There is one big difference between Republican John McCain and the Democratic yet to be named candidate. The Democrats promise to recall our troops from Iraq as soon as possible (ASAP) where as McCain promises to prosecute the war until victory is achieved. Election day promises don't come much clearer than that.
Elect a Democrat and the troops pull out. Then Al Quada or Iran takes over Iraq, all the Iraqis who have worked with the Americans are murdered, the country dissolves into a Sunni Shia civil war. The entire Arab world gets an object lesson in what happens to anyone who co operates with the Americans, namely the Americans will go home and leave you twisting in the breeze. This will demoralize even the Israelis, let alone any Sunni Arab government. Iran brings their nuclear weapons program to fruition, and pressures all the middle east countries to knuckle under to them. Think oil is expensive today? Wait til Iran shows up at the next OPEC meeting, armed with nuclear weapons, the Americans totally discredited, and demands cutting production and hiking the price. The Saudi's wouldn't dare oppose Iran in those circumstances. If that isn't bad enough, think about where we go if the Iranians carry thru on their pledge to nuke Israel out of existence.
On the other hand, sticking it out in Iraq will deal Bin Ladin's Islamo Fascist movement a mortal blow. Just this last month the Iraqi government finally gained the strength to confront its enemies, the militias and gangsters still holding out. The Iraqi government is the first real democracy in the Arab world. If it survives, Iraq will become the most desirable place to live in all the Middle East. A peaceful and prosperous democratic Iraq would set a powerful example to the entire Arab world. So powerful that the Arab dictatorships (every other Arab country is a dictatorship) would be under enormous pressure to emulate Iraq's democracy.
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Full Scale is the best scale for drawings
I did a 1 inch to the foot set of drawings for the coming HO train layout. Took my time, did several trial drawings, copied the best one over on a clean piece of paper. Used squared paper, compass, architect's scale and the resulting A size drawing was nice and neat.
Next step, draw the track work out full scale in the actual layout table. Bought a dozen sheets of white poster board and covered the layout with them. Tacked the poster board down to the foam with drafting tacks and started drawing the track plan out full size. Used a trammel (long piece of board with holes for pencils) to swing the 22 inch, 20 inch and 18 inch curves. The centers of most of the curves are off the bench work out in mid air. I used a yard sale photographic tripod to give me a center to swing the trammel on for the airborne centers.
Partway into all this layout work, I began to change the plan. All sorts of things that looked great on the scale drawing, began to look less than great at full scale. So, out with the powered eraser, and change things around. Lesson learned, always mockup things up full sized.
Next step, draw the track work out full scale in the actual layout table. Bought a dozen sheets of white poster board and covered the layout with them. Tacked the poster board down to the foam with drafting tacks and started drawing the track plan out full size. Used a trammel (long piece of board with holes for pencils) to swing the 22 inch, 20 inch and 18 inch curves. The centers of most of the curves are off the bench work out in mid air. I used a yard sale photographic tripod to give me a center to swing the trammel on for the airborne centers.
Partway into all this layout work, I began to change the plan. All sorts of things that looked great on the scale drawing, began to look less than great at full scale. So, out with the powered eraser, and change things around. Lesson learned, always mockup things up full sized.
Monday, May 12, 2008
A single USAF relief plane lands in Burma
The Burmese junta really doesn't want US aid for its uncounted hurricane victims. The hurricane was a week ago, and only now, does the junta allow a single USAF relief plane to land. Reports of 27,000 dead and 41,000 missing should require a Berlin Airlift kind of response. A single C-130 (medium sized turbo prop) isn't going to do much for a disaster on this scale. The junta is clearly doesn't care much for its citizens.
Sunday, May 11, 2008
Free AntiVirus for Windows XP
Due to the porous nature of Windows all sorts of malware (virii, adware,keystroke loggers, spam senders) can slide right into your computer from the Internet, from file sharing, from thumb drives, and just plain out of the air. There must be a malware magnet deep inside Windows. If you want to call your computer your own, you have to do something the keep the bad stuff out.
New machines come with something, usually Norton Anti Virus or McAffee Antivirus pre installed and pretending to be free. After some months, the free wears off and the programs beg for money to "keep them selves up-to-date". I used to run Norton Antivirus, but when it begged for money, I took a hit to my credit card but the program still refused to update and shortly just stopped running. Unless kept up to date the program quickly becomes useless. Scumbags from all over the world are constantly writing new malware, and unless updated, the anti virus program won't recognize the new malware when it strikes.
After the Norton failure to update, I started using F-Prot, an old DOS antivirus. So, starting up son's new laptop, I put F-Prot on it and ran it. Surprise, F-Prot only scanned 300 files and declared the computer virus free. That can't be right, even a virgin Windows computer has tens of thousands of files on it. Some googling on F-Prot and "long file names" revealed that trusty old DOS programs , raised on short filenames (8 character name plus three character extension), have trouble with Windows file name that can be of any length and even contain embedded spaces. So much for trusty old DOS antivirus.
Some more googling put me intouch with AVG antivirus. It's free, it updates itself, and it is a real Windows program in which the mouse works. It's 45 Megabytes to download, but broadband makes that happen with ease and grace. It is painstaking, examining file after file.
So if you want to save the maintainance fees of the commercial antivirus programs, try AVG.
New machines come with something, usually Norton Anti Virus or McAffee Antivirus pre installed and pretending to be free. After some months, the free wears off and the programs beg for money to "keep them selves up-to-date". I used to run Norton Antivirus, but when it begged for money, I took a hit to my credit card but the program still refused to update and shortly just stopped running. Unless kept up to date the program quickly becomes useless. Scumbags from all over the world are constantly writing new malware, and unless updated, the anti virus program won't recognize the new malware when it strikes.
After the Norton failure to update, I started using F-Prot, an old DOS antivirus. So, starting up son's new laptop, I put F-Prot on it and ran it. Surprise, F-Prot only scanned 300 files and declared the computer virus free. That can't be right, even a virgin Windows computer has tens of thousands of files on it. Some googling on F-Prot and "long file names" revealed that trusty old DOS programs , raised on short filenames (8 character name plus three character extension), have trouble with Windows file name that can be of any length and even contain embedded spaces. So much for trusty old DOS antivirus.
Some more googling put me intouch with AVG antivirus. It's free, it updates itself, and it is a real Windows program in which the mouse works. It's 45 Megabytes to download, but broadband makes that happen with ease and grace. It is painstaking, examining file after file.
So if you want to save the maintainance fees of the commercial antivirus programs, try AVG.
Saturday, May 10, 2008
The Future of Freedom by Fareed Zakaria
"Illiberal democracy and home and abroad" is the subtitle. Interesting book, published way back in 2003, but I just saw a copy in our modest Abbie Greenleaf public library. The author is an Indian guy, editor at Newsweek magazine, frequent contributor to Wall St Journal op-ed pages, and talking head on the TV Sunday pundits. He is reasonable guy, smart, well read.
He uses language in non standard ways. For instance to Zacharia, democracy means any regime with universal suffrage. Limited suffrage, as we had in this country in the 18th and 19th centuries doesn't count. Regimes that hold elections count, even if the voters don't get much choice, like Eygpt or Hamas controlled Gaza. In normal usage democracy is any regime with a reasonable degree of personal liberty and an elected leadership even if the suffrage is limited to men, or property holding men.
He uses language in non standard ways. For instance to Zacharia, democracy means any regime with universal suffrage. Limited suffrage, as we had in this country in the 18th and 19th centuries doesn't count. Regimes that hold elections count, even if the voters don't get much choice, like Eygpt or Hamas controlled Gaza. In normal usage democracy is any regime with a reasonable degree of personal liberty and an elected leadership even if the suffrage is limited to men, or property holding men.
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
Roadbed for the HO model railroad
The model railroad in the down stairs guest room is progressing. I have the benchwork up, and a layer of 2 inch blue insulating foam down, all around the room. Roadbed comes next. The foam is too soft to take track nails or spikes, and the only commercial roadbed is cork, which isn't much better at taking nails and spikes. Most folk using cork on foam glue all the track down with latex caulk.
This works, but it is unforgiving. If you make a mistake and get a kink in the track (an easy goof to make) repair is hard. The glue is unyielding. More repairable is to fasten the track down with nails. Should you need to realign the track to make changes or get rid of kinks, you just pull up t he nails with long nose pliers and press on.
To nail down track, (or hand lay track) you need a roadbed that takes and holds nails and spikes, like basswood or white pine. Local lumber yards have plenty of pine, but it comes 3/4" thick. Roadbed wants to be 1/4" thick to look right. No problem, I got a band saw off Craig's list. With a new sharp 1/2" blade, and a home made fence, I can resaw pine boards up to six inches wide. The re sawn surfaces are smooth and flat, and with a home brew fence that is truly a right angle and clamped to the table, I can resaw to 1/4" and the stuff looks good. Progress.
So all I have to do, is bandsaw all the curved trackwork out of resawn pine and stick it down with latex caulk. So. Ho, to the stationary store I go, and buy poster board to cover the whole layout. Draw the track plan out full scale on the poster board and cut each piece of road bed out on the band saw. This should keep me out of trouble for weeks.
This works, but it is unforgiving. If you make a mistake and get a kink in the track (an easy goof to make) repair is hard. The glue is unyielding. More repairable is to fasten the track down with nails. Should you need to realign the track to make changes or get rid of kinks, you just pull up t he nails with long nose pliers and press on.
To nail down track, (or hand lay track) you need a roadbed that takes and holds nails and spikes, like basswood or white pine. Local lumber yards have plenty of pine, but it comes 3/4" thick. Roadbed wants to be 1/4" thick to look right. No problem, I got a band saw off Craig's list. With a new sharp 1/2" blade, and a home made fence, I can resaw pine boards up to six inches wide. The re sawn surfaces are smooth and flat, and with a home brew fence that is truly a right angle and clamped to the table, I can resaw to 1/4" and the stuff looks good. Progress.
So all I have to do, is bandsaw all the curved trackwork out of resawn pine and stick it down with latex caulk. So. Ho, to the stationary store I go, and buy poster board to cover the whole layout. Draw the track plan out full scale on the poster board and cut each piece of road bed out on the band saw. This should keep me out of trouble for weeks.
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Computer Cleanup
One thing leads to another. New laptop for youngest son arrived via DHL yesterday. Son was overjoyed, but he is off at college, 7 hours away by road. So son asks if I could start it up, make sure it truly has XP and not ugly Vista. And then could I do some of my Windows XP speedup magic to it?
So, first thing is to port Zone Alarm (free firewall) over from my desktop, so new machine can go on the internet without instant virus infection. According to the trade journals, a new Windows machine will be infected within 10 minutes of going on the net without a firewall. So I gotta burn a CD to move all the goodies off my desktop (Blackbox by name) over to son's new laptop (InlineSkater) It's been a while since backup to CD, so let's kill two birds with one stone. I'll backup and then install Zone Alarm and other goodies from the backup CD.
So, to save time and CD's I always do a bit of disk cleanup before backup so as to avoid wasting CD space on trash. And avoid confusing myself if I ever have to restore from the backup CD. For disk cleanup I still use an ancient piece of freeware/shareware called EZCleaner. The ancient version is free, the programmer, a young kid in Finland, is now charging money for his handiwork. Being a cheap bastard I keep running the freeware version to save a couple a bucks. It's good stuff.
EZCleaner zapped a 100 megabytes of stuff, and I blew away a backup of daughter's laptop and few DVD movies by hand. Freed up four gigabytes of disk. Then I started up my freeware/shareware CD burn program (DeepBurner) . Loaded the last burn script, and Deep burner informed me that I needed a 1 gigabyte CD to fit everything on. Hmm, plumpness has infected my 200 GB hard drive.
Some time later, I managed to fit everything I cared about one two CD's, 0.6 Gigabytes apiece, Saved two new burn scripts, and two freshly burned CD's.
Now that the urge to clean is upon me, I ran my freeware antivirus, F-Prot. It's an old DOS program, it's free, and it even automatically downloads new virus definition files. DOS programs run like lightening compared to Windows programs. I got into F-Prot after Norton Antivirus expired some years ago. I tried to renew Norton, but all that happened was my credit card took a hit, but Norton never worked again. Later I ran into a weirdo bug caused by old dead Norton .dll files left on my disk. Although some googling was able to fix the bug, I have sworn off Norton for the duration.
So, last trick, run Lavasoft Ad-Aware, a freeware anti malware program that specializes in ad programs that slip into your machine via the net. Step one for any malware scan program is to update the malware definition files that drive the program. After clicking on "update malware definitions" the program trundled along and after a decent interval announced that the download failed. So I tried the alternate manual update procedure listed in the help file. No dice.
Some googling revealed that "Ad-Aware SE" was now obsolete and no longer supported, but "Ad-Aware 2007" was now free and supported. A direct attempt to download Ad-Aware 2007 thru the Lavasoft site led into a cul-de-sack that required me to sign up for expensive junkware in order to get the anti-malware software I started out for. Fortunately more googling got me to a site that let me just download "Ad-Aware 2007" and run it.
The Ad-aware run proudly discovered 343 tracking cookies (fairly innocuous items) and I duly zapped them all. Program reminds me of my cat, which proudly brings back every mouse, chipmunk, and bird that she catches to show them to me.
Thus endeth computer cleanup for today.
So, first thing is to port Zone Alarm (free firewall) over from my desktop, so new machine can go on the internet without instant virus infection. According to the trade journals, a new Windows machine will be infected within 10 minutes of going on the net without a firewall. So I gotta burn a CD to move all the goodies off my desktop (Blackbox by name) over to son's new laptop (InlineSkater) It's been a while since backup to CD, so let's kill two birds with one stone. I'll backup and then install Zone Alarm and other goodies from the backup CD.
So, to save time and CD's I always do a bit of disk cleanup before backup so as to avoid wasting CD space on trash. And avoid confusing myself if I ever have to restore from the backup CD. For disk cleanup I still use an ancient piece of freeware/shareware called EZCleaner. The ancient version is free, the programmer, a young kid in Finland, is now charging money for his handiwork. Being a cheap bastard I keep running the freeware version to save a couple a bucks. It's good stuff.
EZCleaner zapped a 100 megabytes of stuff, and I blew away a backup of daughter's laptop and few DVD movies by hand. Freed up four gigabytes of disk. Then I started up my freeware/shareware CD burn program (DeepBurner) . Loaded the last burn script, and Deep burner informed me that I needed a 1 gigabyte CD to fit everything on. Hmm, plumpness has infected my 200 GB hard drive.
Some time later, I managed to fit everything I cared about one two CD's, 0.6 Gigabytes apiece, Saved two new burn scripts, and two freshly burned CD's.
Now that the urge to clean is upon me, I ran my freeware antivirus, F-Prot. It's an old DOS program, it's free, and it even automatically downloads new virus definition files. DOS programs run like lightening compared to Windows programs. I got into F-Prot after Norton Antivirus expired some years ago. I tried to renew Norton, but all that happened was my credit card took a hit, but Norton never worked again. Later I ran into a weirdo bug caused by old dead Norton .dll files left on my disk. Although some googling was able to fix the bug, I have sworn off Norton for the duration.
So, last trick, run Lavasoft Ad-Aware, a freeware anti malware program that specializes in ad programs that slip into your machine via the net. Step one for any malware scan program is to update the malware definition files that drive the program. After clicking on "update malware definitions" the program trundled along and after a decent interval announced that the download failed. So I tried the alternate manual update procedure listed in the help file. No dice.
Some googling revealed that "Ad-Aware SE" was now obsolete and no longer supported, but "Ad-Aware 2007" was now free and supported. A direct attempt to download Ad-Aware 2007 thru the Lavasoft site led into a cul-de-sack that required me to sign up for expensive junkware in order to get the anti-malware software I started out for. Fortunately more googling got me to a site that let me just download "Ad-Aware 2007" and run it.
The Ad-aware run proudly discovered 343 tracking cookies (fairly innocuous items) and I duly zapped them all. Program reminds me of my cat, which proudly brings back every mouse, chipmunk, and bird that she catches to show them to me.
Thus endeth computer cleanup for today.
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