The Great Gate of Kiev

A Question

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 05:44:10 GMT

Since I have a "smart phone" (a term that is rapidly dying, and being replaced just with "phone"; maybe I should clarify as "internet-enabled phone"), does this mean that I should use Twitter? It would probably mean I would blog less (if that were possible), but I could get some syndication set up and make it look like I'm actually saying more.

The War on Apartment Clutter

Mon, 29 Dec 2008 05:49:52 GMT

So my new desk is (for all practical purposes) assembled. There's a piece that's supposed to attach to the top that hangs down and (as I later discovered) covers the gap between the drawers and the top, but it's "cosmetic", and I can hopefully attach it later this week. Pictures coming soon, once I figure out how to get them from my phone to Picasa (or a less Google-owned photo-hosting site).

I have to describe it as "low-quality", as at least two pieces had holes in the wrong spots, and a plastic "compression dowel" (like a regular dowel, only load-supporting) snapped in half because the construction directions given required it to hold more weight than it could at one point in the assembly. A nail (not included) fixed that, so no harm done. In general, the directions were not very good; I re-arranged a few steps during the process, and would do more now.

And with the desk comes two welcome tidings:
1) The old, old (my parents may have bought it before I was born) folding card table is now in the dumpster.
2) The large pile of bills, credit card statements, pay stubs, etc. that I don't really care about because it's all online is gone (I guess it's a small pile of my 2007 taxes and my car insurance papers). The other papers are now in the trash (envelopes/ads), my bag (to get shredded), or the file drawers.

The next step is (most likely) moving stuff around in my apartment. I'm not sure if it makes sense to have my desk in the more-desk shaped area by the kitchen, and to move the kitchen table more into the living room area. I'll figure something out. Also, I should start up my desktop and probably start the decommissioning process. It's 6+ years old, I rarely use it, the monitor stand broke so the monitor is at a terrible angle, and it takes a lot of desk space. I've got lots of old stuff on there I may want to keep, though.

And then the next project will likely be that my book collection has overgrown my bookshelf and I need another one somewhere. I'm at about 3.9 / 5 shelves used, so I probably have about 3 months at the current rate before it starts to seem full.

Thoughts on the Phone

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 04:50:05 GMT

I'm back to my apartment, and before the maelstrom of Google starts to re-envelop me, here's a review of my new Google phone (aka Android, aka G1).

Like: Mobile-optimized versions of websites. I'm talking about you, Google and Facebook. Both have homepages highly optimized for mobile screens, with less information on the page and more links useful on mobiles (Goodbye links to Youtube and Maps; most phones have separate apps for these and no Flash).

Don't Like: Regular sites on the phone. Besides Yahoo! and Microsoft, neither of which have done anything for mobile, sites like cbs.sportsline.com and cnn.com also have issues with usability. Assumptions of at least 640x480 generally break down, and elements such as SELECT boxes and iframes work (or don't work) completely differently.

Like: Dedicated apps for sites. As noted above, usability can be a pain, so if you can't do what you want in a browser, write an app for it. I would love a good "sports scores" or "stock quotes" or "TV schedule" app, even though I know sites that do this.

Don't Like: Lack of apps. Most of the apps listed exit for the iPhone, but not Android (at least not yet). This should pick up on the next few months.

Don't Like: Mis-clicking. It's very easy to click in the wrong place or hit the trackball too much. This can cause havoc by loading links you don't want to load, or doing the wrong move in a game.

Don't Like: The unbalanced keyboard. As I noted, typing with the two thumbs is painful on my right fingers, since there's the part of the phone where the "home" and "end" keys are on the right side, causing your fingers to have to stretch. Alternate typing techniques should help.

Like: Integration with Google Contacts. This is great from a Google strategic point of view (more people using contacts = more people using GMail), but it's also nice because emails and phone numbers are now really tied together.

Like: Free ring tones. This is the type of thing where having an "open" system will help, it's trivially easy to add ring tones or create your own from existing songs (Ringdroid is an app to do exactly that). I sense that the "ring tone" market is nearly dead, and with it the stupid commercials to spend $20 bucks for 10 ring tones per month.

Like: "Draw pattern to unlock". Not less secure than a password, but easier to remember and faster to do. Also serves well to prevent accidental use in a pocket, which is the main point.

Don't Like: Lock speed. Phone will go to sleep mode (good) and lock itself (less good) after about 30 seconds. If it didn't require a pattern for the next minute (perhaps "click here" to prevent accidental use) it would be nicer.

Like: Maps and Youtube apps. They "just work". Very good.

Don't Like: Camera app/camera. You have to hold still for about 5 seconds to take a non-blurry shot. Even if I don't shake, I often assume the picture is taken and move before it actually takes.

Like: MicroSD card, particularly after upgrading to 4GB. Enough to keep enough music as well as other stuff. Very tiny, actually.

PS: Like: Automatic notification on email arrival. I get a volume of email at my public account (5 per day or so, most of which I care about) that this is very useful.

The Parting of the Ways

Tue, 01 Jan 2008 11:51:33 GMT

Well, after 1330 days, 1225 posts (counting this one), 1270 received comments, and a bunch of other statistics I don't want to bother to compute, we have reached a crossing roads for this blog. It's being sharded three ways, as of today.

1) The "link blog" lives at Google Reader, containing all the day's news stories that are interesting in some way. If there were an easy way for me to comment on them and I had more time, I would.

2) I'm starting a blogspot blog for "serious" posts. To start with, this will probably be mostly about technology, politics, and a bit of random other stuff that seems serious. It specifically will not comment on anything related to Google. It also will not talk about anything related to who I am or what I've done recently. The url is http://appower.blogspot.com/ . This blog, in line with the theme established here, will be named "Pictures at an Exhibition". Expect volume of at least 2 posts per week to start with.

3) This blog isn't going anywhere. Er, that's not exactly true. It's going in two directions. First, I'm going to try to give more detailed and frequent posts in the "what's going on in my life" direction, that aren't just random ramblings. Second, it's going friends-only after this post. I'm pretty sure that most people who read this have a large number of their LJ posts as friends-only already, so it shouldn't really matter. For those of you who might be reading this some other way, I will syndicate some of the posts to Facebook notes, which should be readable by you. If you are neither an LJ-friend nor a Facebook friend (my profile), and you can't bring yourself to ask for either, then you're just out of luck.

The Domain Registry

Sat, 29 Dec 2007 06:10:59 GMT

It costs a domain registrar $6.62 in fees to ICANN and Verisign to register a domain name. This is around 1.8 cents per day. With a well-designed hosting system, it probably costs not much more than that to host domains in bulk as well, and set up some auto-generated content with lots of ads. If you can get 2 or 3 people a month to come to the site and click on ads, it's a profit-generating business. And with billions of people on the internet, many of whom are keen to make typos and click on the oddest ads, that doesn't take that much effort. It would be relatively easy for one person to scale this to 10000 domains with a dozen or so machines, a dedicated internet connection, and a few simple scripts that could be written in around a week.

Thus, people do this. A lot. Some of them make money, many of them don't. Regardless, it leads to millions and millions of "parked domains", where people spend the $6.62/year (probably around $7 with the registrar's commission) to hold onto the domain and generate the trickle of clicks. At this point, in the .com realm (which is still the only one that matters for any business), probably every 3 letter domain is registered, as is every 4-letter alphabetic domain and every 4 or 5 character numeric domain (you can get random 4-letter hybrids, like d3gf.com, z3gf.com, hea4.com were some randomly available ones). Any logical English word is registered, as are most logical combinations of words.

In one sense, this price is fair, since ICANN and Verisign really don't have that much in the way of costs per domain. They have to have a large replicated database and a lot of serving capacity, but each record is so small it amortizes to maybe 15 cents per record. On the other hand, demand for many domains is a lot greater than supply. So there is a secondary market with utterly obscene prices (For example, Computers.com for 2.2 MILLION dollars, CaribbeanVacations.com for 130 thousand, News.mobi for 110 thousand, RapVideos.com for 70 thousand, CertifiedPublicAccountants.com for 30 thousand, DrugRehabilitationProgram.com for 8 thousand). What we have here is a land grab, and lots of people hoarding domains and doing nothing with them. It also looks suspiciously like a Dutch Tulip auction, but that's just me. Ideally, there would be something akin to property taxes on domains or some other way to drive the price up to prevent people from registering them and doing nothing, and causing startups to have stupid names like Meebo and Kijiji and Foonz.

However, the single letter domains mostly aren't registered to anyone. Paypal owns http://www.x.com/, Nissan owns http://www.z.com/, and Qwest owns http://www.q.com/ . In this blog, some guy suggests that ICANN auction off the domains to raise money. Fair enough idea, even if the auction scheme sounds like it is ripe for collusion. However, the comments are priceless in their stupidity. They're worse than Youtube. And, if you replace ICANN with "the government", pretty clearly show flaws in conservative logic that conservatives are more careful to cover up.

I agree with StockDoctor… I like the concept of a price “reduction” based on the revenue generated from selling these single character domains.

Kicking more money back into ICANN doesn’t make much sense.. It’s like with with any bureaucratic or governmental agency, the more money that is provided, results usually become less efficiently achieved, and more money is wasted..

Drown the government in the bathtub, anyone? And you see what you get, a couple people who grab everything and claim that it's their right to have it all and extort everyone else.

There’s a handful of single letter domains. And over the years probably thousands of people and businesses that would have registered them at the going rate or purchased them for a higher price from the rightful registrant.

Now they’re worth millions and it seems unfair to the people who would have bought them to make them available now just to line the coffers of ICANN. ICANN receives a fee for each domain registered and they are to fund ICANN from that. They need to stay within their core responsibilities and leave the sale of domains to the registrars and the aftermarket.

There’s only one fair way to distrubute these single character domains and that is some form of lottery or drawing run by a outside agency suppervised by several other concerns. Else they need to just keep them in reserve and the few that are registered already need to be locked to the present entity and not allowed back into the market if surrendered.

WHAT? Since ICANN should have sold them for $6, they're stealing from people by selling them for more? This guy calls himself spambait, so I'm not going to even bother replying.

ICANNt may be a corporation, but it is a non-profit and was contracted by the DoC to manage for “OUR” benefit, not to generate revenue off “OUR” backs with a tax, and fund their globetrotting parties. Who the heck said these 1 character domains are “owned” and can be sold by ICANNt? Seems to me “WE” own them and any of “OUR” sales revenue should go to reducing registration costs etc.

It's our money, not ICANN's. God forbid that ICANN have any money to do anything useful for the internet.

Ps think about the money generated how many people live on this rock we call Earth a few BILLION lets say at least 100 million chances are sold (i think alot more)100 million x 25 = ummm 2.5 Billion now thats what i call capitolism.Jay what do you think of this idea.

Because Lotteries are Magical! Lotteries cure everything! And people will drive the price of the lottery to 10 times Powerball.

Sorry. I don’t know why some people here are so strongly in favor of a million dollar auction. What would that actually say to a normal ‘user’, a smaller company ? You aint’t got the funds to get our ’special vintage’ domain?

If ICANN auctions these domains, it actually ignores about 99.999 percent of the Internet users it is supposed to serve.

Yes, because every company should be able to buy a single letter domain name. And if ICANN doesn't let them, they are evil and fascist.

Good Morning, DMV

Fri, 28 Dec 2007 04:11:52 GMT

Random Fact of the Day: If you drop a half-full glass bottle of Orangina from 2 and a half feet onto a parking lot, it won't break! At least mine didn't.

Random Fact of the Day Number 2: Firefox spell-checker doesn't like the word Orangina. This puts the all-time score at me: 258, spellchecker: 3. (259, since I think it's perfectly fine to make spellchecker into a compound word)

So, despite going to the DMV in early October to get my driver's license, I am yet to actually RECEIVE it. This is because California has a bizarre policy where you don't actually get the license when you are at the DMV, you have to wait for them to mail it to you, supposedly within 60 days.

Now, it's been significantly over 60 days, so I called the DMV to find out whether they were being slow, or if (possibly) it was the post office's fault. I call them up, and I get a minute-long recording "The DMV will be closed on Dec 25 and Jan 1" in English and Spanish and "Try using our website!" in English and Spanish before they give you any options. "For English, press 1". *1*

Another minute of talking, letting me know about the changed hours, and how I can do some things online now. "To check on driver's license, press 2". *2*

"Please be aware that it may take up to 60 days. If it has been 60 days, press 0 to talk to a person." *0* *ring, ring*

At this point, I get a person who conveniently tells me after a minute of getting my info that I need to call a different DMV number to find out what is going on, and ask about a PDPS inquiry.

I dial. Busy signal. 5 minutes later, I dial again. *ring, ring*

The second person, after entering my information, lets me know that they sent for a PDPS inquiry (something about if you have points in another state) about 60 days ago. They normally come back after 30 days, but mine apparently hasn't. He told me I would have to call a third number to check on the status of that. Also, I could go down to the DMV to get another temporary permit. Considering I'd have to wait an hour, I think I'll pass.

I dial the third number. Busy signal. 5 minutes later, busy signal. I get distracted and don't get back to calling today.

In conclusion: I think a person could get elected Governor of California by running on a platform of reforming the DMV.

Top 10 RSS Feeds

Sun, 23 Dec 2007 08:35:56 GMT

By popular demand (er, maybe not so popular, but who knows), I have compiled a "powera's Top 10 Feeds" list!

Dishonorable Mention:

http://www.blogsforvictory.com/ - Wait, this isn't "Bottom 10"? Still, Mark Noonan is the best "right-wing moron" on the entirety of the internets, which is some form of accomplishment, I guess.
http://precursorblog.com/ - On the same "Bottom 10" line, Scott Cleland is the best "I hate Google, Moveon, and anything else possibly hostile to telecom companies" moron on the web.

Runners-Up (there are 10 of them):
http://www.basicinstructions.net - Pretty good webcomic, but it gets a tad formulaic over time
http://iowahawk.typepad.com - Iowahawk, the only one of the conservative political humor commentators that's ever funny
http://www.allfacebook.com - If you want your Facebook news.
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ - If you want tips on Search Engine Optimization from deep inside Google.
http://kara.allthingsd.com/ - A good "tech industry" blog.
http://www.gigaom.com/ - A good Silicon Valley focused "tech industry" blog.
http://www.realityblurred.com/realitytv/ - For all your reality TV "news"
http://www.boingboing.net/ - It's Boing Boing. You probably already read it.
http://www.valleywag.com/ - It's the "National Inquirer" of Silicon Valley. Occasionally, they do break stuff. However, they're usually wrong.
http://www.scobleizer.com/ - Sorry Scoble, you just missed the cut. He's got lots of long videos. He's also not afraid to be wrong, which is both a good and a bad thing. He's got lots of good posts, but also an hour long video of how Mahalo is going to beat Google, which is just ridiculous.

And the winners:
10) http://blog.pmarca.com/ - Marc Andreessen's blog - Good, solid commentary on the tech industry mixed in with the world at large.
9) http://jwz.livejournal.com/ - JWZ - He used to be in the tech industry, and wrote stuff like Netscape and xscreensaver. Now he owns a nightclub, and writes about ... whatever.
8) http://www.joelonsoftware.com/ - Joel Spolsky - Lots and lots of great ideas in his posts. If he didn't try to make everything be somewhat of a promotion for FogBugz (a product I've never used with a terrible name), this blog would be much better.
7) http://www.nerdnirvana.org/ - Sangent: The Daily Ramblings - Lots of amusing YouTube and other videos. I'm particularly fond of the "The Real Hustle" videos he gets from the show in the UK.
6) http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/ - Strange Maps - Amusing historical maps. 'Nuff said.
5) http://www.xkcd.com/ - XKCD - Do I need to elaborate? It's XKCD.
4) http://www.politicalwire.com/ - Taegan Goddard's Political Wire - Good brief summaries of the day's most important political news, without too much of a political bias.
3) http://www.dailykos.com/ - You may protest his politics, but Kos is very good at both analysis and running a website. The presence of diaries mean that there are literally thousands of budding political writers there, and the best of them move to the front page. Former bloggers there populate a large portion of the liberal blogosphere, but a good number of the best still post on the front page. The group blog aspect also allows it to hit top news 24/7 with limited latency, and to have experts in many fields. There really isn't a conservative analog, since Free Republic had such an early start that it swallowed up any efforts on the right.
2) http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/ - Google Operating System, by Ionut Alex Chitu - The best blog on all things Google, period, hands down, end of discussion. I work at Google, and I read this blog to find out what is going on. It's not affiliated with Google, but it's great at finding all the new Google products and giving a reasonable analysis.
1) http://www.techdirt.com/ - The best tech blog I've seen. Lots of relevant posts, with thoughtful analysis. This has the best signal-to-noise ratio for a blog of it's volume in posts per day by far, and accordingly has the most shared posts in the past month, beating out blogs with 3 times as many posts.

You can get the Top 10 blogs conveniently at http://www.google.com/reader/shared/user/04455784389254111638/label/Top10 and the runners-up at http://www.google.com/reader/shared/user/04455784389254111638/label/RunnersUp .

Oikonomos

Sun, 23 Dec 2007 07:43:43 GMT

"The children asked him if to kill was not a sin
"Not when he looked so fierce" his mommy butted in
If looks could kill it would have been us instead of him" - The Continuing Story Of Bungalow Bill

I like to cling to the fiction that prices are in some way directly related to the cost of production. In Economics 101, the model is that if prices are sufficiently above the cost of production, there will be competitors, and the price will naturally get knocked down.

However, that doesn't work for multiple reasons. First, you have patents, copyrights, and trademarks. Second, you have innovation that occurs faster than competitors can keep up. Third, there's implicit collusion on prices in some situations, since nobody wants a price war. Fourth,

There are two incorrect conclusions that can be drawn from this. First is the timeless "Just because it costs more means that it's better/more valuable". Second, we can get "By buying the cheapest thing that satisfies your needs, you are not only saving money, but also helping the store and the rest of the economy behave more efficiently."

I tend to lean towards two other fallacies as well: "Rent seeking is always bad and those doing so should be shunned", and "Waiting in line is generally bad, and a symptom that you should try at a different time". As for rent-seeking, the main issue is that it leads to people making (possibly large) amounts of money by basically being in the way, and it in general is not very useful. As for queueing, it also does serve as a way of effectively increasing prices for a scarce good. If the good will become less scarce in the future, it's generally a good thing to avoid the excess queueing. If the good will always be scarcer than demand, then, well, you're generally out of luck, and have to just try and get lucky.

My General Schedule for the next 2-3 months

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 10:15:07 GMT

December 19-25 - My brother is in town visiting from Iowa. Sightseeing and tourist-y stuff abounds, probably including going to the 49ers-Tampa Bay game, and probably working on furniture and household accessory acquisition.

December 25-31 - Generally working and on-call, so the other people in the rotation who actually care about Christmas aren't. I think I won't be on-call for New Year's Party time (we're working to get Dublin to cover that in our timezone), but haven't figured that out for sure yet.

January - Nothing exciting scheduled yet for this month. If you're in the SF area or know stuff that is, feel free to suggest stuff.

February 4-6 - Valleywag was right, Google is going to Disneyland! Everyone in the western half of the US in the company is going to Disney on Tuesday, with 2 travel/party days book-ending it. I'm thinking that I may leave on Friday, February 1 to go to LA to sightsee, since I'm yet to be in that town. If you have thoughts as to why that would or would not be a good idea, or have ideas on what I should do when down there (apart from corporate-sponsored drunken debauchery), please comment.

February 8-11 - On a red-eye arriving Friday morning, I fly back to Iowa. My other brother's Bar Mitzvah is on Saturday. I still need to book a one-way flight back. Flights out of DSM are ~$100, flights out of CID are ~$300, and flights out of ALO are ridiculous. I may do some convoluted tour of the state to end up flying out of DSM on Wednesday, especially if deathweasel, who will be in CID, doesn't have a reliable car yet.

rest of February - Google doesn't run itself, you know. Somebody has to feed the gnomes.

Oh, I got business cards. They say "Alexander Power, Gnome Feeder, Site Reliability Engineering". See, I told you I wasn't lying when I said I feed the gnomes. It says so on my business cards even!

Iowa Caucus Analysis

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 09:58:28 GMT

Any analysis of the Iowa Caucuses really needs to keep in mind 3 things which may be different about the caucuses than a regular primary election:

1) Only people who physically attend the caucus at 7PM on Thursday, January 3, can participate in the caucus. There is no absentee ballot, no make-up date.
2) On the Democratic side, there is no secret ballot in the caucus. You vote by joining a preference group. Republicans use the results of a secret ballot.
3) On the Democratic side, only candidates with at least 15% of the vote in a precinct can get any votes from the precinct. Further, only committed delegate counts are announced. Republicans, once again, use a secret ballot without a threshold for viability.

This impacts the Democratic results a lot more than the Republicans, which is mostly a regular election apart from the "specific place and time" aspect.

In general, this means:
Dennis Kucinich should do exactly as well as he did last year, hitting viability in a few precincts by Fairfield (home of the Maharishi college), and in major cities. Gravel may fail to be viable in any precinct. Al Sharpton and Joe Lieberman didn't reach viability in 2004, and Wesley Clark got only .1%.

Chris Dodd, Joe Biden, and Bill Richardson are likely to have their support appear significantly lower than it would otherwise be from the viability constraints. I would expect a candidate with 5% support statewide to get at most 1% of the vote in the caucus. Considering that all endorsements and momentum is being gobbled up by Obama, Edwards, and Clinton, I don't see how any of them will break 2% statewide unless they can push closer to 10% in statewide polls.

I think the decision between Obama, Edwards, and Clinton is still too close to call at this point. I wouldn't want to speculate without being on the ground in Iowa. However, assuming that they each get 25%, and the win doesn't cascade into a larger win in New Hampshire, there probably will be nothing decided until the mega-primary on February 5, by which point at least one candidate should be practically eliminated. If it's close enough between the other two, they could keep running to probably force a brokered convention, but that's very unlikely (I'd estimate a 40% chance all 3 are viable for the Feb 5 primaries, and only about a 5% chance all 3 keep going after that). Edwards obviously has the most ground to make up, but the sheer math in Iowa looks good. I'd estimate the 2004 supporters to break down about as follows (this is a complete WAG):
Kerry - 60% Clinton, 30% Obama, 10% Edwards
Edwards - 70% Edwards, 20% Obama, 10% Clinton
Dean - 50% Obama, 30% Edwards, 20% Clinton
Gephardt - 50% Clinton, 30% Obama, 20% Edwards

which gives Clinton 35%, Edwards 34%, Obama 30%. This is obviously missing lots of factors and based on a lot of wild guessing, but it's my best attempt at a prediction. Overall, I'd put my money on Obama, since he seems to have the most upside left.

The Republicans are more interesting, with 6 candidates figuring to have a possibility of winning the race: Thompson, Romney, Giuliani, McCain, Huckabee, Paul. I have them listed in the order from "most establishment" to "most non-establishment".

The FReepers are generally Thompson supporters, which should say something, but he hasn't done a thing to distinguish himself other than being the great hope of the establishment powers that be. Romney is certainly the "big business" candidate, and the "I stand for everything the Republican party is under George Bush" candidate. Giuliani is the candidate of the fascist wing of the Republican party, and has various problems on "social issues", but "9/11" and "I can beat Hillary" and did I mention "9/11"?

McCain used to play the radical, but seems to have gotten too tired of being attacked by his own party to be too much of a disruptor, and is getting the lion's share of endorsements, from Joe Lieberman to the Des Moines Register. Huckabee frightens the big business part of the Republican party but has the Christian base and Chuck Norris. Paul frightens most all of the Republican party that doesn't support the gold standard and leaving Iraq, but has the most fervent supporters and (astonishingly) the most money, and should get >15% in New Hampshire regardless of what happens.

Then there's Duncan Hunter (supported mainly by some die-hard Freepers), and Tom Tancredo (still pushing against illegal immigration, legal immigration, and foreigners in general). Once again, they can be best ignored, except for their endorsement if they decide to drop out. Tancredo may go all the way to the convention on issues, but Hunter may endorse relatively early, perhaps before Iowa if he doesn't want to be crowded out by bigger fish or feels he can guarantee a theoretical cabinet slot.

Also note that a lot of states on the Republican side use winner-take-all for delegate allotment, which can easily cascade small margins in votes to large ones in delegates. (The Democrats banned this after the '68 convention) These states include (from The Green Papers): Arizona, Connecticut, Delaware, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Utah, and Virginia, with many other states using winner-take-all by Congressional District (including California, Florida, Ohio, and Michigan).

If I had to predict overall, I'd be most wary of Huckabee, as Markos of Daily Kos has felt since May 2006. The only other feasible option I can imagine is Romney, as the Establishment candiate. The Powers That Be realize that Fred Thompson is a lazy old man who doesn't have a single interesting idea and has no charisma, and they won't prevent him from going nowhere. Giuliani is probably sunk regardless of what happens. McCain ... McCain is an enigma. I can't imagine he'll do well in Iowa, but if Huckabee wins Iowa it may end up McCain-Paul-Huckabee in New Hampshire, which could give him a fighting shot. Paul cannot win unless he manages a complete sweep on Feb 5 because of the super-delegates, but he could do well enough to split the party in half.

This Week's (British) Sign of the Apocalypse

Thu, 13 Dec 2007 08:23:21 GMT

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2225434,00.html

"The question of just how long it should take to eat fast food is being answered by the burger giant McDonald's, which is making customers finish within 45 minutes or face a charge of £125."

"Several weeks later, he received a letter from Civil Enforcement demanding £125, or £75 if the charge was paid quickly. At first Thomson, a businessman from Sussex, did not even realise that he was being charged for spending too long at McDonald's, as the notice gave only a partial address.

When he remembered his visit to McDonald's, Thomson asked Civil Enforcement for photographic proof of his "offence", but was told he would have to pay for a photo. He contacted the DVLA to ask how Civil Enforcement had obtained his details, and was told the DVLA releases data to bodies which have "reasonable cause" to ask for it.

McDonald's told Thomson that the use of "enforcement methods" happened only in "extreme" circumstances. The company added: "At this restaurant we have stipulated that a member of the public may be parked for 45 minutes unless permission is given to stay longer by the duty manager."

McDonald's in effect washed its hands of the charge, saying it had been imposed by Civil Enforcement and the burger giant did not profit from it.

Thomson's charge has risen to £213. He has been threatened with court action and received a letter from a debt collection company. He said that neither he nor any member of his family would eat at the chain again."

(link via Boing Boing)

Hey hey, Woody Guthrie

Sun, 09 Dec 2007 09:33:02 GMT

"Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides they wear black, which is such a beastly color. I'm so glad I'm a Beta."

Sometimes I wish somebody would tell me "You don't have to be perfect" in such a way that I would actually believe them. Being able to do so is an exercise left by logical necessity to the reader. (In all honesty, if you're reading this, and thinking to yourself that you should do so, you probably don't have a chance of doing so.)

Sometimes I think that I would lose my "edge" from that, that I'd no longer have this driving sense of vague inadequacy. But other times, I just get sick of thinking that I look funny or talk funny and the realization that if I didn't recognize the person in the picture as me I wouldn't think as such. Or I do something wrong and dwell on it for far longer than I should until I manage to atomically forget about it.

I think that I'd probably have a lot more fun that way, and be a lot more sociable with strangers, and get into a lot more trouble that way as well. Neither of those are necessarily good or bad things, though. At worst, it just sounds frightfully mundane. Which is probably just as much a driving factor, another vague sense.

Anyhow, in the "my life" rundown, stuff is generally going good. Friday, Randall Munroe of XKCD gave a tech talk at Google. The highlight of the talk had to be the beginning of the Q&A, with the first two questions coming from Guido van Rossum (creator of Python) asking if he had to fly to imitate XKCD now (a la Cory Doctorow), and Donald Knuth himself asking about the O(n log log n) algorithm. Also where he was asking "what are some other types of weapons" and I took advantage of the finger missiles I brought along in case the situation presented itself.

The holiday party was Friday night (er, my half of it was). This was generally good, and a good way to see Google people actually wearing nice clothing and in the company of significant others. It was very ... big, with the tent taking up a substantial portion of the parking for Shoreline Amphitheatre. Other than that ... the Google hospitality department is filled with experts, and this was no exception. However, heavy desserts (especially those which are labeled "creme brulee" but I would describe as "chocolate mousse in a mini pie crust") don't go that well with open bars ...

We've also hit that point on the analemma (ok, this is a case of "long word dropping to make myself feel better than those of you who need to look it up") where we have the earliest sunsets. It's definitely taking a bit of a toll, with the whole "Google campus is great for vampires" sense. I may go on a light-seeking expedition tomorrow.

This Week's Sign of the Apocalypse

Sat, 08 Dec 2007 22:05:05 GMT

Mr. T doing a commercial for World of Warcraft

These Nuts Are Why I Hate Everyone

Fri, 07 Dec 2007 08:01:19 GMT

Okay, that's an exaggeration. But still, in a frightening display of idiocy on the internet, here we go:

Our first stop is our old friend/moron Scott Cleland of the Precursor Blog. Today's idiocy: net neutrality is unreasonable because some people use too much bandwidth. Earth to Scott Cleland: Despite what Verizon and your other sugar daddies say, net neutrality is not about whether they can limit people's bandwidth. The concern is WHY they are limiting it, and whether they're doing what they legally claim to. Net neutrality restricts something along the lines of "You get a connection, but only to certain sites". It doesn't restrict "We only want to sell you 128k and not a 10M connection". And "We sell you a 10M connection, but if you use more than 128k we ban you" is just lying.

Next: EDRO, a global warming zealot who claims "In the most probable future scenario, about 20% the world’s cities become uninhabitable by 2012", which is entirely bullcrap. When I say that Al Gore's awareness drive isn't doing anything much for the environment, the fact that there seems to be more than a fair share of morons like EDRO around is a prime reason why. EDRO was linked to by another idiot who claims that Google's renewable energy push is bad for the environment because it would push us to use more energy. Apparently, the only real solution is to immediately cut all energy use by 90%, which is apparently "evolution". I'd love to see how solar panels create "energy pollution", unless they would rather us turn off the sun since the fusion is going to run out in 5 billion years otherwise.

Third, we have one of the worst interpretations of quantum theory I've ever seen, as referred to in this Slashdot article. As always, Slashdot reports about press articles about research papers should be taken with a lot of salt, but the quotes of Prof Krauss make it pretty clear that this one is at least partially "Person uses bogus science and scaremongering to get article in major British paper".

But not even half as bad as Darrell Williams (link goes to smackdown), who in a long and rambling article claims that relativity is utterly bogus. His reasoning: Einstein was a celebrity that nobody really believed; Physics and math are incompatible (apparently because of Zeno's paradox); Everything's an approximation anyhow, so there is no mathematical evidence for relativity; and the Big Bang happened at a specific place and time, so it isn't relative. I have no idea why he has it out for relativity, but the smackdown is very direct. It's also very long, since there's just so much that is so bad, it isn't even wrong.

Next, we have this post about attempts to "Willie Horton" Mike Huckabee. The whole Clinton-related aspect of this is slightly freaky, but I'm concerned on at least 4 levels about this. First, why are Democrats busy gooning Huckabee during the primary, where he is probably the most decent of the Republicans running (not liberal, decent)? Second, Willie Horton was bogus 20 years ago, it's still bogus, and the hard-core "tough on crime" crowd is voting for a cold-hearted Republican anyhow. Third, the only reason Willie Horton did anything was as an extension of the Southern Strategy (subtle racism), and that doesn't even apply here. Fourth, what's with all of these "liberal Democrats" suddenly getting "lock 'em all up, throw away the key, and let God sort 'em out" now? You'd think they have no principles whatsoever.

And, last, since no such post would be complete without him, from his new home at http://blogsforvictory.com/ , we have Mark Noonan!!! with It SNOWED! Ergo, global warning is a hoax!. You fucking moron. Apparently, if it's hot, it doesn't mean shit, but if it snows in December, it means that there's no global warming. You can't have it both ways. Actually, you shouldn't be able to have "One weather event implies global warming is/isn't true" either way. It isn't true with Katrina, it isn't true with a heat wave or a snow storm or a drought or a flood or a groundhog seeing his shadow.

Me Fail English? That's Unpossible!

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 06:46:29 GMT

Dear Kind Sirs Who Manage The Radios (An Older, Formerly Notable, First Cousin of The Internets):

Please to be playing less on your kind stations certain Songs, which I am to be finding Annoying through overplayment. These songs to be that which include lyrics of "If someone said three years from now you'd be long gone" which is "Who Knew" by Pink, and that which include lyrics of "When you kiss my nose the feeling shows" which is "Bubbly" by Colbie Caillat. These songs have much extra playing on radio stations beyond their quality would suggest amount value.

Much thanks to you and your pet iguanas for this kind service. May your hair fall out due to your pending advanced age, and your toenails turn yellow with joy and happiness.

PS: Also to be not playing so many Christmas songs. If we wanted Christmas songs, we'd listen to the 5 other stations with Christmas songs already. And seriously. We don't have President's Day songs for weeks, we don't have Flag Day songs or Armistice Day or Thanksgiving or Columbus Day songs. So why do we have so *#$@%^@ many Christmas songs?

PPS: Don't even think about bringing up Adam Sandler's Hannukah Song.

Tabs!

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 04:52:51 GMT

If you use Firefox and have lots of tabs, I recommend the Tab Mix Plus extension (look it up at mozilla.org) to manage them. As far as I'm concerned, it is essential for 2 features:

1) You can "protect" a tab to prevent closing it, and "lock" a tab to prevent jumping to another website from links, clicking a bookmark, entering a URL, etc. (they open new tabs).

2) Multiple lines of tabs.

As far as other useful add-ons go, there is RefControl, which allows you to block sending an HTTP Referer or edit what is sent on a per-site basis (generally useless unless you want to avoid leaking internal DNS names), and SwitchProxy, which lets you change proxies from the bottom right corner of your screen and not have to go through preferences.

Also, in Google product news, GMail now has Colored Labels. If you generally get only a few emails a day that are useful, you probably don't use filters and labels enough to need this, but if you are like most internal users at Google and get emails in ~300 threads per day (perhaps 1500 messages/day), it will change your life. Also: an AIM client built into GMail.

I Hit Midnight

Sun, 02 Dec 2007 08:09:22 GMT

More substantive posts may be coming soon. There's frankly not very much exciting happening. I do have a digital camera in my possession now, so you may see pics coming at some point in the near future. (No, not of me.)

In the mean-time, you can look at some of my meta-feeds. I would HIGHLY HIGHLY HIGHLY recommend you not try to read any of these in any other way than an RSS reader. Especially tech-popular, which gets literally hundreds of posts per day:
http://www.google.com/reader/shared/user/04455784389254111638/label/amusements
http://www.google.com/reader/shared/user/04455784389254111638/label/tech-personne
http://www.google.com/reader/shared/user/04455784389254111638/label/tech-popular

2358 RSS Posts

Tue, 27 Nov 2007 05:55:11 GMT

This is what I get for going offline for a full 120 hours (at least as far as corporate GMail and RSS are concerned). There's also the ~575 email threads, but those are filtered enough that I can read the most important 25 and search/ask people if anything else happened. This includes, by category:

amusements (85) - Comic strips, comedians, etc.
celebrity (45) - Anything relating to TV, Hollywood, etc.
deportivo (145) - Sports
google-related (76) - Google (also includes Yahoo & Facebook)
material-y-dinero (22) - Money or consumer goods sites
meta-feeds (81) - Shared feeds from others (thank God Scoble took the weekend off)
nouvelles-general (77) - News
personal (54) - Facebook status updates, plus some people I've met
personne-anonyme (146) - Personal blogs of people I haven't met
personne-fou (138) - A collection of morons (Mark Noonan, Jason Calacanis, Scott Cleland, Henry Blodget, ...)
politics-main (83) - Politics blogs I actually care to always read
politics-segundo (361) - Politics blogs I read mostly the headlines of
science (351) - Science. Also stuff like airplanes or oil drilling.
tech-personne (38) - Blogs by people about technology stuff
tech-popular (545) - Boing Boing, Engadget, GigaOM, Lifehacker, Mashable!, Slashdot, TechCrunch, Valleywag
technical (23) - Anything somewhat technical that doesn't fit in another category
technology (88) - Blogs by companies or news sites about technology

Now, to actually try to read all of these that I care about. This probably means all of amusements, personne-anonyme, tech-personne, technical; most of google-related, meta-feeds, politics-main, technology; and just headlines of the rest.

Oh, yeah. I was in Iowa over Thanksgiving. It was generally a surprise. If you were in Iowa and wish I had surprised you and I didn't, I'm sorry for forgetting you.

A Revelation

Sat, 17 Nov 2007 08:34:29 GMT

You know why the Bush-TANG (Texas Air National Guard) stuff never stuck, even though there was probably sufficient evidence to prove it?

Not because of the "mainstream media covering it up".

Not because of the FUD of the vast right-wing conspiracy.

No, it never stuck because nobody particularly cares if Bush was draft dodging Vietnam. By this point, it's generally accepted, despite whatever certain politicians may protest, that A: The draft is bad unless it is necessary; and B: the Vietnam war was bad and mostly unnecessary, certainly by 1972. The only people who are likely to care about the fact that somebody didn't show up for Vietnam are people who are voting straight-ticket Republican anyhow. Show me one Democrat or Independent who didn't vote for Clinton because of avoiding the draft in Vietnam, and I'll show you someone who's lying.

Quote of the Day

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 20:38:54 GMT

From Jim Cramer: "My method of buying is to lose money at a very, very aggressive pace" - Catch a Falling Google

I'm A Rock Star

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 20:42:36 GMT

1) So, I'm not always the best at putting things together. On Saturday, it was terrible weather all day here, both in San Francisco and in the South Bay. Later, I'm watching USC and Cal play football at Berkeley, and they're discussing how the bad weather is impacting the game. It doesn't occur to me until the end of the half when they mention "The rain here in the San Francisco area" that there might be a correlation between these weather-related events.

2) So I was pointed to some pages at http://www.californiamuscle.com recently. After a discussion as to whether or not certain clothing on the site was attractive, I finally came to the conclusion: "see, this is why you have sex with men and i don't"

3) I came across this interesting article over the weekend. It's generally pretty good, with a few exceptions and overgeneralizations.

4) Yeah, today is WFH. The amount of decongestants needed to be somewhat functional is enough to make me ... the word I keep using is "loopy", but I realize that I actually don't know what that means in this context. Anyhow, I keep moving faster than I can think and accidentally bumping into things and not being able to breathe, so it's probably a good idea to stay away from other people as much as possible.

*

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 08:30:07 GMT

The problem with AI approaches to understanding language in general is that they assume there is a fundamental meaning to the language that can be learned without access to the outside world; that if you look at English long enough and hard enough you can understand what "computer" means or what "book" means or what "lamp" means or what "red" means. But this is obviously nonsense, as anyone who has ever used a euphemism can surely test. They'll "analyze" your "language", if you know what I mean.

Until you have systems with sensory input beyond the shell, you will never get beyond gostaks distimming doshes in NLP.

But then, it is still a hard problem to try to embed actual meaning in language, that can be determined without appeal to context or translation. It's still a hard problem even when language is reduced down to number and number is reduced to a few axioms and an empty set.

(The first two parts are orders of magnitude easier; ZFC axioms or the ilk can take you from the empty set and some axioms to most of math, and then using math to build up models of objects to define basic linguistic terms, and so on.)

Edit: And that's the solution to the Chinese Room too. Assuming there isn't an Oracle present (not the DB, a system that can predict what questions you'll ask), the system would have to be intelligent to be able to actually answer your questions of arbitrary length, which as a Chinese speaker you could construct with relative ease.

Rocks (similar to such)

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 09:00:30 GMT

So, if I manage to find enough spare mental CPU cycles, I'm going to try running 13 characters in the /dev/null/nethack tournament. Here are some scratch notes for that:

Options to set: time, color, hilitepet, showexp, pickup $"?+!=/

Archaeologist - Lawful Dwarf, Start with 15HP, 16INT - T362 for L1, Bones on L4 - Samurai - 4 rings, some ?!
Gnomish stairs on L2, find +2 iron skull, 2 amethyst on G3, died from being in a shop with a hostile monster at L1 without a pickaxe and inciting guards after digging down

Barbarian - Neutral, Human - Found early /oPoly to get pet Aleax, but it killed the altar priest before I could get protection there. Sokoban had the amulet. Lost illiterate to a fortune cookie on L10. Managed to fall in water on a swamp level, BoH in a sack got wet. Took a trap door to Medusa, blew up dwarvish mithril and cloak of invisibility on Poly trap. Good early finds of stethoscope in store and ring of ~~winning~~ conflict in Sokoban. Died in the castle from running out of /Tele and a Lich with /oCreateMonster, even with conflict on.

Caveman - Lawful, Human - St/Cn 18, In11, Ch8 - Stethoscope on first level of mines - Killed by lack of HP at CLvl2

Healer - Neutral Gnome - MAGIC WHISTLE on DLvl3, Pet level-ported and trapped and died on M5 (hobbit had Trollsbane)

Knight - Lawful Human - Made the protection racket, bought 4+1+1+1 AC points at XP0. Sokoban had BoH, got Excalibur right after finishing, /Poly on DLvl12, got 11->13 from wraiths, missed TWO death rays from a lieutenant with a WoD, black dragon on Medusa, no /oDigging, didn't get wish from my blessed magic lamp, BONES on Mines 8 with Magicbane, opera cloak (displacement), 2 amulets, stethoscope, magic whistle, hiking boots, =oConflict - Blew away magic protection by praying on wrong altar, went to aligned priest on L15, recovered, had "oR, did Ludios to get money for new protection but blew away =oConflict from a trap, died to invisible Ixoth

Monk - Neutral Human - St18/08 to start with, only Dx12,Co9,In9; GenStore with Stethoscope on L2, Speed Boots on L3, buy 2 rounds of protection (4pts), hit levelport out of mines on next level, Sokoban had holding, got luckstone from Mimic of the Mines, wish from Opulent Throne on L10 (Eye of the Aethiopica for MR+mana regen), cross-aligned priest on 11, leprechauns on 13 got $$ for 2 more AC, gnome with /oLightning nearly killed me, quest portal and more leprechauns on 15 (2 more AC), MORE leprechauns on 17, Medusa on 21 (no Titan), bought final AC, killed priest on 11, got holy water, blessed-ID inventory, sacced quite a bit, climbed to top stores, learned spell of ID, got 4 !oGA, 3 !oFH, descended, killed Medusa w/o reflection, genocided L, levitated to back of castle, charmed monsters to clean out, got wishing (0:3) - charging, "oReflection, OrbOfFate, found +ForceBolt, +Healing, +MM in VotD, jumped to quest, made 5 more !oFH, killed Master Kaen easily while standing on stairs and taming Xorns/Earth Elementals.

At this point, I have a character that is nearly invulnerable to anything save Rodney, the High Priest of Moloch, Demogorgon, or the Riders. I don't have the energy (or the time) to go past this point. Sure, I wished for quest artifacts, but at least it's still vegan, weaponless, and polyself/polypile-less.

And now, for the main event: Stupidity on the Internet!

Editor war - The fact this article exists could be one thing, but "GNU Emacs can perform computations with some calendars, such as Mayan or Discordian, which are not supported by the vi-like editors." as a benefit of emacs takes the cake.

Time to turn back clocks, and be careful - "A three times increase in the risk is really dramatic, and because of that we're carrying a flashlight," he [Prof. Paul Fischbeck] said. Um, no, moron. You sound like a commercial for a casino, with "triple the chances to win big". The key here is the absolute change in the risk. How the fuck do you manage to do research without having even a basic grasp of statistics. - OK, maybe I'm being harsh. It's possible that the reporter is the moron, and misquoted him.

'Million Little Pieces' refund claimed by only 1,700 - Why everyone hates the legal system: "Although Random House set aside $2.35 million in a fund to cover costs related to the lawsuits, advertisements in 962 newspapers and elsewhere drew only the 1,729 claims for reimbursement by the deadline, costing $27,348. Another $783,000 will be paid in legal fees, as will $432,000 in costs associated with publicizing and carrying out the settlement."

Google: As Open As It Wants To Be (i.e., When It's Convenient) - The whole thing is just mind-bogglingly stupid FUD. I'd love to go into a lot more details, but I really can't.

Adventures in Pythonics

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 07:25:34 GMT

Prescript: Something I'm doing at work that isn't in the least bit confidential, mostly because it's not for anything. So, a blog post.

So, for greater learning for more betterment in the areas of Python, I have tried to set up code for a cache server in Python. You know, something that supports SetKey, GetKey, and DelKey, for an arbitrary key and an arbitrary value.

Now, Python has dicts, which make the first pass through most of this very easy. You write a hash function (Python will do this for your dict, but you don't want to be dependent on that. Er, I don't. It may well be the right way to do this is to redefine __hash__ for your dictionary if need be.), write some code to stick an item in or remove a cache_entry from a dictionary, and BLAM, version 1.

Then, you get to the item expiration. Idea #1 is something only moderately complicated in my head. Basically, each item is also an element in a doubly-linked list and a heap. The doubly-linked list is used to keep track of what elements were recently accessed, and the heap is used to track the expiration times and make it easy to find the next element to expire.

This is simple enough, but then you have to deal with multi-threading. And that means two things. First, we have mutexes. You don't want to be in the middle of updating a linked list and have someone else grab the wrong pointer. Thus, you have a mutex for each cache_entry, mutexes for the pointers to the start and the end of the list, and a mutex for the heap. Second, your operations have to be a carefully constructed series of events such that at any time, if another thread were to do anything, it would block on a mutex before it would mess your data up. This has the disadvantages of taking multiple times more lines of code, being confusing, and having lots of risks of blocking for potentially long periods of time.

This leads directly into batching your updates of the meta-data, or at least returning "Yes it is accessible" or "Yes it is deleted" as soon as you can get it out of the main dict and into a holding area. You still need some form of a mutex when you are updating an entry to make sure you don't interfere with another thread adding/deleting an entry, but everything else can be dealt with completely non-interactively.

At this point, it's obvious there's a much simpler way of doing things. Instead of a linked list, have N boxes of keys for the recent access times. When you come across an element that has expired, you can remove it from the box and delete it outright. When you access an alement, you can move it to the newest box. And when you want to GC, you can just delete everything in the oldest box.

It's so much more elegant, but I'm kind of disappointed I don't get to write a multi-threaded linked list + heap data structure. Actually, I'm not sure a heap can be multi-threaded, I may have had to go to a B-Tree or something. Something ugly that I should probably be excited about not doing.

Take That, Cardinal Ximenez

Thu, 01 Nov 2007 03:14:22 GMT

“I have seen filibusters. I have helped to break them. There are few Senators in this body who were here [in 1977] when I broke the filibuster on the natural gas bill….I asked Mr. Mondale, the Vice President, to go please sit in the chair; I wanted to make some points of order and create some new precedents that would break these filibusters. And the filibuster was broken – back, neck, legs, and arms….So I know something about filibusters. I helped to set a great many of the precedents that are in the books here.” - Robert Byrd in 1980, as quoted by Republicans in 2005

The Iconoclast: *snipped about personal issues*
ES4: tell him *snipped* you'll hate him and never talk to him again
TI: lol
ES4: ... and you'll drive there every weekend
ES4 and ... he can keep your puppies
TI: 1)Is it really okay to lie?
TI: 2)Fuck no he can't have my puppies.
ES4: i thought we were weill past that point
ES4: 2) see 1
TI: You're ruthless.
ES4: thank you
ES4: /me is replacing his facebook status with "ruthless"
TI: /me feels sorry for your future girlfriends