The Hive Archive

Oh Wikipedia, I do love thee.

Ghetto Latte Entry

Apparently once in the iTunes EULA:

You also agree that you will not use these products for any purposes prohibited by United States law, including, without limitation, the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.

Did they take it out? I can’t find it in the latest one.

From a Forum I was reading today:

The F-22A has two redundant CIPs, each powered by Intel i960 RISC microprocessor and VHSICDSP chipsets, with fiber-optic links used for transferring data between the CIPs and sensors. It’s capable of 700 mips, which makes it roughly equivilent to a Pentium III. A modern core 2 duo is about 10x faster. If the mips of the CIP is determined to be a limiting factor, it will be replaced, but the new technology is fickle as you know- I mean, who among us has not had a computer die out from under them? The F-22A has to fight in a very hostile environment, and has to use extremely robust industrial components that you can literally hit with hammer blows and flash with nuclear EMP and they still keep working.

Read the rest of this entry »

Canada blows my mind. My Canadian friends tried to explain their magical blinking protected left traffic lights, and I didn’t quite get it, but I remember thinking there was some logic behind it. Today, driving in Vancouver, I came across regular blinking green traffic lights. I asked my friend about it and after five minutes of explaining, all I got was to go forward on green, I think. Metric continues to blow my mind, even though I spent some of my formative years in Europe. Google Maps automatically switches to metric if your starting position is in Canada. Nifty.

Overall, the most baffling thing I have experienced in Canada is the hotel room key. The hotel is nice, but it has a dated feel to it. At one time, you can imagine that it was all very hi-tech, but parts were just never upgraded. Surprisingly, one of these parts is the hotel room key. While most hotels have chosen to go with magnetic swipe cards, this nameless hotel has kept with punch cards. No kidding.

Check it out:

Yes, just by posting this image, the key could probably be copied. All I could find about this on the ‘Net comes from a 1989 Usenet posting:

There used to be only one kind of Ving card lock. Now there are two kinds,
as I discovered to my horror a while back while at a convention. The first
and possibly “classic” version is all-mechanical, while the second is optical
with an electronic controller. I did a longish article on the mechanical
one back when I got to take it apart, which I will send to anyone who asks,
and since the time of that writing discovered a few more things about it.
I believe this article was sent to this very list years ago…

I love stuff like this. These things were spoken about on a security list in ‘89 with horror and how they ran across them a while back and discussed them “years ago”. Not only do these things seem trivial to copy, but seeing the regular pattern in the holes seems to suggest you could easily reverse engineer the algorithm and make keys for every room in the hotel given the room number. I guess you don’t need high security in a country where people say they don’t even lock their front doors. Good times.

I recently ran across some rather amusing Amazon reviews from some madman genius. Here is a sample:

Margaret Dickenson is the wife of a Canadian diplomat. I learned from her book the hierarchical placement of guests around the dinner table that diplomats use. The most important sits to the right of the host, the second most important to the left. I have used this dinner table tactic to divide and conquer my guests, making them jealous of each other for my attention. I had Jeremy Saltmaven over for vermouth the other day and made him sit to my left, leaving a vacancy to the right. With this subtle trick I suspect I probably let Jeremy Saltmaven know he needs to give me more finery to secure my favour. Margaret Dickenson also explores dinner party themes, but this is where I went soft on the book. For my Hieronymus Bosch themed party, I assembled a nice costume from one of Bosch’s panels. I heard the first knock at the door, and hurriedly threw on my bird mask, mounted a copper cauldron on my head, and leapt up onto my stilts. In the process of taking my first step I spilled headfirst into the front door, misjudging the weight imbalance of the cauldron on my neck. My guests later told me they first heard some shuffling, the single sonorous knell as of a large bell, and then nothing. After waiting patiently on the porch for 5 minutes, it took them a few moments longer than normal to open the front door, heaving it, unwittingly shifting my dumped motionless body across the vestibule floor.

So, Margaret Dickenson, that’s why I can’t give this book anything higher than 3 stars.

Hello Everyone,

This morning a crazy man wearing tan pants, tan shirt, baseball cap, and sneakers bolted through security and managed to get up the elevators before anyone could stop him. He has been raiding the first aid kits mounted in the hallways, and pulling the blue phones off the walls. If you see this man please contact security and let me know about it.

If you are going to be the last person to leave of the day please check your room to insure that you really are the last person, then double check the lock.

Thank you

A BBC photographer embarked on a project to talk to, “… people you see every day but never meet. Urban living is full of these close encounters where we never make contact.”

Tony, from London, had the following to say, “Oh, stop it, you touchy-feely freak! I live in London precisely because people here are NOT overly intimate. I like the fact that I walk amongst strangers, I love the fact I am not subject to tedious drivel from people who happen to impinge upon my geography. If you want to know your neighbours, go live up North or something - stop assuming we all want to be like you.”

<@ebnf> “I made a program that connect to the outlook calendar database, checks if a meeting takes place on any of the 6 floors at lunch and then alerts me of the meetings ending so that I can rush to the breakroom on that floor and get at all the food before anyone else can. Those sandwiches can be really tasty.”
<@ebnf> that guy is genius

Wes over at brokenbuild.com has posted two jobs that have opened at his company:

• Java Software Engineer
• White-box QA Engineer (SDET)

If you, or someone you know is interested, send them his way. The jobs are located in Seattle, WA.

“I tried to rotate the parachute and look in other directions. But with one hand devoted to keeping the face plate up and both hands numb from high-altitude, subfreezing temperatures, I couldn’t manipulate the risers enough to turn. Before the breakup, we’d started a turn in the New Mexico-Colorado-Oklahoma-Texas border region. The SR-71 had a turning radius of about 100 mi. at that speed and altitude, so I wasn’t even sure what state we were going to land in. But, because it was about 3:00 p.m., I was certain we would be spending the night out here.”

SR-71 Blackbird Break-up