So a few words about my impending trip to Russia: it isn't clear why I'm going. Officially, I am part of the "technical delegation" assigned to assist with a decidedly non-technical meeting. My role is that of "Information Barrier Expert." I've only been in this business for about 6 months, and in that time I have never built or even designed a piece of information barrier hardware. I read a couple of papers, so now I'm the expert. I am assured that this is OK, because I won't actually be called on to speak.

The purpose of the meeting is for the Russians and Americans to agree on specifications for an attribute measurement system for assaying sensitive plutonium items. I can tell you one thing for certain: none of the decisions that have ever been made at one of these meetings are rooted in actual technical reasoning. So when they tell me that the technical delegation will not be called upon to speak, it is both believeable and depressing. I expect that at this meeting I will see the faces of those responsible for the weird framework of arbitrary nonsense that I have to work with when I am doing AMS work.

And I have to wear a suit. Everyday, all day. Basically I get to sit in a room with a bunch of non-techie beaurocrats, wearing uncomfortable clothes, and I can't talk or sleep. I am very not looking forward to this meeting

However, going to the meeting gets me to Moscow with the better part of two rest days to do nothing but wander around Red Square and buy concentric dolls. I'll be travelling with Doug; he and I get along great. He was one of the people I interviewed with when I applied for a job at N-1 and I specifically requested that he be one of my mentors when I was offered the job. Unfortunately for me (and possibly him), he got promoted to management between when I accepted the job and when I finished my thesis. So he's not one of my mentors and I don't get to do much work for him. But he's still hilarious and I'm glad that, of all the people I could have gotten stuck with for two days of wandering around Moscow, it's him.

So yeah, at least one good travel companion combined with the fact that the Russian business workday is actually really short means that the suit-factor of this trip won't be as horrid as I may have let on earlier. Once we get out of the meetings, it'll be ridiculously opulent Russian hotels, fuzzy hats, and onion domes. Yeah

And then, after three days of suits, I fly to Vienna, where I won't have to wear a suit at all. Furthermore, the purpose of this trip is well-defined, as is my role in it. I'm giving a talk and demonstration of a piece of hardware that I'm writing the firmware for (and that, on the next turn, I will probably be the lead hardware designer for). Basically the Vienna trip will be entirely centered around my work, and I'll be running the show at the meetings. Much better. And, as a bonus, Vienna has the Christkindlmarkt. Now I'm not a huge Christmas participant... but apparently this includes good chocolate and cider. I'm in.

When the original Xbox came out I was still living in Boston and attending grad school at MIT. My friend Bunnie reverse-engineered the hardware copy protection on the thing and apparently became somewhat of a celebrity in both the RevEng and Xbox Warez crowds, completely unbeknownst to me. At the time I was pretty busy with school and didn't really follow the progress of the quest to put Linux on the Xbox.

I understand that there isn't any really good practical reason to have Linux on an Xbox, though it is humorous considering the vitriol MS marketing seems to have towards open source software.... Considering how crippled I found the first Xbox despite its hardware capabilities, it was nice to see an OS on there that could take better advantage of what was available.

Anyway, now that I seem to have transitioned myself into the role of a hardware and embedded systems engineer, I find the idea of reverse-engineering such a complex system as the Xbox360 that much more intriguing. I'd help out if I had more time and, say... a spare $400 to actually buy a console that I would only rip apart. I think this time around I'm content to sit on the sidelines and watch, but I will be paying much closer attention to the progress as it is made. It's nice to get in at the beginning and be able to witness the entire evolution of something like this.

Speaking of getting in at the beginning and Microsoft, I totally missed the A.I. ARG back in 2001, which I still contend is Microsoft's most innovative product to date. I see now that they had another ARG as viral marketing for the Xbox360, and I missed it as well. However, I think what made the A.I. game so great was the fact that ARGs were entirelly new at the time (certainly on that scale, anyway). Now it has become old-hat, somehow. Oh well. Wish I could have been there.

This is sorta cute...

You give it your birthday and it finds a star whose distance from Earth in lightyears is roughly your age. Therefore, the light from that star that you see today originated at the star right around when you were born. :)

SCIENCE!!

Does anyone have the soundtrack to Kill Bill Volume 2? There's a hidden track on there (#16) that I think may be what was originally the closing credits music from the cinema version of Kill Bill #1 (replaced with some worthless schlock in the DVD version). Help a brother out with an MP3?

I'm not buying that soundtrack on account of it sucking ass and leaving out a lot of the music that I think made the movie great. And thanks ITMS for not carrying hidden tracks. As I've mentioned before, I hate it when soundtracks don't... you know... have all the songs from the film on there. Particularly when there's one song that stands out above the others and yet it is somehow missing from the soundtrack. See: The Life Aquatic, Kill Bill, True Romance, etc. etc. etc.

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UPDATE: Thanks Adrian for pointing out that track 16 is available as a hidden track at the end of the track 15 MP3. And it's not the right thing. The original credits music from KB1 was an instrumental, and it sounds sorta like the background music for the hidden track on the KB2 soundtrack. But for now I'm left wanting. What's Quentin Tarantino's email address? (or RZA's, for that matter)

Before I went to Kazakhstan I drew up a schematic for an accelerometer board that we're going to be using with our safeguards hardware. While I was gone, they made up a layout and had some boards made. Last night i stuffed the first board and this morning I turned it on to find... it draws an amp. Ouch.

Careful review of the connectivity showed that the board electrically matched the schematic, and I verified that all of the parts were in the right places and soldered down well. But that op-amp sure was hot...

Prognosis:

The schematic has the rails of the op-amp chip reversed. Yeah. So that part is dead... Prepare for ugly jumper wires.

The bigger problem: I used the PDIP part for the AD637 RMS converter chips I'm using when I drew up the schematic. The layout person used the SOIC footprint for the board, which has a different pinout, but kept the pin numbering I had on the schematic. Ouch. 10 of the 16 pins on the chip are wrong, goo. Luckily, the way the power rails were coming in on this one probably didn't kill the chips. It'll just take... the ugliest modification in history to get it working.

boo.

Frostbyte inspired my transition from nuclear physics theory to electronics design. I never looked all that favorably on his drug habit, but his amazing talent as an artist kept me coming back to Warehouse 23 to see what new and amazing sculpture he had created. He was responsible for the Light Suit 2000 and the incredible Persistance of Vision Towers.

He died this weekend of an MDMA-induced heart attack. He fully understood the risks of his drug use and accepted them willingly. He told me once that all of his best ideas came to him when he was high. And whatever assumptions you might make about him, he was brilliant and had some of the most creative and original ideas of anyone I met while at MIT. He'll be missed.

December 2:
8:00am Albuquerque to Atlanta on Delta (flight time 3 hrs.)
3:50pm Atlanta to Moscow on Delta (fligh time 10.5 hrs.)

December 8:
9:05am Moscow to Vienna on Aeroflot (flight time 3 hrs.)

December 17:
7:10am Vienna to Milan on Alitalia (flight time 1.5 hrs.)
10:50am Milan to Atlanta on Delta (flight time 11 hrs.)
7:55pm Atlanta to Albuquerque on Delta (flight time 3.5 hrs.)

Noteworthy: First time to Russia, first time to Italy (though it hardly counts).

Just went to Occ. Med. to get another round of exciting immunization shots. This time it was Hep. B Part Deux and Flu. Take that, rabid chickens...

Due to an unexpected trip down to the vet in Albuquerque on Thursday, I worked on Friday (Veteran's Day). Due to the demo I have to give to the IAEA in Vienna in December, I am working through all my weekends between now and when I leave (December 2nd). I did take a couple hours off yesterday to not play dodgeball, but otherwise its as though the weekend never happened.

Speaking of December and my being out of the country, here is my tentative itinerary:

* Leave Los Alamos on December 2nd
* Arrive in Moscow on December 3rd
* Leave Moscow and travel to Vienna on December 8th
* Leave Vienna and arrive in Los Alamos on December 17th

Also, I'll be in Hawai'i from December 30th to January 9th. Can I get a job with Lonely Planet or something? The penalty for all this travel (which I am very much looking forward to) is that I don't get any days off, including weekends, between now and then.

I did manage to make it to Nate's place last night to watch Ken produce a fancy Japanese sushi meal from scratch. We had rolls, nigiri, miso, and mochi. Very good. And we watched kung fu movies (two at a time) without the subtitles on. I only knew a few people there (Nate and Ken, both formerly of Dan's roommate fame, and some people from work). The rest of the people there seemed to be NMT regulars.

Cari announced, out of the blue, that there was a dodgeball league at the Y and that she was playing in a game this morning. Of course I asked if I could sign up. So in an hour, this will be me:

Yeah. Fear that.

The rules have changed a lot since I last played in gym class back in highschool. Apparently they don't use the big red rubber inflatable balls anymore, they use rubber-coated foam balls that are only 6" in diameter. And there are 6 balls in play at once, 8 players on a side... It'll take some getting used to.

So yeah that's what I'm doing this morning.

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Ok, maybe not. The guy who's space I was taking magically reappeared much to the surprise of the rest of the team. So there was no room for me and I just watched. Man it looks fun though. If there's a regular league I've gotta get on a team. How dorky. But fun.

Having finished Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon while on travel, I can safely say that it has secured itself a position in my top n books of all time, where n is a small positive integer. I heartily recommend it to anyone with an interest in cryptography, though I suspect I'm probably the last of these people to get around to actually reading the book.

Anyway, I went online to see if I could find a working example of van Eck phreaking and failed. I understand that there was a working demonstration given at DefCon IV. I was at DC4, but don't recall seeing this presentation. I can't find any imagery from the demo online (or any other demonstration of van Eck, for that matter).

Anyone ever seen a working implementation?

--UPDATE--

Thanks to Robin and his link, here's a really amazing demonstration:

The above image was shown on a computer monitor that was pointed at a white wall about a meter away. A photomultiplier tube was aimed at the same wall from a distance of about 1.5m, with no line of sight between the sensor and the screen. Using some assumptions about the phosphor decay curve and a Butterworth filter, here is the reconstructed image:

Keep in mind that the wall is only diffusely reflective (like drywall) and the sensor is not a camera, just a light intensity meter. I'm impressed...

Here's some pictures from my trip. As of this writing, they aren't sorted, ordered, or commented... but you can get your early view of the coffeewater, the barbeque "testical," and the weird-face contest I lost with a camel.

It's been over 50 hours since I've slept in a bed, so here's some brief highlights. Expect a more coherent post later.

* They lost our luggage again on the way home
* I had a 5 hour layover in Frankfurt plus a bonus 2 hour delay
* Someone stole my ambien out of my hotel room
* Benedryl doesn't work as well as ambien
* My new cat beat up the Fou and scratched his cornea
* When I got off the last plane today I couldn't think of what day it was and I had no clue what time it was