Blogs from 2006
Election Day
Tue Nov 7 13:11:10 EST 2006
I voted. Have you?
MIT Remembers 9/11
Mon Sep 11 23:38:48 EDT 2006
MIT has been cracking down on the pranks over the years, but today's placement of a firetruck on top of the great dome is a worthy follow up to a history of good hacks.
I don't want to overdo the 9/11 thoughts, but let me just say that as sad as I was for the events of 9/11, the patriotism and love shown in the days afterwards was America's finest hour. I easily get choked up remembering the heroism and love shown to complete strangers as well as family when our country pulled together following a tradgedy. I only wish we could maintain that attitude without so much sorrow to motivate it.
America sucks at Math
Fri Aug 11 22:33:22 EDT 2006
I realize that some people are just not "math people" by their own admission. I've always accepted that. I am happy to memorize 1 formula while the English majors memorize a whole page of random facts and then memorize the teacher's interpretation of those facts. At least math has right answers.
I've discovered a problem. I've been studying recently to take the Virginia Life and Health exam for certification in selling life insurance. I have a study CD by Kaplan which goes over lots of questions and provides practice. Now here is the problem. In order to get the right answers on these questions I have to forget everything I ever learned about tests from a math perspective. Almost every question required the test taker to make assumptions about how it "normally is" and then choose the best answer. The problem is that I found numerous questions where a slightly different, but still perfectly valid assumtion, would give a differnt answer. The non-math professions are clearly training people to be bad at math. There is no hope for America. I really wanted to strangle some one while studying, but computers really don't care if you get mad at them.
Just to illustrate, let me tell you one of the questions I missed on the SAT, which still bugs me to this day. The multiple choice test portion gave two numbers (A and B) and then asked if which was greater, were they equal, or cannot be determined. So, here is the question, which just for fun I will number 4. (Numbers have been changed to protect me from lawyers.)
4. Make a numerical comparison based on the following criteria. Ten people have a combined weight of 2000 lbs and the elevator they are about to enter has a weight limit of 1600 lbs. A= the weight of 6 people B= 1600 lbs a. A > B b A < B c. A = B d. cannot be determined
If you answered the question with b, like I did (I am a moron), then maybe your should start studying for the Life and Health exam in your state. More than ten years later, and missing that question still bugs me.
I did take the test. I passed. No calculator required.
Net Neutrality
Tue Jul 25 21:18:36 EDT 2006
Everyone has something to say about net neutrality. Some of them are clearly misinformed and some of them just plain don't know what they are talking about. So as long as everyone else is yacking, I'll throw in my two cents too.
My biggest gripe is the analogies people use. They focus on the problem from a particular perspective. The idea of the Internet being transport is tossed around frequently. While everyone likes that 1 stamp will get a letter to anywhere in the country, the anti-neutrality people point out that legislating a one size fits all approach would rule out a FedEx, or UPS. Here is where I have a problem with this analogy. For a package, the sender decides what class of service is used. I want faster, or more reliable, I pay extra to get the quality of service I want. The problem with the Internet comparison is that people have been brainwashed by content providers that the content is pushed to people. It doesn't work that way. The client is in charge. They come to the server and ask for something, which the server provides. The content providers pay for Internet connectivity (not always with money) and they sit their data there and wait for clients to come ask for it. Clients pay for Internet connectivity too. If this mail analogy were correct, a non-neutral Internet provider would charge a premium to the customer depending on what content they were requesting. If you want good stuff you pay extra, if you want our stuff (ours meaning from the ISP's content producing friends) it is cheaper. If this reminds you of the commercial describing how Google wants the consumer to pay for the Internet you are on the right track. The transport people want to flip the economics around and charge content providers an extortion fee in order to play on their street. This is not a technical issue, it is an economics problem.
Bruce Schneier has said that problems are best solved when those with the capability to solve a problem are those economically motivated to do so. If an ISP provides poor network connectivity to customers, they will rebel. Now, what the anti-neutrality people want is to make the bad connection a property not of the transporter, but of the destination. Changing ISPs doesn't necessarily solve the problem of a bad connection, and its not the ISP's fault, so there is less chance of loosing customers. The ISP also gains immense power to make or break particular network destinations of their clients, and that power means new revenue streams from their favored business destinations.
Like most things, legislation is not black and white. I could come up with a whole range of ISP behavior and various forms of favoritism and if I asked for a vote people would be all over the map about what was acceptable. Legislation simply draws lines (often blurry lines) and defines economic incentives to stay on a particular side of the line. Regardless of the laws, companies are in business to make money, so they will make money, or they will quit being in the business. My biggest clue to the debate comes because the Internet providers are against network neutrality and consumers are generally in favor of it. Hmm. The providers say "don't legislate unless there is a problem." And the consumer advocates say "if we don't legislate there will be a problem." Perhaps the whole world has watched how the Government, Microsoft and the public interact. If you don't fix a problem before it arrives, is too late?
Balanced
Pro Neutrality
Anti-Neutrality
Preserving Digital Content
Sun Jul 9 15:14:44 EDT 2006
Everyone is in a rush to put things into digital form these days. I think starting digital has advantages, mainly from a searching standpoint, but there is also a dark side. Paper and other physical materials last a long time, often hundreds or even thousands of years. Home made CDs have a life of a few decades at most, and perhaps less. Even hard drives and disks only last a few decades. The digital preservation coalition has an excellent article on the challenges of preserving digital files that details some of the issues.
In sunday school today our lesson was on journal writing, and some one brought up electronic journals. I am in favor, and in fact keep my journal electronically myself, but I also brought up the problem of compatability and legacy formats and software. I've been familiarizing myself with my dad's family history work, which has used several DOS based legacy software packages. The life of electronic data in a proprietary format is only about 5 years, and that is assuming that the company has long term viability and believes in backwards compatability.
My Dad's family history uses DBase 4 as a programming framework and database store. It uses Wordstar format for the text files. My only saving point is that he documented his database structure and he is still around to ask questions of. I did find a tool that will migrate dbase 4 tables into MySQL tables, unfortunately I couldn't get it to compile on my computer, which turns out because it requires an old version of the MySQL libraries. I managed to install the dbf2mysql package, but had to downgrade the MySQL libraries. Once I got the tables into MySQL I went back to the current libraries and uninstalled dbf2mysql. I am still trying to figure out what to do with the Wordstar text and programming constructs. My preference would be to generate either xhtml or Latex format, which would then be easy to print. The problem is all of the linking and embedding between files and the fact that Dad's books are dynamically generated. I'll probably do the history and geneology separately. The geneology is going into a web based software package I bought that should allow broader access and update capability to the family. I'm still trying to figure out how to translate all of the history into a more modern and long term viable format.
Quit using MS Office
Tue May 23 22:44:05 EDT 2006
If you didn't have enough reason to quit using MS Office before, the recently discovered vulnerability is a good enough reason. SANS suggested dumping office and using OpenOffice, which I highly recomend. It works well, is free, and is not saddled with the whims of Microsoft. You data is not held hostage, although you may be forced to save things in Microsoft formats to interact with all of the other sheep.
<img src="http://marketing.openoffice.org/art/galleries/marketing/web_buttons/nicu/125x50_3_get.png" border="0" alt=" Use OpenOffice.org" title="Use OpenOffice.org">
I took the Tickle Tests
Sun Mar 26 22:00:20 EST 2006
Some surveys are silly, and these are some of them, but they were mentioned on Tara's page so I decided to take them myself. My true color is brown, whatever that means. I'm having visions of UPS. My celebrity match is apparently Rebecca Romjin-Stamos, although I think she makes a terrible match since she is married. Hey its Hollywood and they aren't very smart in that department.
You're Sweet 'n' Sexy
Brought to you by Tickle
I hate MS Excel
Thu Mar 23 23:50:00 EST 2006
Has anyone else ever been utterly frustrated with Microsoft Excel? Let me tell you how annoyed I was. It is actually a good thing I didn't write this post Tuesday or it may have had some profanity in it. All I wanted to do was some graphing, but for the life of me I couldn't get the graph "wizard" do do what I wanted. Maybe it is just because I was a math person, but the lame brain terminology in Excel was driving me to baldness. By default the "data range" is all the data, which didn't make any sense to me, but I tried it. The graph looked terrible. In my book range = Y values, so I changed the "data range" to be the Y values I wanted on my chart. No go. Eventually I found that the only way to get a graph like I wanted was to use a Pivot Chart, and a Pivot Table. And then the stupid interface insisted on putting the word "Sum of" in front of my numbers. I tried erasing the words sum of an got an error about how that value already existed. Anyway . . . Two days later and my desire to strangle somebody (preferably somebody responsible for Excel) has subsided.
It turns out I was able to get what I wanted on some later graphs, but only if I used the scatter plot type. I'm not sure why the data means different things to Excel when you change chart type, but don't argue with Bill. The most maddening thing was the help. The stupid paper clip would come up and offer to help. I said "What is a series?" and the answer it gave was "select your series values and input them here" or some lame answer like that. I better not get started. I feel the animosity returning.
How did Microsoft become so dominant anyway? I grew up with Wordstar, then Wordperfect. I never used MS Word until I got my first job after graduate school. At the time I was shocked to find out that businesses used Microsoft products. I thought they were just for students and home users. That was a quick education. There are still a lot of things I prefer about Wordperfect and the other products in the suite, but Wordperfect was the Russia of the features race and couldn't keep up. There were too many bugs and Microsoft's proprietary file format kept changing so that it was impossible to save a .doc file from Wordperfect and have it work in Microsoft or to do decent imports either. What a pain. OpenOffice is my friend. At least at home I can make logical decisions about the software I choose to use.
Blogs are really working
Fri Mar 10 23:15:52 EST 2006
OK. It turns out I had an off by 1 error in one of the functions I wrote. It was a standard programming mistake. If I have the starting index, a and the ending index b and I want to find the length of that piece it is b-a+1 and I obviously forgot the +1 part. Anyway . . . TADA!
Blogs are working
Thu Mar 9 22:29:59 EST 2006
I think I have the blogs working now. I don't know how well that will stay though. One problem I have is that once things are working they aren't as fun, so I play with them. My process for uploading new content to the server allows me to do development at home and then to upload once things are working. Since some of my fiddling breaks things I keep working on stuff until it works, but that doesn't allow timely blogs. Anyway. For now, it is what it is.
ok, I was wrong about the blogs working. Only this one is showing up now.
I'm a blogger
Sun Mar 5 22:30:40 EST 2006
OK, so I am trying to enter the world of bloggers. One problem I have is that I want to be more technical and actually edit my entries with HTML. I also don't want to just edit things on the server but rather to edit stuff locally on my computer and then upload it. Most of the blogging software looks way more complex than what I need. In fact it is too complicated to even cut and paste PHP code that I might want.
This is therefore a work in progress and I plan to roll my own blogging stuff. We'll see how it turns out.
Spoke in Church
Sun Aug 27 22:33:44 EDT 2006
I spoke in church today. My assigned topic was Moroni 10:32 with a meeting theme on perfection. I've edited the document from my actual material, since I don't actually read my talks. I've added some filler language so it reads more like a paper than an outline.
It was a good meeting. The speaker after me was a high councillor and his angle on perfection was on the alternate meaning of whole, or complete and he spoke of Christlike attributes of compassion. He also told an excellent story about how our timing and perspective may not match the Lord's. A man that had turned his life around and died in his sleep the day before his scheduled baptismal day. (It had a happy ending!)
