Worst IT job ever. The North Pole.

Around this time of year I always sit back to a nice cup of eggnog and read my favorite web discussion, The Physics of Santa Claus. This work came originally in a 1990 issue of Spy Magazine physically justifying that if Santa does exist and provides this astonishing feat of delivering more packages than UPS does in a week in one night, then he would be vaporized in 0.0003 seconds due to atmospheric pressures of earth. Of course in all fairness there is several rebuttals to this calculation.

As we end 2008 however there needs to be a new perspective on Santa's yearly task. I want to question Santa's naughty or nice list. Popularized by the song "Santa Claus is coming to town", the naughty or nice list is suppose to comprise of a list of all children with a check-box for naughty or nice on it. According to more recent census figures than the 1990's Spy passage, there is approximately 400 million children who are Christian and still in relative Santa believing age.

So I took the liberty and found that 50 names could fit on one page using Times New Roman size 12 font. 400,000,000/50 = 8,000,000 pages, but lets say that Santa is somewhat ecological he went double sided, so 4,000,000 pages. Why size 12 font, well Mr. Kringle does wear glasses. At any rate according to this wiki.answers.com post about how much paper does one tree make, a 4 by 4 tree that is 8 feet tall could make 90,000 pages. So 4,000,000 / 90,000 = 44.4 * 8 = a 4 by 4 tree 355.55 feet tall. That would be 5688.88 cubic feet of wood. So a mile of wood would be taken yearly to create this list. Using the average thickness of paper of 0.1mm the naughty or nice list would be 0.4 km thick or about 4 football fields in depth. I'm not sure what the size would be if rolled but I can assume it would still be a 50 yard diameter circle and still to cumbersome for humans to use.

Now that the paper list is out of the question lets look at the hardware end of it. Someone suggested to me that Santa uses a PDA. Well it should be noted that the maximum text size of a Word 2003/2007 document is 32 megabytes. 400 million names with the average size of 20 characters and spaces is 8 billion characters divide by MB size (1,048,576) = 7629 MB or about 7.4 gigabytes. Even if this document is broken into time zones, this still violates document maximums. OK so how about a database. Could the database be onboard or can it be at North Pole HQ.

To start the name field would have to accommodate for all names and most likely middle names as well so a field of 100 characters would be required. A boolean yes no is necessary for naughty or nice. In all likelihood there would also be fields for address, GPS coordinates, country, city, state, age, sex, toy tracking number, and a comment field for logistical information such as vicious dog, or thin chimney. Overall I figure about 500 bytes of information for each child. A 200 gigabyte database after multiplying by 400 million records.

Given the Physics of Santa article, Santa has one millisecond to "park, hop out of his sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house." I've give this possible system 1/10000 or one ten-thousandth of a second for Santa to input a search criteria, access the record, display the record, and Santa to read this probably while flying. Depending where Santa is at a giving time, no transmission medium known to man can send a request to the north pole, extract it through the seek times of hard drives, obtain the record and send it back to location within 1/10000 of a second. This would beat the speed of light if Santa was below the Arctic Circle. So using the North Pole database would be extremely out of the question. Even so, he would be sending / receiving anywhere between 10 MB/s - 50 MB/s transfer rates, the packet load through the routers would not be able to transfer the data in time.

This leaves only one possibility, that Santa is the fastest speed-reader on the planet and would need extremely fast PC on board capable of performing high-detail algorithmic searches using Solid state hard drives. I'm certain however the tremendous friction Santa takes in while flying will also burn this database as well.

Please send all rebuttals to solutions@calumettech.com. I'll post them as they come in. Just a few side notes.

1. Given that the average typist types maybe 4 records a minute, it would take a team of 190 elves to work non-stop to create the naughty or nice database.

2. Mrs. Claus doesn't do anything and was never given a proper first name other than a few movies.

3. I wonder what the Physics would look like if Santa would do 16 U-shaped loops around the globe, ideally time zone one he heads for Antarctica, then time zone two he returns to North Pole to reload take a 5 minute break and recharge his nuclear powered reindeer.

Who we are, what we do

Calumet Tech Services is a small computer repair business located in Northwest Indiana (Highland to be exact). We have extensive experience repairing and working with computers. We have experience working with both PC and Mac. We also have experience working with many different operating systems (from Windows 95 to Windows Vista) and many different programs (word, excel, photoshop, etc).

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Calumet Tech Services can also help you setup HDTV. We will help you get the best picture and ensure you are using the right cables. Not all cables can provide High Definition and we will recommend the right cable for you.

If you live in Northwest Indiana or the Chicagoland area and need computer help e-mail us at solutions@calumettech.com and we will see if we can help. Please provide us with a brief description and what city and state you are located in. Our prices are very reasonable.

Zero-day IE after major security update.

So new fuel has been added to the browser war and the typical fan boy hatred of Microsoft products this week. On December 9th the typical begining of the month Tuesday update included 28 fixes, the highest in 5 years. 23 of the 28 fixes were marked critical patching Internet Explorer, Office, Sharepoint, Windows Media, and Visual Studio. Patches included fixes to Graphics Device Interface (GDI) previously patched (again) items. This actually wasn't the news however.

The news came from sans.org that even after the severe patches performed by Microsoft, a zero-day exploit is still remained open. Wikipedia defines this as zero-day (or zero-hour) attack or threat is a computer threat that tries to exploit unknown, undisclosed or patchfree computer application vulnerabilities. Believe it or not this is common practice with your software developers. There is no way to complete all software gaps or issues without reducing all services the product represents. What isn't like a manufacture however is to request users to switch to a rival temporarily while kinks are fixed.

As a typical IT junkie that I am, I found this sceptical. Apparently the communication chain between Redmond, Washington and London missed a link and IT evangelist have chose to issue commandments as opposed to finding sources. What I didn't expect was Microsoft claiming other browsers are vulnerable as well. So everyone is advising to use caution, like we haven't heard this before. There is several nasty bugs I've came across this month, they are getting quite nasty without protection. Keep it safe and clean out there.

I hope this serves as my rebuttal to the Apple virus scare attack I made last week. I hope both parties of the OS wars are happy. I however will practice transcendentalism when it comes to software. I'll use unpopular open-source for awhile.

So shall we come to look at the world with new eyes. It shall answer the endless inquiry of the intellect, — What is truth? and of the affections, — What is good? by yielding itself passive to the educated Will. ... Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions. A correspondent revolution in things will attend the influx of the spirit.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Oh Boy, a Cybersecurity Chief. I feel so safe now.

I want to apologize in advance for my poor GIMP skills as I'm using Linux this week. If this was photoshop, it would shine in a million colors. At any rate more important matters are at hand.

One, the most disliked political figure of Jason and I has finally been arrested. In this 78 page complaint Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich is charged on three major counts, selling Obama's senate spot, running pay to play politics, and trying to fire the Chicago Tribune editorial board. So wait how does this play out on me. Well simply if Illinois Governor actually passed a budget instead of slow playing it as he has many schools would have the technological funding that was requested last year. Several schools that I was to provide for didn't get the funding they requested. So long story short, this guy ruined educational funding for schools beyond his other crimes.

But the subject is cybersecurity. Apparently Obama needs to do new homework as he is requested to suggest a cybersecurity chief. All I can say is, its about time there was emphasis in this subject. As I stated in the cybermonday post, lots of weird stuff has been developing on the web. There has also been a minor shift in platform power as well. For the first time in over 10 years, Microsoft no longer holds the 90% market share. Apple for awhile considered security software but quickly removed it as it contradicted their advertisements. As they approach the 15% it will be a target for virii writers as the system does hold a large consumer based of people who can afford apple hardware.

What I look for in a security chief, is someone who can see trends like the one I just posted. A person that can make a stand about net neutrality and its relation to the consumer. A guy who can think out of the box and demonstrate the needs of his people towards computing. For the love of god, this guy has to be able to explain the OSI model in detail.

Why is setting up wireless so hard?

During this past thanksgiving I helped my parents changed from a phoneline network (HPNA) to a wireless network. The phoneline network had slowed down to a crawl and was unable to provide decent speeds.

For awhile my dad had been planing on switching the phoneline network to the wireless network. He purchased the D-Link DIR-825 router and the D-Link DWA-160 from amazon.

The DIR-825 seems to work fine. The wireless on the laptops seem to work fine also. The real adventure was trying to get the wireless to work on my moms Dell desktop computer.

The installation of the DWA-160 went fine. The drivers were installed and we began to test the wireless. The signal strength was only about 35% and the speeds would fluctuate between 24 and 130. The speeds were almost random and we also suffered random disconnects.

I went with my Dad to best buy and decided we should try a different wireless card. We selected the linksys WUSB600N. Installing this wireless device provided little if any improvement. We then decided that would should try the hawking HWDN1. My dad had the 802.11g model and it seems to work quite well. We were in for a surprise.

The installation of the HWDN1 went well. We were instructed to plug the device into any open USB port. Next the wireless software loaded and we were surprised at the signal. The signal strength never went above 20% and the speeds were never any higher than 19 Mbps. I thought that maybe the drivers were old, so I downloaded the new drivers, which didn't offer any improvements. This product was supposed to provide higher speeds, but it did provided headaches more than anything. Overall, I was completely unhappy with this product and the support that hawking provided.

We then decided to go back to the DWA-160, since that product appeared to be the most stable. After using the computer for several minutes and having many disconnects, a new solution had to be found. My dad and I were debating if we should get a PCI wireless card or a wireless repeater. We finally decided to go with a PCI card and give it a try. The sales people at best buy said we can return the product if it doesn't work that well.

The D-Link DWA-552 was the PCI card we decided to use. I downloaded the newest drivers and then disconnected the DWA-160. I opened the case of the dell computer and took out the modem and replaced with the DWA-552. Once the computer rebooted, I installed the drivers and began to test the wireless.

I was expecting to have similar results to the other products we had purchased. I was surprised when the wireless signal was in the high 60's. The speed also seemed to be steady at 130 Mbps. Overall this product appears to be working the best. I think the three antenna's on the back probably are the reason this product works so good.

Setting up a wireless network should not be this difficult. There is no reason it should take almost 4 days to get the wireless to work properly. I guess wireless is meant more for laptops than desktops, but there is certain situations where wireless is the only option. Hopefully in the next few years, wireless products will improve and all products will work flawlessly.