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Saturday, April 28th, 2012
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12:04 am - Tonight's babysitting entertainment
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| Thursday, March 1st, 2012
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12:25 am - today in awe
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| Thursday, July 28th, 2011
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8:09 pm - lj's new russian overlords are good people
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but fighting a tough battle:
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2063952,00.html
If the hacker attacks that hit Russia's top blogging service, LiveJournal, this week are anything to go by, the unwritten rules of cyber warfare no longer apply. Instead of the focused assaults hackers often used to force down the websites of their ideological enemies, these attacks look more like online carpet bombing. Their victim is not one voice but the entire cacophonous world of the Russian blogosphere. And the motive, as close as experts have been able to figure, is to erode the virtual infrastructure of free speech itself.
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| Monday, July 18th, 2011
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12:39 am - Typefaces past
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| Wednesday, July 6th, 2011
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3:49 pm - Xylocopa californica
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I heard an odd quiet sawing/buzzing sound coming from the middle of our side fence a few days ago. Today I looked again and found the culprit; a 1.5" long (huge!) carpenter bee (I believe this one was Xylocopa californica) that had bored a perfectly round hole into the fence and was happily excavating its way through.
They chomp on the wood and kick the saw dust out the hole. They're not like termites that actually eat and gain nutrition from the wood, and don't do nearly as much damage, but i still had to remove this one and I'll end up filling the hole.
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Monday, May 9th, 2011
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11:12 pm - I met him in a swamp
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Dagoba dark chocolate "New Moon" is extraordinarily smooth for chocolate that is 74% cacao. It's much tastier than dark chocolates from Scharffen Berger and Ghiardelli.
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(comment on this)
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| Thursday, February 17th, 2011
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4:58 pm - Jeopardy versus a computer was boring and unfair
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I looked forward to the Ken Jennings (human) vs Brad Rutter (human) vs IBM Watson (8 racks of computer) battle on Jeopardy. However, it turned out to be a dull match. All three competitors could correctly answer 70-90% of the clues by the time the clue had finished being read. They were likely an close match in terms of knowledge, but we'll never know, because the humans didn't have a chance to show it.
A fair fight would have been if the humans had the same buzzing capabilities that Watson had. The Jeopardy buzzers are only interesting if all competitors are human. The buzzers work by having some countdown that completes after the question gets read. If you buzz in too early, you get locked out and can't buzz in for a few seconds. Buzz in too late, the other contestants beat you. Watson, on the other hand always buzzes in at the perfect moment. This could even be done without computing power...it is not an impressive feat for a machine. To make the competition fair, the early-buzz lockout should be replaced by a random picker which chooses from any competitor who buzzes in before the question has completely been read. This way everyone has a fair chance at buzzing in. Easy questions would be a toss up between the three contestants instead of a gimme for the computer.
As it was played, the match may as well have been 121 iterations of A:"2-1?" Q:"What is 1." Watson was impressive, but we still don't know how well it compares to the top human Jeopardy players in terms of answering trivia--all we know is that it's pretty good, and a computer can push a button a lot faster than a human (leave George Jetson out of this).
Rematch proposal: Jennings vs Rutter vs Watson. Early buzzes are registered at the time when the question reading is complete; the winner out of multiple early buzzes is chosen at random.
(Finally, IBM, please program Watson to choose the funniest, rather than most likely to be correct, answer in the cases where it has an insurmountable lead. "Alex, what is a steampunk sneezing panda frightening Rick Astley. aaaannd...I'll take Your Mom for $400.")
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Wednesday, February 16th, 2011
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2:26 pm - Amazon Payments doesn't actually keep your email address private
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I bought something from a merchant who uses the Amazon payments system, and sent some questions via the Amazon payments form, which stated:
IMPORTANT NOTICE: When you submit this form, Amazon Payments will replace your email address with one provided by Amazon Payments in order to protect your identity, and forward the message on your behalf.
That statement is incorrect. The merchant sent a response to my questions directly to my email address (i checked by looking at the Received: headers, of course), not via some anonymous one provided by amazon. Also, the email they were responding to had my email address in the From: line.
No big deal, but someone should fix that.
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(comment on this)
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| Saturday, January 8th, 2011
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12:27 am - Amazon video on demand -- eh
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Amazon has been offering free streaming versions of movies that you buy on disc from them. In theory it's a great concept, however:
- I had to reload about ten times to get anything better than 384 kbps quality (one bar) video; there's no way to manually tell amazon what bandwidth to use. After that reloading, as suggested by people with similar problems, i finally got 2.5 mbps (full bars). I have a 20 mbps connection. I saw the same thing on other mac browsers i tried.
- Video and audio were out of sync and video was mildly but consistently choppy. Perhaps this is a problem with flash on the mac, but 720p youtube videos play perfectly on my mac.
- The picture leaves a big black bar on the side edges...turning your TV/monitor into one that's 80% as big.
- Audio is only in stereo. Only the download version (windows only) offers 5.1 sound.
eh
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(comment on this)
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| Sunday, December 12th, 2010
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2:20 am - Most 1st place heisman votes received--what does it predict?
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Here are the five highest first-place vote-getters in the history of the Heisman Trophy:
1. O.J. Simpson - Currently in prison
2. Troy Smith - On the 49ers, Recently demoted in favor of Alex Smith (career QB rating: 70)
3. Reggie Bush - No longer a Heisman winner
4. Charlie Ward - Did not play in the NFL, had a fair basketball career
5. Cam Newton
Heisman curse?
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(comment on this)
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| Saturday, December 11th, 2010
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4:38 pm - Video capture on your Mac, for under $10!
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Short version:
1. Buy the EasyCAP DC60 (NOT the DC60+)
2. Install the open source EasyCapViewer, reboot
3. Plug the EasyCAP directly into your USB port, connect the EasyCAP to your video source
4. Connect audio source to your Mac's audio input with a two-RCA to 3.5mm cable
4. Run EasyCapViewer, configure video to use the either S-Video or input 1, and audio to use audio input
5. Press play. If it doesn't work the first time, press play again.
Long version:
I've always wanted a video capture solution that could take analog video (S-video or composite) and dump it to my Mac. There have certainly been many options out there, but I didn't want to spend much on something which would inevitably be a time-waster. Previously when i needed to do this I borrowed a firewire-equipped camcorder, but that's a hassle and a big box to have around. Dedicated analog video to firewire converters run around $100 and analog video to USB boxes tend to be Windows-only.
If I recall correctly, Amazon suggested the EasyCAP DC60 to me once when I was searching for a cheap video input device. I was fascinated by the $9 price and it had over a hundred reviews spanning the entire range. One of the reviews said that the device worked on the Mac using some free/open-source software. Buy!
I got the EasyCAP today. Connecting it is well...easy. Do not use the included USB extension cable (mine appeared to not work). Connect your video source to the EasyCAP. Hook up the audio to your audio input instead of going through the EasyCAP.
The EasyCapViewer software is a bit rough around the edges, but functional. After installing, I had to reboot for it to work (not completely sure why). It lets you select the video input and audio source, and shows you the video in a window. You can adjust the aspect ratio to match the source. You can capture into motion JPEG and mpeg-4. I would recommend the "half frame rate" and "record to RAM" options.
Now you can transfer all of those clips you've been saving on your DVR to your computer and send them to youtube so someone searching for "panda toaster" gets to watch your video. $9 well spent.
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(comment on this)
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| Saturday, October 16th, 2010
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4:05 pm - Fixing the broken checkbox problem when viewing PDF files on OS X
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I've recently seen pdf files which have broken checkbox characters due to a missing font. I don't know what generates these pdfs, but they have what are supposed to be checkbox (checked and unchecked) characters that show up as unrelated substituted characters. Presumably this can be fixed on the production end by appropriately embedding fonts in the pdf.
If you simply want to view the file correctly in OS X, here's how to do it:
1. Obtain the "marlett.ttf" font file one of several ways:
- It's included in the "Steam" game distribution engine for OS X.
- You can extract it from the source code distribution for WINE.
- You can find this as a hidden file on a Windows box; copy it over.
2. Search for "marlett.ttf" in spotlight or wherever you saved it, open it, then select "Install Font". This will copy the font to your ~/Library/Fonts directory.
3. If you want the font installed for all users, copy it to /Library/Fonts
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010
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11:19 pm - Zombie javascript banished
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Discovered by process of elimination the culprit behind the idle browser page CPU-eating woes. The javascript from "sharethis.{com,net}" causes "idle" pages in Chrome to eat around 6% CPU on my old Macbook Pro.
Additional tabs loading the same javascript consume an additional 6% CPU if they are in a separate process, but a bit less if in the same process.
Many blogs (including LJ) use sharethis. I blackholed w.sharethis.net w.sharethis.com wd.sharethis.net wd.sharethis.com and my CPU and battery are happier.
There's also some strange runaway CPU situation caused by an NPR page that's left open for a long while. All of the sudden without any specific user action the CPU usage of that process will shoot to 100%, fans shoot to rocket speed, not stopping until i close the NPR tab.
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(comment on this)
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| Wednesday, July 28th, 2010
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10:55 pm - Currently watching: The Ice Storm
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9:16 pm - Craigslist vs .info TLD: annoyances
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I registered shieh.info back when I was working on our wedding website. Flense.com was a bit odd, shieh.[other tlds] were for the most part taken, and I figured reputable people were using .info so it would be fine in the future.
For the most part, it's fine. Yes, there's annoying garbage on many .info domains but you could say the same about .com and any wide-open TLD. I've seen a couple sites with poor email address validators reject it, but only one major problem:
Craigslist
I was helping my parents rent out a duplex they own in Upper Dublin. I wrote up a big description with nice pictures, registered a Craigslist account w/ my @shieh.info email, then tried to post the ad. Every time i tried, it was rejected. I removed links, removed random HTML, and so on, but it would always be rejected. Even a barebones text-only ad was rejected, despite filling out the captcha and completing the phone verification.
I searched through the help forums and discovered that Craigslist often rejects postings that contain *.info. I created a new account under @flense.com and my posts worked. Blah.
More recently, I've been browsing Craigslist for used cars (looking for something with 4+ doors, hatchback or folding rear set, is awesome/fun, cheap to run, reliable, $5000-$20000). After replying to a few ads via email to sale-[randomstring]-[randomnumber]@craigslist.org, I began to notice that strangely, no one replied to any of my messages. Until today I figured people were ignoring me because I was asking too many questions. Finally, I ran a test, tried to email myself through one of these craigslist redirection emails, and found that I never received the email.
Apparently they're also blackholing any email that comes from a @*.info email address. BOOOO. There isn't even a courtesy bounce message to explain why my email's not going through to sellers. Is there a good reason for blackholing *.info? A quick search through my spam folder shows that out of 1446 spam messages, exactly ZERO of them have a From envelope or From: header with a @*.info email address! Sure, craigslist might have a different incoming spam profile, but why use a trivially forgeable header for rejecting messages?
I'll try to pass this along to folks at Craigslist. In the meantime I'll have to remember to switch my email address any time I'm replying to a Craigslist ad. I appreciate their fast old-fashioned text-only interface, but i wish they'd spend more time supporting people who have trouble posting ads. At the time I submitted a couple detailed help requests and received no response. Their system is intentionally non-transparent, so I wasted far too much time trying to figure out why my ad wouldn't post, then wondering why my ad wouldn't show up in search results ("ghosted" in Craigslist help forum terminology). Dumping an entire TLD might make sense for some provider with very limited resources, but a business like Craigslist shouldn't exclude a significant chunk of users for no fault of their own.
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(comment on this)
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| Saturday, July 24th, 2010
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10:15 am - Get over yourself, ESPN
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ESPN's Ombudsman Don Ohlmeyer writes about their decision to air the one hour LeBron James announcement special. He questions the news ethics of releasing an hour of air time to the James team.
"Paying to play in a news environment is both dangerous and wrong"
ESPN pays the NFL roughly $1.1B/yr for broadcast rights and other large numbers for the NBA and NHL. Do you think ESPN reporters would get the same sort of access without these deals?
I watch SportsCenter daily but am under no delusions that it is "journalism". If it were truly sports journalism, there would be coverage of other popular sports which do not have television deals with ESPN. Another notable example is how much hockey coverage dropped after ESPN's deal with the NHL ended in 2005.
Other popular sports are neglected. Formula 1, the most popular racing in the world (but broadcast on Fox networks only), is almost never mentioned on SportsCenter. Soccer only started gaining some coverage when ESPN gained broadcast rights to the World Cup. The lives of other "minor" sports are made or broken by ESPN.
ESPN is not some neutral, independent news organization. ESPN feeds its own news pipeline and the "journalists" are simply its bullhorn. TMZ, The National Enquirer, and so on are more journalists than ESPN; at least they do not face the massive conflict of generating their own news.
Yet I still watch ESPN. That's because it's not news; it's entertainment.
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(comment on this)
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| Tuesday, July 13th, 2010
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10:54 am - Tour de France for newbies
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Like all but the simplest forms of racing, the Tour de France is confusing and not very entertaining if you don't know the basics. Here's what you need to understand to enjoy three weeks of 6-hour-a-day racing.
The fundamental force governing TdF stage racing is wind resistance (drag). Riding solo, the difference between the best and the worst TDF rider is around 10%. Riding directly behind another cyclist, or diagonally behind in the case of cross winds, saves 20-30% of your effort at typical flat-road racing speeds. The best cyclist will easily lose out to the worst cyclist if the worst is allowed to follow/draft and conserve energy. The key strategy to understand about drafting is that the percentage of energy saved greatly decreases as speeds decreases. Wind resistance is roughly proportional to velocity squared. Going up a steep hill, fighting a strong headwind, or riding on cobblestones slows you down and reduces the effectiveness of drafting. That's why on flat areas most riders stick to a big pack, while going up mountains, riders spread out.
There are many competitions, not only the GC. The GC is the general classification, the total time for riding the 2000+ miles of the race. It's the biggest prize of the TdF but there are many others:
- Green jersey, for the overall best sprinter
- Polka dot jersey, for the overall best climber
- White jersey, for the best GC result for a rider under 26 yr
- Winner of each day's stage
- GC (yellow jersey) leader after each stage
Winning any of these is a big deal and is a career highlight for the winner. For the lesser teams, winning just one stage would make for a successful Tour.
The TdF is a team sport. The majority of the 198 riders on the 22 teams of this year's TdF have no chance of winning any of those prizes--not because they're not good cyclists, but because they are support riders called "domestiques", whose purpose is to support the top riders on their team. They'll do whatever is needed to help the top riders conserve energy and change the pace of the ride as strategy dictates. If the support riders are out of range to help their teams' top riders, then they need to conserve their own energy to ride another day. In individual time trial races they'll ride at 90% of their max effort since all they need to do is go fast enough to avoid disqualification.
Energy conservation is critical when you're racing 100+ miles a day. Riders bulk up before the race, eat around 7000 calories a day for the three weeks of the race, but still end up looking deathly gaunt towards the end. Energy you spend unnecessarily today will detract from the rest of your race. This is why you won't see any GC contenders going for sprint wins, and you won't see sprinters trying to finish in the front group of a mountain stage.
There are official rules, but many rules are unwritten. The race has evolved into one with a sort of road honor, where racers don't take direct advantage of the mishaps of others. A rider will be severely scolded if they attempt a breakaway right after a big peloton crash. If a rider violates these rules of honor too often, they'll be out of a job. Everyone is competing, but everyone also depends on else. GC contenders want to win because they're the strongest rider, not because their opponents crashed.
Flat stages are a battle between sprinter-led teams and small teams. Both teams mainly go after individual stage victories. Sprinter teams win by having races end where everyone's in a big bunch; they'll try to get to the front towards the end of races, and ride at maximum speed leading one rider at a time until they launch their best sprinter just before the finish line. Small teams tend to try breakaway victories, where small packs of riders attempt to leave the big pack early on and try to maintain their lead to the end. Though the breakaways are usually caught, they occasionally escape and win, but at the very least they provide some exposure for the team sponsor. Sprinter teams are the main force trying to bring the breakaway back. GC-focused teams typically try to stay out of trouble and conserve energy in the flat stages.
Mountain stages and time trials are where the GC is won and lost. Since low speeds decrease the effectiveness of drafting, much more separation gets created on the mountain stages, especially when the stage ends on a climb. The only winner in recent history who wasn't one of the top time trialers was Marco Pantani in 1998. This year's race only has one time trial, giving a lesser time trialer like Andy Schleck a better chance of winning the race.
Strategy is a huge deal. Most teams have multiple goals and the methods to achieve them are often conflicting. On occasion teams have had multiple riders at the top of the GC, most recently in 2009 when teammates Contador and Armstrong finished first and third. This inevitably results in conflicts because team resources need to be distributed between the two. One may even be ordered by the team manager to slow down to assist the other. The really hard part is figuring out what you think the other teams will be doing and how to react to that. Game theory folks could go nuts studying the Tour.
If all else fails, enjoy the amazing camera work and European scenery.
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(comment on this)
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| Saturday, July 3rd, 2010
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3:34 pm - Recipe: Blueberry bannock, bread for the lazy
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Mix water slowly into two cups of white whole wheat flour, 1 tsp baking powder, 1/2 tsp salt, cup of blueberries and apricot chunks. Mix until a stiff dough is formed. Flatten to 1/2" thick (uneven/messy is fine), place dough on med-hot grill, flip after five minutes.
Serve with sweet butter.
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(comment on this)
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| Friday, July 2nd, 2010
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12:26 am - MATHCOUNTS caption contest
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| Monday, June 28th, 2010
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2:09 am - Dear Internet, FIFA doesn't care about your complaints about bad refereeing
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Soccer refereeing ranges from mediocre to horrible. We already knew that. This is something that comes up at every World Cup, the couple of weeks every four years when Americans watch adult soccer. How can one referee cover a huge soccer field and watch 22 players, with minimal assistance from a couple sideline refs? It's an impossible job to perform perfectly. Errors are frequent. Game-changing errors are not uncommon. Solutions ranging from more referees to instant reply abound. FIFA doesn't care.
FIFA's not going to change. I don't know much about them, but I presume that their goals are to get more interest and more money into soccer. Would better refereeing contribute to either of those goals? I don't think so. The reaction of the U.S. players is telling. The U.S. goalie, Tim Howard, stated, "Some of those stories have been trickling into our camp, how people are up in arms and can’t believe the call, and that’s pretty cool".
Sport is not life-or-death[*]. Sports are about performance and drama. The drama of blown calls brought U.S. fans into the sport; we talk about it and write about it. I'm sure someone at FIFA is rejoicing at how many twitter messages show up every time there's a bad call. Drama draws in fans. Talking about sports draws in fans virally. FIFA understands that perfect refereeing is not what makes sports popular. Armando Galarraga's near-perfect game brought out more attention than Roy Halladay's perfect game.
If your team is outplayed, like England was today, a blown call gives fans and players something to complain about. Sure, we were totally beaten, 4-1, but hey, maybe if they had called that second goal right, we would have played differently and would have won. FIFA will only implement replay if the players want it (unlikely, they're all accustomed to this kind of refereeing) or if FIFA can be convinced that they're losing fans because of bad calls.
So write FIFA and tell them "I'm not watching the World Cup unless you implement instant replay" and don't write about the bad calls--write that you're never watching soccer again. But I know you won't. You love the drama too much.
[Ok, I actually think instant replay actually will start being used in soccer, simply because every other big sport uses it. There are two kinds: awful, like NBA replay, and entertaining, like tennis replay. Fans love tennis replay; it's fast and fun to watch the computer recreation of the shot. EVERYONE hates NBA replay (except for some broadcasters who claim "what's important is they got the call right"). It's ridiculously slow and breaks the flow of a game, and is used mostly towards the end of the game which is already far too slow.]
[*] Usually. Watch the amazing 30 For 30 documentary The Two Escobars to see how ugly sports can get when there is too much at stake.
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shandrew's journal
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