NASA to make the Muslim world feel good ?

Damn, that's new. I thought NASA was about space travel, not touchy feely relations with a hostile culture. I mean we have the State Dept and the Peace Corp, and a raft of non governmental organizations all just so eager to improve US relations with the whole world. I think NASA should concentrate on space exploration and let the touchy feely stuff go to agencies that do that sort of thing full time.
Kennedy started up NASA to get the the moon, ahead of the Russians. NASA was supremely successful in this task. Once accomplished, NASA turned to building and then operating the Space Shuttle, Hubble Space Telescope, and a bunch of interplanetary missions. Shuttle being the big end of the stick. Trouble is, Shuttle turned out to be dangerous to fly, and expensive to boot. So the Shuttle is going away, and NASA doesn't have anything to do.
NASA tried to build a new ground to orbit system based on a brand new rocket and a great big capsule. They could have bought working rockets from Space X, Lockheed and Boeing, but instead squandered their funding on a brand new design. Obama hasn't decided what NASA should do in the space exploration business, so he has drafted them into the world wide PR campaign.
I liked it better when NASA did space travel.

Firefox; fix for "server not found" error.

The Firefoxers have been "improving" Firefox. One "improvement" which has been causing trouble since version 3.5 is "network prefetching". This software glitch tried to think ahead and go out and open websites before you need them. Unfortunately, it doesn't work right, and you draw a lot of "server not found" error screens. PITA.
There is a fix. You can turn network prefetching off and the bug goes away. I just did it, and it works like magic.
Just add a boolean variable named network.dns.disablePrefetch, with value "true" to firefox's config file. This file is named prefs.js and lives way down in Documents and Settings on the C drive. In principle you could merely edit this file with a text editor, but there is an easier way. From within Firefox go to pseudo-website about:config. Just put "about:config" on the address line as if it were a website you wanted to visit. Firefox will open prefs.js and display it in ASCII, in alphabetical order. Right click on a blank spot and Firefox will allow you to change values or add a new variable. Select "new" and enter network.dns.disablePrefetch as the name of the value. Assign it a type of Boolean, and a value of true. Fixes the problem.
Why has this bug persisted from Firefox 3.5 and into 3.6? The Firefox software people claim the problem comes from bugs in network routers and not Firefox. They may be technically correct, but that doesn't help us users much.

Firefox 3.6

Firefox 3.6 isn't as good at connecting to web sites as previous versions. You keep getting to the "Server is unavailable" error window.
Small work around. Try the "refresh" button in the toolbar. It's a blue curled up arrow, right next the the red X "stop loading" button. Works better than the "try again" button on the error window.

Sunday Pundits (again)

ABC had Paul Krugman calling for yet another stimulus bill. Last one wasn't big enough. Krugman is a NY Times op ed writer and a Nobel prize winning economist. Listening to him this morning makes you wonder why this turkey won the Nobel. He starts out explaining than another $500 billion or so makes no difference in the budget deficit. Then he claims that there is a difference between "long term" deficit and "short term" deficit. I don't see that, deficit is deficit.
What Krugman doesn't understand is the US economy is the biggest in the world, by a lot. We have a debt approaching 100% of US gross national product (GNP). That's more money than there is in all the world. We are too big, and need too much money to be able to borrow it all. Little dinky place like Greece can borrow 100% of its GNP, and because their GNP is tiny, the money is there. The US GNP is too huge to finance. The Obama budget runs trillions and trillions of dollars in debt, for ever. Today we can sell T-bills at 3.5% interest, mostly because the US government is considered the soundest investment on the planet. Tomorrow that won't work. Today the Chinese are raking in more money than their economy can handle, so they are parking it in a safe place, namely T-bills. Tomorrow their economy will be big enough to absorb all their earning and they will stop buying T-bills. Look for interest on T-bills to jump up from 3.5%.
In short, Nobel prize winning Krugman thinks he sees the light at the end of the tunnel. He doesn't realize that it is the headlight of an onrushing train.

Economic recovery depends upon real jobs.

Real jobs in manufacturing, mining, logging, trucking, farming, air transportation, construction and power generation produce real goods, with a real market value. And the workers get paid, which stimulates demand in the economy. Government jobs do not produce anything with real market value. The wages of government employees come from money taken away from real workers. Creation of a government job does nothing to stimulate the economy because the reduction in real worker's wages is exactly equal to the extra spending power given to the government employee.
The Obama administration has been increasing the number of government employees and disrupting the real economy with uncertainty over health care, taxes, fuel costs, credit availability and green regulations. The $850 billion "stimulus" (porkulus) bill has largely gone to subsidizing state governments. Here in NH, the state budget would be much farther in the red without federal handouts from the porkulus bill.
Obama should work on foreign trade treaties, making credit available, financing research and development, reducing federal red tape, and increasing domestic energy supplies. In actual fact, he has been doing just the opposite.

Firefox Themes

I upgraded to Firefox 3.6 and found it supports "themes". I scanned thru a bunch of them and selected a winter ski mountain theme that put a soothing background behind the Firefox tool bar, menu bar and the rest of the screen hogging bars at the top of screen.
It looked kinda cool. Except it did something to the color of the text in the menubar making it harder to read.
So themes are gone now. And the menubar is readable again.

Reviving Firefox

Some months ago my Firefox got flaky. Screens showed in odd colors, or just black and white. Some buttons (reply) on some websites stopped working. Printing became erratic or came out in strange colors.
Fix. Create a brand new user account and use Firefox from the new account. All the colors came back, the invisible buttons re appeared and print worked right.
Of course I had to re apply all the fixes I had to apply to Windows XP to get the new account to look right. (show classic start menu, show classic Explorer, and more).
Why does this work? Windows must store some customization information in each user account ("loading your personal settings") which gets corrupted and cannot be fixed. It is NOT a firefox problem per se. I executed the procedure to refresh firefox's "profile" (private, per user status file in which things like passwords and bookmarks are stored). No luck. I had to create a whole new Windows user account and then do the Firefox "create new profile" bit in the new account.
I love Windows.
PS. It rained on the newly stained deck today. The water beaded up nicely on the new stain.