Snozberry

I'm back!

I bet you loyal readers thought I'd died or something. Well, actually - uhh.... no. I've been in a bit of a communications funk, but I think I'm slowly crawling out. It's really been since Christmas since I last typed some stuff into here, so I'll catch you all up.

I visited my parents and Jenny's parents in New York (Albany & Pond Eddy, respectively) for Christmas week. I took a week of unpaid leave from Mitretek and really lived it up, up north. It was great to be home, relax and see everything that's going on. As you probably don't know, my parents are having a bit of construction done. They're growing out their bedroom and the two rooms underneath. Actually, they think of it more as adding a room on the ground floor and getting more space in the rooms above it, but who's keeping track. The upshot of the construction is that my parents now have a proper-large bedroom, my dad's woodshop is going to be much more spacious (yeah!) and there will be a new room that is accessible through what we call the "computer room". Exciting. Pictures can be seen in the appropriate gallery link on your left.

As you probably have heard by now, I'm no longer working for Mitretek. That's right, I'm back at RAND. The change has been great. I've stopped caring about all things biometrics and border control (finally) and have been working on a lot of defense projects. To date, the most prominent occupation of time has been for a project devoted to reforming the way the DoD does its Joint Battle Management Command & Control (JBMC2). You see, there are lots of systems that are currently used to track forces (friendly, neutral and unfriendly - blue, white and red) and generally manage a battle. These systems currently don't necessarily talk to one another and are often run by people who don't necessarily talk to one another. For example, a hypothetical (I really haven't learned much of the real details of what systems do what, but that seems to be on its way): let's say the Army doesn't have a minute-by-minute capability to communicate where everyone is located. This means that fires may be allocated inefficiently, ground forces don't know exactly where their comrades are, or worse yet the Air Force jet that's coming screaming in with four 2000lb Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAM) may drop them a few hundred feet off position, accidentally obliterating the poor infantry guy trying not to get shot.

In reality, there are systems in place that provide means for Joint Close Air Support (JCAS) - the latter portion of the situation I was describing above - but I was just trying to make a point that the services and their systems could benefit from a network-centric model where they are all constantly sharing information to improve everyone's picture of the battlespace (i.e. improve the common operational picture (COP) shared by ground, air & sea forces and commanders).

My particular task is to help plan the data strategy for this future capability (network-centric JBMC2). One of my first observations was that not everyone needs the same amount, type, precision, or timeliness of data. A tank commander has very different data needs, from a fighter pilot, from a missile defense battery, from a commanding officer sitting 100km away. Therefore, a major component of a successful data strategy will be to be able to send only the appropriate data at the right intervals, keeping in mind data incompatibilities, bandwidth, processing and other constraints. I'm going to leave my discussion there, because this stuff gets sensitive pretty quickly and I really don't want to get into trouble.

In other news, I've started taking a CS course at GWU in DC. I was going to take two, but one was so bad I had to drop it (I was not about to pay $2700 for a professor who could probably not manage formal proofs). As it is, the course I'm in is sub-mediocre. I'm approaching it as though it's a guided self-tutorial to C++ and data structures. It's not a pleasant start to my CS career, but you take what you can get, no?

Enough of that. For those of you curious about my Stylistic LT - I haven't been doing too much on it. I did get the initrd all set so that it mounts the second CF card as root, but I am somewhat stalled in building the root filesystem. I found some cool Debian tools to help me along. Eh; I should've been taking notes so that my trials could save someone else some time! Ah, yes: debootstrap. It consists of scripts that you can use to install Debian to a non-root directory (i.e. install Debian to a CF card). I had to change some of the packages listed in the script (to make it work) and that reminds me I was going to share that fact with the maintainer so that it "just works" in the future.

Okay, my fingers are getting cold and I have to start on a C++ project for class. Cheers.

Posted by reds at February 2, 2004 07:24 PM