Securing weapons - a grave responsibility

My previous post on gun control is already one of the highest traffic postings. And judging by the few responses and email's that I've gotten (I generally don't post responses) the readership reaction will pretty much fall in line with the general positions on the subject: those who are for stricter controls on guns will hate it, those for gun rights will approve.

What must be remembered is that ownership and operation of any tool that has the potential to harm or kill a person comes with a grave responsibility. To own a weapon is to accept a responsibility to control its use. "Gun control" starts with the person who owns the gun.

The stories of children and and adults who have killed with weapons owned by a parent or friend are cases which could almost certainly have been prevented. There are very affordable and very effective products to secure guns. These include the very good products from GunVault (my personal choice)- who has a great lineup of product to secure hand guns, to more full-sized cabinets. There are other strategies such as locking the bolt of a rifle in a safe and gun locks. (You can buy 3 of them at Amazon for $22.)

The sad reality is that too many people own guns but have not secured them. It's simple: if we have a right, but with that right comes a grave responsibility. I personally favor two things: 1) Require that gun owners must demonstrate that they've handled their tools responsibly and taken care to secure them from wrong or unlawful use, and 2) The courts must hold parents and others responsible where they have not and their tools are used to kill others. No, I don't mean that the police can come knocking on your door and do surprise inspections, but if care was not taken then they must suffer sever penalties. This would send the chilling message that having a cache of guns sitting in the corner is a recipe for a deadly disaster.

We don't allow dynamite to sit around. We don't leave nuclear weapons unsecured. We don't leave the keys in the F-14. We simply do not provide the temptation or access to those who would use them for harm. We also should not leave our tools of protection, of sport, and of historic collectable significance freely available to the chemically induced mood swings of angry teens.

Gun control does not solve the problem

I don't hunt. I simply do not like the idea of killing something. Were it necessary to hunt to feed myself and my family, I'd hunt. I do find it fun to shoot but that is not why I am "pro gun". I have a carry permit and carry a gun to protect myself and those around me. It's that simple. It's a dangerous world and there are crazy angry people in it, and I have a right to defend myself. I know how to use it, and I think calmly under pressure. If I find myself in a situation where there is an "active shooter" you can be sure that I'd respond. And I'm not alone - there are thousands like me (like stats?).

The idea of police protection is a myth. The NY Times published a revealing article on the climb in violent crime due to an increase in police response times. They cite a statistic of an increase from 7.5 to 8.4 minutes in the average response time - that's 8.4 minutes until the police show up (14 minutes in Milwaukee, 12-48 minutes in rural Virginia areas! Atlanta took slowest at 11 minutes, 11 seconds in a survey). Start a timer (I'll wait) and see just how long 8.4 minutes is. At the Colorado theater shooting the police showed up in 1.5 minutes. This was too late. Why did no one there defend themselves?

In Detroit, which has suffered from one of the worst economies in the Nation, the police are simply unable to protect the citizens, who have taken to defending themselves. While this is not a good situation, it is a necessary one. When (and where) the police can not defend the population, they must defend themselves and their families. If a person - crazy or not - knows that a location has people who are armed they will choose another location to attempt their crazy killing spree.

We must change our way of thinking. We need to stop this trend of relying on the government to provide and protect us. We are Americans - we have always been self-reliant and courageous. We have always fought hard for what was right and valued our individual rights. Why the people today want to give up their rights for the myth of security is beyond me. But the fact remains, if there were trained, armed people at or near these situations less people would have died. The response time for someone already at the scene is immediate - they are already there and ready to respond.

• Texas, man stops brutal stabbing.
• Parking lot in Salt Lake
• 71 year old absolutely halts armed robbery at an Internet Cafe. (See the amazing video)
• Store owner makes would-be robber think twice
• Auto parts store in Indy. Future would-be robbers will think twice
• Troy, MO bank president defends his bank, customers.
• Milwaukee - Nazir Al-Mujaahid calmly defends store, patrons from armed robber. (Watch the video of his press conference. I'd love this guy to live near me. Well trained, calm, focused.)
• Hialeah, Florida man foolishly attempts to rob business owner.
• Texax - assailant with shotgun meets man with handgun. Shotgun 0, handgun 1

Gun control is not the answer - it is an ineffective solution to a rare (though admittedly a highly emotional) problem. The recent mall shooter in Oregon used a stolen AR 15. He broke the law twice - once when he stole the weapon and another time when he walked into the mall and began shooting. We have laws in this country about assault and about murder. They're both illegal. Were we to pass a law that makes gun ownership illegal the old mantra kicks in: "When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns". There is simply no way to prevent the flow of weapons into our large country. See how well our war on drugs [sic] has fared with preventing the flow of illegal chemicals.

I live in a safe area. There isn't much crime in Forsyth County. But I work in Duluth and travel into Atlanta. I feel it my responsibility to be able to defend myself and those around me. I do not have  "cowboy" mentality. I find it very sobering to think that some day I might need to respond with violence. Yet, I believe that all able American's need to be empowered and be held responsible to help make our society a safer place. Arm the citizens and they will be protected.

Fun with ADB

It seems you can connect and debug the Android tablet over WiFi. Way cool.

Enable it on the Android device running 4.1.1+ under Developer Options, Debugging and check ADB over network.

Then on the desktop in my android-sdk\platform-tools folder:

adb connect 192.168.0.106:5555

connected to 192.168.0.106:5555

Viola! Neat stuff

Hacking Samsung Galaxy 2 7.0

I mean leave the stock Samsung kernel? pfft! Where's the fun in that? Besides, I want to get Android 4.1.1 on this puppy.

• Odin - Samsung Flashing Application
• ClockworkMod - ClockworkMod directions
• I downloaded the "P3113 - 6.0.1.0" one
• Follow the steps in the ClockworkMod directions
• CyanogenMod 10 - directions
• I downloaded the Google apps and nightly build for P3113
• Copied zips to the internal card on the tablet. I just put them in the root.
• Booted into recovery and flashed CM10 zip - love the confirmation screen!
• Did a wipe, reboot

Let me say, this community is great. There is a ton of work going on and good creativity. This is one thing that is seriously missing from the iOS community - different target, I know. But there is more of an adventurer/hobbyist feel to this one.

The upgrade went smoothly and it all appears to work as it should. I don't care for the default keyboard - the Samsung one was a little nicer. I also expected the device to tell me it had 8GB but still reports only 4 - Samsung must have absconded with the other 4. But I have a 16 GB external card so storage should be sufficient.

Are you really, really sure?

Samsung Galaxy 2 WiFi

I picked up a Galaxy 2 to play with. Partially I wanted to see how Samsung's iPad knockoff performed, and partially because I want a real Android device to explore development with.

So far I like it - not an iPad by far, but not bad either. The biggest issue that I've experienced so far is the horrible performance of the WiFi radio. One floor above my newish Apple Time Capsule router and I'm hardly registering signal. Compare this to every other computer from iPads, Mac laptops, iPhones and HP laptops - all of these get sufficient signal even at the far reaches of my property and two floors above.

This device came with Android Ice Cream Sandwich (aka, 4.0). I'm going to try to upgrade it to Jelly Bean (4.1) though this might be a little more difficult than had I bought the Nexus. It's an 8 GB device, but there's only 4 left after the Samsung bloatware footprint.

Those who know me know that I'm a borderline Apple Fanboy. I've not bought the new iPhone 5 though unfortunately I did upgrade to my phone and iPad iOS 6 (I hate the maps, but overall like it on my new iPad). So why fool around with Android? Because it's fun. Because I suspect that corporate users will ultimately be more comfortable with it over being tied to Apple, who they might feel is too much of a consumer company.

So, we'll see how this goes - but so far, I really like the little Galaxy 2.

Death from the sky; death demanding a "why"

The personnel of the US Military hold within their highly trained and motivated hands the technologically advanced tools of death. Their ability to take a life has repeatedly been illustrated over the past decade with our many battles in the Middle-east. This power, when supported by solid and accurate information and in the hands of responsible humans is still frightening in its severity.

Never has this been driven home for me more than the recent video of military operating from a flight platform delivering death to innocent civilians and media far below on the ground. While this story has been told and an investigation has been urged by Reuters officials, only now do we have actual video from the perspective of the helicopter and the soldiers who delivered death from the skies. (Fox News, MSNBC, WikiLeaks ) The video that has been released is obviously from an internal military source who feels strongly that this is wrong and took the risk to leak the video.

This video and the associated dialog of the soldiers is sickening. They are disassociated from the scene, and it is obvious - especially from our hindsight perspective - that they have misunderstood the situation. Where they saw AK-47's and rocket launchers we now know were really cameras and tripods. Where they saw a gathering of "insurgents" we now know was simply a gathering of civilians totally oblivious to the fact that death was hovering just over their heads with weapons of mass destruction targeted on them.

The very best that we can say is that we "F'd" up - we very badly screwed up in that situation. Unfortunately, I'm sure that what will be said by terrorist group recruiters is that this is further evidence of the terrible wickedness of the United States and decadent Western nations. They will see in that video the absolute depravity of our soldiers and their lust for murder and destruction. Too harsh of a description? I might have thought so before watching the video; now I feel that their accusation might have merit. The soldiers are desperate to kill; repeatedly they beseech their handlers for permission to rain down a hail of death and destruction. To the man who has a hammer everything appears to be a nail. To the man in an armored attack helicopter with a powerful machine gun everything appears to be a target and an insurgent.

The US - Obama and his administration - must not bury this. We must not ignore it. We must not deny our mistake. We must address this direct and fully. We must admit our mistake. We must admit our overzealous rush to determine that this was a situation that required a deadly response. We must bring those involved into a court marshall - we must decide if this was justified, if it was a mistake, or if it represents a failure of our entire policy and approach in that region.

If we do not approach this correctly I fear that the next generation of reaction out of that region toward we Americans will be more vicious and much more terrifying. Far from providing security for Americans the US Government has just guaranteed far more of a threat than we previously had. This episode will recruit strong and zealous young men and women into a war that will have no end; a war that will continue to spray the blood of the innocent across the pages of history; a war that will have no meaning or purpose except to make more wealthy those manufacturing the weapons of destruction and to make more frightening an existence on this lonely planet in a cold galaxy.

Properly addressed, however, and this situation could spell a turning point for America with the people of Arab states. Will we have the courage and the character to do the right thing? Will Obama? Will the Republicans? Will anyone?

Update 4/11: Gates on the Sunday circuit - "killing was justified". Me: "Bullsh*t". And, not only will this in fact effect our image abroad, it damages our image here. As a life-long Republican, fiscal conservative, and one who voted for Regan, and every Bush to come along - it damages my image of the U.S. policy. It just stinks, Mr. Gates. Bullsh*t.

ONVIF "plug-fest" wrap-up

This week I attended the ONVIF "plug-fest", where the various members of the ONVIF organization got together to test interoperability. This committee endeavors to create a standard for interoperability between security cameras, DVR's, other devices and the software that uses and manages these devices. I came to this party from the perspective of this software, in particular in testing the capabilities of my video streaming and viewing component. This streams video from the cameras in MJPEG, MPEG-4 and H.264. In short, it displays pretty pictures (hopefully). Each came to this "plug-fest" to test their conformance to the ONVIF specification, their interpretation of the text and requirements it laid out, and (ahem) their success in coding to that interpretation. This last ensured there was some rapid fixes being made on the fly to adjust code that may have performed a task not intended (often mistakenly called a "bug"; really just a rebellious feature).

The attendees came from local companies here in Stuttgart Germany, from other European countries and from as far away as Japan, Taiwan, Korea and India. It was a pleasure to meet and work with engineers from Sony, Samsung, Canon, Panasonic and Vivotek as well as EU companies such as Axis, Bosch, Softhard, and Dallmeier. Each brought a product in various stages of development. Some brought a production device with possibly a firmware in development for testing, while others brought circuit boards with cameras attached via a wire harness. The latter were the most interesting - it was entertaining watching them search for screwdrivers to attach power supplies and to see all the wires. It felt more like a robotics convention.

The spirit of this "plug fest" was great, and the ONVIF coordinators helped ensure this spirit - while many are direct competitors with each other the spirit was one of inquiry and learning. This is "geeks" coming together to test their creations. We'll leave it to the marketing boys to duke it out in the press and market. These were techies hooking up wires and watching messages flowing across the network. PTZ cameras swung wildly and images streamed as we made sure our mad-scientist inventions had come to life as expected. While I appreciate the stern warning of the organizers that we were not allowed to share pricing information for anti-trust reasons, I'm not sure any of us even have any idea of the price of our products. All we cared about was if our code could talk to the camera, and did it give me what I expected. No? Hmm, ah - that's an optional feature of the standard - got it.

In the end I hope that everyone has great success with their products and they sell a million of them, thus funding work on yet more "toys". I'm sure as we all refine our products in conformance with the language and intent of the ONVIF standard some of the fun will be taken from these plug-fests, but I also expect that the scheduled follow-up test meetings will also have the joys of success as features work ("yes!"), and the anguish of "huh? You didn't receive my message? Hmm - let me have a look."