Here’s a demo of a simple technique to fill out fields in a Word document. This looks like it would work well if you need to do some type of programmatic mail merge that goes beyond what you can do simply by using Word and Excel. Unfortunately it looks like it is dependent on Windows to run the .exe file.

In 2005 British television aired a reality show called Space Cadets. The show put out ads for “thrill seekers” and then ran them through a process to identify the most gullible individuals with the least knowledge of spaceflight, science or (it would seem) any form of common sense.

The individuals were told they were going to be part of the first reality space tourist television show.  They were flown to Russia and launched into space and spent five days aboard the Space Shuttle.

In reality they were flown over the ocean for several hours and landed right back in England where they were surrounded by actors pretending to be Russians.  They spent their space time in a mockup of the Space Shuttle that was used in the movies Armageddon and Space Cowboys. The shuttle was set inside a simulator showing views of earth.

After five days they were to go on a space walk at which point the hoax was revealed and the door opened up into the studio where their family and friends were waiting.

Obviously the simulator wasn’t able to recreate weightlessness so they were told that they were in a very low orbit where they had only 70% gravity, but the Space Shuttle had gravity generators that made up for the other 30%. Actually any object in orbit is going be weightless because orbiting is simply falling fast enough that you never hit the ground. (The ground curves away before you hit it.)

From the clips I’ve seen, the producers seemed to have pulled it off incredibly well. They put a lot of effort into the simulator in making it as realistic as possible–well other than actually being weightless. In one scene before they were “launched” they were interviewed by members of the press.  However, to make sure no one was caught smiling, the “press” all had to wear face masks presumably to keep them from spreading germs to the cadets.

The show’s selection process along with the actors playing the pilots and even a planted “cadet” who was in on the hoax helped insure that their suspicious were minimized.

Another show that used a similar technique of duping the participants was Superstar USA.  With a format and style similar to American Idol, it attempted to find the worst singers possible while telling them that they were talented.

I have limited bandwidth at my house. I’ve been experimenting using cloud computing when I need a faster connection to the internet. This week I’ve been using RackSpace’s Cloud infrastructure to bring up Windows based machines, connect to them using RDP and move files around. For example, I needed to download a 600Mb ISO and then use it to update a VMWare server. The Windows machine I brought up allowed me to do this work quickly and on a much higher speed connection than anything I could possibly get at my house. The cost was about $0.16 for two hours worth of work.

OpenBTS is software will let a standard GSM phone connect and place outgoing calls over Asterisk (an open source voip PBX). They set it up at Burning Man and people were able to place outgoing phone calls. I think there might be a way to use this in your house so you can place outgoing calls without incurring minutes from your cell phone provider. Their might be a problem with the spectrum license, but if it were low power enough, I think it would probably be legal because there are products like the Air Rave that will do this already.

OpenBTS is being used on the small island of Niue. With less than 2,000 residents, cellular companies aren’t interested in putting in service so they are doing it themselves. OpenBTS is also looking for ways to deploy to rural areas. Their goal is to make it possible to provide cell phone service for around $1 per phone per month.

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Hudson is a continuous integration server that will watch a source code repository and automatically build and test the code whenever it is updated. There is an interesting plugin that lets it integrate with Amazon EC2. If you need more server resources to build and test the software, Hudson will simply bring a new instance up on Amazon, use it and then shut it down.

Since the actual source code in a project is typically not going to require much bandwidth to move around, this would work a lot better than trying to use EC2 for other on demand applications–like video rendering that are both processor and bandwidth intensive.

My 17 inch MacBook Pro is coming up on the three year mark so I thought I’d take a look at the new version.  Last time I upgraded I went from 1.5 Ghz to 2.4 Ghz. However, the fasters 17 inch available today is 2.53 Ghz. It appears we are really seeing the limit of Moore’s Law when it comes to the raw processor speed. The newer processors do have other updates that make them faster, but still nothing like the speed difference between a computer purchased in 2000 and 2003.

Wooki is open source servers software for creating and editing documents.  It looks like it is kind of like a Wiki, but a bit more structured for creating actual documents.  For example, it can export to PDFs, let people make editing comments that don’t show up in the actual document, etc.  It is still under development, but it looks like it could be a very nice system for creating textbooks or other documents that need to be a bit more formal and “bookish” than what you tend to get with a Wiki. You can demo it on their site, but I think the idea is that you’d host it on your own server.

I’ve intend to write a post here about the entire experience, but until then I wanted to announce that I’ve completed my online masters degree through Harvard University.  The degree is a Masters of Arts in Information Technology focused on software engineering so it was quite a departure from my previous Master’s degree in music composition.  The degree took a bit longer than I had originally hoped for, but it was a very good experience and I’d highly recommend Harvard’s Extension School to anyone. In the next month or so, I want to follow this up with a detailed look at the classes I took and some thoughts for anyone looking at pursuing the ALM in IT degree.

Skydeck used to offer a service that would keep your SMS messages from your phone backed up, but they are now focusing on offering what I’ll call “social caller id” and they have rebranded at Mr. Number. MIQ offers this SMS backup along with a few other nice features.  You can send messages through your phone from your computer keyboard, see a list of all your calls and add notes to them and backup the media on your phone all over the air.

I heard about a guy who had someone else install MIQ on his phone without his knowledge.  Late at night the perpetrator would log into MIQ and send out inappropriate text messages to everyone the victim knew.  It came from his phone, but he had no idea how it was happening.

A numbers radio station is a signal that transmit some type of code. There are quite a few of these and some of them have been operating for quite some time. UVB-76 is one that transmits from Russia. It has been playing a buzzer sound since the late 90′s and occasionally there are voice transmissions.

Earlier this year it stopped transmitting, but now it seems be back and people are hearing a lot of background noise–almost like there is a microphone left on in a storage room somewhere that everyone has forgotten about. You can listen for yourself here. An archived Russian web page seems to indicate that the station was used to send out military orders and the time they were to be executed.