Congress is coming down on the F35 program this year.

 Complaints from Congress are about large numbers of F-35s out of commission Awaiting Parts (AWP we used to call it).  One troublesome part is called the “F135 Power Module”.   I am not quire sure just what this part does, it sounds like it does something for the F35 engine driven generators.  Average time to repair an F135 power module was 207 days back in October last year.  Design goal for Mean Time to Repair was only 122 days.  Back when I was a flight line maintenance officer in USAF we could repair anything we took off the aircraft, in our on-base shops, inside of 1 or 2 days.  122 days or worse, 207 days, is ridiculous.  “We” (my people) was Avionics, radios, radars, IFF, TACAN, compass, anything electronic except gyros.  The engine shop (not my people) could overhaul an engine in 4 or 5 days.   F-35 program has 20 aircraft grounded for lack of engines. 

    They are changing out the maintenance support software from Autonomous Logistics Information System (ALIS) to a cloud based system Operational Data Integrated Network (ODIN).  Apparently both systems run on hardware on board the F35.  Dunno why they did this, you only do maintenance on the ground, the pilots don’t do maintenance while airborne.  Why add weigh by carrying stuff you don’t need to carry?  Needless to say, the changeover is slowing all sorts of things down. 

   Anyhow the US is committed to the F35 as our fighter for the future. 

 

Free up 2 Gig of disk space.

 

Piece of cake.  In Win 10 type “Disk Cleanup into the search box  on the task bar.  The heavy duty stuff only shows after you hit “Clean Up System Files”.   On my computer it took a while but it freed up a gig of disk. 

   For the next gig of disk I started Firefox and on the toolbar select “Options” Then select “Privacy and Security”.  Look at “Cookies and site data”  Firefox allows any website to store as much as it pleases on your hard drive.  I hit “Remove All” and freed up another gig of disk. 

Took it a while. One downside, this erases all the pass words to sites and you will have to type your password in to use the site.  I have all my passwords filed for me so this is not a problem.

  I don’t know why I bother.  My medium speed Dell Optiplex 990 has 1.75 TERA bytes of disk so a couple of Gig is nothing.  I suppose it has something to do with starting out programming many years ago on a DEC PDP-11 with a mighty 5 megabyte RK05 disk pack. 

Big Tech Censorship

Facebook and Twitter and probably a bunch more are censoring people that I want to hear from, Trump in particular.  Chris Wallace had a Facebook censor on Fox this afternoon.  Said censor was very firm that Facebook had every right to post who they felt like posting and censor who ever they pleased.  Kinda like a newspaper, you get to publish on the op-ed page only if the editor thinks you are good for circulation and not too offensive.  

  The best fix for this problem is to use the old Sherman Anti-Trust Act to break up the big sites.  They are clearly monopolies.  Once Facebook or Twitter is broken up into two or three piece, the pieces will have to compete with each other for advertisers and members.  One piece or the other piece will decide that giving guys like Trump access is good for business.  That’s the proper fix.  Unfortunately it won’t happen as long as Biden is president.  He and his like the solid leftwing spin that Facebook and Twitter are doing right now and will simply tell the anti-trust division at the Justice Department to lay off.  Keep things the way they are.  By now, Facebook and Twitter are so big and cover so much of the market that a new startup doesn’t have much chance of getting starting going up against them.  Trump might have the money to do a startup, he has talked about it, but that is a very long shot.

   The Facebook guy Wallace had on TV suggested that Congress might pass something like a fairness doctrine for Facebook and Twitter.  Same objection applies, Biden would veto it. 

   So until the voters vote in a solid Republican Congress and a Republican president, we are stuck with Facebook’s censorship. 

Mother's Day.

 On the top is a picture I took of Mother, Janet K. Starr, back in the winter of 56-57 at Cannon. She lived til 91. Her health kept up right to the very end when a stroke carried her off. She died back in 2010. She was a great Mom and I still miss her. She raised her three boys right, and she did a lot of raising of her six grandchildren. On bottom is the last good photo I have of her from 2009. 

Texas to East Coast pipeline shut down

 This just hit Fox TV news a few minutes ago.  It is being said that a cyber attack has caused the pipeline shutdown.  They are talking about horrible price spikes for gasoline.  As of this writing, no forecast of repair time.  Could be anything.

Some questions for the pipeline owner.  

1. Are you using Windows to control or monitor anything?

2.  Are you using the public internet or the public telephone system to control or monitor anything?  

A yes answer to either question means they are guilty of gross negligence and should be sued down to their socks.

Fox News sound is noisy

The TV was making a high pitched little chirp.  It got to the point I got up from my chair and walked around the house checking for leaky faucets dripping or a water leak somewhere.  Didn't find anything and careful listening made me decide the noise was indeed coming from the Fox sound track on TV.  Fox needs to move their studio to a quieter part of town to cut down on the emergency vehicle sirens and heavy crashing noises from the street and odd things like that chirp.  

Warren Buffet Breaks NASDAQ

 According to the Wall St Journal, the NASDAQ computer systems can only handle stock prices less than $429,496.7295 per share.  Warren Buffet's share price has climbed to $421,000, close to the limit.  With a little more good luck on Warren's part, NASDAQ will no longer be able to trade his stock.  The magic number of NASDAQ's limit is otherwise known as 2 raised to the 32nd power.  Which says the software guys chose to store stock prices as 4 byte integers back when they wrote NASDAQ's software.  Far as I am concerned a couple of hundred dollars a share is a perfectly reasonable share price.  All of my stocks are $50-100-200 a share.  So going with a 32 bit integer and a max share price of a little less than half a mil per share was, and still is, a perfectly reasonable design decision.  

The WSJ article goes on to say that NASDAQ is considering rewriting all their software to support Warren's fantastic share price.  That's Wall St weenies for you.  Me, I would tell Warren to do a stock split if he wants to continue trading on NASDAQ.