After everything seemed to be working, I made sure by running a quick scan with my wireless card on my laptop. Sure enough, there’s now 2 different routers with the same SSID, and connecting to either one yields the same results.

eth1      Scan completed :
          Cell 01 - Address: 00:1F:90:CA:F7:84
                    ESSID:"KB3RXM"
                    Mode:Master
                    Channel:11
                    Frequency:2.462 GHz (Channel 11)
                    Quality=81/100  Signal level:-53 dBm  Noise level=-61 dBm
                    Encryption key:on
--
          Cell 04 - Address: 00:1A:70:75:E7:E6
                    ESSID:"KB3RXM"
                    Mode:Master
                    Channel:11
                    Frequency:2.462 GHz (Channel 11)
                    Quality=98/100  Signal level:-25 dBm  Noise level=-61 dBm
                    Encryption key:on

So, I want to thank daovertaker for his great tutorial. Now maybe I can get better reception in the back yard!

hank@tardis:~$ wget -S http://www.ralree.com
--2009-06-30 09:52:13--  http://www.ralree.com/
Resolving www.ralree.com... 74.54.115.108
Connecting to www.ralree.com|74.54.115.108|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response...
 HTTP/1.1 200 OK
 Date: Tue, 30 Jun 2009 13:49:54 GMT
 Server: Apache/2.2.11 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.11 OpenSSL/0.9.7a Phusion_Passenger/2.1.3
   mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635
 X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.8
 X-Pingback: http://www.ralree.com/newblog/xmlrpc.php
 Last-Modified: Tue, 30 Jun 2009 13:49:21 GMT
 X-Content-Security-Policy: allow self; img-src *; object-src *.ralree.com
  *.ralree.info; script-src *.ralree.com *.ralree.info pagead2.googlesyndication.com
  friendfeed.com; style-src *.ralree.com *.ralree.info
 Content-Length: 57457
 Keep-Alive: timeout=5, max=100
 Connection: Keep-Alive
 Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

As you can see, my content security policy is sent as an HTTP header on all HTTP responses from my site.  I basically stole an example from this page.  I’ve attached it in the .htaccess file in my site’s root, before everything else in there, like so:

<IfModule mod_headers.c>
Header set X-Content-Security-Policy "allow self; img-src *; object-src *.ralree.com *.ralree.info; script-src *.ralree.com *.ralree.info pagead2.googlesyndication.com friendfeed.com; style-src *.ralree.com *.ralree.info"
</IfModule>

I highly recommend everyone with commenting activated on their blog enable this, since XSS is a serious pain.  This seems to work very well on Site5, where mod_headers was simply enabled out of the box.

This knife is a switchblade apparently...

Customs and Border Protection has moved to ban import of all knives with springs, or knives that can be opened with one hand. This is ridiculous, as these are no more dangerous than any other knife. All it will do is make these knives more expensive, and hurt knife manufacturers, which will destroy jobs (because jobs are all that matter these days, I had to work that in somehow). I’ve handled quite a few knives that have assisted opening, and I find them much easier to handle than knives that have no assist. Get ready to see new US knife sales hit an all time low as the better knives are traded underground. Just my 2 cents.

(d) MINIMUM TYPE-SIZE AND FONT REQUIREMENT FOR CREDIT CARD APPLICATIONS AND DISCLOSURES.-

All written information, provisions, and terms in or on any application, solicitation, contract, or agreement for any credit card account under an open end consumer credit plan, and all written information included in or on any disclosure required under this chapter with respect to any such account, shall appear-

(1) in not less than 12-point type; and
(2) in any font other than a font which the Board has designated, in regulations under this section, as a font that inhibits readability.

Interesting – I wonder how much extra paper that would waste every year, and how many more trees would be required to make it happen. Is readability really a problem? If one is blind, he/she can probably find help to read the terms (yes, they can). Funny enough, nothing this guy’s ever sponsored or co-sponsored has passed – so he’s zero for 44 as of today.

When it comes to electricity in Maryland today, coal is king. It fuels 58 percent of our needs and is used at plants such as Constellation Energy’s Brandon Shores and H.A. Wagner plants in Pasadena. Behind coal is nuclear power from Calvert Cliffs in Lusby, which satisfies another 26 percent of the state’s needs. Oil is used to generate 7 percent, natural gas just 2 percent. The rest comes from minor alternative sources.

So, getting some more data from here, we end up with this:

There’s an extra 7% from “minor alternative sources” that I’m just going to estimate is an average of 100g/kWh of CO₂, coming out to 7g/kWh contribution to the whole. That means for Maryland, for every kWh of power produced there are CO₂ emissions of 661.25g. That’s actually really good compared to the 8,788g of CO₂ per gallon of gasoline, as calculated here.

Another point to take into account is the Transmission and Distribution losses in the power grid, which are substantial:

The transmission and distribution, or “T&D” system includes everything between a generation plant and an end-use site, i.e. a residential home or commercial business. Along the way, some of the energy supplied by the generator is lost due to the resistance of the wires and equipment that the electricity passes through. Most of this energy is converted to heat. Just how much energy is taken up as losses in the T&D system depends greatly on the physical characteristics of the system in question as well as how it is operated. Generally speaking, T&D losses between 6% and 8% are considered normal.

We’ll stick with 6% in this article (look on the bright side). This means that rather than our original figure of 661.25g/kWh, we have to adjust for 94% efficiency, which means we need an extra 6.38% (100/94 because we cut into our principle…) emissions to get the power to the customer. This makes for a total of 703.46g/kWh.

So, in the Volt, that’s 6,190.43g of CO₂ per 40 miles. Now, remember a gallon of gas is 8,788g of CO₂. That means that in 30 miles my Civic creates 8,788g of CO₂. That’s 292.93g/mile. The Volt comes out to 154.76g/mile.

So, even today, on mostly coal power, you can cut your CO₂ emissions basically in half with a Chevy Volt provided you don’t use the gas part of the engine. That’s a larger margin than I was expecting, and it’s actually quite impressive. Of course, as I discuss at length in the previous article, the initial production cost of the Volt makes it a worse choice than a used Civic initially, but the Volt would have a much lower angle for BTU production than the Prius, so I assume it would become worth it in quite a few less miles (maybe like 50,000, but I don’t know). When it comes down to cost, forgetting the initial cost of the Chevy Volt, let’s see what happens.

A gallon of gas is right around $2 right now, which gets me 30 miles. That’s 6.66 cents/mile. Power from the grid is 11.82 cents/kWh. So, to go 40 miles, I pay $2.66 in gas. I would only pay $1.04 for that distance with the Volt.

All in all, it’s a very impressive vehicle, and it and other electric cars like it seem like a very viable option for the future. The biggest problem is cost, at about $32,500 in the US after subsidies. You’d have to drive it 679,012.35 miles to make up for the fuel price difference vs. a 2000 Honda Civic. If you want to feel good about carbon emissions, and you’re rich or ready to be in debt, get one. If not, get a Civic and save money.

Now if we just make more of the grid nuclear, we’d have a pretty tight infrastructure.

So, for the data used to obtain this, I looked all over for real road tests of the Prius fuel economy.  This one seemed to fit well with everything else I’d been reading, giving an average range of 42.6-45.2 MPG.  So, I’m going to say 43 MPG.

The Prius uses enough gas to create 2639.53 BTUs per mile.  The Civic: 3783.33.  At these rates, and coupled with the initial component of the BTUs used to manufacture and import the Prius, we come up with the following:

Graphing this in gnuplot, we get the following:

So, one would have to drive almost 100,000 miles to get an advantage over simply buying a used Civic.  Interesting.  Here’s the GNUPlot Plot File for anyone that’s interested.

sudo apt-get install hugin autopano-sift

Now, open up Hugin from the Applications -> Graphics menu.  The first step is to import your images.  I’m going to stitch together four images for this demo, though I have tried the exact same procedure with 20 and it came out beautifully.  Here are the three images in gThumb:

Simply drag-and-drop these into the Images tab of Hugin:

Now, we need to generate the control points.  These are the places each image has in common with its neighbor.  We can make these manually in the control points tab, but that’s tedious and crappy, and the computer can do it just fine on its own.  In the same Images tab, there will be a part at the bottom that says Feature Matching (Autopano). Set the Points per Overlap to 7, since that should be sufficient for most stitching, then click Create control points.  After it does its thing, you’ll see something like this:

Click OK, and move on to the Optimizer tab.  Here, we can automatically tweak the parameters of each photo.  First, let’s just do positions starting from the anchor image (which is the first one by default).  Make sure to uncheck the first checkbox, as shown here:

Once that’s finished, you’ll see something like this:

If these numbers are small (like less than 30 or so), go ahead and hit Yes.  Otherwise, you need to go take a look at your control points manually, and possibly shift your anchor image for position, both of which are beyond the scope of this tutorial.  These numbers look perfect, and are what we expect from autopano magic.  Now, let’s fix lens issues with another pass in a different mode.

Hit Optimize Now! again, and click Yes when it finishes.  We’re done positioning.  Now, let’s fix the exposure.  Click the Exposure tab, and you’ll see something like this:

Set it up as shown, making sure to uncheck that box.  Then click Optimize Now! and Yes like before.  You’ve now balanced the exposure levels of the images.  Let’s take a look by hitting the Preview button, which looks like this:

You’ll see an image in crosshairs, and some buttons at the top:

Click Straighten, and then Center.  You should now have your image all set to go.  Don’t drag it around, you’ll just ruin it.

Now, go back to the main window, and click the Stitcher tab.

Click Calculate Optimal Size to get the correct numbers in the boxes.  Then, click Stitch Now!.  After lots of thinking, you’ll end up back at the same screen.  That means it finished.  Now, check out the result!

It obviously needs some cropping, but I have to say it’s not bad!  Let’s open it in GIMP and finish it up.  I simply cropped it into a nice rectangle, tweaked the colors, and saved it as a 95% quality JPEG.  You can delete the TIFF file if you want – it’s probably huge.  Here’s the result:

So, now you too can make beautiful panoramas.  Here’s now I did recently from the top of Die Wank in Garmisch, Germany:

TR: What about the public-health benefits? Systems that house large quantities of patient data could enable new types of research studies.

KB: Absolutely, that’s something I get really excited about. It will totally break open our knowledge base. For example, I have been diagnosed with low-pressure glaucoma, which is fairly unusual. No one knows what causes it. I would love to be able to search the system for anyone with this form of glaucoma and start to look for similarities.

I’d love to be able to do that too, except it would potentially violate the privacy rights of all of those individuals if they hadn’t agreed to specifically let you see their records. If they were to elect to share their information to help others find similarities as she suggested, that would be fine, but we should not assume everyone will do that, and we would have to have a process for this election upon diagnosis.

The first issue to cover is whether the Internet will be used as the medium of record transfer, if point-to-point connections will be established using the phone system or another network, or if an entirely new network will be created to facilitate these transfers, like the financial network. This article assumes the first option, especially since citizens will supposedly have access to the information online.  A separate network would be a much better solution, but would cost much more to deploy.

Why does it matter?

What are the non-privacy-related implications of Internet-accessible health records vs. them being on paper in a drawer? Most of them have to do with hacking, bribery and blackmail. Let’s say someone pays the Database Administrator of the health system $1,000 to change your health records to indicate you saw the doctor about gonorrhea (or they simply use a stolen doctor’s account, or they’re a hacker, etc. etc.). Now, they give you a call, letting you know that they’ll tell your wife unless you pay $10,000. Blackmail is a huge possibility. This is possible now, but only by those who work with patient information physically.

One effect of the centralized hackable database of health records would be the illegal issuance of prescriptions for drugs like Valium, Oxycontin, etc. for a fee. All that would have to happen is a falsified entry into the database, and you can go down to the store and pick up your bottle. I don’t necessarily oppose loosening rules on prescription drugs, but creating a new electronic black market for health record falsification could prove dangerous. After considering this possibility further, it would be possible to remove prescriptions from the system as well, possibly endangering lives.

So we should just use paper?  Come on!

Now, I’m not necessarily against digitizing health records. If each citizen, on the initialization of their record, was given a private key, and all the records were encrypted with the matched public key, and kept in a large central database, that would be fine. Yet, there are problems with this too since in an emergency, the health records wouldn’t be accessible unless the patient was conscious and able to type their passphrase. Therefore, there would have to be an override of some sort, which would destroy the security of the system. This override could be a “health safety deposit box” provided to patients optionally by a private corporation, which would contain their passphrase for emergency use, and would be authorized for query by the living will of the patient. This is the only possible way I can see for centralized health records to be implemented securely, but it seems to be unworkable at the moment.

So what about decentralization, which is what we currently have with paper and with the SAFEHealth system. If the records were kept by the doctor, and encrypted with both his and the patient’s public keys (for patient confidentiality), that would be secure. Of course, assuming the medium of transfer is the Internet, the decryption and changes would have to be done on a standalone computer to prevent the cleartext from being retrievable from the Internet, and any transfer to another office would involve re-encrypting the files with the other doctor’s public key, transferring of the result to an Internet-enabled machine, and the reverse process on the other end to read the records. Because this is painful and time-consuming, doctors and administrative assistants (I like ’secretaries’ better, but whatever) would obviously skirt the security here. And human involvement to decrypt would still be needed in emergencies. I’ve just sent an email to SAFEHealth asking for more information about their system:

Hello,
I’m interested in learning more about how your system works at a deeply technical level. Could you please point me to an explanation of exactly how records are stored, accessed, encrypted, decrypted, which keys are used, who generates those keys, and what network protocols are used to access the information? Thanks.

The only workable solution seems to be the patient signing away the rights of the government to make his/her health records potentially public information. We’ve seen various scandals involving medical industry employees already, like Octomom. Many people would sign this, especially if they went to different doctors all the time. Many people don’t care about their medical records being public, so they’d do it for convenience. But at a process for removal from the system at any time should be available for all patients. A system like this might complicate seeking diagnosis for things like alcoholism, opiate addiction, and mental health for fear that one’s employer might find out about the condition. Any patient should be able to elect to use paper instead, and be responsible for the transfer of his/her medical records to medical professionals for treatment.

But it’s for your own good!

A dangerous assumption is that we must force the patient to allow doctors access to their medical records for his/her own good. The fourth amendment exists to prevent this very thing from happening. It could also be argued that random searches of homes would discover meth labs and would save children, but it is unacceptable in this country because of our natural right to privacy. One way to assure access in case of emergency for those who have privacy concerns is by using a living will to allow access to the paper records assuming they’re filed somewhere accessible. Private companies could provide medical record storage facilities for profit, and could be called in case of emergency need of the records (or as I described before, the passphrase to unlock the records).

If one thinks this article is scathing to the whole idea of digital health records, he/she should have a look at this one.  While some of the same concerns and many more are brought up, different fears are addressed.  The corruption of government employees would also be a danger (which I touched on with the DBA bribe example earlier), but some of the later examples (the police officer having access) are a little unfounded and paranoid.

Microsoft and Google both have products for storing large amounts of health information.  When stories like this are appearing all the time, that really concerns me.  I’ll finish up with a good quote from this article.

“Ironically, HIPAA creates felony penalties if a doctor or hospital abuses the data, but there’s absolutely no penalties for a Microsoft or a Google because they’re not covered by the law,” Brailer said. “It’s nothing that they’re doing wrong. It just shows you the state of mind of Congress when that rule was written 10 years ago, because they never ever envisioned there would be online services managing health information.

“I think that’s a very high priority, because one consequence of the President-elect ramping up people’s attention to this is that people will come back to a lot of their fundamental worries about the protection of their health information,” Brailer said.

I look forward to comments and suggestions for this post.  This is definitely a hot-button issue at the moment, and any constructive criticism will be appreciated, and probably responded to.

Update 4/10/2009

So, Lawrence Garber, Principal Investigator for SAFE Health, and I have had a great email thread going on the security details of their system.  It sounds pretty good, but there are still concerns.  Apparently, they use HTTPS over a VPN, which isn’t a bad solution for network traffic security.  Yet, the last response I received from him indicated the following:

There’s no need or requirement to encrypt the data on the server because it’s within our physically, password-protected, and firewall secured datacenter. However passwords and credentials are encrypted.

So, again, we’re back to the unhackable datacenter with unencrypted data idea, which, from personal experience, isn’t a good idea.

Did you know that you are related to President Obama? We found him in your family tree on Geni.

Specifically, he’s your 18th cousin five times removed.

You can find this in the tree by navigating to your father’s mother’s father’s mother’s mother’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s sister’s daughter’s son’s son’s son’s son’s son’s son’s son’s son’s son’s son’s daughter’s daughter’s daughter’s daughter’s son’s daughter’s son.

To see the exact path from you to President Obama or any other blood relative on Geni:

1. Upgrade to Geni Pro
2. View the public profile for Barack Obama

Geni needs your help! We’re proud of the hard work our users have put into building our site and we want to share the story. Please reply to this email if you would be willing to let us list your name among the tens of thousands of President Obama’s blood relatives who are on Geni.

Thank you for using Geni.
-The Geni Team

I’m not going to upgrade to Geni Pro to actually traverse this path, but it’s interesting nonetheless. He can go on the list with Eisenhower, Daniel Boone, and King Edward III.