word phrases.

    On just our own 100 most recent stories, there are 19374 words. Of those, there are 6176 unique words. I run this against a "stopwords" table, so common words (like "and" "the" "or" "I" "he" "she", etc). We're using about 1000 stopwords. Even with this, there are 5676 unique words.

    Does anyone have any suggestions?

I love the moderation system here. It's funny to watch. This simple post went from -1 to 5 in a few hours. :) I posted a message to the Chinese web server story, trying to be a first post *AND* be on topic (I missed, only got 2nd post). When I looked from my phone, this post was one of the most informative. Viewing from a cell, it only shows 5 comments.

    Anyways, following the bouncing moderation.

Corrected Story Blurb, posted to The Chinese (Web Servers) Are Coming, has been moderated Troll (-1).

It is currently scored Troll (0).

Corrected Story Blurb, posted to The Chinese (Web Servers) Are Coming, has been moderated Troll (-1).

It is currently scored Troll (-1).

Corrected Story Blurb, posted to The Chinese (Web Servers) Are Coming, has been moderated Underrated (+1).

It is currently scored Troll (0).

Corrected Story Blurb, posted to The Chinese (Web Servers) Are Coming, has been moderated Informative (+1).

It is currently scored Troll (1).

Corrected Story Blurb, posted to The Chinese (Web Servers) Are Coming, has been moderated Funny (+1).

It is currently scored Funny (2).

Corrected Story Blurb, posted to The Chinese (Web Servers) Are Coming, has been moderated Underrated (+1).

It is currently scored Funny (3).

Corrected Story Blurb, posted to The Chinese (Web Servers) Are Coming, has been moderated Funny (+1).

It is currently scored Funny (4).

Corrected Story Blurb, posted to The Chinese (Web Servers) Are Coming, has been moderated Funny (+1).

It is currently scored Funny (5).

So I was presented with a problem.

    A friend of mine has a few hundred orchids. She grows them as a hobby (I say unhealthy obsession, but hey...) They can't take temperatures below 40 degrees without getting damage.

    We're here in sunny Florida, so it'd never get below 40, right? Wrong. Last night the low was 32. Tonight it's forecast to be 22.

    She has a propane heater with a parabolic dish on top, like you may see outside a restaurant or bar. it's nice and all, and provides plenty of radiant heat in a circular, but a cold breeze will ruin that heating. It also doesn't provide a large enough heating area..

    I love a problem. It calls for a solution. Last night at about 10pm, I made the first attempt at a solution. We went to Walmart, and bought plastic sheeting (like painters drop cloth, but 3mil thick), and I duct taped it to the available cement surfaces around her porch, where she had gathered all the plants she couldn't fit inside. Unfortunately, she has more plants than will fit on the porch, so part of the plastic extends about 6 feet beyond the farthest wall of the house.

That worked well. The porch dipped into the high 50's, with the outside temperature at freezing.

    We have 3 thermometers placed. One is at an inside corner, easily visible from inside. That's so we can see how cold it is when we go outside to smoke. One is now at the outer edge of the plastic, at ground level. The third is on the edge of her property, so we can get an undisturbed outside temperature reading.

    Unfortunately, duct tape and stucco don't mix well. Sometime this morning, all the plastic fell, because the tape gave way.

    Tonight, the project was to replace the uppermost horizontal edge with 1x2 wood, screwed into the wall.

    The current temperature outside is 30 degrees. According to our thermometers it is 32. The inside edge thermometer reads 56. Whee! The coldest protected area is 16 degrees above minimum. By the door is 68 degrees.

    It's comfortable enough to sit outside, where I'm writing this from my laptop now.

    I'm proud of myself, that I managed to build a functional (functional enough) 15x10x9 greenhouse on a budget of about $25. :)

    Now that I've shown it can work, she's seriously considering what I had suggested before. She keeps all of her plants around her swimming pool, which is contained in a screened porch. I offered to make plastic panels (greenhouse plastic, not crappy barely translucent "clear" plastic), so she can enclose the whole thing.

    The cool part about using the whole porch is that she has a solar heated pool. It does get warm in the winter, but it loses it's heat to the atmosphere. I did a budget for her, and it would be a very small fraction of what a professional company would charge.

    I love being handy, and doing things for cheaper than you could pay someone to do. :) Ok, they'd have it done faster, but I'll have the opportunity to take my time and do it exactly as she wants. I know, I should make money on it, but I really enjoy doing something constructive, and this would be one of those things. :) I could have been programming something, but this was more fun for the evening, even though I didn't get started until after dark, so I didn't get finished until it was already freezing outside. And hey, I saved lives tonight. Well, plant lives, but it's something. :)

    I know, this won't impress anyone who's sitting in negative degrees right now, but ... well ... you should move South if you don't like the fridged cold. That's why I haven't moved up North. :)

G'evening all!

    My friend's son wants to build a Tesla coil for his 7th grade science fair project. I'm perfectly capable of helping him accomplish this, but I've run into a pretty major snag. There has to be a hypothesis, and the coil would need to prove or disprove that hypothesis.

    I have no idea what we could use it to test.

    Can anyone make any suggestions?

    Thanks!

So I've had the long standing joke about fishing with C4.. It usually starts with someone saying they enjoy fishing. Then I say I like fishing too. As long as I have enough C4. I don't have the patients to spend the whole day with a string in the water not catching anything.

    Years after I started joking about it, there was a Stargate::SG1 episode where one of the guys (the annoying good/bad guy) gets stuck on a planet. He would take a ball of C4, about the size of a baseball (if I remember right), put a remote detonator in it, and throw it in the water. He'd push a button on the remote, you'd here a "beep beep" {BOOM}. It was the funniest thing I've ever seen.

    So, out of curiosity, I went looking for "Fishing with C4" on Google. Funny thing, nothing came up. Not a single page about fishing with C4. I'm so upset.

    When I was a kid, I was talking with a state fish & game officer, who was telling us a story. He heard a loud explosion in the distance, so he went to investigate. He came up to a lake, and there was a little old man in a boat who seemed perfectly content fishing. Then he watched him light a stick of dynamite, and toss it over the side of the boat. {BOOM} He then rowed around, and picked up several floating fish.

    After the officer's ears stopped ringing, he yelled and waved at the old man. The old man rowed over to the shore.

    "What were you doing?" asked the officer.

    "Fishing", replied the old man.

    "You can't fish with explosives! That's illegal!"

    "But, " said the old man, "I learned this from my pappy, who learned it from his pappy. We've fished like this for a long time. This is the way it's done. I don't know how you kids do it, you barely ever catch anything."

    Realizing he wasn't going to get anywhere, and respecting the old man, he simply told him, "Really, it's illegal. You could go to jail for this. I'm going to turn around, get in my truck and leave. Be careful, and don't get caught."

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blast_fishing

    It may be illegal, but if I'm hungry, and I have C4 in my pocket, I'm going to have a feast. :)

A friend wrote me from her hotmail account today, to my gmail account. I replied, and a couple minutes later, I got a reply.. Oddly enough, it was this.. I guess the Hotmail/Gmail war is on. :)

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

        _____@hotmail.com

Technical details of permanent failure:
PERM_FAILURE: Gmail tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the recipient domain. We recommend contacting the other email provider for further information about the cause of this error. The error that the other server returned was: 550 550 DY-002 Mail rejected by Windows Live Hotmail for policy reasons. The likely cause is a compromised or virus infected server/personal computer. If you are not an email/network admin please contact your E-mail/Internet Service Provider for help. Email/network admins, please visit http://postmaster.live.com for email delivery information and support (state 13).

    I always have grand plans when I'm broke, but there's no harm in documenting my plans, should I accidentally get some money. I could have (theoretically) done this with my tax return and economic stimulus check, but those disappeared before they ever got to me. The evil ex-wife had them sucked away straight from the Fed. If she was computer literate enough to read this, then I could add a few more phrases to say how I feel about her sucking every penny I have away, but I'll save that for later.

    Anyways, on to the car.

    I've wanted to do an electric car conversion for a while. I've been trying to figure out the best way to do it. I've read countless pages where other people have built theirs. Most of the problems they run into are finding places to put batteries, or other idiosyncrasies with the particular vehicle. I want to avoid those. :)

    Right now, I drive 30 miles daily. 15 miles to work, 15 miles home. Other than that 30 to 60 minutes driving (depending on traffic) it is parked. Half of the drive is stop&go at up to 45mph (speed limit & lots of cops). The other half is one long stretch where I just have to get up to speed, and then coast. Sometimes in my regular car, I do exactly that. I get up to speed (about 80mph), for about 1/3 of the run, put it in neutral, and coast the rest of the way. It saves me a lot of gas.

    My concept is to make a "sand rail" EV. Most cars weigh 3,000 pounds or so. My TransAm weighs in at 3,400 pounds dry (no gas, no driver). Even something tiny like a Miata weighs 2,100 pounds. Looking around, a good ballpark for a sand rail, with engine, is about 1,000 pounds.

    I'd want a 4 seat version, just for the extra space. I'll explain space in a minute. I looked around online, and there are a bunch of different manufacturers, making almost identical frames. Not hard, since anyone who can weld can make a frame. It's the same technique as making a roll cage for a race car, which every town has a shop that can do.

    I'd like to find a semi-complete project. That would be frame, transmission, wheels, seats, brakes, and most of the lights.

    I found batteries for my bus. 1200A group 8d batteries, for $85/ea. They're "used", which appears to mean remanufactured, not taken out of a crashed truck. They're roughly 250Ah each. They each weigh 120 pounds too. They're not a lot of fun to move by yourself, I assure you. :) My bus takes 2 just to start (wired serial for 24vdc)

    It would require an electric motor (obviously), which would attach to the original transmission. A lot of them use VW bug parts, which is cool (cheap and readily available). The batteries would be mounted everywhere I could. Most of them have a long nose, which could hold 8. Around the motor could hold at least 2, and the remainder would be put under, beside or between the seats. I'd like to have at least 10 of these group 8D batteries, which would give me 2,500Ah.

    Then it would be a matter of skinning it. That is fiberglass or sheet metal to make it somewhat aerodynamic. A little Heat & A/C unit would be nice too. That should run on a power inverter happily, and there *should* be plenty of power to run it with for 15 minutes. Here in Florida, it's hot 13 months of the year, but on occasion, we get a cold day, cold enough to justify having heat, and not just a jacket.

    For recharging, since there is a minimum of 6 hours of daylight here (Florida), I'd cover the roof area with solar panels. That's part of why I'd want the 4 seat version, so it would have extra surface area.

    Worst case, I have to plug it in at home too, but at least it would get some charge while I'm at work.

    Now, all I need is money. I'm working extra now, which may pay the bills, but not pay for projects. I thought about bank robbery, but the profit vs risk isn't worth it. Banks don't keep enough cash on hand, and I'm not a good criminal, so I'd get caught. :) With my luck, I'd get $2,000, and end up in prison for 40 years. Prison definitely keeps me from doing cool projects. I've been thinking about prostitution, but as an average skinny white guy, the most I'm going to get from wearing a G-string on the corner is people begging me to put clothes on. :)

What is the densest CPU configuration motherboard available?

    I know in the Linux kernel, it handles SMP from 2 to 255 CPU's.

    I was talking to a friend, and we were considering what the most CPU's we could stick into a server is. Anyone can buy older CPU's at budget pricing. From what I understand, most of the older Opteron's were limited by design to 1, 2, 4, or 8 CPUs in one machine. I don't know the limit on P4's, nor the newer Opteron's.

    Where could I find a motherboard a huge density of CPU's?

    Wouldn't a 128 CPU 1.5Ghz machine be just a little faster than a dual core 4Ghz, assuming multi-threaded processes?

    Besides the cool factor of having 128 CPU's running at once, this could make one hell of a server or virtualization environment.