New Swine Flu Outbreak Map

The map I posted earlier this week doesn't seem to be updating in a timely fashion. This one looks to be better on that front.

2009 Swine Flu (H1N1) Outbreak Map - Google Maps

This map was culled from the aptly named swineflumaps.com.

Swine Flu Tracking - Google Maps Mashup

The good folks at Google have put together an interesting maps application that tracks suspected and confirmed H1N1 Swine Flu cases. Data is better understood when visualized... go take a look.

H1N1 Swine Flu - Google Maps

It's even better in Google Earth...

Google Earth Swine Flu .kml file

U.S. Already at War in Cyberspace

The following article isn't very deep, but it underscores an emerging threat. Cyber-warfare shares several key traits with terrorism in that it is asymmetrical and can easily be conducted by non state actors. The ease of an organization to attack a nation through these means, coupled with the relatively low risk from doing so virtually guarantees a huge upswing in this type of conflict.

U.S. already at war in cyberspace, experts say -- Government Computer News

Twitter Panic

As always, XKCD is topical and hilarious...



From XKCD.com

Pandemic, Update

After a little research, the current estimate is a mortality rate of around 6% for this strain of swine flu.

Two questions stand out. First, why are cases in Mexico City apparently more severe than cases in the U.S.? And second, how accurate are the infection estimates coming from Mexico? There are reports of (around) 2,000 hospitalized, but how many got sick at home and never presented themselves to a doctor? That would swing the mortality rate lower.

Just food for thought.

Pandemic Does Not Mean Panic

Swine Flu has been in the media quite a bit the past few days, yet info about the disease seems to always be light in these reports. The biggest take away I got from the networks this morning is that there are 100 reported deaths in Mexico, and that cases have been reported in the United States. The networks then went on to report about how some European governments are recommending that their populations limit travel to North America, including the U.S. Of course, this type of announcement is news, especially in the economic climate we live in right now, but I can't help but feel as if CNN, FOX, and MSNBC have missed some key points in their reporting.

First, there is little or no talk about the mortality rate of this strain. Unconfirmed reports of 103 dead in Mexico means nothing in a vacuum. So 103 are dead, but how many are/were infected? And of those infected, how many received medical treatment? These are the important questions. If 103 died, and 200 were infected, that's a mortality rate of over 50% - and I'm worried. If 103 died out of 20,000 infected, I'm several orders of magnitude less concerned.

At the same time, I've actually heard people today postulating that eating pork can cause this disease. I'm sure this is coming from the fact that China has now banned live pork imports from Mexico and some U.S. states. The problem is, China's action was designed to keep infected swine from bringing the disease into China and then infecting Chinese swine. The action has nothing to do with people eating pork from Mexico.

And lastly... every major news report has talked about this new strain of swine flu becoming a 'pandemic'. What people need to understand is that pandemic is a technical tern describing an emerging disease that effects humans, across a loarge geographical range. It does not mean that the disease is necessarily going to kill millions (though that can and does happen).

The CDC, in an excellent proactive move is using the web to get accurate, responsible information out the the public. They are providing a link widget (written in ColdFusion, I might add) for people to use that will stay updated with direct links to the CDC fact sheet.


If you would like to use this widget, you can pull the source code from here:
http://www.hhs.gov/web/library/index.html#HHSWidgets

So try to ignore the the inflammatory reporting, and get your facts from the source.

The Railo Project, Part I

My center, The Center for Disaster Risk Policy, has for years been using an custom application called Tabletop Exercise System Technology (TEST) to facilitate discussion based tabletop exercises. TEST was written in house, lately by me, in Adobe ColdFusion, utilizing a MySQL database backend. We deploy TEST on a 'server' laptop that is connected via a wireless network to a cache of client laptops that then run the application via a web browser. The application captures particpant responses to scenario information, and formats those reponses to be compliant with the Homeland Security Exercise Evaluation Protocol (HSEEP).

TEST has been used successfully by the center since 2004, and has been evolving ever since. As part of that evolution, we have licensed the software to a private firm, who is now marketing the product across the country. As we anticipate third party users, I started to think about the licening fees we were going have to pay Adobe to use ColdFusion. This led me toward two newer ColdFusion Markup Language servers, Open BlueDragon and Railo. BlueDragon is the older of the two, but it was Railo that I've settled on for our needs.

Railo has been around for a few years, but version 3.1 was released as an open source project just a few weeks ago. It is compatible with almost all of the ColdFusion 8 standards, and includes a few tricks of its own that Adobe's server can't do. For starters, using Railo, you can deploy a CF application as a Java app into a cloud environment. That's pretty exciting, and I can't wait to give that a go.

I downloaded Railo Community server 3.1 and installed it on a Windows 2003 virtual machine. The install started simple, but got more complicated as I configured Railo to work with IIS, not it's own internal web server. Railo is marketed/packaged as a stand alone product, but in fact is a layer that sits on top of Resin, an existing Java server. Once you have everything working properly, you never notice that Resin is there, but getting everything up and running took a little trial and error. More on that in a different post.

Once I had everything running, I installed the TEST codebase on the new server and took it for a spin. A couple fo things needed to be fixed, highlighting the subtle differences between Railo's CF interpretation and Adobe's. All the changes were minor, and fixed with about thirty minutes. Once that was done, the app ran beautifully, In fact, it was perceptibly faster than the Adobe CF server. That was impressive.

I've not had time to play much beyond that, but I'm fairly certain I've purchased my last Adobe CF license. I can see where CF Enterprise may be required in some instances, but Railo has clustering and failover capability built in. Impressive. Our next step here at the Center is do deploy a CentOS server running Apache, MySQL, and Railo. That would allow us to deliver enterprise grade CF apps without paying for any server software. Personally, I can't wait.

More to follow on Railo as we continue our migration, and I fully intend to document how we got it running from scratch, since there was a lack of single source docs on the subject.

Expanding a Virtual Drive in VMWare Workstation

Here are some handy instructions for expanding the size of an existing virtual disk in VMWare Workstation. We've all done this; you created a VM, and now decide that the system partition is too small. Sure you can add another virtual disk, but sometimes you need that system partition to be bigger.

Expanding a drive within a VMWare image at Sean Deasy

After you have expanded the virtual drive, you can use a partition tool to expand the partition in the guest OS to make use of all the new room.

Here is a link to how to do that.

Cheers!

Aviation Diplomacy

When flying throughout the Persian Gulf these days, aircraft are required to communicate with local Air Traffic Control AND to provide the Iranian Air Defense Radar a ten-minute heads up if they will be flying, briefly, through Iranian airspace.

Recently, a commercial airline pilot overheard this conversation on the VHF Guard while flying from Europe to Dubai. The conversation went like this...

Iranian Air Defense Radar: "Unknown aircraft! Unknown aircraft! You are in Iranian airspace. Identify yourself immediately."

Response: "This is a United States aircraft, and I am in Iraqi, repeat Iraqi, not Iranian, airspace. Over."

Iranian Air Defense Radar: "You are in Iranian airspace, sir. If you do not immediately change course to depart our airspace we will launch interceptor aircraft!"

Response: "This is a United States Marine Corps F/A-18. Send 'em up. I'll wait around."

Iranian Air Defense Radar: (no response)

Google Made Me Irrelevant

With the release of CADIE, especially this auto-email portion, Google has finally made me irrelevant. More than usual, that is. I don't know what to do. There is even talk that CADIE will be able to write code and design emergency management exercises. I'm crushed. Why Google, WHY?

Check the date, folks. Fully 104% of news you read today will be fake. Or that's what they want you to think. :)

But this is one of Google's better April Fool's Products, to be sure.