Hans Cathcart’s Homepage

Today I made my first contribution edit to this page on Wikipedia.  I was actually able to add some relevant content, information about the FAA’s decision to extend the expiration dates on first and third class medical certificates for pilots under 40.  Quite amazingly, looking at the history of the page I discovered an old friend of mine who, it turns out, is a flight instructor.  Small world.

An interesting presentation at Stanford’s ACM on how facebook works behind the scenes with images. It talks about Akamai (my company) a bit and mentions how they are able to off-load 99.8% of their profile picture traffic. They also discuss their server-side Cachr project which is based on the memcached project.

CAPTCHA. You’ve all seen it on web sites where they want to read an image and then type the letters to ensure you’re a person and not a computer program. Well, a couple of guys at the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University figured out how to make this annoying process into something that actually benefits humanity. Recaptcha.net helps digitize books from the Internet Archive.

I’ve now been ‘online’ in one way or the other for nearly 20 years, starting the first time I connected to a bulletin board system in Dec. of 1988. I’ve played, chatted, searched, published, expressed options, made friends, argued, campaigned for office, experimented, learned, even entered the truly bizarre world of online dating. What’s it all leading to? Well, if you recall the battle-cry of the Borg on STTNG you’ll already know ‘you will be assimilated.’ We Fell Fine is just about the only proof you’ll ever need. As far as interesting Internet experiments go it’s not completely lame. And I want you to want me is slightly surreal. Jonathan Harris & Sep Kamvar are sickly creative.

This week could be one for the Space history books…

Atlantis (STS-122) is scheduled to land on Wednesday. There are four possible landing opportunities, two at Kennedy (preferred) and two at Edwards AFB. As you may know NASA likes to avoid landing the Shuttle at Edwards because then they have to load up the orbiter onto the specially-equipped Boeing 747 and haul it back to Kennedy, which looks cool, but delays the next scheduled mission for that Shuttle. Now, typically if the weather at both these locations is unfavorable due to storms or high-winds then NASA will delay the landing and try again the next day. They have enough oxygen and fuel to make it to early Friday if necessary. But, here’s the catch…

Last week President Bush authorized the DoD to attempt to destroy a doomed super-secret spy satellite, designated USA 193, that is expected to tumble uncontrolled from orbit within the next few weeks. The U.S. Navy will try to destroy the satellite prior to its reentry by slamming a ship-fired SM-3 into it.

from Sky and Telescope:
“Apparently, DoD computer models have shown that, if left alone, more than half of USA 193’s roughly 5,000-pound mass would survive the atmospheric plunge and reach the ground. In particular, there’s a 20-inch diameter tank containing about a half ton of the highly toxic propellant hydrazine. So the decision was made to break up the satellite if possible.”

The DoD has determined that Thursday is the first possible day to start letting the Navy begin ‘target-practice’ and let SM-3 ‘meet’ USA 193. And this brings up the interesting question of, do you really want to be launching a kinetic warhead into space to break-up a spy satellite into thousands of little bits the same day 7 relatively un-armed Astronauts are attempting to guide a rather fragile glider back to Earth. Now, admittedly the Earth’s atmosphere and Space are pretty big, but if something were to happen it would look rather… what’s the word… stupid.

NASA is remaining surprisingly mum about the conflict, but I bet NASA really, really, really wants to get out-of-the-way and land Atlantis on Wednesday. And that brings up the interesting possibility of the fifth landing opportunity on Wednesday. That’s right, the fifth. If the weather at both Kennedy and Edwards is unfavorable, then Atlantis can also land at White Sands, NM. The last and only time the Shuttle has landed at White Sands was in 1982 when Columbia (STS-3) landed there during an R&D flight. But as it stands White Sands is now prepping for a possible landing.

Admittedly, this landing of Atlantis is not going to be as exciting as Jerry Bruckheimer could make it, and it will not end in Bruce Willis sacrificing himself to blow up an asteroid, but bringing in a Space Shuttle for a combat landing just before you start shooting at an out-of-control toxic spy satellite is about as exciting as it gets.

Working at a technology company that doesn’t make products like Apple or web services like Monster, but instead helps those companies have faster-performing web sites is sometimes a little hard to explain. Plus most people don’t really care how the Internet really works. But, every so often something happens on the Internet that catches the media’s attention, and when we’re quick Akamai’s marketing team puts some pretty cool info online for everyone to see. Here is a time-lapse depiction of the Middle-east Internet outage that started a couple weeks ago. The thing to realize about this animation is that all the lines are Internet BGP routes that are being advertised as good to use for Internet traffic. However, the latency on those links is so bad as to make using Web applications through those links practically impossible. Yes you heard me right, the Internet does not magically fix itself in real-time.

Earlier today I was watching NASA TV and Ihappened to catch Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, give a talk at one of NASA’s 50th Anniversary events. While I was watching, it struck me what a natural and gifted speaker Schmidt is, especially when compared with the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder. While looking around YouTube I found this video of a much younger Schmidt giving a talk to a Public Speaking class. I guess you really can learn to become a better speaker.

I find the term Web 2.0 so painful I honestly don’t use it in conversation. I’ve been a huge fan of the Web and hypertext in particular since I first saw it. Mwesh created a pretty neat YouTube video “The Machine is Us/ing Us” which is a bit of a history lesson about the Web. CoreyTheRaven created a video expressing his thoughts on paper, which perhaps has the highest bit to content ratio I’ve ever seen.

The German TV news channel ARD has a very interesting news atlas (in German!) on their site. While MapReport is probably an earlier incarnation of this type of service, sites like NewsMap organize news by popularity. 10×10 gives you the same concept with pictures.

Just got back from Akamai Kick-off 2007 at the Copley Marriott in Boston. What a blast. It’s always great when you get to meet the people that you work with remotely on a daily basis. We had great fun at bowling and I learned that I’m no good at Guitar Hero II. Meeting the San Mateo, London and Munich teams was awesome and I got to practice my horrible German on a few unsuspecting souls.