John Jay Chapman's commencement address to the graduating class of Hobart College in 1900 comes to us by way of David P. Reed, Internet luminary. John Jay Chapman address

Lorraine and I finally got the floors refinished in the bedrooms and the upstairs office. We spent last weekend clearing those three rooms out -- what a chore! -- and spent most of Christmas Day moving stuff back upstairs. It will probably take weeks to get everything resorted and carried back up to the upstairs office. Whew!

Too funny. adrants.com carries Big Wassabi's salute to Paris "Paris the Heiress" Hilton. Well done, Big. Adrants: Advertising and Media News With Commentary, Gossip and Opinion.

From the "What was she thinking?" file....

Boeing shows Darleen Druyun the door: what was she thinking? I guess she may have missed the procurement scandals of the 1980's, and must have missed the MANDATORY annual ethics training.

I'm a fan of Alan Simpson, former U. S. Senator from the great state of Wyoming. Al's been particularly critical of AARP. I heard about Third Millenium by reading an interview Al gave, which mentioned this group as an alternative approach to that taken by AARP.

I'm also a sucker for good "news" sites. The Onion is one of the very best. RealStupidNews and Fark are also good.

I'm a sucker for well-written food critiques. Today's critique comes to us from the folks at Flak Magazine.

One of the topics that I'll need to write a bit about in the next week or so, is the use of "open source" in combat, weapon, and military command and control systems. I did a quick Google(tm) search on "military use of open source", and what should pop up, but a reference to The Initiative for Software Choice. There must be an art to naming organizations -- make sure the average reading can't figure out exactly what you're for, and what you're against. Who wouldn't be against "Software Choice"? Wouldn't it be positively un-[fill in your nationality here] to be against "Software Choice"? Welcome to Software Choice

Found this site while looking around for something else (UML and C++ documentation tools): Boost C++ Libraries

I was searching around the Web, this evening, looking for information on my old friend Dr John A Gauss, formerly the CIO over at VA and before that, a Rear Admiral in the U. S. Navy. I ran across this interesting site: Open Government Information Awareness

Here's another interesting RAND Corporation report related to interoperability: Interoperability: A Continuing Challenge in Coalition Air Operations

While doing a little interoperability-related research this afternoon, I ran across this report. I haven't read it yet, but I suspect there are some useful tidbits contained within. The subject of the Global Information Grid is always worth a quick read. Who Runs What in the Global Information Grid: Ways to Share Local and Global Responsibility

It's a stretch to say I'm adept at engineering statistics. I always keep one or two statistics books at hand. Here's a helpful link to the Engineering Statistics Handbook, located at our very own National Institute of Standards and Technology: NIST/SEMATECH e-Handbook of Statistical Methods

In the reference section of today's missives, I offer two entries. The first is Dictionaraoke.org -- a site that I believe I heard about (about which I heard?) on NPR: National Public Radio. Dictionaraoke.org - The Singing Dictionary

The second entry is one that I came upon this evening, whilst looking up the definition of the word "canard". I was searching for a word that would be appropriate to describe the myth that floats around in DoD that goes something like "application-centric approaches lead to O(n**2) effort". The word "canard" isn't really appropriate, so I'll keep searching. Anyway, the site is UrbanDictionary.com.

Happy research.

This RAND Corporation study is somewhat dated, but a good source of background material.

Interoperability: A Continuing Challenge in Coalition Air Operations

How telling it is that the key words 'tactical', 'data', 'link', 'interoperability', and 'problems' would generate about 12,900 results in a Google(tm) search. The full employment act of the 1990's (which, unfortunately, has not been repealed as we march headlong into the new century). Sigh.

Google Search: tactical data link interoperability problems

I've run across several references to the "C2 Integrated Exchange Data Model" -- I'd like to do a more thorough examination of this data model and assess its completeness in the context of my work and research. Because it is a data model, and not an object model, I'd be inclined to believe it is incomplete. More work, and a lot more studying of the proposal, is needed.

Google Search: c2 integrated exchange data model

I ran across a reference to this site this afternoon. While they've shut down due to budget cuts, there's some interesting work here.

"The Institutional Governance of Interoperability in the Computer and Telecommunication Industries"

Universität Bremen has started up a new site relating to mobile ad hoc networking. They also have a site relating to mobile IP.

I ran across a link to Wil Wheaton's web site this evening. Wil played the engaging Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: Next Generation (ST:TNG). Good to see that Wil is getting along well.

I'm fascinated by the notion of the "commons" and how humans interact with that notion. Garrett Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons nicely summarizes the argument.

This is an interesting paper on failure semantics.

As you may know, I'm somewhat interested in the business of providing educational materials on the World Wide Web. I recall reading, some time ago, that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was releasing some of its course materials into the wild (AKA the WWW). Well, without much fanfare, they've opened the floodgates, and there's a lot more to come: MIT for free, virtually | CNET News.com

Here's the MIT link: http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html

Happy learning!

I've always been interested in maps. With the advent of Geographic Information Services as a discipline, and with the support of the Internet, I'm really hooked. I ran across this link this evening: U.S. Census Bureau Maps and Cartographic Resources

These Census Bureau folks really know how to get their data into the hands of the public in a useful way.

Consistency management among replicas in ad hoc networks: Re: [manet] Replication in wireless ad hoc networks

This is a nice list of MANET-related papers: Papers on Ad-hoc Multihop Wireless Networks

Well, life is pretty much back to normal around Casa de Wilson. Hurricane Isabel whipped through here Thursday night; we lost electrical service about 2200. We were very fortunate -- we didn't lose any trees or have any other property damage. The folks across the street lost the very large conifer that had been growing in their front yard. That tree had been planted nearly 20 years ago by the previous owners.

Electrical service was restored about 1900 yesterday (Friday). There are still a lot of people in North Carolina, Maryland, and Virginia without electrical service, so we were very lucky there, as well.

The federal government was shut down Thursday and Friday, so we've had a little time off to relax and get a few things done around the house.

Today and tomorrow are going to be consumed by dissertation work, and a little cleaning up needed to get the floors done in the three upstairs rooms.

Thanks to Entertainment Weekly for the reference to http://www.stealthdisco.com. I wonder about "crazes" like this -- how many people are doing this?

This, I suppose, is the definition of "self-referential".

Computing Science

This is the first entry for my new Blog. I've been meaning to set up a Blogger site, and now that the new Google toolbar supports it, it makes a lot of sense.