Back in August I was flying from Gnome to Anchorage in a Twin Otter (I was sitting in the back reading Terry Pratchett and checking out the scenery along the way). When we got near Anchorage, I saw this thing. I asked the other guys if they knew what it was, and they didn’t – but it sure looked fishy to me.

Turns out it really is a fishy thing, and I finally found out what it is. It’s an old FRD-10 circularly disposed antenna array. These things were built during the cold war to gather signals for western signals intelligence (SIGINT). This world wide network (known collectively as “Iron Horse”) could supposdly eavesdrop on HF communications from almost anywhere on the planet. Check this page out at cryptome.org to see more pictures of it.

I’ve been really happy since I switched to Gentoo. I have a rock-stable 64-bit platform with the latest builds of the software I want. It’s quite easy to maintain, and installing it can be a learning experience.

Every once in a while I run across strange fiddly things that I have to do to get things to work right, and Mathematica 5.0 is one of them. While the newer Mathematica versions will likely install fine from what I’ve read, version 5.0 doesn’t seem to want to run after being installed. The solution to get it working is quite simple, though.

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