MOCKINGBIRD By Walter Tevis

This book was a fantastic find in a genre I thought I had long ago read everything that was any good.

The problem with dystopia fiction is that it is all so damn relevant, so damn accurate and so damn depressing. Reading it through never pays off with any hope at the end. You nod your head and think, the author is so right. We are so doomed.

MOCKINGBIRD ends on a real high note. You can see the beginnings of something brewing that may  bring mankind back. I don't want to give you any spoilers but the robot actually turns out to be a good guy in this one who is pulling for mankind even as he works towards his own destruction. The climax isn't sappy, sophomoric or unrealistic and it leaves you wondering if there is something in the spirit of mankind (meaning Neanderthals) that will triumph no matter what in this world, given enough time.

The journey of the protagonist from old silent movies to determined survivalist is pretty cool too. Read it, you will see. Definitely worth it. This book in an underrated classic.

Our Ancestors Tried To Tell Us

They told us that if Americans stayed a strong people ... literate, fiercely independent, free and well educated that there would never be a global thermonuclear war.

They said that as incredible, as unlikely as it seemed in 1955, if they allowed their educational system to be taken over by communists and the citizenry dumbed down that a third world war which would destroy the United States would be inevitable.

I could see this coming in 1992. I could press my ear to the ground and hear it approaching like distant thunder from the hooves of horses.

Robert Welch was right. The John Birch society was precognition. They tried to tell people about this but men being incapable of receiving wisdom, just didn't listen.

Kwanstainia, The Land Of Winnarz

I like it when they talk about their high-tech future.

All they lack now are people to staff it.

Even shut down, government still finds ways to ruin life and cause general misery

Winnarz believe government runs the ocean

Scientists Concede They Completely Made Up Neanderthal Facial Features

It is amazing they can believe they have any credibility left on the subject. They don't. No reasonable person would continue to think they can speak with authority on this or any other topic.

They keep trying to gradually morph the Neanderthal models into what appear to simply be very handsome modern people with very good bone structure and deep-set eyes. They can't keep up with the internet which exposes these models as fabrications before they sufficiently amend their story.

I know what Neanderthals looked like. I have a mirror at home. There were four species of  Neanderthal in Europe alone and all of them looked remarkably different from one another. Did anybody ever bother before to point out this distinction for you? No? Ever wonder why?

The Chilling Stars

Finally got a copy of this book on Tuesday.

It is awesome. Real science in this book, backed by real experimentation in real labs by real scientists, not "sociological scientists" or "environmental activists."

Gas composition in the atmosphere has nothing to do with climate. Nothing. To. Do. With. It.

Gas composition changes with climate because temperature affects chemistry atmospherics, not the other way around.

The only factor that counts in climatology is how much cosmic background radiation is hitting the Earth's atmosphere. There is nothing else that matters.

I have almost finished it. Highly recommended.

UPDATE : This book is full of win cover to cover and highly recommended by Vault-Co. It deserves to be on our top ten list for required reading. You will learn more about astrophysics reading this book in two hours than you would in 8 years of that guff they teach in edjamafacashun academee. Will answer any questions you might have left about the interplay of solar wind, magnetic field reversals, ice ages and long term climate cycles.

Barcodes With Label Printing Sheets In Vault-OS!!!!

I got it working! Barcode labels and onscreen displays of barcodes is going to be in Vault-OS V1.0 IN THE BROWSER!! On-the-fly from CueCat wand in Jquery popup dialogue!!

I spent a good couple of nights trying to hack it together in Raphael, knowing it was not right and was not going to work, especially for printing off whole pages of barcode labels from the browser. I finally found a way to do it and it is so simple it defies belief! Perusing the CodeProject revealed the usual culprits and over-engineered solutions until I stumbled over the innocuous little article above!

Uses the SPAN code in HTML 1.1 and tables! :) It takes longer to explain how it works than it does to simply implement it! The example at the CodeProject was for Code 39, but I got it working for the majority of barcodes recognized by the CueCat by just adapting the routine to take a string of 1s and 0s in Javascript!

Tested in IE6, would probably work in IE5.5 as far as I know.

There's a lot more to my barcode routines than just simple scans. I am trying to streamline the process where it is as simple as unpacking groceries for your preps and waving the CueCat to make entries. Not far off now. I am getting pretty stoked. I keep whittling away and it keeps getting better the simpler it all is.

False Flag

Vault-Co Right, Everybody Else Not Even Close

I told you this is why you get those Facebook queries all the time in your email.

Why? They need to know who will miss you if they put you on a boxcar to a FEMA camp. Totalitarian regimes want to know who to specify when they make up lists.

If they make you vanish, then make everybody who would notice vanish, did you ever really exist at all? This same sort of thing took place in the old Soviet Union all the time. They'd clear out whole blocks of dissidents in one fell swoop.

If modern people had a brain bigger than that of a squirrel this might change things. That's why this revelation won't have much impact at all.

VOS : SCADA Controls Test

Sample of the Real-Time Raphael Vector Controls Available in Vault-OS

I know most reasonable people have long abandoned the idea that Vault-OS will ever see the light of day. I don't want to bore you with all the code I have written that turned out to be not quite exactly what I needed it to be. For example, I wrote a bunch of DXF drawing server code that I chucked once I realized I could handle nearly all the "diagrams" in Vault-OS on the client side for display. I didn't know how this should work six years ago, I just assumed in order to draw a map or a layout on the screen I would have to do it by preparing a bitmap server side and sending it down in the cache. That was the wrong idea. I have thrown all that code out. I knew I could not do it via SVG because SVG has never been properly supported on older browsers like the thin clients I purchase for a buck and intend to serve as workstations in a Vault at very cheap cost of ownership.

I figured out how to get SVG import going on-the-fly into REST services on the browser side and then break it down into controllable chunks for the SCADA system for display. So it can get stored as an SVG and displayed with dynamic control in Raphael even on very old machines and systems.

The code you see above was tested on Internet Explorer 5.5 and I found both the JSON REST service and the JQuery/Raphael/JQUI all seem to run the exact same way they do on Firefox or IE 9. You would not believe how many nights of coding it took to get it this far.

Anyway, got quite a lot to do. This is really getting somewhere now, though. This runs in 814K, a single executable, no configuration, no additional files, no installation, no DLLs, no nothing. On DOS, Linux or Windows ... you just run it and it works. All configuration takes place internally.

Simple clock in upper right corner. I don't have a screen shot yet but in the authorized page there is a Telnet-like terminal running in the browser for power users to operate everything from the command line. Very crude at the moment but that is working, too.

Next up is regex wildcard matching for resource URLs in the built-in web server. At present I have hardcoded the JSON REST calls as a static address, this will never do for production code. My basic paradigm is an OAuth style scheme with the control sensor/switch/device addressed along a path interpreted and dispatched dynamically rather than just a literal lookup. I have some regex code that compiles to a 4K library I will be using for this.

The next time you see this program those crude buttons that act as a menu along the top will be replaced by a proper DHTML pulldown menu in JQuery-UI.