William (Bill) Vaughn's Musings

Posted by William Vaughn at 12:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by William Vaughn at 12:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 28, 2006 • Vol.28 Issue 17
Page(s) 25 in print issue

I spent the last week in March in Leavenworth, Kan. I was speaking at the Kansas City, Mo., .NET User Group. They had a great turnout and made me feel very welcome. I gave my Hitchhiker’s Guide to Visual Studio and SQL Server “Connecting” talk, which seemed to be very well-received.

Doing Time In Leavenworth

The rest of the week I spent at my mother-in-law’s house there in Leavenworth. Her family homesteaded the area around Leavenworth (Kansas’ first city) where my brother-in-law runs a small cattle ranch (farm?). Anyway, since Granny didn’t have broadband (she’s not exactly technologically aware, to be kind), I had to prevail upon her to let me tie up her (one) phone line so that I could call the nearest Verizon ISP to check mail and try to get some work done. The good news is that I was able to easily connect to some site in St. Joseph, Mo., at 44kb—about 30 miles away. The bad news is that this ISP was so hammered it would not support more than about 25% of the available bandwidth, so effectively I was connected at 10kb. I think a tight string with two cans would have had better throughput. Yes, I tried to use my wireless card to reach one of the neighbors, but they must have read Dan Appleman’s book on safe computing; they were all locked down.

Everything Moves At A Slower Pace—Especially The Data

Given this primitive connection, everything I tried to do online took a lot longer. Since I had so much time to wait for each Web page, mail message, and file to get downloaded, I spent considerable time looking at what else was moving up the wire. Sure, Microsoft Outlook adapted itself by downloading just the mail headers. However, there were other culprits that made matters worse. One offender is the new Microsoft Live One Care beta that insists on downloading fresh virus signatures and updates in the background along with the other security updates. It was nice that I was not confronted with a modal dialog when these downloads were required, but the number and size of the updates were a bit onerous at this download speed. These patches, fixes, and whatnot ranged in size from a few hundred thousand bytes to several meg.

I also noticed that all of the Web sites I visited (except Google.com) were choked with picture-rich ads and animations. For example, the Southwest Airlines and Microsoft.com sites were clearly written for a broadband connection. I guess they figure that everyone is connected to broadband nowadays. Well folks, they’re not. Today’s content providers (including MSN, AOL, Yahoo!, and other “home page” sites) should have an option to trim down their content for those who can’t open a high-speed connection for whatever reason. Windows provides enough information to applications to sense the net speed, so these sites could trim down the flood of “nice but not necessary” stuff they feel compelled to put in our faces. Yes, that means the ads need to be tighter in some cases.

No Relief Or REA In Sight

One of my wife's cousins living in Lansing, Kan., works for AT&T. I asked him about the availability of broadband in the countryside out near my brother-in-law's farm. He said that due to the way that the politicians (state and federal) have structured the rules, if AT&T builds the infrastructure to support the rural areas (that include small schools, farms, homes, and businesses), other companies are permitted to lease the lines at a tiny fraction of the cost to install and maintain them. This keeps broadband from reaching his cousin's farm or the thousands of others too far away from existing equipment. He said AT&T will never install the needed infrastructure as long as those rules are in place. I expect we as a country might need to set up another REA (Rural Electric Authority) like the one established in the ’30s to electrify rural communities too far out to be economically viable for the big power companies.

My visit to Kansas was very enlightening. As usual, the people were nice and friendly (it helps to speak “Kansan”), but I also found that they’re a bit behind the times here and there—they still let people smoke in restaurants and other public places. Perhaps they have to smoke to soothe the frustration they have as they try to catch up with science and technology.

Posted by William Vaughn at 07:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by William Vaughn at 07:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by William Vaughn at 11:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 14, 2006 • Vol.28 Issue 15
Page(s) 25 in print issue

I attended the chapter meeting of the Vietnam Helicopter Pilot’s Association this afternoon. We were given a talk from a member of the current generation of wartime helicopter pilots—an Army captain just back from a tour in Afghanistan. His presentation included a number of photographs shot in combat and during a wide variety of situations, some quite familiar to the 50 or so Vietnam helicopter pilots in the room.

They have to put up with heat like we did but they also have to deal with dust, which we (for the most part) did not. The troops, pilots, support crews, and aircraft in Afghanistan also have to put up with snow and bitter cold as well as high-altitude flying, often in excess of 10,000 feet, where the air is too thin for some heavy-lift operations. If I recall correctly, the highest mountains I had to fly over in Vietnam were only a few thousand feet (if that).

However, some of the pictures and stories were not familiar to those who flew the helicopters in the ’70s. I was fortunate enough to fly a UH1 (huey). Our unit (the 7/17 Air Cavalry) also flew the AH1 (cobra) and OH6 (loach). The huey first came to Vietnam in ’63, but the aircraft we flew (model 205) were virtually new. If they were anything, they were tough and reliable. I had few missions cut short or not started by maintenance problems (at least not in Vietnam). The aircraft were really pretty simple as helicopters go, especially by today’s standards. The electronics back then were limited to tube-based radios and electromechanical flight instruments. The only computer we had access to was in Saigon—an IBM 360 used to “plot” troop movements.

Computer-Related Problems

Our Army captain just back from Afghanistan also told us of how his helicopter pilot came to the theater without sufficient armor. It seems that his CH47 (Chinook) was built in the ’80s with updated electronics and was far better equipped than the same CH47 that served as heavy lift workhorses in Vietnam. He did remark that the CH47s flown by some of the other countries had better armor and upgrades. His ships were fairly reliable but still prone to a few computer-related problems.

The most troubling reports were about the unit of Blackhawk helicopters whose mission is to support his aircraft and its missions. He told us that the Blackhawks spend more than half of the time in maintenance. It seems the numerous computers used for everything from flight control to navigation to firing its weapons are not up to the heat, dust, cold, and punishment of battle conditions. While this aging aircraft has served for decades, according to the reports from the front, it’s just not reliable enough to be alongside the CH47 when it makes an approach into a hot LZ. All of the nap-of-the-earth computer-assisted flight systems in the world don’t do any good at all if they keep the aircraft in the maintenance hangar instead of flying close-air support for the relatively unarmed CH47s.

What’s important is getting the aircraft, and the guns and troops they carry, to the places where they are needed. While the aircraft we flew in Vietnam were far less sophisticated, they were also cheaper and far more reliable. We never got to the AO (area of operations) only to find that the guns would not fire because the fire-control computer would not boot. That’s exactly what happened on at least one critical mission in Afghanistan where equipment and, more importantly, lives were lost.

Reliability vs. The Latest Technology

You’re right. I’m no longer in the military. I’m no longer a combat pilot. I am a dad and father-in-law and an American with friends, family, and a son-in-law on the front lines. I’m concerned that those who send our men and women, boys and girls into combat are more enamored with technology and making money than with the realities of combat conditions on the far edges of civilization. Sitting behind a desk in the Pentagon, these officers and the civilians who sell them the latest war machinery should think about ways to send our soldiers and sailors into battle with equipment that actually keeps working when it’s hot, cold, dry, wet, dusty, under a driving rain, or under enemy fire. Aircraft and support systems that are dependent on a spiderweb of complex computers do not seem to be worth the expense—not unless they work when needed most.

Any one of us who works on equipment that ends up at the front should take a moment to realize that if it fails to hold up, it won’t just wreck the day of some bookkeeper in Cleveland; it puts our troops in jeopardy. If it were up to me, I would send cheaper, simpler, and far more reliable equipment into battle—especially when fighting those equipped with far simpler weapons that don’t rely on a half-dozen cross-connected computers to pull the trigger.

Posted by William Vaughn at 07:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by William Vaughn at 07:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by William Vaughn at 07:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by William Vaughn at 01:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)