Corporate Rant

Unlikely Canadian Headlines

2009-09-19T01:20:00.000-07:00

Unlikely Canadian Headlines

The Canadian Mounted Guard Wants YOU
Welcome back- Nickelback
Canadian Man Recognized
Canada Declares War
Attack on Canada
10 Million March in Canadian Pride Parade
Words to “O Canada” discovered
Canada Wins
Canada Added to Map
American Boy Recites all Provinces
Canada to Open 1st McDonald’s
Canadians Everywhere Agree: Blame Canada!
Canada Enters Space Race
Canada Makes the Headlines

How to destroy negatives

2009-07-08T23:18:00.001-07:00

After some searching, the most I saw was old-school types proclaiming how bad of an idea it is. I played around and found a way: bleach. Within 20 minutes in just a weak solution, the negatives will be stripped down to a clear strip of plastic (and possibly some emulsion). I even tried to redevelop the negatives in sepia toner, but nothing.

I also tried alcohol, which was surprisingly uneffective. It stripped something brown out of my black and white negatives, but after over a week in a sealed alcohol bath, the images were just as clear as before, only the film was a little softer.

So there you go: the recipe for erasing memories.

Gibson ES-335 and SG weights

2009-04-27T23:00:00.000-07:00

The weights can vary, but they tend to be around

ES-335: 8.6 lbs (3.9Kg)
SG: 7 - 8 lbs (3.2Kg - 3.6Kg)

Stratocaster vs. Telecaster dimensions

2009-04-19T00:39:00.000-07:00

Wondering how a Strat compares to a Tele? Here's a image with the two (to scale) and their profiles.

Strat:

body: 17" x 12.5"

overall: 38"

Tele:

body: 15.5" x 12.5"

overall: 38"

If you're looking for more than just a quick comparison, here's a actual schematic of a Telecaster: tele_body_drawing_revD.pdf

Cat on a cable box

2009-02-24T15:14:00.000-08:00

Cats and electronics don't mix. A cat use this satellite box as a bed for a few years.

Death rate in Iraq by month

2009-02-22T15:34:00.001-08:00

It's been just over 5 years since the United States invaded Iraq, and I thought it'd be interesting to look at seasonal death rates of US troops.
It seems the US is up against fair-weather guerrillas who avoid the City of Peace's near-freezing winters and 100°+ (40° C) summers. Data source.

Statistics by the generation: what will your descendants look like?

2009-02-08T15:22:00.000-08:00

Reading statistics about car crashes, cancer, and poverty is one thing, but when will it happen to someone in your family?

There are loads of simplifying assumptions here, but it gives a general idea of just how likely certain life events are. The statistics are mostly for people in the US and assume each descendant has exactly two children (using the remaining 0.4 to account for infertility, deaths, etc).

Second generation: grandchildren (~25 years)

Third generation: great grandchildren (~50 years)

Fourth generation (~75 years)

Fifth generation (~100 years)

Sixth generation (~125 years)

Seventh generation (~150 years)

Eighth generation (~175 years)

Ninth generation (~200 years)

Tenth generation (~225 years)

One will drown

Eleventh generation (~250 years)

Twelfth generation (~275 years)

One will die in an airplane accident

Thirteenth generation (~300 years)

One will get a perfect score on the SAT

Fourteenth generation (~325 years)

One will be a super genius

Fifteenth generation (~350 years)

Sixteenth generation (~375 years)

Two will be conjoined twins

Seventeenth generation (~400 years)

Eighteenth generation (~425 years)

One will be stuck by lightning

Nineteenth generation (~450 years)

Three will be identical triplets

Twentieth generation (~475 years)

Twenty first generation (~500 years)

Twenty second generation (~525 years)

One will be a celebrity

Twenty third generation (~550 years)

Twenty fourth generation (~575 years)

One will win the Nobel Prize

Twenty fifth generation (~600 years)

One will be President

Stating the obvious: anatomy of a popular Digg comment

2009-02-04T22:20:00.000-08:00

Put your money where your mouth is

2008-02-03T22:54:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure how it happened, but the Giants beat the Patriots in the Super Bowl. I overheard some people who had money riding on the game.

I'm not a sports fan, but even if I was, it's a bad thing to bet on. Betting on the stock market is one thing; long term, it goes up, and short term, there are lots of indicators you can look at. In sports, there are too many variables (injuries, weather, "momentum"), too high standard deviations on outcomes, and bets aren't just one one team, they're on two.

If you want to make money, stick to the stock market. Yes, your returns for a day trade might be a modest +/- 10%, but betting on sports is just gambling.

Symbolic action

2008-01-29T23:48:00.000-08:00

It's nice to have separation in life--work vs. home, friends vs. family, etc. In trying to spend less time in front of a computer and more with other people, and, shit, for once, my thoughts, I found a simple, but nifty thing I can do to change my focus: close my laptop.

On a personal note: cheap has a cost

2008-01-28T23:03:00.000-08:00

After too many hours on the phone today with Sprint (not a Consumerist-style rant, I promise), I realized two things (one's relevant).

Irrelevant: when mad at a company, calm down and think things over. Doing business elsewhere can be a pain; consider keeping your current business, but think twice about future business.

Relevant: after I reached a dead end, I spent too much time frustrated and mad. I wasn't productive; I wasn't even being entertained. My dad recently started taking blood pressure medication. He's always stressed, worries easily, eats too much salt, and isn't the yoga type, so it wasn't a surprise. When I heard about the pills (and his fancy BP graph over time), I started watching stress levels and trying to relax more. Call centers don't help, and it's time my cheapskatery comes to and end. Not that my live is extravagant, but I'm going to aim for a tad more modest life instead of dealing with stress, be it from work or call centers.

The stock options scam

2008-01-24T20:36:00.000-08:00

Back in the good times of the 90's, all it took was holding onto stock options for a few years to be rich. Options have become so ingrained in the culture that they've come to be expected. Companies promote them as a way to reward hard work and give you a vested interest in the company, while employees see them as a means to get rich quick, or so they did back in the 90's.

Once companies transition from growth to blue chip, there's no longer the chance to get rich, but employees don't know this, and enjoy the prospect of compensation once reserved for only upper management. Here's the cool part: employees think options are good--an increase in their "total compensation." Companies know that they have to expense the options, but the only time they get exercised is in a good market; options are a way for employers to vary employee pay by market conditions without explicitly stating that goal, while encouraging corporate loyalty.

And what does the employee get? A lottery ticket and a fluctuating, delayed paycheck. Golden handcuffs my ass.

Call it like it is: dems are bigots, and the polls prove it

2008-01-20T15:45:00.000-08:00

In recent polls, blacks seem to be supporting Obama while women support Clinton. The only reasonable explanation I can see for this is that Democratic women and blacks are, as a whole, sexist and racist. On the outside, they like to create an aura of equality, but when when put to a vote, bigotry makes an appearance.

Certainly not all Democrats are bigots, and there are certainly Republican bigots, too. The difference is that Republicans aren't in a position where it's so apparent. Alan Keyes is the only non-white candidate, but he has a general lack of support--Condoleezza Rice would likely get more support.

The underlying problem is that the Democratic party, like the GOP (Ron Paul and John McCain are very different candidates), consists of separate groups and interests loosely joined by a single platform. The feminist interest is very sexist, and the minority "chocolate city" interest is very racist, but in appealing to the broader group, the party platform has to reconcile these differences and put on a face for the public do see. Meanwhile, Republicans can have WASPs run (Keyes and Romney for flavor) without alienating groups within the party. At least Republicans are discrimating on the basis of supposed morals (Huckabee vs. Giuliani) and government styles (McCain vs. Paul) instead of race and gender.

Double-standard, reverse discrimination, hypocrisy, call it what you will, but the last party that should have a holier-than-thou attitude towards minority and women's equality is the Democrats.

Clinton wins Nevada... sorta

2008-01-19T20:21:00.000-08:00

Bloomberg and other media outlets are reporting that Clinton won the Nevada primary. When I actually read the article, it said that Clinton won the poplular vote, but Obama won one more delegete. This wasn't even visible on the the initial view on my browser; I had to scroll down.

In the Democratic National Convention, elected delegates (like the electoral college, only at a state level) account for 80% of the delegates. The remainder are free to choose whichever candidate they want. They could favor the candidate who got more popular votes, but with the number of people who won't vote for Clinton, and especially if McCain gets the GOP nomination, that would almost be a recipe for failure.

At the very least, I think it's inaccurate of media outlets to claim Clinton won without explaining the context of the victory, especially when it's almost their duty to inform. At worst, they could be promoting an agenda, but I'll leave that to the conservatives pundits to speculate.

Protecting YOU from Uncle Arnold

2008-01-14T21:28:00.000-08:00

Word around the bogo-blogo-sphere and conservative talk radio is that California wants to regulate thermostats over the air waves. I'm a fan of lazes faire economics and libertarian ideals, so there's no need for me to rant about what you already know.

So here at the Corporate Rant, we have all the information you need to beat this system.

All you need is the defense of nutjobs everywhere: aluminum foil. Just wrap your house, thermostat, or anything in between in the stuff, and you have a shield that radio can't penetrate. If you want to test it, put your cell phone in a foil pouch and try calling it, or wrap up the electronics you're trying to steal in it.

Stock tip: DBB is a metals ETF. Whether it's an overzealous government or inflation that worries you, commodities are a good investment.

Immunity

2008-01-13T13:47:00.000-08:00

I don't put much effort into my job (but that's another post). My manager talked to me about this (I've been looking for a new job, so this isn't a big deal). One thing he mentioned from my last evaluation was that people thought I needed to work on my turnaround time when dealing with others. Fair enough. My manager went on to say that they have more expectations out of people with more seniority, and that as low-level employees start to beat deadlines, they get promoted.

Later that day, we had a meeting. A few people were especially late. One of them is well respected. He works on lots of projects, is always busy, and would probably be a manager by now if not for his vocal threat to quit if he gets promoted. Here's the thing: as good as his reputation is, he turnaround times suck. He delayed a meeting 5 minutes for 20+ people (almost 2 man-hours), he follows up slowly on things he initiates, and he generally is slow to respond. The best part: he can keep promoting a busy, hard working image, while hurting productivity of others. Genius.

But looking back, he's doing the same thing I am. Granted, he's getting more work done (he's overextended and I'm slacking), but we're both higher levels than we should be, and in the level-adjusted ranking system we have, all that matters is the work-level relationship, not how hard one works.

I'm in no position to tell my manager this. He has immunity, and I'm in a position where what I have to say will come off as a desperate and critical, regardless of whether it's true.

Who got screwed by Blu-Ray

2008-01-12T00:23:00.000-08:00

Warner Brothers just picked Blu-Ray over HD-DVD for their HD movie distribution. They claim they were picking the winner, but while Blu-Ray has a lead, it wasn't a clear winner. The real reason for Warner's decision was probably money from Sony.

Here's where Sony screwed themselves: they must have lost so many format wars (Beta, MiniDisc, MemoryStick) that they were willing to win at all costs. They delayed PS3 in part over Blu-ray, releasing only on their own format, and probably buying titles for their format. They saw what VHS did for the industry, and were looking at the war as an investment.

The mistake was putting all their eggs in one basket (they aren't currently a successful company from an investing perspective). It was a risk, but the alternative was becoming a minor player.

Meanwhile, writers go on strike. Without content for their new format, the only reason to buy a Blu-ray player is a few years' worth of movies--no new TV shows, no no movies. I don't expect the strike to last more than a year, but there also won't new films for a year after that. That's a long time for Microsoft and the cable companies to get on-demand in homes.

Inside Outsourcing

2008-01-10T21:28:00.000-08:00

My employer is making some moves into China. Luckily, the days of moving entire groups to Bangalore, US teams might see one or new people added (if their team even has anyone). There were a few interesting things I learned about the process:

There is a glut of applicants. My employer saw around 200 résumés, interviewed around 20 candidates and made around 10 offers (all of which were accepted). A test was used to help decide who's worth interviewing.

The problems are more interesting than that basic story.

This is the Corporate Rant, so it's a fair assumption that I work for a large company. I'll say that in the US, the company is a bit of a has-been. The Chinese didn't feel that way. For whatever reason (a fascination with the West, eagerness to industrialize, or behind the times), a large, stable US company is prestigious for Chinese.

There is a history of cheating on the exams. In the time I spent as a TA, I noticed this, too; foreign students were more likely to cheat and more brazen in it than their domestic counterparts.

Not surprisingly, there is concern about revealing our code base to our Chinese workers. Apple-style black box coding is common due to security concerns. Outsourcing facilitators are even aware of this and provide fine grained access control to their client companies.

Their English is bad, even by Chinese American standards, though a few are good at it. Contrast this to India, a former British colony with a language distantly related to English.

Workers are assigned to cubicle corners, 4 workers per cube.

Long term, China's only chance of surpassing the US as a global power is through their population. There are too many accidents waiting to happen there for it to maintain such a position for long.

Smallest Computers (That You Can Actually Use)

2008-01-09T21:50:00.000-08:00

What constitutes a computer that you can actually use? Basically, you need to be able to use it without any special experience or hardware, so microcontrollers are out, but so are cell phones (for now, anyway).

1. Digi Connect ME

55 mhz CPU
8mb RAM
4mb flash
$145

The company that makes this has other models, but this one wins on ridiculous factor; it's like a pack of gum with a 2.4ghz antenna coming out of it.

The family of products has support for Linux, Windows CE, and something I've never heard of.

2. Jack PC

500 mhz
128mb RAM
$400

Don't lie; you've had dreams of thin clients around your house. If keeping that small box bothered you, this PC is for you. It runs Windows CE, and they're looking into making a Linux distro (advanced users can probably make one, already). It has support for a few thin client standards (Citrix's and Microsoft's), though I'm sure Linux hackers could get LTSP and X going on it. The HDMI version even supports dual monitors.

3. RouterBOARD

175MHz MIPS CPU
32MB RAM
64MB flash
$150

Looking to borrow all your neighbors' WiFi at once? RouterBOARD has the board for you (and many others). They offer boards of varying size, CPU architecture (some are PPC), with different slots (mini PCI, PCI, compact flash), and price. Some even have daughterboards that add even more slots.

Some boards support Linux, and all support their proprietary RouterOS. Basically, you're getting a general purpose version of what Linksys and Netgear sell. You're paying a bit more, but getting a few more features, too.

4. http://www.soekris.com

266 mhz CPU
256 mb RAM
Compact flash slot for storage

My first dedicated router was a Soekris box. It's biggest selling point is a 586CPU, so any i586 is supported. I've heard stories of Windows being loaded, but no recent versions (i586, remember?), and the PCI slot doesn't supply enough power for a fancy video card.

It doesn't officially support OSes, but it runs most Linux/Unix variants.

6. Mini ITX

~800 mhz
RAM supplied by user
IDE/SATA storage provided by user
$150

These days, Mini ITX is hardly new, but if you need an almost full featured computer in a small form, and you don't want things to get complicated, this is where you look. VIA is the primary manufacturer, and their EPIA product line has almost any feature you're looking for. This is also the smallest board that has video, and the smallest aimed at consumers.

5. SBCs

Consumers, be damned! Single board compters have been around forever, but not for consumers. They're as big as a full length (remember those?) PCI card, and come with slots for RAM, a CPU, IDE/SATA, and connect to a PCI bus and backplane. Backplanes can give you just a few PCI slots or a whole army of them. There are even backplanes designed for multiple SBCs, so a single rackmount case can hold 4 standard computers.

It's a standard motherboard in an unusual form, so any AMD64/x86 (there are probably IA64 SBCs, too) OS is supported.

Honorable mention:
3Com IntelliJack

$125

After adding the wall jack computer, I felt bad for leaving this little guy out. Granted, it isn't really a computer, but if you need a few more ports in your wall and want it to look clean, it's perfect. It gets power with power over ethernet. Other than that, it's a simple 10/100mbps switch. Since it replaces a jack with keystone modules, they left space for two phone jacks (or other pass through connectors).

Writers strike, but fail to prove point

2008-01-08T20:57:00.000-08:00

The studios are probably right; there is no money in internet content. They're just doing it because if they don't, they'll be living the nightmare the music industry is in when it failed to recognize how the internet would change their industry.

But the writers don't know this; they've been separated from the quality of their work for too long. They don't realize that most of what they produce is crap, and that a commission based pay would leave a handful of writers well off, and the remainder in the same state as their print brethren.

What they do know is that there's some value to online distribution, and they want to get paid for it. Here's the problem: why aren't they, along with the actors who support them, writing for a writer/actor owned internet video site? Startup costs are low, and they're already not getting paid, so what do they have to lose?

I didn't get cable in my new apartment because the strike. This is your chance; entertain me, people.

Forget the hybrid, fix mass transit

2008-01-08T20:26:00.000-08:00

I live less than half a mile from a light rail station, I work on a street that the train goes right by, and my employer gives employees free service, so yesterday, I decided to take it into work.

I missed the train by about 5 minutes, and the next one was in 25 minutes. Once on, it takes about 20 minutes to go to the transfer station. In a planning flaw, I can walk a mile from the transfer station to work faster than waiting and catching the connecting train.

Over an hour after I left, I was at work... 10 miles away by car.

Granted, I'd save money, about $140 per month in gas, though honestly, with only 5,000 miles per year from commuting, light rail would cost me in a lot in depreciation, and it isn't like you can live without a car in California.

Here's the problem: instead of expanding mass transit and improving its infrastructure, we're giving money to people who buy hybrids. Hybrids aren't even a fix; the technologies needed to switch to electric cars haven't materialized in years of research, and the advancements that have been made, e.g. lithium ion batteries are near their theoretical limits. Making matters worse, hybrids encourage road usage. As the population increases, new roads create an induced demand on roads, leading to worse traffic.

The problem with mass transit is that it has and was designed for 1.5% market share. Now, while the system powered by oil is still running smoothly, is the time for urban planners and civil engineers to address problems, not when $500 / barrel oil makes it a necessity.

Feature request: advanced digging

2008-01-05T23:55:00.000-08:00

When it comes to Digg and friends, interesting stories and comments can end up buried, not because they're bad, but because most readers disagree. Permitting voting on opinions creates de facto censorship; voting is great for representing quality, but another measure is needed for stating agreement. I'd rather read a good comment I disagree with an a lousy one I agree with.

Damned If You Sue, Damned If You Don't

2007-12-30T10:42:00.000-08:00

The children of James Brown are suing over the validity of their godfather, err... father's will. They're claiming that Brown's lawyers pressured him into setting up trusts from which the lawyers would profit to pay for his grand children's education and for charitable causes, presumably, instead of giving the money to his kids.

Criticizing lawyers is normally a good thing, but don't accuse them of greed, then turn around and ask for money. The last thing they should have done was provide evidence that Brown knew his kids were greedy and decided to do the responsible thing.

Worst user feedback ever

2007-12-23T22:39:00.000-08:00

I don't use that title lightly. Over the weekend, I called someone who uses "ring back tones." Instead of hearing a ring, I heard a song. Granted, it's a clever idea, but to replace feedback that has been conditioned into callers for years is insane. Instead of thinking someone will pick up, I wondered if I got the number right, and not even by my own choice, a la ring tones.

Never inflict "nifty" on people at the expense of usability.

10 traits of successful geeks

2007-12-12T20:22:00.000-08:00

Or why Keven Rose didn't start Digg

1. Bad hygiene
Geeks with ideas that can change the world don't have time to change their clothes, let alone shower.

2. Limited wardrobe
People aren't impressed by the way geeks dress, they're impressed by potential profit. Successful geeks stick to the product, and let others do the talking.

3. No Friends/Social life
Be honest, they're not really your friends, they just put up with you, hoping you make it big and are along for the ride. Get them off your metaphorical coattails (See #2) before they drain both time and money.

4. Hair
Facial or cranial, it's an excellent insulator, and gives geeks a certain wisdom that's usually reserved for religious figures.

5. The gut
True geeks can't be bothered with meals. Instead, they use their abdominal energy reserves to press on with their development.

6. The slouch
It effectively doubles screen size, increasing productivity as much as a second monitor.

7. No cooking
One word: ramen.

8. Preference for minimal lighting
Like ditsy blondes, geeks are distracted by shiny things. The fewer distractions, the more work gets done. That, and it hides #1, #2, #4, #5, and #6.

9. Parents' basement
See #8. No rent, free food, free electric, and dark--the perfect environment for geek success.

10. Lack of MMORPG addiction
This is what separates the garden variety geeks from the uber geeks. Success and WoW go together like geeks and girls; it's that bad.

I give you the Alpha Geek:

Reality Check

2007-11-03T17:33:00.000-07:00

Lately, I've been looking for a new job ('bout time), and I've come across some interesting ads. Take this one:

Qualifications:
- Amazing coder who takes no prisoners. Master of all things Internet. One of the best coders in existence.
- Learn new languages extremely fast. We use Ruby on Rails … you can pick this up quickly.
- Intensely driven and proactive person.
- Extremely hard working. This is a start-up - team members work long hours.
- Quick learner and real doer. Err on execution over strategy.
- Thrive on working with A-players. Too good to spend long hours with B-players.
- Likeable[sic] person who garners respect on and off the job.
- Thrive on chaos, risk, and uncertainty.
- Should be easy to get along with, nice, fun, smart, ethical, and low-maintenance.
- Strong desire to build a more ethical society.
- Desire to be an early employee and want to be a real owner in Rapleaf’s future.
- Want to work with extremely large datasets and build portable APIs that thousands of other companies can build applications on top of.

Seriously? You think you're going to find that? If you 25% of those qualifications, you're lucky. Requirements like this attract big egos (which the company clearly has enough of, already) and people who will apply for anything. A company with unrealistic expectations of employees probably also has unrealistic expectations for their product; they'll fail as a business in the same way they'll fail in finding the perfect applicant.

Oh, and if you think you really are that good, email jobs@rapleaf.com, but most importantly, give them my name. They're offering a $10,007[sic] referral award[sic]. For the graphic design nazis out there, check out their logo. Who uses Arial?!

Feature request: hide Facebook App

2007-10-28T01:06:00.000-07:00

People over-do things when given the chance. From "Trading Spaces" to MySpace, some people just don't know when to quit, and now, with Facebook Apps, people have one more outlet for their spoiled creative juices.

My request: let me completely block apps I hate. Someone on my friends list has 40 apps. Please Facebook, just let me block every mention of "Zombies," "Superfuck requests," "Gifts" (Facebook or otherwise), and anything else I might feel like never seeing. Let the Facebook whores have their fun, but let the rest of us live our empty online lives.

Review: An Inconvenient Truth

2007-10-15T21:59:00.000-07:00

I'm probably one of the few people who watched both "An Inconvenient Truth" and "The Great Global Warming Swindle," so I should have an interesting perspective. Since this blog is dedicated to complaining, I'll save the compliments for the end.

The film's main problem is that it does little beyond presenting a cum hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. Yes, the charts are similar, but that alone doesn't imply correlation, or even which is the cause and which is the effect. As Darnell from My Name is Earl put is, "it's a bit anthropocentric to think humans could have that much effect."

Aside: I won't argue that the increase in atmospheric CO2 us anthropogenic. I'm already convinced that it is.

Often, he presented the idea of global warming, stated a consequence, and then showed examples, but many of these examples lacked historical context.

Take Lake Chad. According to Wikipedia,

Lake Chad is believed to be a remnant of a former inland sea which has grown and shrunk with changes in climate over the past 13,000 years. At its largest, around 4000 BC, this lake is estimated to have covered an area of 400,000 km². Lake sediments appear to indicate dry periods, when the lake nearly dried up, around 8500 BC, 5500 BC, 2000 BC, and 100 BC.

If it last dried up in 100 BC and it continues to follow the cycle, drying up in 2007 is an expected event. The wikipedia article continues, mentioning that the current drying is due to over-farming/water harvesting and, as Al Gore mentioned, change in rain patterns. Lake Chad was a very poor example, and Gore neglected to mention some important facts.

The more disturbing example was Hurricane Katrina. 50 years ago, scientists knew something like that was going to happen; the city's mostly below sea level and in a place that hurricanes frequent. They did even better, though, predicting it would hit within a century. Again, it's a poor example for global warming, but it makes a good rallying cry for his supporters.

The interspersed clips were interesting, but did little to address the point, and give the film a more political tone, despite Gore's claim that is isn't a political issue. Perhaps the most telling part of the film was Gore's line about being elected president. He knows his audience, and this film was targeted towards them.

I finally saw the polar bear that some people were surprised was animated. I wasn't; it looked very animated.

I picked out a few content faults, but for what it was, it was directed and organized well, but not about global warming as much as it was about Al Gore giving a presentation on global warming.

It made me think, but neither side has me convinced.

Facebook whore: Jim Cramer

2007-09-20T22:23:00.001-07:00

In a new segment, I'm going to post links to the Facebook profiles of minor celebrities who, honestly, should keep their friend confirmation button closed.

Jim Cramer: 718 friends.
http://www.facebook.com/friends.php?id=610179877

Speaking of Cramer's friends...

I was in a blog!

2007-08-20T23:55:00.000-07:00

While editing a wikipedia page today, I searched for a policy on handling . One of the links was a blog entry semi-related to that topic, so I clicked. Someone claimed my company was doing some wikipedia astroturfing. Again, I clicked. It turns out the astroturfing was actually me throwing in my $0.02. Great.

The lessons to learn:

Never edit company-related content.
Full disclosure. On discussion pages, disclose that you work for them, but are not representing them.
Companies should create wikipedia accounts for matters like this. While there may be a conflict of interest, wikipedia allows everyone to participate. Companies should create accounts so that they can show their official position while respecting the process.
Wikipedia users apply guidelines when they support their position.

Lucky for me, no one reads blogs (my adsense account can attest to this), and the blog entry never even got close to being news. This is the kind of thing people lose paychecks over.

"Nappy Headed Ho" sues Imus

2007-08-14T21:54:00.000-07:00

In other news, nappy headed ho Kia Vaughn is suing D-list former radio personality Don Imus for slander.

"This is about Kia Vaughn's good name..."

Before this story, she had no name--good nor bad. Now, she's defending, and advertising in the process, her name by being a selfish, greedy, whiny ass bitch.

Go ahead, sue me too; I need the page views.

Apes and Typewriters

2007-08-14T20:20:00.000-07:00

A followup on the No Touching school, monkeys, and typewriters:

It seems some parents in New Zealand decided to name their baby "4real," sans the obligatory "biach." Stupid? Certainly. A surprise? Nope. Apes are no better. Give six billion apes a typewriter and the job of producing a name, and at least one will get the idea to move his fingers up a row.

On IPOs

2007-08-14T19:56:00.000-07:00

The VMWare IPO sold shares at $29. Within an hour, they were selling for $50. In order to participate, most brokers require a $500,000 account.

"If I had more money, I'd be rich."

On Wikipedia

2007-08-14T19:55:00.000-07:00

Most content on Wikipedia is crap. When editing, "if in doubt, take it out."

Ideas DOA

2007-08-13T19:56:00.000-07:00

As an employee at 90's startup trying desperately to be relevant in the 2000's, I have access to the corporate idea wiki. Most of them are pretty bad ideas. Some people neglect researching their ideas (a protocol like ICPM quench was suggested), some try to port the latest trends to the corporate world. In all these ideas (no comment; proprietary crap is still proprietary), I've noticed three recurring problems with ideas:

Useless technology
Sure you can do it. You can put a "reply to all" button on keyboards, but that doesn't make it a good idea. Before adding the page, make sure people will realistically use the technology.

Intrusive technology
So you're going to immerse users in your beta world. Make sure you have users' interests at heart. Users might not want use all the features in your world, so don't make them jump through hoops there for someone else.

Trendy technology
These ideas are made by people who spent too much time next to the kool aid bowl. They use the latest acronyms and buzzwords, and usually "leverage" the companies latest pet project.

Far from mutually exclusive, these usually go hand-in-hand. These problems aren't unique to large companies, either; even startups need to keep it in mind. If your product isn't the useful, shows copious ads with minimal functionality, or spends more time touting web 2.0, ajax, and xml, you've lost focus on the most important thing: users.

Ergonomics design flaw

2007-08-02T23:23:00.000-07:00

At work, today, they decided to round up the conference room chairs that ended up in cubicles because some conference rooms were empty. The also pointed out an ergonomic reason.

Basically, they say sit like the person in the picture, and you won't have back, neck, wrist, or other problems, and they're probably right, but they forgot something: how am I supposed to spend 5 minutes (let alone the 15 minutes between breaks) in the same, perfect position?

Don't tell us the easy parts of ergonomics, then quit, or maybe they're saying a desk job just isn't for me.

Disclosure: I do not have ADHD.

Feature request: a partial solution to phishing

2007-07-24T22:04:00.000-07:00

Simple: sign your messages. If eBay, PayPal, CitiBank, and friends just signed their messages, it would be easy to check if it really was sent by accounts@paypal.com and if that link really is to paypal. Additionally, it makes it easier to catch the sender of the messages. It wouldn't be perfect, but it could help.

Phishing aside, start giving me the option to get my emails encrypted. I'd rather not have receipts sent in plain text.

Lindsay Lohan

2007-07-24T21:49:00.000-07:00

The Wikipedia article lists Lohan as an actress and pop singer. What's strange is that she doesn't do much acting or singing, these days. She's in the news for drugs more than she's on the radio, and in the courtroom more than in movies. She brings new meaning to "career criminal."

If someone's going to be more known for serial DUIs and rehab than what made her famous in the first place, let's do our job and acknowledge what she's known for: A list addict, C list actress.

Starbucks raises prices, MSN invites users to complain

2007-07-23T19:54:00.000-07:00

Starbucks is going to raise their prices about $0.09 per cup. Not letting pageviews slip away, MSN provided a forum for people to debate if it's worth $0.09 more.

Let's say you pay $3.50 for coffee, and the price goes up by $0.09. That's a 3.6% increase. The last price increase was around 9 months ago, so that's 4.8% over a year. Inflation-adjusted, that's 2.1%.

Who cares? Inflation figures are questionable, and the part that wasn't attributed to 2.7% inflation is $0.04. There are economists that claim we'd save money by abandoning the penny. I have better things to worry about.

Clinton, lesbians, and ignorant writers

2007-07-22T21:17:00.000-07:00

There's this surprisingly lame viral video going around supporting Clinton for president. They screwed up on so many levels. The lesbian suggestions were too obvious to be clever double entendres, but too subtle to court the lesbian-loving 20-35 male demographic. The, uh, well, umm... OK, that was the only selling point of video.

The writers made a mistake. Clinton is already on Capitol Hill; she serves as a senator.

This clearly wasn't a call for her to spend more time doing her job and less time campaigning. They just got it very wrong.

Props to South Park

2007-07-17T20:22:00.001-07:00

I read an article this morning on Priuses. I turns out that 57% of people buy them because it "makes a statement about me." Not the carpool lane or potential savings, but to look like someone who cares.

Props to Trey and Matt. They knew exactly who buys Priuses and why they buy them, and aimed their attack them.

Prius owners: you're on my smack list.

Song rant: "1985"

2007-07-15T00:11:00.000-07:00

Back in the '90's, there was a song by SR-71 called "Right Now." No one remembers the name, but it's still a staple in soundtracks for teen movies (e.g. "Harold and Kumar").

The band's a one hit wonder. Normally, I'm fine with that, but they wrote a second hit: "1985," a song made famous by Bowling for Soup.

Most bands never write a hit. A few lucky ones write just one and are labeled one hit wonders. It's sad to see a band get so close to a second hit and remain a one hit wonder.

Song rant: "Working Class Hero"

2007-07-14T23:51:00.000-07:00

Forward: I'm not a Lennon fan. I think McCartney is a better song writer.

The song sucks. It's typical of Lennon; it's mostly political, and people appreciated Lennon for that. But Lennon's no Bob Dylan. Dylan's protest songs are catchier, his voice fits them well, and they generally have a more positive outlook. Rolling Stone's list of the top 100 songs supports this. As a solo act, Lennon had one song, Dylan had 4, 5 if you could Hendrix's cover of "All Along the Watchtower."

And how does this apply to Darfur, again? Why a Lennon CD for Darfur? And two covers of "Imagine" on the same compilation?

As a solo act, Lennon's overrated, and the "Instant...Darfur" album is proof.

Feature request: Stop the Flash ads

2007-07-09T22:04:00.000-07:00

There are two major crimes of Flash ads on websites: sound and CPU usage. I thought we outgrew sound on web pages. Seriously- having a MIDI on a web page was circa 1996, and we stopped doing it because it was annoying, could cause problems with those nearby, an just in bad tasted. I don't want to mouse-over and hear a sound.

The bigger annoyance, though, is Flash ads on a laptop. Even when my laptop's plugged in, Flash runs Firefox's CPU usage up to 100% and the laptop gets hot. When it's not plugged in, the same thing happens, only now the battery drains in the event I want to whack a mole so I can get a "prize."

I installed the Flash blocker, but I'd websites respect my computer and just simpler ads.

Isn't it cool? Visual effects

2007-07-01T00:34:00.000-07:00

Apple has done some very good things for design. Recently, their switch from the rounded clamshell laptops to sleeker designs, and the sleeker design of the iPhone, shows that the novelty novelty of cool looking designs is wearing off.

Isn't this always the case? When something new come out, be it a music genre, visual effect, or construction style, people become obsessed with and blinded by the novelty, oblivious to how riddulous it is. The 80s, a decade known for excess in everything, has many YouTube clips showing this.

Isn't it cool that we've reached the point where we can use visual effects because we want to, and not to show simply them off? They're becoming more artistic and less rubber stamped.

Compare these two videos:

The effects in the Paul McCartney one are more complex technically, but they don't feel forced--effects for the sake of effects--like the second. Confusing fades, pointless zooms, and a complex title animation sequence all feel forced.

Using modern technology can be good, but use it where it's appropriate, not for the sake of using it.

Think Differently: iPhone design mistake?

2007-06-30T16:01:00.000-07:00

Watching the iPhone commercial showing off YouTube, I noticed this:
I had my cell phone by me and I realize that the Answer button was on the other side of the phone. Most recent phones follow that standard. A quick look at The New AT&T's offerings confirms this. Blackberry, Motorola, Nokia, and Samsung all seem to use this standard. So why didn't Apple make their interface like everyone else's? Probably either lack of experience in making cell phones, accessability by the right hand, or just Apple thinking different--err, -ly.

Some things never change.

Adsense: smart like a trained monkey

2007-06-27T22:41:00.000-07:00

Looking at the front page of my blog, I noticed a bunch of gay (as in of interests to the lgbt community) ads. Clearly, the post about the movie plot caused this.

Google Adsense is like a trained monkey: give him a fruit bowl and he'll hand you a banana. The point wasn't that they were gay, the point was that the premise was flawed.

Maybe that's good. If Google really knew what the post was about, their search function could probably do some very creepy things.

Now what's the monkey further down the page up to, these days?

Feature Requests: email clients

2007-06-27T22:28:00.000-07:00

Quick post today:

Attaching forwarded messages is fine, but please display the message in the same window as the one I get. I had to explain to my grandma that she has to click the paperclip, then the message, and if the sender was extra-sloppy, click a different thing at the bottom.

Scale down those huge image attachments. Even when the person has a broadband connection, images from digital cameras (and large images, in general) should be scaled down so I can see the image without excessive scrolling.

While you're at it, unlike IE and Firefox, do a bicubic resize. Don't say no one notices the quality difference--I notice. It's being downloaded; surely a good quality resize is faster than my internet connection.

Include a "shut off HTML formatting" button. The internet's grown up, now; we no longer animate for the sake of animating, color for the sake of color, and use strange fonts because they're there.

And to all the ISPs who feel the need to sign your outgoing emails with their name, spam's already a problem; let's not put it in legitimate message, OK?

Plot devices and B-List movies

2007-06-26T23:41:00.000-07:00

I recently saw a commercial for "I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry." The premise is that the state challenges the domestic partnership of Chuck and Larry because they're not either gay or in love.

This didn't add up- since when was love required for marriage, civil unions, or domestic partnerships? Why is "domestic partnership" a euphemism for gay marriage? It's possible that two men live together in just that, a domestic partnership.

Looking this up, it seems that, in the state of California, love, or even being gay is a requirement for domestic partnership. I guess that's not a surprise. A quick look at craigslist can prove that marriage doesn't mean there's love or sex. Why should a domestic partnership mean the same?

(Yes, I know, it's just a plot device.)

No-Touching School

2007-06-19T23:02:00.000-07:00

In a policy fitting of a TV Orange County jail, a public middle school recently implemented a no-touching (including hugs and shaking hands) rule.

The MSN poll revealed that most people thought it was crazy to do that, and I have no doubt that the country feels the same way.

While the story might be shocking and absurd, there's a reason it shouldn't be: statistics. They always say that a monkey with sufficient time will reproduce the works of Shakespeare. In the same way, given enough schools, one will surely have the set of administrators and teachers that will accept and implement such a policy.

As with terrorism and the lottery, people are bad at perceiving probabilities. The media know this, and they take advantage of it when they sell news. No one cares about where they might get in a car wreck, but the statistically rare, but predictable school is front page news.

The Missing Computer Standard: Internal USB

2007-06-18T23:26:00.000-07:00

We all thought SATA would kill the ribbon cable, but here we are with SATA hard drives and ribbon cables going to everything else. There's an easy solution to this, but it isn't used that often: USB.

Optical drives, floppy drives, card readers, zip drives, any almost everything else you can put in a 5 1/4 bay can be found in a different from factor using USB. We had a chance to kill three birds with one stone; the power cable headache could be fixed, devices could be easily hotswapped, and the varying standards would all be unified.

While internal USB is used, the connector is just a pin header--nothing durable, or even keyed.

Computers aren't even close to being truly usable, but we still need to take steps to unify similar systems.

The Obligatory iPhone Prediction

2007-06-07T22:44:00.000-07:00

Based on the stock price increase since the iPhone was announced, somewhere between 25% and 33% of Apple's stock price is due to speculation on the iPhone. Instead of tradational investors, Apple gets "fanboy" investors; from a tradational investment perspective, it's a horrible investment. It's P/E is high, and they haven't paid a dividend since 1995--it behaves more like a startup than a mature company. Prices this high are due to a combination of investors expecting growth, or investors expecting the next product to drive up the stock price.

So the question is what should Apple be worth? If there's a crash, at what price should it drop to to make it worthwhile? First, if it didn't have such strong growthm, and instead matched the Nasdaq, it's F P/E would be 20.8--a value indicating it's either a little overpriced or moderate growth is expected. For comparison, this is around the average of Microsoft's P/E and F P/E--it's a reasonable value when compared to similar companinies

There are two examples to look at for guessing a reasonable price for Apple: the iPod and the Motorola RAZR (which was interestingly described as the iPod of mobile phones). The forgotten story of the iPod is that it was launched in 2001 as just another mp3 player. It became popular a few years later after 3 generations of hardware fixed the bugs. Apple kept a prices somehwhat high, balancing the phones exclusivity and profits. In contrast, the RAZR was marketed from the beginning as a stylish, exlusive phone. It followed a business model of consistent price drops, eventually leading to the comoditization of the phone. As more and more people obtained RAZRs, profit margins slipped, and Motorola was left looking for the next RAZR. The likely aproach is a phone initially introduced and priced much like the RAZR, at $400-$500, and over time, prices will be reduced, but the phone will always carry at least a $150 price tag. From a business perspective, Apple is in a good position with the product.

But one product, one $30 billion product. According to the F P/E without the recent price increase, Apple needs to increase profit by $1.4 billion per year to keep up with expectations. Apple's current profit is just under $2 billion per year. The iPhone will likely cut into iPod sales. When Motorola released the ROKR, it was rumored the 100 song limit was done by Apple to prevent the ROKR from hurting iPod sales.

The demographics of iPhone buyers probably looks like this: those under 20 probably can't afford it, and those over 35 are in the Blackberry crowd and were skipped over by iPods.

Apple will probably make the profit margin on iPhones steady (unlike Motorola and the RAZR). The 50% rumored profit margin will probably continue. Since I'm after the price Apple should be, I'll look at long term iPhone sales. Due to demographics, of the 200 million cell phone owners in the US, around 25% are in the age group likely to buy iPhones. Around 80 million mp3 players have been sold so 50 million out there, and around 70% are iPods, so that leaves 35 million buyers in the US. At best, that means 20 million iPhones (remembering that the curve representing iPhone buyer distribution is like the iPod one, only lower and narrower). At what will probably work out to $150 profit per unit, or $3 billion. Most of these phones will replace iPods (or cause someone to buy the phone, not the iPod), so the $3 billion is closer to $1.5 billion. The overseas estimate is harder, but the market is probably a lot smaller. Asia and Europe have see far more mobile phones than the US, and they won't be as easily impressed, especially liking smaller designs. If cell phones get replaced every 3 years and overseas sales is the same as US, iPhones will profit $1 Billion per year, the P/E for AAPL.iPhone will be 30. That's very close to the current F P/E.

So that makes the AAPL price apropriate. The problem is that this neglected risk, competition from Motorola, Nokia, and Sony (who knows, maybe Microsoft), and the 10% market share was generous. Since I want to know what price AAPL is actually worth, all I need to do is guess the market share. In reality and in the long term, I think it will be around 4%. I can barely see 1/20 people having one. That makes the P/E for AAPL.iPhone 75.

Going back up to the corrected F P/E, I'd like to see AAPL.iPhone down to either it or the current P/E (20-30). I'll buy AAPL if it dips below 95, presumably after a correction.

The iPhone will migrate users from the lower profit iPod to the iPhone and take another round of money away for them to say cool, but it won't expand Apple's market; it's just an upgrade. Blackberry users need a keyboard, kids need something cheap, and parents don't need the product. The iPod market is almost saturated, and whatever growth is left is already in the high stock price.

The important thing to remember is that reviews and perceptions of the iPhone within the first month will dictate what the market's reaction will be. Apple has an ace up its sleve, here: there's an opening in the market for such a product. There hasn't been a stylish, exlusive phone since the RAZR came out in 2004. It's all left to Apple's execution, though. There was an opening in the market for a similar product, Motorola's ROKR, a phone that could even work with iTunes. Ultimately, both the hardware and software were clunky, turning users off. Apple certainly has the track record to make it work smoothly, provided they get the GSM part right. After all, who wants to pay $600 for bad reception, dropped calls, and music, all in one package?

The little secret of the computer industry: vendors

2007-05-19T13:40:00.000-07:00

When most people go to look for a networking device (adapter, switch, access point, etc.), with so many options, they go with a brand they trust, Linksys and Netgear usually ranking at the top. What most people don't know is the difference.

I've been on IRC channels where people ask what's the best switch to get. The little secret I usually tell them is they're all the same. Netgear, DLink, Linksys, even the cheap "Airlink" wired switches we have at work all run on a switch provided by a vendor, usually Marvell or Broadcom. Given that chip, making a switch is little more than a EE senior design project.

But what about more complicated things like routers? Same thing. Look at the OpenWRT table of hardware (OpenWRT is an alternate OS that you can use on a router). Despite all the brands, the chips are almost all made by AMD, TI, Atheros, Mavell, and Broadcom. Routers can be a bit more complicated, but the extra components (CPU, switch, wireless) are still made by the same handful of vendors. The only real differences are in software and how well the parts were put together.

So all Netgear and friends do for routers is buy the same parts their competitors did and connect them. What about network adapters? Same story. It turns out the pretty cover on your Netgear WG311 covers a mini-pci card (this is what goes into laptops, and even some routers) with an Atheros chip. So Netgear does almost no manufacturing on products and just plugs them together, but what about the Cisco Aironet line? This is Cisco, a company aimed at businesses demanding stability. You guessed it, the same Atheros chip as Netgear.

It even goes beyond networking. When Sony laptop batteries started to explode, people quickly learned that Sony laptops weren't the only ones affected; IBM/Lenovo, Dell, and others all bought batteries from their competitors.

Next time you go look for a new TV, LCD TVs will probably be a serious contender for your business. So what brand should you get? Is one better than another? Yes, but not the brands, themselves. There are only a handful of vendors that produce LCDs. Every company that makes TVs or monitors buys from these vendors. Now, the vendors produce different quality products, so that Sony LCD TV will probably look better than the Best Buy store brand Westinghouse, but word is Sony gets their LCDs from Samsung. It isn't quite this straightforward. Many TVs do post processing, so that the compression artifacts you see on a low end TV are blurred by higher end TVs (despite what most people think, neither DVDs nor HD content is perfect. It's compressed, so at certain times, if you know what to look for, you can see compression artifacts. Analog signals are compressed, too, but their artifacts are always present).

Basically, once electronics became commodities and prices fell, a few vendors started making all the parts that go into virtually everything, and most brands just put these parts together.

I was looking for a SATA controller for a friend a while ago. Instead of going for the name brand, I got the generic card with a chipset I recognized. The card was simply a PCB with PCI connections, the chip, a few discrete components, and SATA connectors--nothing special. The card worked, and despite not being a name brand, it even worked in OSes like Linux and FreeBSD. Because it was generic, the chipset had to be widely supported, so almost every OS supports it, without some of the headaches of first party chipsets, a la Promise.

The lesson: all that matters how is how well the package was put together. Is the software user friendly? Did the EEs remember to put a big enough heatsink on the CPU? Is it pretty like an Apple product? These are the things that matter, now. For some things, like network cards, there isn't a UI. The thing to look for here is a common chipset. If lots of brands use it, the drivers will likely be more mature at work better.

Top 100 domains on the Digg front page

2007-04-02T22:31:00.000-07:00

This pool of Digg headlines is pretty fun. Here are the top 100 domains that make it to the Digg front page.

Be sure to check out my other lists and statistics on Digg:

Within the next week, I'll try to post the scripts I used and explain how the data were obtained.

Occurrences	Domain
755	yahoo.com
752	arstechnica.com
592	blogspot.com
590	cnn.com
589	com.com
543	nytimes.com
468	bbc.co.uk
443	youtube.com
436	engadget.com
395	wired.com
376	physorg.com
363	washingtonpost.com
336	reuters.com
300	msn.com
284	go.com
273	businessweek.com
258	gizmodo.com
247	techcrunch.com
234	thinkprogress.org
214	flickr.com
207	kotaku.com
201	guardian.co.uk
198	zdnet.com
183	ign.com
173	livescience.com
168	joystiq.com
162	google.com
154	usatoday.com
151	timesonline.co.uk
146	nwfdailynews.com
144	destructoid.com
141	lifehacker.com
134	appleinsider.com
130	breitbart.com
124	apple.com
122	eurekalert.org
117	forbes.com
115	nasa.gov
112	torrentfreak.com
112	technologyreview.com
112	techeblog.com
112	sfgate.com
111	newscientist.com
110	latimes.com
105	treehugger.com
101	theinquirer.net
100	time.com
97	nwsource.com
97	1up.com
95	linux.com
94	informationweek.com
92	wordpress.com
92	tuaw.com
90	scifi.com
88	eweek.com
86	gamespot.com
85	howtoforge.com
85	consumerist.com
82	extremetech.com
81	2old2play.com
77	theregister.co.uk
76	slate.com
76	dailytech.com
75	computerworld.com
72	macrumors.com
72	independent.co.uk
71	instructables.com
71	ibm.com
71	ap.org
70	hardocp.com
70	dailymail.co.uk
69	space.com
69	news.com.au
68	sciam.com
66	wikipedia.org
66	pcworld.com
65	sciencedaily.com
64	abc.net.au
63	techdirt.com
63	readwriteweb.com
63	crooksandliars.com
62	newscientisttech.com
61	wsj.com
61	rawstory.com
61	newsforge.com
61	bloomberg.com
60	gonintendo.com
59	popsci.com
59	boingboing.net
58	cbsnews.com
55	telegraph.co.uk
55	damninteresting.com
54	bit-tech.net
53	macworld.com
52	qj.net
52	freesoftwaremagazine.com
51	desktoplinux.com
50	gigaom.com
49	sourceforge.net
49	nintendo.com

Simple online shopping protection already in place that you don't think about

2007-04-01T21:52:00.000-07:00

Or... Worst title ever.

Whenever I have to provide my credit card information, I like seeing the dropdown boxes for the expiration date. While I doubt there's a keylogger on my computer, it gives me a little extra sense of security.

Spaf said that making an online transaction is like giving a bum a quarter and transporting it in an armored truck; the encryption will keep your information safe--the weak points are you and the merchant.

If your computer happened to have a keylogger installed, the thief would be able to easily figure out your credit card number, but tracking mouse movements and clicks, and trying to piece together what month you clicked is much harder. If you change something as simple as the font size, use a different browser, or briefly do something in another window, determining the expiration date is much harder.

Sure, within 50 attempts, the thief could probably guess it, but credit card companies are always looking for fraud, and trying different expiration dates that aren't close to the real one sends up a red flag, hopefully saving you the headache of cleaning up your credit.

Or you can not run that .exe you were emailed: your choice.

What reddit ads are going to look like: a sidebar hosted by doubleclick.net

2007-03-31T17:45:00.000-07:00

Digging through some js, I noticed a page that reddit is going to use for ads: http://static.reddit.com/ad.html.

It isn't anything special, just an ad for Wired hosted by doubleclick.net.

Sorry for linkjacking, but this seems to be a page reddit isn't excited about users knowing about.

One of the hardest bugs to catch in C: Integer overflow

2007-03-28T22:56:00.000-07:00

Here's some simple C code implements an array that can be accessed with some functions. (There are some casts I left out for clarity. They should be (unsigned char *).)

static void **array, **end;

int allocate (unsigned int size) ...

int deallocate () ...

int write (unsigned int index, void *data)

{

if (array + index < end) {

array[index] = data;

return 1;

} else {

return 0;

}

It does what it should: make a bounds check before writing to memory, and returning an error when the index is out of bounds.

Here's the bug: what the index + the beginning of the array overflows? The sum will overflow, resulting in a modulo equivalent value that's before the beginning of the array.

This type of bug is called an integer overflow. When writing code, sometimes the most legible order for expressions isn't the safest. The best way to prevent bugs like this is to write it out as it is above, then ask yourself what you know about the values of those numbers, and how you can insure the result will be within a certain range. Since end will always be greater or equal to array, using simple algebra, you can reorder the inequality to read (index < end - array). It might not be as easy to read, but since the end of the array is always after the beginning, i.e. greater, this code, which algebraically equivalent, won't have the same vulnerability.

For those who say this example is contrived, I have encountered real world code that requires logic like this. True, this example could just store size, but in some cases, perhaps where the elements in the array are of a dynamic size, the size can vary, so the end of the array is needed.

Remember those times in math when kids asked when they'd need to know about algebraic inequalities and modulo arithmetic? Yes, programming doesn't require lots of math, but it requires some. On one hand, writing C requires enough knowledge in computer architecture to know about integer overflows, and how they're not only good, they're needed, while on the other, it requires the mathematical background to understand and fix these problems.

Funny Wikipedia Image Caption

2007-03-25T17:13:00.000-07:00

Damn you Firefox 2 Spellchecker!!

2007-03-25T00:37:00.000-07:00

The Firefox spellchecker's nice most of the time, but it's suggestion algorithm isn't as good as the Microsoft one, and it strangely thinks some of the words I use aren't really words.

Entendre
Stoners (but not stoner)
Advisor (but not adviser, both are correct, -or is the correct Latin form)
Indices
Fiance
Fiancee
jure/iure (but not facto)
de (but not facto)
omelette (but not omelet)
doughnut
quesadilla
millennia
cultivars

That's it for now, but this list seems to be ever growing, so I'm sure there'll be a Part II.

If you thought the Verizon .01 cents was bad, this is worse

2007-03-20T21:15:00.000-07:00

Forward: this took place prior to y2k7, and I'm sorry, I wish I recorded this, but I didn't

One of the best way to stop text message spam is to call your cell provider and get those $0.20 back. It costs them far more than $0.20 to give you the money back, and it encourages them to prosecute the spammers and have better spam filters.

I called Sprint, my cell provider, to get this fixed. Since my account was new, they offered to give me a free month of data access. I went for it, and once I hung up, I proceeded to start playing with my new data plan.

When I got my next month's bill, it was higher than I expected it to be, about $50 higher. I called up their support line. When I asked, they told me I used the data plan at around 12:30 on Saturday (I forgot the day). I said that's not right, I called on Friday. Well, it turns out that they recorded the time in central standard time. I then asked when I used my data plan and was told 11:35 on Friday. I said I'm sure I used it after my phone call. I had to return a call to get a $0.20 credit, and I created a text file with the information I needed. Interestingly, the timestamp was around 9:30.

Now the fun part: I asked them what time they're on (CST) and what time it was. The time they gave me was 3 hours from me (PST); they gave me EST. I spent 10 minutes arguing with them what time it was. I pointed them to time.gov. Java wasn't working for them. I kept trying to tell them, and they kept saying it was the wrong time. I asked where they were based, and I was told the Philippines. I told them that what happened is that they had two systems running on different time systems, and that was the reason for the mistake, and why should I pay when their system clearly has at least one time mistake.

There was some good news that came out of this. In contrast to the Verizon case, with a single call and without escalating the case (I only talked to one rep.), I was credited on my next bill for the data.

Clearly, outsourcing has problems like this. Screwing up time zones is easy enough, but there's a good chance that whoever coded it was never in at least one of the relevant time zones. This is where good customer service comes in. While this case is as outrageous as the Verizon incident, I had it resolved within half an hour.

Two small values related to global warming

2007-03-19T22:18:00.000-07:00

Fact 1: If all the oil consumed were combusted, the resulting water would raise the sea level about 1 mm.

Fact 2: In burning oil, approximately 3/10,000th of the oxygen in Earth's atmosphere has been consumed. That's around 75ppm. This number was found from the number of barrels of oil consumed. We have seen the C02 ppm increase by about 100 since 1970 (about 15% of oil consumption occurred before 1970).

Corollary: Neither of these statistics account for a significant portion of either the increasing CO2 in the atmosphere or the rising sea level.

Corollary: based on the measured increase in CO2 and the calculated decrease in oxygen due to combustion of oil, 32% of the Co2 increase can be attributed to burning oil (not including coal).

Basically, these serve as a reminder of just how big the Earth is, but also that the increase in C02 in the air is very likely due to the consumption of oil and coal.

Caveat Legens:
I made a large number of simplifications. I assure you that the general idea is right; the fact that the theoretical value was near the measured value suggests that. Just don't believe this fully; it should just give you an approximate range for the actual values.

Sources:
(I had to do the math on my own. It was a combination of aspects of calculus, statistics, and chemistry. Feel free to check it for me. I often made simplifying estimates, like the oil consumed in the past 10 years and the oil consumed before 1970.)

We have consumed around 1.1 trillion barrels of oil since 1900.
http://www.gravmag.com/oil.html, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_economy

By mass, around 1/7 of oil is hydrogen. This neglects alcohols and double bonds. For methane, it's 1/4 (methane has the most hydrogen by mass of all hydrocarbons)

What's in a barrel of oil?

5 months after Firefox 2 was released, misspellings on Digg are down 10%

2007-03-18T23:23:00.000-07:00

It's amazing when the effects of a single software release can be seen so clearly. Firefox 2 added a spell check feature that resembles MS Word's, underlining words in text input boxes that are misspelled. As 65% of the Digg community use Firefox, it shouldn't be a surprise to see an improvement in spelling.

About the methodology:
This graph tracks the misspellings on the first page of comments on front page stories according to the dictionary provided by aspell (with the exception of the word "digg" which was ignored. Approximately 30,000 articles and 4gb of comments were processed to create this graph.

Some observations:
The decline leading up to August might be a result of users using a Firefox beta, but I doubt there would be enough early adopters to cause such a decline.

The increase in misspelled words seem to loosely correlate with the growth of Digg as graphed by Alexa. A Reddit user noted that Digg, and to a lesser extent, Reddit, are entering the Eternal September; interestingly enough, spelling suffers in September. A blogger commented that the Digg demographic consists of CS dropouts. I'm sure it has more variety than that, but the general consensus is that Digg has a large number of college students, a fact supported by this poll, all of which lend some credence to the Eternal September hypothesis.

Spelling has a high standard deviation relative to percentage of misspelled words: 0.42%. Each data point represents the quotient of the number of misspelled words in a day and the number of words in a day. On average, there are around 75-100 stories per day. with so many words making it into a single data point, it's surprising that the points were often .5% apart, and more than 1% apart at times. It took a 30 day rolling average to smooth out most of the bumps; that's around 2000 articles. Part of this is just due to the scale of the chart; normally half a percent isn't noticeable, but this chart has a maximum y value of 9%.

Caveat Legens:
Post hoc ergo propter hoc is a logical fallacy. This blog post uses it. You can't draw any solid conclusions from this graph. This is just evidence that supports a hypothesis.

Life without a printer: How I escaped the rising cost of printer ink

2007-03-18T19:49:00.000-07:00

One of the things I got for college was a printer. When you make the checklist of things, it's around the top; what good is your computer alone when your term paper needs to be printed? I used it a few times, but never all that often. After storing it over the summer, the ink dried out. I stored it two more summers, but I wasn't about to spend $45 at the campus book store for ink. I finally sold it on ebay; I got about $40 for a three year old printer (without ink) that originally sold for $100. As a college student, $40 is a big deal.

That was my last printer.

It wasn't my last because I had no more printing to do, it was my last because I used cheaper printers. The college I went to has many large laser printers (even a few color laser printers) throughout campus, and even one in my dorm. I learned where they were, how to print to them, and their reliability. At times, I found myself in a lecture finishing papers 20 minutes before they were due. Before I left, I printed the essay and picked it up on the way to class.

Several changes in technology have made the printer less of a necessity.

Network ubiquity
Network speed
PDF ubiquity

Networks used to be too slow and rare to not need a printer; most people didn't have the ability to send a document anywhere, and even if they could, it might not be in a format the recipient can read.

Following these advances, it has become possible to outsource printer needs. Companies that do a large amount of printing can afford printers that are faster, higher quality, and use cheaper ink.

Here are some tips to survive in a somewhat more paperless world:

Try to cut back on printing. If you need to store a copy of something, digital copies take less space, can be secured, and can be stored on a server that keeps redundant copies. Send emails when you can. That said, I think most people reading this already do those things.
Print documents at work. This one is a little ethically questionable, but it will save you money.
For documents, a Kinkos (and possibly other companies) offer services that allow you to print to one of their printers from home.
Need to send a letter to someone? USPS offers a service called NetPost that will mail a document you supply.
For pictures, there are many companies out there that will print your photos. If you print any pictures, this tip will probably save you the most money. Between the amount of ink it takes and the cost of photo paper, a company that specializes in printing photos can commoditize the process and save you money.
Think about how often you print, and if you can even justify owning a printer. If you think the prices at Kinkos are high, consider how many pages you'd have to print to pay for that $60 HP inkjet. They charge around $0.10 per page, but that also includes the paper. If the life of a printer is 3 years, you'd have to print 200 pages per year to break even, and that assumes the half filled cartridge the printer came with lasts.
If you find you really need a printer, opt for a black and white laser printer. Since you really need it, you undoubtedly print enough to justify a $200 (at least) printer. While it isn't completely true that the per page cost of laser printers is lower than inkjets, it generally is.

Basically, printer manufacturers make money one way: take a loss on the printer, make money on the ink. You lose money two ways, you have to buy the ink, but you also have to buy the printer.

Funny Windows Error

2007-03-16T19:43:00.000-07:00

Umm, terminate Windows?!

Needless to say, Dr. Watson came to visit, but Dr. Reset had to fix the problem.

Ignorance Sticker

2007-03-15T10:53:00.000-07:00

Walking to work a few days ago, I saw a car with this bumper sticker:

First off, I'm against making a statement with a car other than "look at my car." Putting something potentially offensive something worth $20,000 is just stupid.

Medium aside, I applaud both the car owner and the sticker's creator for addressing one of Bush's policies, not treating him as the the embodiment of what liberals stand against--a catalyst unifying liberals (I'm looking at you, Rock Against Bush/Punk Voter).

Onto my actual point: ignoring the fact that all spending bills originate from the House of Representatives, the federal government has absolutely no duty to give money to students. According to this government web site,

The U.S. Constitution leaves the responsibility for public K-12 education with the states.

a statement echoing the Tenth Amendment:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved for the States respectively, or to the people.

Lesson of the day: educate yourself on the issues before publicly presenting them. Yes, schools get federal funding, but it isn't required; all the responsibility lies with the states.

It always bugs me that newspapers and organizations endorse candidates (and in the case of Punk Voter, protest one). People should educate themselves on the candidates and issues, then decided for themselves. If you aren't informed on either a topics or candidates, don't vote for or against them (strange things can happen when a park ranger runs against an "educator" for the school board), and don't display a bumper sticker that advertises not only your political beliefs, but advertises just how informed you really are.

Why the Democrats Won't Impeach Bush

2007-03-10T19:31:00.000-08:00

First, while the democrats took control of congress after the 2006 midterm elections, they took control with a less than confidant majority of votes. In the house, the Republicans lost 3.6% of the popular vote--not exactly a landslide. Impeachment polls aren't all that common; Googling bush impeach poll doesn't yield any sites of recent mainstream media polls on the first page (contrast this to approval ratings). After the drawn out non-binding resolution to not support the action in Iraq, the current congress shows that they lack the political dedication and courage (balls, cajones, if you will) to carry through with meaningful action. Between their lack of gravitas and limited support, the second to last thing they will do is impeach Bush (the last being removing him from office).

The second reason is half comedic. Bush is a political paradox. The same people who are so quick to call him an idiot are the same who claim he's the mastermind of everything going wrong. Only Bush can not like black people, have black cabinet members, provide little immediate federal response to the attack on the WTC and be praised, provide more support to New Orleans and be cursed. When praising Bush it appropriate, he is easy to praise. When things go wrong, he's easy to blame. When jokes are needed, Bush is an idiot. When conspiracies and scandals emerge, Bush is the villain behind them. The Democrats can't impeach Bush because they could no longer place political blame so well on a single person. Back to the first reason, while Bush's ideas might not be the best, the Democrats have even less confidence in their ideas, and provided Bush is in power, when something doesn't go well, he can take the blame.

The Product that Limits its own Sales: Condoms

2007-03-10T11:22:00.000-08:00

Sorry this is a short post, but there isn't that much explaining to do.

The problem with selling condoms is simple: you're selling a product that explicitly tries to limit its future market. Sure- the condom manufacturers are selling something associated with something very fun and very cool, but not even tobacco companies (...they're cool, available, and *addictive*. The job is almost done for us. ) have this problem; by the time you might die, your kids are already hooked.

So condom companies have a dilemma. On one hand, selling a defective product would help future sales. On the other, selling a defective product labels your company's product as inferior, hurt current sales, and the entire plan fails.

I wonder if some actuaries figured out the ideal effectiveness: effective enough for people to not complain, but ineffective enough to boost future sales.

Top 25 Words Used in Digg Titles

2007-03-08T20:49:00.000-08:00

Ever wonder what the most frequently used words in Digg titles were? Well, wonder no more. Here are the results from the front page articles in the past year (March 6, 2006 - March 6, 2007).

These words are slightly edited. Words like "the" and "a" aren't that interesting, but they're included below the top 25 for verbosity.

The top 25 [noteworthy] Digg title words

Rank	Word	Occurrences
1	new	1923
2	2	1725
3	how	1324
4	Wii	1201
5	Google	983
6	video	897
7	Apple	893
8	Linux	779
9	Microsoft	685
10	year	623
11	free	621
12	Mac	616
13	world	611
14	top	597
15	game	541
16	PS3	537
17	iTunes	522
18	Windows	519
19	Nintendo	288
20	launch	473
21	Digg	464
22	first	460
23	web	459
24	iPod	454
25	pictures	448

Unedited top 100 Digg title words

Rank	Word	Occurrences
1	the	6900
2	to	6289
3	of	4345
4	a	3988
5	in	3576
6	for	3321
7	on	2538
8	and	2064
9	new	1923
10	i	1922
11	2	1725
12	is	1631
13	with	1572
14	your	1434
15	how	1324
16	wii	1201
17	you	1096
18	it	1030
19	from	986
20	google	983
21	video	897
22	apple	893
23	at	841
24	linux	779
25	3	731
26	by	719
27	be	693
28	microsoft	685
29	10	676
30	get	661
31	year	623
32	free	621
33	mac	616
34	world	611
35	not	606
36	up	604
37	top	597
38	do	587
39	1	568
40	us	542
41	game	541
42	ps3	537
43	iTunes	522
44	can	521
45	what	521
46	windows	519
47	will	507
48	an	502
49	out	499
50	why	490
51	nintendo	488
52	that	488
53	are	477
54	launch	473
55	digg	464
56	first	460
57	web	459
58	ipod	454
59	picture	448
60	more	445
61	about	442
62	bush	439
63	photo	439
64	war	433
65	5	432
66	over	432
67	say	432
68	now	426
69	all	424
70	as	418
71	go	407
72	xbox	403
73	vista	391
74	games	390
75	360	389
76	released	387
77	make	377
78	no	375
79	best	366
80	time	365
81	open	360
82	this	360
83	have	341
84	online	340
85	may	327
86	most	323
87	sony	323
88	internet	318
89	ever	317
90	computer	316
91	x	314
92	way	312
93	man	311
94	one	305
95	4	301
96	firefox	301
97	into	293
98	os	293
99	live	291
100	after	290
98	has	288
99	tv	288
100	pc	286

Notable entries just missing the list

102	ubuntu	285
103	million	282
106	source	276
108	iraq	273
112	itunes	261
114	youtube	259

1 1024x768 browser screen with only "Impeach Bush" articles (13 of them) on the Reddit front page

2007-03-08T00:08:00.000-08:00

Will It Blend? Gets it Half-Wrong

2007-02-25T12:47:00.000-08:00

For Valentine's Day, instead of blending diamonds, Will it Blend? decided to blend, due to reasonable budget constraints, cubic zirconia. For comparison, they tell us where it lies on the Mohs scale. What they failed to mention is that the Mohs scale is just ordinal; all the numbers mean is what substances are harder and which are softer. The absolute hardness actually compares the differences in hardness.

Cubic zirconia have an absolute hardness of around 300, diamonds 1500. In terms of hardness, iron is to cubic zirconia as cubic zirconia are to diamonds.

To further complicate things, cubic zirconia are very brittle; impact from a softer object can easy cause fractures.

Now, I'm not going to try this with my normal blender; my blog doesn't generate enough traffic to pay for both the bling and the new blender, and I'm not even going to consider spending $400 on a Blentec blender.

How to Resolve American Political Conflict

2007-02-24T20:08:00.000-08:00

We need a document in addition to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution; we need a mission statement. Businesses have these all the time--they have a product line, an organizational structure, "corporate culture," etc. The US needs a similar basic philosophical premise on which to base policies.

In short, decide on social and economic principles politicians can use as guides in their decisions, like the political compass (find out where you fit in here) Let people not happy with the philosophy leave. This would greatly simplify decisions about foreign policy, wars, social programs (e.g. health care, state-managed retirement), legalization of marijuana, etc.

Since other countries don't have this, the country could be divided into four regions, based roughly on the political expectations of each region.

West coast: Libertarian left
East coast: Authoritarian left
South: Libertarian right
Midwest: Authoritarian right

Just an idea to ease political fighting. In presenting this idea, I don't promote or demote any quadrant, just the idea of putting people with similar political philosophies together so they can more effectively pursue their goals.

Further information:

Here are some competing representation of politics:

Simple Image Compression Techniques

2007-02-22T23:05:00.000-08:00

Before jpeg, gif, and png, images were compressed by much simpler means, often by analog circuits.

Analog TV uses two channels, luminance (the signal used by black and white TVs) and chrominance (color). The trick NTSC uses is to spend relatively more bandwidth on luma than chroma because the human eye is more sensitive to light than to color.

This image employs this techniques, but takes it a step further. The image is in CMYK. All color channels were reduced to 50% the resolution (requiring 1/4 the space) and due to the human eye being even more insensitive to yellow, the bits used were reduced by 50% to 4 bits.

So, the math:

Originally, each channel took the same space, s, so a total of 4s bytes were used. Cyan and magenta are reduced to .25s , each. Yellow, now requiring 4 bits per pixel, not 8, is reduced to .125s. The resulting space required is 1.625s, or around 41% of the original.

Here's the result (you should click it for the full effect; the image is too large):
The left-most pane is the original image. The middle-left pane is the result of resizing the image to take 40% the space, then resizing it up. The middle-right pane is the result of the aforementioned color specific process. The right-most pane is the same as the previous one, only with 1 bit yellow.

Things to note: the pink flower in the 2nd pane from the left is quite blurry when compared to the neighboring panes. The 3rd pane looks less crisp than the 1st, but in a less tangable way. Note the perceived quality difference in colors between the 2nd and 3rd frames is neglegable, despite yellow's reduced precision. Finally, note the severe, but almost acceptable color changes between the 3rd and 4th panes.

10 Ideas for Anna Nicole Smith's Corpse

2007-02-22T20:15:00.000-08:00

Today, the fight was just resolved for where Anna Nicole Smith's final resting place would be.

How many options could there be that people would fight over?! For most people, it's a choice between being buried or cremated. Some of the slightly offbeat choices are natural cemeteries (sidenote: I am very much in favor of this one and would like it for myself), and having remains launched into space.

Here they are: 1 idea that shows I care and 9 ideas that are earning me a place in hell.

10.
Locks of love.

9.
Silicone implants harvested and saved for the opening of the Museum of Plastic Surgery.

8.
Next generation Botox trials.

7.
Brain research.

Albert Einstein's brain was donated for research in hope of gaining knowledge. I'm sure we can learn just as much, if not more with modern medical technology, from the his antithesis.

6.
Next on the Howard Stern Show...

5.
Used to scare Paris, Nicole, Lindsay, and Britney straight.

4.
Corpse stuffed by a taxidermist and displayed in the Playboy Mansion.

3.
ManBeef 2.0

2.
1 word: eBay

1.
The Anna Nicole Adult Puppet Show

Luckily, I'm not alone in joking about her too early. The good people (with whom I have no association) had a few ideas too:

The Biggest Problem with Social News Sites (Digg, Reddit, et al.)

2007-02-20T23:01:00.000-08:00

Quite simply, and might I add poetically, sensationalistic headlines.

We've been exposed to and immersed in social hierarchies our entire lives, so it's no wonder we form similar hierarchies on social news sites. The desire to both fit in and stand out drives people to compete for "karma," recognition, or some other abstract reward for being popular. The best way to be popular is to submit stories with hyperbolic, semi-accurate headlines that appeal to the broadest demographic.

The result is biased news without integrity. True, some stories are of interest primarily to the demographic on the site, but others are explicitly biased.

Yes, the problem with social news is, ironically, the social nature of it.

Now, a solution: since these sites encourage almost capitalistic behavior, there needs to be some large penalty for submitting inaccurate and biased stories--enough of a penalty to discourage such tactics. In contrast, a community (more communist) approach would be to eliminate karma altogether, but people would quickly form black market karma (tm) that's created in the comments section.

Why doesn't my old computer work well anymore?

2007-02-19T22:27:00.000-08:00

In fixing people's questions, I got this question a lot. It's fairly complicated, and there are a number of reasons, some easy to fix, some not-so-easy.

First, it might not be, it might be you. Psychologically, when you buy a new computer, you expect it to be fast, but as it gets older, you expect less of it, and get dissappointed in the performance.

Here are some of the most common problems:

A virus, spyware, or adware is using you computer's resources.
Between installations and uninstallations, your systems registry can get corrupted. Additionally, it can get corrupted through normal use.
System files are damaged due to occasional hard power downs.
The hard drive is dying and beginning to corrupt your files.
Overheating
A weird hardware problem

Before trying anything, back up your data. You've heard it before, but it's true; backing up data can save you time, money, and a major headache.

If you're sure it isn't just you, it might be programs running on your computer. Spyware and adware use your computer resources for their ends, not yours. Before going further, make sure you virus scanner is up to date and run a scan. If you don't have a virus scanner, Avast free edition is, well, free. I'm not getting paid to plug them, but I found their virus scanner to be fairly user friendly and most importantly, free. After you've made sure a virus isn't using your system's resources, there might still be spy/ad-ware on it with a free scanner like AdAware.

Lots of programs use the Windows registry to store their information. With all the changes made to it, it can get corrupted. A tool (again, free) like CCleaner can fix some of these issues.

So you don't have any malware, and your registry is fine, but your computer is still acting weird. If some files got corrupted, there are three reasonable solutions. The easy one, although less effective, is using system file checker. To check system files, go to Start, Run, then type "sfc /SCANNOW" (without the quotes). It will ask you for your Windows CD. Hopefully your manufacturer included one with your computer for a situation like this. If they didn't you can probably find a copy on various websites, or you can call them and ask for one. Even if they won't give it to you, it will let them know that customers want to have this CD. If the system file checker doesn't fix your problem, it's time for more drastic action where you really should back up your data first. Boot from the CD and repair your Windows installation. This replaces most of the files Windows uses. If thing are still screwed up, repeat the process, only reformat your hard drive an reinstall Windows. This is where your backups come in handy.

If your new installation starts acting up or the installer fails, you probable have a bad hard drive, but first, make sure you don't have a dust problem. It's a little rare for computers to be affected by dust, but it's worth checking.

These days, new drives are pretty cheap. For those not technically savvy, picking the right replacement can be a challenge. The two things to look for in a hard drive. First, the size. Laptops use 2.5 inch drives, desktops 3.5 inch. The second thing to look for is the interface. The two main ones are Serial ATA and Parallel ATA. The label on the drive will probably say what the interface is. The general rule is that if the are a lot of pins, it's PATA (also called ATA), if it only has around 10, it's SATA. Be a little careful, though. If you see words like SCSI or fiber channel, it's not a typical consumer hard drive. Armed with this information, browse the internet or a local store for a new drive. If you know what you're doing, get the size that's right. If you don't, aim for the most reasonably priced size, and try to spend between $50 and $100. Once you've purchased and installed the new drive, repeat the Windows installation.

If you're still having problems, here are some things to remember about old computers:

Sometimes, they don't play well with new hardware.
Don't spend much more than $100 to fix it. At that point, just get a new one.
You might just need more memory. For Windows XP, 256mb is a reasonable minimum, but 512mb really helps.
If you're hearing strange noises, the parts that are supposed to make noise are the hard drive, CD-ROM drive (when in use) , CPU fan, and power supply fan. Strange noises are a bad sign, and you should try to replace the part.

The quick summary is that things usually get corrupted at different levels, and sometimes old hardware is responsible.

This isn't exhaustive. There are unusual things that can happen. Sometimes, CPUs, motherboards, and RAM die, but all of these are solid state, so death usually occurs later. I have a Pentium 2 system that's over 8 years old and still works fine, except everything other than the CPU, motherboard, and RAM has been upgraded.

I didn't explain the details on how to do some of this as there are numerous guides out there already. I mainly wanted to explain why your computer that worked fine when it was new is now sluggish.

The Hidden Cost of Big Box Retailers

2007-02-19T21:10:00.000-08:00

In the form of an anecdote, of course.

Today, I headed to the local major electronics store (not Best Buy) to get a few miscellaneous things, one of which was compressed air. I don't normally need it--I go through so little that I might be better off letting my money make interest in the bank than buying three cans--so I just wanted a single can. Most were in packs of three, but some where singles. I found one, and it seemed to match the $4.xx price tag below it.

After picking up something else (and deciding to just order the other stuff online to save money), I started waiting in an extraordinarily long line, a line Disneyland would be proud of (the store was even themed like Disneyland). After the wait, they scanned in my stuff. The problem was that the individual can didn't show up and probably came form a three pack.

And now dear reader, where we started: the clerk wouldn't just sell me the can. I was polite, I didn't push him to do it, or anything, but I could purchase the single can I found with other single cans.

Every small business owner would have said "oh, well, if the three were $10, is $4 fine for the single?" The clerk didn't. In his world of SKUs and barcodes, this simply wasn't an option. For me, going back and waiting in line again for something so small wasn't an option. I purchased the other item and left.

In big box retailers, clerks lack, the power and the appreciation for the customer, and appreciation of the business to make a simple gesture like that. When people lose concern for others, the world becomes a very anesthetized place. Uniform, big box retailers encourage this general lack of concern among people.

I'm going to try to surrender an extra few dollars in exchange for a retailer that recognizes the value of my time and loyalty. We all know the tradeoffs of mom and pop vs. big box, but it had more personal meaning when 30 minutes stood between me and what I already stood in line to buy.

Bayesian Probability on TV - A title only a nerd would love

2007-02-14T23:34:00.000-08:00

I recently saw an ad for TGI Friday's 3 course meal where they stated there were 210 combinations for meals (5 appetizers, 14 entrées, 3 desserts, stated explicitly in the extended version) .

Does anyone care? Nope. They were just filling up time. It's just fun to see simple principles that are used in places like Google, Reddit, and Digg for delivering relevant content show up on a commercial aimed at crows not likely to otherwise see them.

Odd, I thought I went to college and took math classes to avoid asking people if they'd like fries with that.

Second Best Facebook Group Ever

2007-02-13T00:58:00.000-08:00

(The first, which is about as tasteful as a Chris Rock black people rant, is Facebook Group for College Threesome)

No, not even my high standards are immune to content like this.

"Drunk Girls That Kiss Aren't Lesbians"

Fair enough, but that means they're either trendsbians or bisexual.

These pics don't lie.

The obligatory full page. Click it to see the big version.

Tips: Finding software and website alternatives with Wikipedia

2007-02-12T23:41:00.000-08:00

Have you ever searched for a program, found it, only to find you have to pay $40 for the full version?

Have you ever found a website you like, but found you don't meet the requirements to use it?

A quick tip: look up the software or website in Wikipedia. People often list competing and related products on the same page.

I found an open source equivalent of the sampling program Fruity Loops (a PC based predecessor of GarageBand) that way.

If that doesn't work, try looking up the general thing you're trying to do.

I found a tool that can extract files within Windows from a FreeBSD UFS2 partition on the UFS2 page.

A request: if you can't find what you're looking for on wikipedia but do elsewhere, please put it on a related page to help future people in your position, and maybe even yourself, later.

Leftover Technical Details: Part I

2007-02-12T00:08:00.000-08:00

In much of our lives, engineers hide the technical details from us. We drive our cars through a simple interface, we flip a light switch and don't have to worry about circuits, volts, or amps, but in a few strange places, users are forced to learn the underlying details of technology.

Radio station frequencies, AM and FM

If we weren't so used to it, the idea of AM, FM, frequencies, and 4 letters representing stations with the first letter representing which side of the Mississippi the station is on would all seem crazy. How many people know what AM and FM stand for? How many people know what they mean from a technical standpoint? How many people actually understand what the frequencies mean, what frequency division multiplexing is, and the original meaning of bandwidth?

These are all technical details we must have a cursory knowledge of to operate a radio. They're mainly left over for historical reasons--a lack of technology to abstract frequencies into a list of stations--but now we have such technology. There's no need for us to know frequencies or even of AM and FM.

UHF and VHF

Fortunately, these are going to be phased out soon in favor of broadcast digital HD TV, and the technical details are mostly a thing of the past.

Some of use remember that not long ago, the coax cable that came in from the antenna attached to a splitter. Then, we had to hook up the VHF coax cable to the TV, and the weird cable with the screws up to carry the UHF signal. Some TVs came with two antennas on top, one for each band, and each screwed into the TV in a different place.

Before there was UHF, there was only VHF. To save money, when the first TVs supporting UHF were made, they used two internal tuners.

Old TVs featured the two dials above. The first selected either a VHF channel or switches the TV to the UHF tuner in the second picture.

The channel numbers don't overlap, and the frequencies don't overlap. The only reason this was done was to save money, and it lasted a while. This is similar to AM and FM, but luckily, these technical details from the past are almost gone. New TVs integrate both tuners together and hide the notion of different frequencies altogether from the user.

URLs

After reading an article about how Google is the new http://, I quickly realized URLs are yet another unneeded technical detail. When my mom wants to look up a website, e.g. eBay, she searches for it instead of going to http://www.ebay.com; she avoids URLs altogether. Average users don't care what the address is. That's just an abstraction above IP addresses--closer to what users are looking for, but not quite.

That said, should Google and Yahoo be the definitive source for where eBay is? The strange thing is that this has been solved, albeit in a proprietary way: AOL keywords. Ironically, AOL has even abandoned them in favor of Google.

My solution is a non-proprietary top level keyword listing that ISPs mirror on keyword lookup servers. Registration priority goes to the owner of the trademark, generic search terms, e.g. cell phone, prescriptions, paint, are not permitted, scopes exist (global, national, regional, provincial, etc.), providing a means for returning the most relevant "Stan's Doughnuts."

The URL bar on browsers would be replaced with a keyword bar, and the search bar would be widened. Advanced users could still add a URL bar, but this serves no purpose for average users.

Area Codes and Long Distance

Between cell phones, VoIP, and instant messaging, I'm surprised long distance still exists on landlines. It seems like a dated construct leftover from the days of Ma Bell.

In a time where phones were switched by hand, the cost of long distance calls made sense (and cents for the phone company); it took a lot of effort to do the switching. When phone companies migrated away from that and to electronic switching, the overhead of a circuit still provided some justification for higher prices. Now, however, when even phone companies run calls over the internet, and two average users can use VoIP to talk to each other for free, the idea of long distance just seems dated. Maybe AT&T should have spent more time delivering my long distanceless world and less making a shiney new logo.

Part of the Solution

2007-02-11T21:28:00.000-08:00

A major problem America faces today is obesity; approximately two thirds of Americans are obese. Numerous diseases have been linked to obesity, including diabetes and even Alzheimer's. The government has been less then helpful. Even the Food Pyramid produced by the USDA (and influenced by lobbyists), makes questionable suggestions. Between two and three servings of dairy products are suggested, despite the fact that dairy consumption among mammals (after nursing has completed) is generally limited to humans in Europe and North America. Websites like NotMilk are dedicated to showing medical problems associated with milk consumption and exposing some of the tactics of the dairy industry.

When an industry as historically "wholesome" as the dairy industry is part of the problem, who could be part of the solution?

In part, an industry paired with milk: cereal.

According to the Mythbusters, there's a myth that the cereals that kids like, usually ones with words like "chocolate" and "sugar" on the box have less nutrition than the box itself. Jamie and Adam failed to mention that humans don't digest cellulose very well, but that just makes my point stronger.

I purchased a few boxes of such cereals:

Both of these are marketed with the appeal of junk food to kids not in a position to make educated food choices. Nutritionally, though, they're surprisingly good, especially when compared to the store brand "Healthy Advantage," a product clearly targeted at these kids' more informed parents:

For the calorie counters out there, the "healthy" cereal might not be such a clear choice:

Just looking at calories, a key factor in obesity, 3/4 cup of both sugary cereals have 130 calories, compared to 2/3 cup of the healthy cereal having 230, approximately twice the calories per cup than the others.

While targeting kids through ads promising a tasty breakfast might create problems for their future diet, I applaud major cereal manufacturers for doing their part to fight obesity.

It's nice to see some responsibility, but the "healthy" cereal also reminds us to read the box before we buy.