SPDCA: Keyboards
I've been using a Macbook at home now for a few years, which means I've been typing primarily on a Mac-layout keyboard (different locations for the "system" keys, and on laptops, a lack of the keypad and Home/End/etc. key group.
Prior to that, it was the IBM Thinkpad A31 (from 2003-2008), featuring useless media/search/whatever buttons, and the indomitable mouse nub (which I loved):
Prior to that, it was my IBM mechanical keyboard (2003 and before), which was my parents' foremost reason for sending me off to college (CLACK CLACK. CLACK CLACK CLACK.):
My IBM mechanical met a grisly demise as part of a Halloween costume, and my Thinkpad has been decommissioned since its memory module cracked in half and I got a new Macbook (which, in the last week, met with hard drive failure (secure67.nocdirect.com), which I haven't had time to address). I've been trying to use my ASUS Eee 1215N Netbook kicker (a small Linux laptop I've been toting back and forth to work to watch TV at lunch), but the keyboard is constrained, and the touchpad is at once overly sensitive when trying to type over it and ignorant of your repeated strokes when you intend them.
While I'm getting my Macbook back in order, I've switched to using my Mac Mini at home, with a terrible, generic, "ergonomic" Dell keyboard. I'm not even going to try to find a screenshot. But I can tell you that having been torn away from good keyboards, it makes using a computer all that much worse, particularly if you rely heavily on keyboard commands.
After making a trip to Best Buy to get a DisplayPort-to-DVI adapter, I found this guy (Logitech K750) in the tiny "Mac Accessories" shelf in the back.
Turns out, this is a really, really nice keyboard. The fact that it is solar powered is entertaining, but the Logitech folks actually did a decent job replicating the feel of a Mac keyboard. Not just the button layouts, but down to the spacing, key resistance, everything. If I wasn't already used to the keyboard I have at work, I'd probably try to buy another one to use here (though, I'd have to re-wire all the key commands for working in Windows).
We'll see how it works in the dead of winter when it only has a desk lamp and the weak afternoon sun to keep it powered.
Also, having made a slight improvement on my home computing experience with the addition of a nice keyboard, it got me thinking about what better things I could do. I still have an incredibly shitty "computer desk" that is impossible to sit at comfortably, no less store any tools, computers, cords, what have you. Not that I really need any more of an excuse to spend more time on the computer, but, there are things that could be improved upon than just sitting on the couch, slumped over my coffee table. I've been trying to request a stand-up desk at work for two months now, but to no avail.
My TV I lovingly bought when I came back from college kicked the bucket the week before the wedding. (A 46" tv)
We used our bedroom TV as a patch until yesterday. (A 36" tv)
Saturday evening, some acquaintances posted that they'll sell their 60" TV. Bought it, picked it up, set it up yesterday.
Wow, its big!
The Netflix "Watch Next" preview screen at the end of an episode or movie on the 60" TV is the same size as the full screen on the 36" TV we just stopped using.
I'm happy.
Regarding PRISM, and the "whistleblowing" of Edward Snowden, exposing the NSA in their ability for warrantless surveillance:
This sort of thing is, of course, fascinating to me. It at once affirms my paranoia, my distaste for "the cloud," and my overall fear of government-sponsored computer espionage.
This item is not new, however. This type of technology has existed and been in place since 2007 (www.pbs.org) (and likely long before). While acknowledged in court, it had failed to find any significant public attention (discarded at one point in the interest of security, I think).
The conversation about the legality, ethics, etc., is a lengthy one, and probably one I'm not really equipped to argue. However, I can comment on some of the interesting technical pieces. For instance, this diagram:
As the horrid PowerPoint rounded box says, traffic on the Internet follows a least cost path. The cost of a path from one point on the Internet to another is a metric measured in time, error rates, and manual overrides to determine which paths will be taken given a source and target.
For example: you're an Internet router, and you have a choice among routes A, B, or C. A is fastest, so it usually wins out over B or C. However, if A goes down (fails), it chooses among B or C until the cost metric for A can be established to be cheaper than B or C. This makes the network failure resistant, meaning that it can route around failures without human intervention.
The above example works when you replace A, B, and C with names of countries (or continents). A small African country wants to route a packet to Latin America. To route this packet, it looks at the metrics for the routes it has available. For the diagram above, it has the choice among a 343 Gbps link to Europe, 11 Mbps link to North America, and 40 Gbps to Asia. However, the metric for cost is for the full path, not just the "ways out." It will take into account the massive capability of the North America/Europe link, as well as the North America/Latin America link. Rather than the Africa ->North America -> Latin America route, it will take the Africa -> Europe -> North America -> Latin America route because it is determined to have the lowest total cost.
The PRISM application (and those like it) exploit the fact that for most inter-continental traffic, the US and/or Europe ending up being the lowest cost route, and thus, pass traffic along. Being able to collect, aggregate, and analyze this data is made possible purely by the fact that our external Internet infrastructure (note: not necessarily our internal, Internet-to-your-home infrastructure) is considerable. Other continents route through us because we are cheaper.
A fun part of this is that the route metrics I describe above can be manipulated. The routing devices I describe are all configurable devices, and the speeds/metrics they advertise to their neighbors is purely configuration not determined by any physical or hardware limitation. When they set up the devices, they input the values that say "I can handle this speed." Which means that it can be changed, and other routers have no choice but to route their data accordingly.
China has done this one multiple occasions, during which they will advertise things like, "We have better speeds, so your routes should use us instead," during which if we do not have the routes statically configured on our end, we will happily route all of our data through China.
This exploit is purely based on how the Internet was designed, and isn't a flaw (unless routing metrics are lied about). Aside from being installed at the right "observation" points, the US has always had this ability, as we are the "default" route for much of the Internet. When the Internet is passing through you, there's value in seeing from where and to where things are going, and depending on the case, may have data mining or intelligence significance.
Weirdly, thinking on this a bit more, I've actually built systems like this before. At one point, our customers asked if instead of having to call into us, we could provide them with a "top talkers" report (a listing of "Who is pumping the most traffic over the last N minutes?") This information was only available by way of the programming interfaces on our devices, which we would never give up to our customers, but we still needed to find a way to provide this information without wasting time on phone calls.
And so, we had our routers report a stream of data back to a centralized server, where it could then be received, analyzed, and made available to our customers via a secure portal. Our coding ensured that all customer data was strictly separated, and only a certain number of customers were even provisioned to have this feature.
The data itself wasn't particularly interesting. At least, not in the details. However, when combined over time, we could see things like malicious botnets, DDoS attacks, iTunes, Youtube, etc. (whatever was using the most traffic at the time). Being that we were only telling the customers what was going on on their own network, there were no ethical questions raised (aside from those like me being able to see the data).
The mechanism here would have been exactly the same. They may not be able to see content, but they can see where you are coming from, to where you are going, and however much. It would not seem important at small details, but given the granularity of searches or the intelligence of the pattern recognition, you could very well catch things like news events, uprisings, etc., as they are happening.
Also, fun side note: the Read/Unread mechanism on idkfa was used on the "Top Talkers" report to be able to track/discard/identify new messages versus repeat messages.
Ah, Captain Picard helped save this woman from abuse (or helped her find the strength to leave). And they hugged.
Patrick Stewart is one of my favorite old white guy actors.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2333629/Emotional-moment-domestic-abuse-victim-thanks-Patrick-Stewart-saving-life-hugs-conference.html (www.dailymail.co.uk)
This is the story of one of the last great scifi television shows. The year is 2013. The name of the show... is Babylon 5.
(Show synopses and commentary to follow.)
Star Trek Voyager meets West Wing.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/04/13/star_trek_and_west_wing_captain_janeway_killed_president_bartlett.html?wpisrc=obnetwork (www.slate.com)
so kaiden I showed you Automatic (www.automatic.com) and I showed you NetAtmo (www.netatmo.com) - I forgot to show you Thermodo (thermodo.com), another little iPhone gadget I ordered.
We already have the Nest (www.nest.com) and the Harmony Link (www.logitech.com). And I keep telling E that when we get her a new car, we're getting the Viper (www.viper.com) autostart.
And, I want to get the Craftsman Assurelink door opener (www.craftsman.com), but we'll see on that one. That one is a much lower priority than anything else.
I think we're finally starting to get to what Steve Jobs imagined when the iPhone first came out 6 years ago.
Edit: and I even forgot the Pebble (getpebble.com)I just got!
Periodically I do rewatches of television shows I only watched in part. Typically I favor shows from my late elementary to high school years tha I often did not see al of and definitely didn't catch in order.
I went through all of Start Trek: Voyager, Buffy (except the last season, should really finish that) and most recently, Quantum Leap. I took a year long break from a grand re-watch for the Newbery, but I just started Sliders (streams on Netflix). I've watched the preview. I remember really liking this show, but losing the thread toward the end when I'd missed too many episodes and didn't know about that other group of sliders they were fighting (or a conspiracy or something).
Preview is slightly more hokey than I remembered, but worth the re-watch. Plus the mid 90s fashion - tons of flannel and oversize clothing everywhere!
For the first time at my job I am the first user on a brand new computer! Every other machine I had was a handmedown from our CAD group. Fast clean spiffyness! 12 gigs of RAM! Two 6 core Intel 2.4GHz processors!
I feel more guilty for liking things now: http://girlsaregeek...c-four-chord-song/ (girlsaregeeks.com)
Here's a great article on The Awl (which all of you probably don't read but you should because it is an awesome mix of gossip, intellectualism, and humor) about Star Trek TNG. It is basically my relationship with ST:TNG including reading Imzadi as an impressionable hormonal preteen (I was 12 or 13).
http://www.theawl.com/2013/02/you-me-and-star-trek-the-next-generation (www.theawl.com)
Only substitute "math team" for newspaper and academic decathlon and the girl I bonded over Start Trek with went to the same church as me and we never mentioned our fandom at our respective (different) schools.
And now I'll just quote the article:
When you love a show as a young person, it can manifest in all manner of ways. Some start swearing in Klingon, some read fanfic erotica. Some buy the technical manual and figure out how to craft a make-shift phasor. Some just learn codes of behavior, adopt understandings of tolerance and commitment and duty. Most, once grown, do not outwardly manifest the signs of their childhood devotion. Yet in certain situations, the evidence emerges, like so many bubbles striving for the surface.
Today, you could name dozens of people, from all paths of life, with whom you've breathlessly, earnestly, gigglingly exchanged "Next Gen" stories. Because there's no such thing as a casual "Next Generation" fan: you either understand wholly or not at all. Upon encountering another, details begin to babble out—slowly at first, then a flood: COLM MEANEY! His WIFE KEIKO! Data acquires EMOTIONS!
It's unclear whether these moments are meant as confession or catharsis, but the result remains the same. You are bonded to that person, and that person to you. How you dealt with your "Star Trek" consumption—how you hid it, or chose not to hide it—becomes as a crucial a personal narrative as the story of how you lost your virginity.
SPDCA:
I have a new project. It's called Giterary. It's nearing completion. I've been coding for about the last 6 months on it. I need to hear your thoughts on it.
It is a novel writing tool that makes use of the cool programming tools I use to keep track of my programming projects, both personally and professionally. It puts them in a wiki web application that helps to get the content for your novel into a good place, and tries to help along the way.
It has piqued my interest for this long partly because I want to write a book someday, and partly because the tools that exist right now suck due to the following:
The main site is here: http://giterary.com (giterary.com)
The demo/example site is here: http://giterary.com/playground (giterary.com)
I have about 17K words worth of documentation between the user manual, install guide, and other assorted documents, so I won't go into too much more detail here.
What I will ask, though, is for your time, if you happen to have it. Very few people have viewed the application, but the few times that I have demoed it the feedback was pretty valuable (if soul-crushing at times). I'm getting ready to release Giterary "into the wild," so to speak, and fairly soon, publishing it as a free open source application that anybody can download (because honestly nobody would pay for it).
The thing is, I've been staring at the thing for too long, so everything is old and tried and familiar to me. I don't know what new users see anymore.
What I would ask is that you log in to the "Playground" and roam around. Create things, change things, move things, delete things, whatever you like. You cannot break anything, and the entire Playground resets itself at the top of every hour. I would also ask that you look over the documentation to see if it can answer any questions you have (and let me know if it does not).
I'm exposing this to idkfa so that I hear it from people I know and respect, and not the assholes on the Internet. Any pain you can save me at the mercy of the uncaring trolls would be a kindness.
Thanks for your time.
Couldn't figure out if I should post this here or in Cognitive Surplus. Either would be applicable:
http://what-if.xkcd.com/29/ (what-if.xkcd.com)
In other words - SCIENCE!
For Josh, for his hypothetical future, "I raised my kids on the command line"
http://lifehacker.com/5974087/i-raised-my-kids-on-the-command-lineand-they-love-it (lifehacker.com)
Though I would hesitate to say at age 5 he can use the past tense "raised", perhaps "I am raising my child to view the command line as the primary means of navigating computers." However, I am a bit surprised at their ability to spell and use all these commands, I suspect the author is glossing over the amount of help the require. Perhaps he is sitting behind them spelling out commands for them? It's a very high level of literacy, not impossible in a 5 year-old, very impobable in a 4 or 5 year old though. This why toddlers and preschoolers do so well with GUIs like the OS on most tablets and smartphones (as mentioned in a previous post) because it is image rather than text based.
In my experience an average-bright child at around age 6, mid-first grade, will move past "reading" for the point of skill development to the point where they have that skill firmly established enough that they can read for learning and other purposes. A very-bright child will get there sooner. But there is a definite point in which the child passes the "reading is the challenge" to "reading is the tool I use to get to the next challenge" level.
After watching my (spoiled, first-world problems) niece and nephew fight tooth and nail over their iPads and vTech laptops just so they could play Fruit Ninja while the other couldn't, this gives me some hope: http://dvice.com/ar...ethiopian-kids.php (dvice.com)
My mom got a new MacBook Pro on Saturday this past week. I spent a good portion of New Year's Day setting it up, along with the new 4th gen iPad she got for Christmas.
It was a bit frustrating changing around the settings on her phone so that they'd play nicely with iCloud and the rest of the Apple suite of devices, but after getting it all set up, I'm totally jealous. I'd love to have an Apple laptop, and since I got everything to the point where it seamlessly talks to each other like Apple intends, it's pretty sweet. I'd never set up an Apple laptop like that, or set up a phone and iPad to work with a laptop like that, and seeing what I've been missing is what's made me jealous.
But I'm holding out for a 13" macbook air with retina screen, or something to that effect.
Disneyland Synopsis, Christmas 2012
My family took a trip over Christmas this year, first flying to Arizona, then driving to Anaheim, and visiting Disneyland and Calfornia Adventures over the course of three days. Here are my findings.
We Need a Good Plague
I remember the first time I went to Disneyland we got a special pass that let us get into the park an hour before opening. We took that opportunity to hit Indiana Jones three times in a row, seeing all three alternate tracks. It was awesome. Yet, I didn't understand why there was such a huge line that I had to run through in order to get back from the entrance to the start of the ride. I couldn't imagine there ever being a time where there would be that many people.
This time, apparently, we decided to visit at a time of predicted high park attendance. And, as predicted, it was insane. If you can avoid it, avoid peak seasons. Or holidays. Or really any time you can guess somebody else might want to also go to the park. I overheard a cheerful Disneyland Castmember, rolling a trashcart through a throng, say to somebody "Come in February. February is better. Nothing happens in February."
I say this not out of my own dislike of crowds, or people, but out of consideration for return on investment. At peak times, ride waits are upwards of 2 hours (not including breakdowns), which means that despite the park being open from 8am to 11pm, if you only chose to wait in line, took no bathroom or food breaks, and were able to travel from ride to ride instantaneously, you'd only be able to ride ~7 rides/day. You can, of course, prioritize to only hit main attractions, but in the course of three days, with stops for food, bathroom breaks, and kid-related catastrophes, we were barely able to hit all of the big ones.
A lot changes in... oh man... 18 years?
Last time we went, we think it was 1995. A number of things have changed. Notably: Fast Passes.
Fast Passes are an ingenious mechanism. They help to schedule your day a bit, but also demonstrate that Disney isn't looking to really help you to ride all of your rides, but rather to keep you in the park and spend more money. They let you schedule a "Fast Pass Return Time," which lets you enter a shorter line with priority over the longer, "normal" line.
However, you cannot simply collect a number of Fast Passes and have your day ahead of you, instead, you have a "cool down" period, during which you cannot request any more fast passes from machines. You can spend this in one of the "normal" lines, or you can shop/eat/whatever in the park, and not have to worry about your place in the Fast Pass line.
There is also a MouseTime phone application, which is invaluable in determining wait times for rides, and whether rides are down, without having to walk the length of the park to see them. This helped us figure out our daily schedules far better than anything else.
Additionally, there's a whole new park, California Adventures, right next to Disneyland. Our passes were able to "park-hop," which meant that we could go back and forth between Disneyland and California Adventures. It's a bit weird that there's a park, in California, that is celebrating California, when you could theoretically be seeing those things yourself while in California, but it has the same Disney look-and-feel, so it still works. I have a theory that it was a tax write-off.
Also, lines are sort of a different animal as well. While lots of work went into hiding the lines, making them interesting to spend time in, it was much more bearable having a phone available. However, this didn't really help my niece/nephew, who were bored out of their minds, and needed constant entertainment. It made me wish that some of the army of Disney employees could be dedicated to "line entertainment," much the way that the enforcers would entertain people in lines for PAX.
Being an adult is lame
There are a few things I don't miss from childhood: poor bladder/bowel control, the inability to drive, and the relative height disparity. However, as made apparent by my recent visit, I do miss some of the things I left behind with childhood: appreciation of whimsy, a love of all things animated, and the inability to understand wry, adult humor.
Going along with my parents, my sister, my sister's children, and my effective godparents, it was an interesting study in how people of different ages engage with Disney things. My niece and nephew, aged 6 and 3 years, respectively, probably saw an entirely different park than we did, full of things they recognized and understood on their own level. See somebody dressed up as Minnie walking through Toontown? Sure, you can give Minnie a hug. See somebody dressed up as Minnie walking through any other given city's downtown? Ah... no, no, child... that's not really Minnie, no hugs...
Don't get me wrong, I had a lot of fun. I'm just saying that having viewed Disneyland once as a 5th grader, then as a shitty teenager, and now as an adult, I now see it fully from my parents' perspective. I could now laugh with them at the ridiculous name of the "Astroblasters" ride, or share a "kill me" look with a dead-eyed park employee, or cringe when I pay $10.99+tax for a burrito.
Also, in my old age, I've developed a habit of pondering on the "scale" of things, particularly in large groups of people. I do this because human beings are largely disgusting, selfish, violent animals, and more so when in large packs. I wonder at things like this because I wonder what happens when 70,000 people visit the bathroom. Or if somebody gets hurt. Or if there's a fire. Or what have you. I wonder at the scale of the Disneyland operation as a machine that takes in money and humans and outputs happy humans. I would love to have seen a "behind the scenes" tour to show the scale at which things are operating on the backend.
And then I go on Space Mountain, and it all sort of just washes away.
Anywho, I should get back to work.
OMG! A patron just picked up the mouse of the library computer and tried to speak into it like Scotty in Star Trek IV (or as most of the time we call it, the one with the whales)! Probably not an intentional Star Trek reference as the patron is completely computer illiterate and mostly drunk. I should probably kick him out for the drunkeness, but he's not bothering anyone.
Best video I've seen so far describing (and not face-melting) the principals of the encryption methods that control today's Internet: https://www.youtube...utube_gdata_player (www.youtube.com)
