Fairhaven, The River

BYOD Security rears an ugly head

The Wall Street Journal has noticed the growing issues around securing data on personal devices.  The BYOD movement has some serious downsides. Companies are implementing phone wipes (reset to factory default) for employee and contractor phones as part of their BYOD programs.  When contract/employment ends the phone is wiped.  Very few people have backups for their phone, and very few people notice or recall the terms of the BYOD program.  Lots of personal information is getting destroyed as a result.

I practice maximum corporate/personal separation.  I'm now fanatic to the point of bringing a personal and a corporate laptop while traveling.  I've been through one hostile corporate takeover where I saw what can happen to company laptops.  The separation of function has only been directly beneficial once.  It made recovery from a failed disk drive while traveling easy.  Corporate could recover their stuff onto a replacement laptop that reached me the next day.  The rest of the time it's a nuisance.  But a data wipe is too traumatic to risk.

Aviation News

Today's Aviation Week had three relevant articles.

1. Another article on upgrading aircraft to use digital telemetry, GPS, etc.  This time it was discussion of the steps that Delta is taking with some of their aircraft.  Nothing new or radical is reported.  It's just another article how to upgrade at reduced cost.  Long term (assuming the FAA mis-managers don't completely ruin things) the digital upgrades should reduce fuel use, air pollution, noise pollution, and flight times.  Switching from voice to text messaging makes sense for all the routine flight control.  There are two pilots and messaging doesn't interfere with flying the way it does with driving.  It's faster and avoids the confusion over exact numbers that sometimes affects the voice controls.  It also carries a lot more messages per second over the limited radio channels.
2. A report on prototype effort by British Airways, as part of joint effort with Solena Fuels and GreenSky London, to build a $500 million plant to convert waste biomass into fuels.  It's to be built in Tilbury and go operational in 2016.  The plant will take 565,000 metric tons of sorted municipal waste and generate 50,000 tons jet fuel, 50,000 tons diesel, 20,000 tons naptha, and 50 megawatts excess electrical power.

   The feedstock is dry sorted municipal waste. That means metals, glass, and other recyclables have been removed.  (Technically it's called refuse derived fuel - RDF).  Part of the deal is the attraction of using something that somebody else collects and pays you to take, as are airline commitments to reduce carbon impact.  These fuels count as bio-fuels with no carbon impact.

   It's a plasma torch gasification, so plastic, tires, etc. can be processed.  It uses the usual syngas F-T processes, with the latest chemical reactor and catalyst designs.

3. An article about the complaints about latest idiocy on carbon tax for aviation.  The European Parliament has clearly said that they will collect tax on aviation travel outside Europe, has created a bureaucratic monster, and all the non-EU countries (US, Russia, China, etc.) have reacted with immense hostility. This choice abrogates promises to use ICAO international processes for aviation CO2 controls. One of the absurdities is that a charter airline that flies one 747 per week is considered de minimus carbon contributor and avoids most of the paperwork.  A business jet operator that flies one business trip per month is not considered de minimus and must follow the full bureaucratic procedures.

   The annual paperwork cost (filings, people, etc.) is estimated at $100K/yr.  For an airline this is just another piece of the regulatory burden.  For business jet operators this is a big extra cost.  There is a series of "free" allowances.  Again, even for small airlines the cost of filing and qualifying is justified by the value of the allowances.  For business jet operators, the filing cost exceeds the value of the allowances.

   The laws justification was CO2 emissions, but clearly the regulations are designed to eliminate private aviation and business jet operations in favor of commercial airlines.  Extending the reach outside Europe is a simple power and money grab by the EU Parliament.

Chromebook C7 Experience (Initial Review)

Summary: The Acer Chromebook C7 works as an ultralight Linux system and I will continue using it.  There are plenty of annoyances and it is not for everyone.  It is for people who can tolerate annoyances and who like to tinker with things.  The $200 price compensates for a lot of annoyances.  If you can't handle annoyances or don't want to tinker with things, get an Ultrabook ($800+) or Mac Air ($1300+).

I got a Chromebook C7 and have replaced the ChromeOS with Ubuntu linux.  It will replace my aging Mac Pro laptop.  This began as an experiment.  I was willing to risk $200 on this.  It's working and I'm now committing to it.

I evaluated my needs by examining all the applications on my Mac Pro and on my corporate laptop.  This established what I want from a travel machine.

• I rejected the tablet plus keyboard alternative.  An Android tablet plus keyboard could do about two thirds of what I want.  I'm not willing to give up the other third.  One thing that I really want is the ability to browse the web, refer to PDF, Word, and other documents, all as part of writing another document (using either emacs or an office system).  That's the one thing that tablets can't do easily.  They are really limited to showing one application at a time.
• The Mac Air and the PC Ultrabooks can do everything that I want.  These cost about $1400 or $800 respectively.  If the Chromebook experiment failed, I would have gone to a PC Ultrabook.
• The Chromebooks have the option of replacing ChromeOS with Linux.  The $200 model is the better choice for this than the $250 model.  The two deciding factors were storage space and CPU.  The $200 model has 320GB disk and an x86 CPU.  The $250 model has 16GB static RAM and an ARM CPU.  For the non-tinkering user, the $250 is a much nicer machine.  But if you want to install Linux on it you need to put linux onto a separate 16GB microSD, and you're very storage limited.  The ARM means a lot of cross-compiling of software because there are relatively few Linux packages compiled and configured for the ARM family.  There are many different incompatible instruction sets among the ARM family, so you need to target machine types, not just ARM.

Physically the C7 looks like a Mac Air designed and built by a PC vendor.  It's clunky, boxy, a bit heavier, a bit thicker, slower, and much shorter battery life.  On the plus side, it has intelligent security protections, 320GB storage, and many useful connectors (like VGA and wired Ethernet).  It's flimsy, which does lead to some annoyances.  I haven't broken anything, but it feels fragile.  The battery life is only 3-4 hours, but you can buy additional batteries and swap batteries if you want.

Installing the software is straightforward but requires following a lot of instructions carefully.  (Instructions with pictures, and the real instructions). You can't just boot from a CDROM or Flash stick.  You need to get the machine into developer mode, download and run ChrUbuntu as an experimental OS, repartition the disk, sign it, and get Linux stored onto disk.  The first download is 1.5GB which takes a long time even with a fast Internet connection.  Then, the first update to bring it up to current versions will download another 400 MB.  And forever you must accept warnings at boot time that you are running an experimental OS in developer mode.

I do expect other distributions to follow Ubuntu's path and configure versions that can be installed in this way, but they haven't done it yet.  For other versions you are much more on your own.  You get to go read the ChromeOS developer documentation and figure it out yourself.

I've installed another 500MB of software downloads for

• emacs
• truecrypt
• Skype, and
• XCFE4

These first three are because they are core applications that I want to use.  They were the highest risk of failure on this system.  The other missing applications are going to work if Linux works.  (Most of the 400MB is dependencies pulled in by Skype.  Skype is only available in 32-bit mode on Linux.  ChrUbuntu is 64-bit mode.  So the Skype package pulls in a mass of 32-bit mode library and compatibility support.)

I installed XCFE4 because this system needs a lightweight windowing system.  I tried Canonical's preferred Unity system that comes with ChrUbuntu.  I replaced it because:

• It places too many demands on the 1.1Ghz Celeron.  The clickpad was highly erratic.  Other features were slow or erratic.  Unity really needs a beefier CPU and GPU.  It's full of demanding eye candy.
• It interferes with my doing multiple things at once.  It's like the tablets.  It's set up to show one application at a time.  If you fight hard you can have multiple applications at once, but it was easier to switch than fight.

An example of the kinds of annoyances you must face and fix is a conflict between Unity login manager and XCFE4 over access to the power system controls.  These are known bugs.  They leave it unpredictable whether power status will be shown and whether lid closure will trigger standby or not.  I dealt with the first by installed "xosview" to show me system status.  Further examination of comments on the bug reports showed how to configure XCFE4 to not use the power control daemon.  Now power management works much better.  But there are still occasional glitches where the system powers up from standby despite the lid being closed.  I haven't figured out how to stop this yet.

I've got plenty of software installing and customizing to go, but I'm confident it will work.  The high risk stuff is working and indicates that the rest will work.  It's just going to take time to do.

It's got lots of annoyances and limitations, but for $200 I can accept them.  (Extra:  I've just added 8GB of RAM ($40) and it's doing fine.  Instructions are here.)

RNP (Airline Energy Efficiency)

Southwest Airlines announced their plans for using RNP to improve efficiency (this presentation has nice graphical illustrations) a while ago.  They just announced their vendor selection.  Southwest is not the first to use RNP.  Alaska Airlines has been using it very effectively in Alaska for several years.  The primary motivation there was dealing with the mountains and bad weather.  The reduction in flight cancellations and flight diversions justified the high capital investment.  RNP has also been prototyped in the US by Delta and in Australia to improve flight operations at congested airports (while also reducing fuel use).

The big deal with Southwest is that this will be system wide for them, with every airplane upgraded to RNP navigational equipment and every airport that they use having RNP approaches designed.  This is a big dollar investment.  The FAA portion of the investment in approach designs and ATC procedural changes is not called out.  Much of this is being designed by Southwest's vendor so that it is ready now for the Southwest routes and aircraft, instead of waiting for the FAA funding schedule.  The FAA needs to review, approve, and integrate the procedural changes.  Southwest is spending $175 million over six years to do this and upgrade their avionics, and expects to get a return of about $25 million/yr in fuel use savings.  They will also get a non-dollar savings from reducing flight times by 1-2 minutes per flight, and from using continual glide descents.  The FAA expects to reduce load on ATC and increase airport capacity slightly, based on preliminary experience with RNP.

Delta, American, and other airlines have been rolling out RNP support within the US and internationally to deal with difficult airports, where congestion or terrain give a special advantage to RNP.  Southwest is the first to announce that it will be system wide.

An unusual fish farm

I didn't understand the Homer fishing hole until I was there recently.  It made no sense that a little tidal bay would attract salmon.  But in this case, the salmon are raised to fingerlings there in the hole.  So they return to the hole in their return to spawn.   It's never going to happen, so they return to be caught and eaten (aside for a steady selection of a few for collection of eggs for the next crop).

The rush of fish and water when the incoming tide crosses the bar is quite a sight to see.  From the perspective of world fish farming this is just one more farm.  But it is an interesting way to harvest the open ocean.

Decent food at a conference

I regularly complain about the terrible things that travel does to my diet. For the first time that I can recall, I'm getting suitable food at a conference. The HL7 conference lunches are genuinely suitable food. There is a salad that is tastey components, not just an excuse for fat laden dressings. The fruit is large quantities that are expected to be eaten, fresh and tasty. This is not the fruit display that is expected to last all week. Then they have good fresh vegetables without a sauce and meat in it's own juice. The only traditional carbs and fat offering is the potatoes side dish.

This is a great improvement over the usual carbs (bagels, pastry, more pastry, more carbs)and coffee, with fat laden carbs and meats for the meals. It is much easier to eat properly when the food is suitable.

Tonight's dinner was with relatives. Fish and lean beef on an electric grill at the table, eaten wrapped in lettuce leaves.

This is the first trip in a long time that is not a dietary disaster. Being in San Diego does make a difference.

Ohare, and why muni wifi may fail

Friday was terrible for travel. The weather at Ohare was awful. From 2PM to 11PM I watched standby flights leave iwthout me, themselves later and later due to bad weather and intermittent airport closings. Mine left many hours late. Numerous flights to secondary fields were cancelled, filling the open seats with standbys.

When I arrived at my home airport, the offsite parking shuttle was no longer running, and only an answering machine answered their phone. So I checked into the airport hotel for a few hours sleep. I caught a morning shuttle and got home for breakfast.

It's the first time I've seen the new Boston skyline from harborside in the early morning light. It really is as beutiful as the tourism posters.

The WiFi at Ohare was useless. A little network monitoring revealed that it was melting under the intense load of a packed house of people trying to use it. Municipal WiFi plans and others will need to face the reality that there is no magic free lunch. Shannon's law still applies despite all claims to the contrary and there is a finite capacity for WiFi.

As an accused "old man afraid of change" I must admit wasting almost a half hour before I remembered that I also have GPRS service on my cell phone. It was also suffering from heavy utilization by the thronging masses, but I was able to track the incoming flight (my airplane to be), check radar, and get some work done. Bandwidth was poor, so I didn't take the risk of trying to synchronize or move large files.

More BWB

Yet another blended wing system, this one making press at Farnborough. The work at Cambridge MIT research is the latestt. The target of 215 passengers makes it look like a serious proposal. This time they are focussing on silencing the noise. Again, it looks like about 2020 for the introduction of these airplanes.

Future Airplanes

My impending trip to Europe reminds me that there was another anouncement a couple months ago that wind tunnel testing will proceed on another of the experimental evaluations of the blended wing body (BWB) aircraft. There are a few sites with good summaries and illustrations.

This technology is decades away. Boeing or Airbus could have gambled on it for their latest round of new aircraft, but instead we have the 777 and the 380. They continue the solid tradition of tube with wings aircraft. That was a good decision. BWB has lots of promise but not enough experience.

I expect BWB to emerge first in the freight market. The wide cargo area and direct tail loading are very attractive for cargo. You see this in all the military cargo airplanes. BWB would be an obvious C-5 replacement first.

People are uncomfortable with non-traditional airplanes. The BWB has no good places for side windows, although skylights is a real possibility. That would be an interesting alternative. Would air travel be better if there was good natural lighting throughout the cabin? A BWB passenger load would be more like an auditorium than an airplane. It would also suffer the inverse problem from freight. Passengers do not like tail loading from a ramp. So there will need to be a long period of visual acceptance and some other motivations for acceptance.

The real potential motivator is price and capacity. On routes where the 380 is being considered, a BWB would carry more people, with less ATC interference, probably less wake turbulence aircraft separation problems, and lower fuel burn. That will be a motivator.