September 10, 2008

Google Chrome

I'm a bit underwhelmed so far. There are some nice user interface improvements but pages don't seem to load as quickly as they do on Firefox. (Then again this could be a sample size issue with the specific sites I've hit today: sometimes both Football Outsiders and mail.yahoo.com just under-perform no matter what browser you use.)

Posted by Matt Bruce at 12:40 PM

September 03, 2008

MIT Grad Students, Saving Lives

(To respect a well-known rivalry: I'm sure Caltech grad students are saving many lives as well, but the past two stories I've read about specific projects have both happened to involve New England beavers.)

Better evacuation routing through software.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 12:47 PM

August 19, 2008

"You must be Kurt. I suppose your resume is mildly impressive..."

Few things in life are as deliciously enjoyable as overhearing aggressive job interview questioning from a conference room on the other side of a not-so-soundproof wall.

(If you get the reference in the title then I pity the number of radio ads you've subjected yourself to. Just try not to get the jingle stuck in your head.)

Posted by Matt Bruce at 05:27 PM

August 01, 2008

Not Cool

I wouldn't have mentioned cuil in this space had I not gotten a spam e-mail whose subject line describes cuil as "a google-ish search engine."

A while back I made fun of Ask Jeeves in this space only to learn that a colleague was actually at Ask.com and (justifiably, it turns out) begged to differ with my knee-jerk critique.

Given the performance issues I've seen this week on trying cuil, and the terrible results from any useful search term*, I fervently hope I don't know anyone who works there.

*- for example, a movie quote or lyric snippet or something with the "site:" clause. Anyone can write code that delivers decent results for generic words ("penguins") or proper nouns ("Coldplay"): A reasonable solution there would be to take 100,000 particular keywords (choosing them is sort of an interesting task) and build/cache result pages that include the relevant Wikipedia link, fan sites for any performer, etc.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 12:53 AM

July 10, 2008

Internet Startup Evening Shift

It's been six years now, but the same three of us routinely worked late: a sys-admin, a QA lead, and a sustaining engineer. (Me, officially "Senior Software Engineer," but I think the other three Java developers also had that title. It's not that I wasn't interested in design, but that I was very interested in making sure things actually worked and that bugs were actually fixed; I also aggressively believed that if there were some code change I hadn't finished by the end of the day, it would probably be more efficient for me to abandon the new/revised source code and return to the existing code the next day with the gist of where I'd been going and without spaghetti. But that's just me.)

Of the other two, one formed this band and the other does a lot of open source work with Mozilla.

Unrelated (this sort of fits the non-technical part of the theme of the post, though not the subject line), my Concord roommate's birthday is today, at least according to Friendster. I haven't used Friendster in years and we hadn't been in touch since 2004, but it was fun to see the name in the Friendster auto-email.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 12:05 PM

June 27, 2008

The New Cheating

Outsource your homework?

...as e-mailed to me by Brian

Posted by Matt Bruce at 01:53 PM

Be Careful Turning List Items into Paragraphs!

According to The Onion, accessories for [the 2006] Streisand farewell tour included 25-foot-long acrypc fingernails and James Bropn.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 09:18 AM

June 20, 2008

The Recent AP Copyright Mess

In no particular order:

1. What kind of name is Rogers Cadenhead, anyway?

2. That's the name of a person, whose weblog is named "Drudge Retort." If I were Matt Drudge I'd be tempted to file a trademark claim based on likelihood of confusion.

This (via Orin Kerr); there's sometimes an inverse correlation between the amount of breathless hysteria on the part of particular bloggers, and the degree to which there's anything to be breathlessly hysteric about.

4. This is not the first time (and probably won't be the last) this individual has been involved in something stupid. By my count these are the seventh, eighth, and tenth Google search results on his name, where in we find:

A. Someone else accuses him of intellectual dishonesty in light of his critique of BitTorrent

B. A mainstream news source lists him among those cyber-squatting papal domain names

C. He himself accuses some conservative think tank of wanting a Bush dictatorship

(If you're looking for a political slant either way here: Cadenhead seems to be a left-wing crackpot; the people I saw most vehemently in his court (more exactly, most vehmently anti-AP) are righty bloggers, Instapundit et al; Orin Kerr is a moderate who posts thoughtful-but-not-very-libertarian entries on the mostly-libertarian Volokh Conspiracy.)

Posted by Matt Bruce at 07:50 PM

May 15, 2008

Stupid Excel Meta-Question

How is it even remotely possible to create (intentionally) a reference that's (inadvertently) circular? How could you possibly fail to realize this would happen, unless you were stabbing formulas in the dark?

Quite often I create inadvertent circular references always by inadvertently typing the wrong thing, say C2 when I honestly meant B2. The Excel UI for "yes, I know I meant B2 not C2" is subpar.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 02:53 PM

Backscatter

Any suggestions for how to combat this? (Even excluding my bulk mail folder, this month I've seen a 20-fold increase in unsolicited messages per day and only about a five-fold increase in "real" e-mail. Most of the unsolicited are backscatter.)

Should I finally get around to filtering out any subject line like "Undeliverable Mail" or "Mail delivery failed" or such?

Posted by Matt Bruce at 12:36 AM

May 06, 2008

Come for the Geekout, Stay for the Bizarre Comment Thread

This post contains a fantastic video reminding us how amazing Google's search functionality is.

The ensuing comment thread involves one particular user ("DRB") who has surprising opinions about what constitutes a level of insubordination worthy of firing someone. I have no idea who DRB is but there's a strong chance he or she is a rotten human being; I pity his or her co-workers and especially family members.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 04:03 PM

May 02, 2008

A Very Distressing Time Horizon Question

Don't think too hard about this, because if you're like me it may lead to brief but debilitating depression (near catatonia). But if you're morbidly curious...

(On a much more uplifting note, that also happens to have a sports theme (despite the sports "hook," the central questions here are by no means sports specific; maybe culture specific), 50 years ago there was no such thing as a Super Bowl. What will exist 50 years from now that will be as important then as the Super Bowl is now, yet unfathomable to us now?)

How likely are the 2108 Chicago Cubs to exist? (As you know the 1908 Cubs won the World Series, and the 2008 Cubs keep getting reminded that their franchise hasn't won a World Series since then.)

How likely are the 2508 Cubs to exist?

I think it's safe to assume that the 12008 Cubs won't exist, though it's unclear why I assume that. Will MLB lose popularity to a competing league? Baseball to a competing sport? How likely is Chicago (as we know it) to exist in 10008? (The obvious follow-up is "define 'as we know it'!")

When will be the final season that the Cubs exist?

When will be the final calendar year that the United States exists?

When will be the final calendar year that people living in the present actually think of within the same time system we currently use?

(That is, exactly 10,000 years from now how likely are people to think of that day as May 2, 12008? Cutting to the chase, how likely are people to exist?)

Posted by Matt Bruce at 11:34 AM

April 23, 2008

I, For One, Welcome...

Here's some business news, with a topical Onion chaser.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 01:22 PM

March 24, 2008

xkcd

I can only hope we're about a week away from a "Comic Strip Not Found" HTML joke. (Go here, hit "Prev," hit "Next," and look at your address bar.)

Posted by Matt Bruce at 12:08 PM

March 20, 2008

Zombie Richard Feynman!

In case you missed it.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 11:38 AM

March 10, 2008

Investment Baking

Pretty good typo find (March 6 entry).

I had a roommate a few years ago who had a character in Everquest that spent all its time baking. Since the idea was to sell these baked goods at a profit, I guess you could call this "investment baking." (Same roommate had a different character whose defining feature was "pacifist necromancer.")

Posted by Matt Bruce at 10:37 AM

March 05, 2008

E-Mail Subject Lines You Should Never Use

I presume nobody uses "Hi" anymore, since the spammers hijacked that one years ago. And everyone remembers to put a subject line.

The next one to crack down on is "Question." Not necessarily for spam-based reasons (even though I always think an e-mail with that subject will be spam, surprisingly often it isn't), but just because a much better subject line would reflect what the question was about.

Oh, and if you're trying to prevent your legit e-mails from being mistaken for spam, apparently you should avoid subject lines where the penultimate line is "for." To Bayesian filters, it would seem a subject line like "ICT Invitation for [name of school]" looks a lot like "Rolex Watch for [name of person]."

Posted by Matt Bruce at 12:12 PM

February 20, 2008

Quick Quick Hits Hits

This screen contains 13 months of better blogging than most bloggers' 13-month output.

(He has a more conventional blog whose target audience is people who care about himself, as opposed to just his best ideas.)

I did not know about Python's pass command (having never written Python) but I do use # do nothing quite often (as should you).

I also emphatically share the "inordinate thrill" mentioned in the January 11 entry. Just reading that made me irrationally euphoric. Math geeks have weird happy places.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 11:36 AM

February 01, 2008

I Don't Own As Much YHOO AS I Thought I Did

Opened e*Trade expecting big things, but between YHOO and GOOG (and in a smaller effect EBAY up AMZN down) I'm slightly in the red today.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 11:59 AM

January 20, 2008

My Car Hardly Ever Returns the Favor

This isn't nearly as dumb as the ad alluded to in the post title (it's actually an interesting question), but:

In light of the mock Second Life IBM ad, do we really agree that "The point of innovation is to make real money"?

In theory any capitalist would/should agree, but is it inefficient of me that every now and then I innovate just for kicks and giggles?

Posted by Matt Bruce at 02:07 PM

January 12, 2008

CES/Gizmodo Thoughts

Nick Denton probably has deep pockets. Motorola probably has top-notch lawyers.

The people who disagree with each other in this Fark thread are never going to convince each other of anything. "You are not your bank account." Oh. Well that settles it. Might as well end the discussion.

There's a geek-off within this Slashdot thread about the relative merits of electrical tape versus sending a lock command through the serial port. The former is obvious enough but it works only until Gizmodo decides it would be amusing to peel the tape back and repeat step 1.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 12:21 PM

December 31, 2007

Desktops or Clouds?

A couple weeks ago the Sunday NY Times business section had a long article about Google vs. Microsoft. Part of the conflict is a paradigm collision between people who see their productivity happening mainly on a local machine, versus those who see it happening mainly on-line.

(Of course that's not just a Google-Microsoft thing. You can add Apple to the "local machine" paradigm and a variety of web companies to the other side.)

Anyway, I think one of the best pieces of concrete evidence in favor of web-based computing is Microsoft Outlook (and everything wrong with it). [N.B. I have never used Leopard, so I have no idea how good Apple's e-mail client is apart from my high esteem for the developer(s) in question.]

Posted by Matt Bruce at 01:17 PM

December 23, 2007

The Arrogance of (Some) Modern Technology

This article is why good user interfaces are critical.

I'm all for getting everyone to their floors a few seconds faster, but a system flaw that misleads people into getting off on the wrong floor is far worse than a system that fails to save those few seconds.

"When our building opened, people kept getting off on the wrong floor because the elevator didn’t tell you which floor it was. Traditional elevators tell you where you are by lighting up each floor number as you reach it, but this elevator didn’t bother. It simply listed the next stops it was making. If it was stopping at floors 4 and 7, when the doors opened at the 4th floor, the electronic sign above the elevator doors would be displaying 7 - and people going to the 7th floor would see it and get off. It took months before engineers finally added a feature to the sign showing which floor the elevator was on."

Posted by Matt Bruce at 11:01 PM

December 17, 2007

Bad Robot! No Biscuit!

If I infer correctly, this company that Facebook just sued executed some scripts that didn't do anything an end user couldn't do manually -- just thousands of times faster than an end user would have been able to.

I see three theories here, one of which is significantly less plausible than the other two:

1. This web scraping may have violated a Terms of Use policy. Highly relevant if the links in question were available only to a registered Facebook user; irrelevant otherwise. (If I'm an anonymous web surfer, I have no particular obligation to obey any given Terms of Use of any given publicly available site.)

[1a. The web scraper might have violated the Terms of Use of whoever old that company Internet access.]

2. The web scraping may have interfered with, or degraded, other people's use of Facebook. This is what Denial of Service is about. It's a Very Bad Thing.

3. Facebook may claim that it's somehow this other company's fault that Facebook users' privacy was compromised. The basic idea here is security by tedium: There was a way to get all this user data, that nobody would bother with because it would take so long (except when someone wrote a script to make it not take so long). Here the blame is entirely with Facebook.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 04:59 PM

December 12, 2007

Visual Basic for Applications

The language so inherently insecure that, instead of bothering to actually (oh, I don't know...) make it secure, Microsoft decided instead for XP to cut off your access to it by default, without any user-friendly instructions on how to set the security level properly so that you can easily use macros you wrote yourself.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 02:24 PM

If XP Is This Bad, Why Would Anyone Even Consider Vista?

Really, Bill, you can't even untar something without doing a web search and downloading a free utility?

Utter madness.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 02:19 PM

My Favorite Text Editor

...is still the top hit for this search.

(And the latest release is still September 2004.)

Posted by Matt Bruce at 12:18 PM

December 11, 2007

My Work Computer Died Last Night

Luckily, you don't need Outlook to do real work (and certainly don't need meetings, or meeting notices). Mind, the lack of Office (i.e. Excel) poses a degree of difficulty, but the data will all be recovered and the software installation will work itself out over time. (Better to have to reinstall Crystal Reports than lose a bunch of .rpt files I was too stupid to back up.)

But the point of this post isn't minor workplace griping; rather it's another plug for the good old popularity map: Now with some artist biographies (click on an artist name to see them), and with N% more Christmas music (if you're clicking around U.S. states rather than the countries of the world).

And hey, maybe next week there will be line breaks between albums' track names. (It's basically my fault there aren't.)

(But don't blame me for the editorial comments, like the subtle dig at Mannheim Steamroller. Those are third-party opinions.)

Posted by Matt Bruce at 06:09 PM

December 03, 2007

The Economic Cost of Service from a Distance

The result mentioned here should ring true to anyone who's had a lot of early-morning (or late-night) conference calls, or been involved in discussion threads where the ping-pong amounts to one volley per day.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 01:43 AM

November 18, 2007

What Would You Think If You'd Heard This Sentence in 2001?

"Wireless spectrum and network management are nowhere near Google's core competency. Its competence is in one market, online advertising,"
--from this article

You know somebody is a suit, rather than a tech, when they simplify an entire realm of search algorithms by just referring to the type of product that most visibly monetizes them.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 10:00 AM

November 08, 2007

This Is Exactly Why Fox News Makes a Big Point Of Referring to "Homicide Bombers"

This article about Halo 3 is edifying up to a point. But whoever submitted it to Fark (under the particular headline that ran) has terrible reasoning skills.

It's not the "suicide" part of suicide bombing that makes the tactic "illegitimate." I'm surprised it took so long for a Fark commenter to make that point. (Scroll to "walked into a cafe in Second Life.")

Posted by Matt Bruce at 06:07 PM

October 20, 2007

A Lifetime of xkcd in One Blog Post

(read in 2-3 sittings, linked here as "best of")

Nash equilibria

The perfect phrase for condescendingly dismissing anything

String theory summarized

The problem with Monty Python

Command line fu

The kayak travels through time?

random number

Escape artist (this one made me laugh so hard)

Dream girl: an excellent short story w/moral (as completely overturned by events I just read about on Wikipedia)

The difference (as posted on a colleague's wall, the first I knew of xkcd's existence)

My all-time favorite xkcd (so far)

Labyrinth puzzle

TCMP

Powers of One

When meeting a girlfriend's family...

Long light -- which reminded me of when I lived at the Sili-Palace, and we received a voter information packet in which some municipal office candidate railed against inefficient traffic light patterns. The particular roommate who'd gone to math grad school took basically the same position as the "designer" in this strip, only with more fulmination.

Names

Excessive quotation

Little Bobby Tables

Eggs (I wish I'd been geekier in college, and also promiscuous)

Posted by Matt Bruce at 12:45 AM

October 19, 2007

Dearest Yahoo! Mail

All right, all right, I've upgraded already: But now that I have, enough with the five boxes opening up at once bombarding me with descriptions of new features that I would have probably figured out on my own.

(Ostensibly the big reason I didn't stick with gmail was that if my wife and I share a computer I like letting her gmail account stay logged in. Now that we use separate computers more and more often this doesn't really hold, and yet... inertia is so powerful...)

Update: Holy flurking schnit, they made one of the worst user interface decisions ever! In "Classic" Yahoo! Mail I display 10 messages at a time, the better to delete copious NAQT spam. (Gmail handles spam somewhat better but still imperfectly enough that on balance I think I'm a tiny bit better with Yahoo! Classic.) In the newer interface, if you check the universal checkbox then it selects EVERY E-MAIL IN YOUR INBOX, even if 238 of them aren't actually on the screen you're viewing. This is unacceptable.

Hence my return to Yahoo! Classic.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 10:00 AM

October 17, 2007

FAIL

My favorite images on Fark are always part of the "Fail" meme -- but I can't seem to find a treasure trove of them. Google Searches and Google Image Searches haven't quickly led to what I wanted to see. Any better ideas?

Posted by Matt Bruce at 11:38 PM

Two Things About Facebook

1. A potentially good writing exercise is to force yourself to update your Status (the "Matt is [...]" sentence) every day. (I actually learned this from Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution, days (weeks?) before I joined Facebook.)

2. If you're not very techy and you want to set up a collaborative weblog within minutes, he most convenient place might just be your own Facebook "wall." (That depends on how easy it is to grant/revoke people's permission to write on it. AFAICT any of my friends can write on my wall; I haven't looked around to see how configurable that is.)

Second-easiest would be Blogger, of course (if you have a Gmail account or have used Blogger in the past). Maybe that would even be easiest. The tricky part is you have to remember to bother to go to blogger.com, which you'd never do except to blog. (Facebook you'd log in for all sorts of reasons, anything from quasi-Scrabble to zombie tomfoolery.)

Posted by Matt Bruce at 01:57 PM

October 16, 2007

Urban Legend: Cell Phones and "Do Not Call"

The e-mail subject began "Fw: Fw: Fw:" and the message text began, "REMINDER....all cell phone numbers are being released to telemarketing companies tomorrow and you will start to receive sales calls."

My skepticism turned out to be well-grounded.

I'd like to have back a few hours (of database query time, not my own time) that went to waste as a result of a stupid less-than/greater-than typo.

October 10, 2007

Slides from the Power Point Deck of Zen

Include, but are not limited to:

"It works just fine."

"This time for real."

"Details will follow when the date gets closer."

"It's totally worth it."

Posted by Matt Bruce at 12:43 PM

September 29, 2007

Google Map-Based IP Location Lookup

This is a nifty tool, according to which I recently got comment spam from Guangzhou, Guangdong, PRC.

(Their capcha script solving skills must have improved.)

Posted by Matt Bruce at 11:28 AM

September 27, 2007

E-Mail: Cognitive Dissonance

The other day my wife started to compose an e-mail and asked me to help her figure out what she'd write. The question seemed strange to me:

If you know why you're sending an e-mail and what information you need to convey, doesn't the message write itself? (That might be much more true in a business context than in graceful social correspondence.)

Despite that conceit of mine I do sometimes spend a lot of time on business e-mails. (And a lot of length, though part of the time spent is editing for length, as I'm well aware that I try to say more in an e-mail than a lot of people would attempt.)

Posted by Matt Bruce at 01:16 PM

September 26, 2007

Vaporware of the Day

"On Tuesday, DEA spokesman Rusty Payne in Washington reiterated that the growing list [of people identified as having received performance-enhancing drugs] included hundreds of thousands of names.

But Dan Simmons, a DEA spokesman in San Diego, disputed the number, saying that 'hundreds of thousands' pertains to the number of emails intercepted during the investigation, not the names of people who received drugs from the illegal underground market. In fact, Simmons said, the list of names is a work in progress and hasn't been compiled yet."
--Yahoo! Sports

I predict this turns into a fiasco on the level of the TSA's No Fly List. That could mean especially bad times for athletes with common names.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 12:40 PM

September 21, 2007

The Cult of the "First Post"

Are these premises all true?

1. People who post "first!" or "first post!" to new threads on web message boards make life that much worse for their failure to contribute anything useful.

2. Nonetheless, having the first post on a new thread at a popular web site is pretty neat in its own right.

3. If you happen across an empty thread (newly posted, naturally) on a very popular web site, you may -- must? -- dash off a very quick first post, so long as it actually does have real content (thus precluding any "first"er)?

4. That dashed-off post must have ONLY "real" content, and can't even allude to the first post phenomenon.

5. Hours later on your own weblog, bragging about a "first post" is borderline at best but vaguely excusable if veiled in netiquette blather.

6. If a site gets anywhere from 100-200 comments on a typical post, the gap between #1 and #2 is on the order of minutes (e.g. nine minutes), rather than seconds, so the "gotta get this first post in under the wire" adrenaline is misplaced.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 05:58 PM

Archetypical Slashdot Commenters Are Deranged in a Manner Completely Unlike That of Archetypical Fark Commenters

Slashdot has a thread about anti-female bias in the engineering world. This comment cites a fantastic engineer joke ("...you've been working late in the lab again!") but inexplicably adds:

Anyone who thinks that's a "sexist" joke isn't a good engineer, because they've never experienced a problem so engrossing that they'll spend all night trying to solve it. An engineer (well, one lucky enough to get the opportunity!) might feel guilty about cheating on his/her spouse... but never about spending a night at the lab!

...which leads this commenter to assert that

You're wrong in thinking jokes like this are completely innocuous. Sending the message that "good" engineers are the ones who'll stay all night is exactly what keeps people who value life balance out of fields like engineering. Such a culture doesn't just tend to exclude women, but also people from non-anglo cultures that value family. (italics in original)

And here I thought the point of the joke was to MAKE FUN of engineers for being so obsessed. By the logic of the second commenter, doesn't ANY field conducive to fanatical obsession (anything from a symphony orchestra to a surgery rotation) "tend to exclude women [and] also people from non-anglo cultures that value family"?

Life is hard: Being the absolute best at what you do best is incompatible with being well-rounded. Make some trade-offs and do your best to find a happy medium. (Or complain that the world discriminates and demand redress -- your call.)

Posted by Matt Bruce at 04:49 PM

September 09, 2007

Google Search Meme of the Day

Find a search that will produce many matches, of which nine of the first ten are about the same thing (something that other people might recognize) but one of those ten is about something radically different. Post the "radically different" page and see whether people can guess the original search (and by extension what the other nine pages have in common).

For example, what search term brought me to this page and what's the back story behind that search?

Posted by Matt Bruce at 10:37 PM

September 07, 2007

Welcome to Price Discrimination, B'tches

Unlike Tyler Cowen, I didn't get mad that Apple iPhone early adopters were kvetching about having paid $200 more than more recent purchasers will pay.

I was going to be floored that Apple bribed the kvetchers with $100, except that it's $100 in store credit: that is, $100 in Apple swag rather than complete liquid/fungible $100. So good job Apple after all.

But the original complaint itself is a mind-boggling amount of chutzpah: They wanted the bleeding edge of technology (and the status that comes with it), so they paid for the privilege.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 02:48 PM

August 21, 2007

On the Street Where (I Once) Live(d)

If you live, or have lived, on a street covered by Google Street View, share a link that shows it.

The old Sili-Palace is the three-story baby blue with the red attic window and the faux-wood stairs. We lived on the ground floor and the first floor.

I'm shocked that there is not yet a Boston street view. Would you settle for an exterior shot of Baker Field (home to Columbia football, yet 100 blocks north of the Columbia campus proper)?

Yankee Stadium doesn't have much of an exterior either. (Nor does Pac Bell Park, which I looked at several days ago but didn't find memorable enough to post a link.)

Posted by Matt Bruce at 02:54 PM

August 16, 2007

This Seems Simple to Me, And Yet...

Company vacation time accrual policy, as I understand it:

Either you accrue vacation hours (henceforth "you do") or you don't accrue vacation hours ("you don't").

If you do, then you will until these things BOTH become true (if ever):
1. You're at/above 160 hours
2. It's December 31, 23:59:59

If you don't, then you won't until this one thing becomes true (if ever):
1. You fall below 160 hours.

Every time this policy is explained (maybe not in those particular words) it seems crystal clear to me, yet confusing to a good chunk of the room. Is the source of the confusion just bad explanation? Is my own explanation messed-up enough to confuse people?

Posted by Matt Bruce at 05:26 PM

Business Rule Breakdown of the Day

How hard would it have been for the Pentagon to avoid auto-paying any bill where the shipping cost exceeded (let's say) 10 times the cost of the part?

Or does the link text itself answer the question?

Posted by Matt Bruce at 12:42 PM

August 15, 2007

Amusing Google Search Result Scavenger Hunt

Give me a search term with these properties:

1. It would be obvious to a human (perhaps with some subject matter expertise) what the searcher was looking for.

2. For some particular, perhaps predictable reason, the actual search results are nowhere near that intent.

This is my new favorite example, inspired by this Cracked article. (I heartily, passionately agree with their choice for #1, at least until some indie band decides that "Various Artists" is a clever name to appropriate.)

Posted by Matt Bruce at 06:11 PM

August 14, 2007

Two Interesting, Yet Possibly Contradictory, Tech Articles

An Oxford philosopher posits that we probably live in a computer simulation, based on these three ideas:

1. There will be enough computing power someday to run evolutionary ancestry simulations.

2. There will be many such simulations of only one "real" life.

3. Those simulations will be indistinguishable (to their inhabitants) from real life.

On the other hand, the limiting factor probably isn't processing power but memory: even with incredibly cheap memory we don't even have enough room to digitize music to audiophiles' satisfaction.

I think either Tierney (the NY Times writer from the first link) or Bostrom (the Oxford philosopher himself) vastly underestimates the order of magnitude of the full set of senses and experiences of our lives.

Even if you comprehend a very large number like the number of molecules within the Earth's atmosphere, think of how frequently one of those molecules has a binary decision point (in one simulation it does A; in another it does B; and at least one observer within that universe can tell the difference). Even if each of those molecules averaged just one such decision point, two to the power of the number of molecules on Earth is pretty staggering, especially if your conceit is that a computer made up of some of those molecules can produce a simulation of the fate of them all.

Think of how much memory would be required to store everything you've heard in your life, to the level of detail that you could perceive.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 10:43 PM

August 10, 2007

Speaking of Dashboards

If I could do just one thing to save the English language from business buzzwords, it would be to ban automotive metaphors from internal requirements documents.

(Well, maybe just the words "engine" and/or "dashboard." It's not as though businesspeople overuse references to "steering wheels" or "hubcaps.")

Posted by Matt Bruce at 12:15 AM

July 30, 2007

URL of the Day

This must be the Mongolia Star-Tribune. (Wait, what?)

Posted by Matt Bruce at 03:39 PM

July 16, 2007

Odd Descriptor of the Day

"Mathematicians have a fancy phrase for waiting in line: Queueing theory."
--awkward sentence from this article that wasn't as interesting as it could have been

That's like saying "Doctors have a fancy phrase for feet: Podiatry."

Posted by Matt Bruce at 01:52 PM

July 09, 2007

Blogroll

I just realized I haven't updated my blogroll in forever. (Keith's comment one post below contributed to this epiphany, partly by being absolutely right. I know he has a blog, that I keep not reading by dint of never getting around to linking it.)

Remind me where your blogs are, either by commenting to this post or by e-mail my Yahoo! account (username should be obvious from the end of the URL of this blog).

Posted by Matt Bruce at 04:30 PM

July 02, 2007

I Don't Understand the Concept of TotalFark

Fark has a green-lighting system through which mods (still basically Drew?) can decide which submissions make it to the main page. The system is so effective that for just $5 a month you can bypass it.

(DVD "Deleted Scenes" present a similar quandary, as do previously unreleased tracks on a box set. They were previously unreleased for a reason.)

Posted by Matt Bruce at 09:49 AM

June 29, 2007

echo "Hello World"

Unix shell scripts aren't nearly as mysterious as I thought they'd be. I wonder what my professional life would be like had I discovered this in 1992 rather than 2007.

fi is also an indescribably sweet choice of keyword. (Same function as the Visual Basic "end if." Of course a closed curly-bracket gets the job done in any generic programming language, but code that actually reads like pseudocode is mildly underrated.)

Posted by Matt Bruce at 05:53 PM

June 24, 2007

Highways Are Our Friends

A short trip that uses highways.

A much longer trip that avoids highways.

(No, we're not going to Fisherman's Wharf, but the actual destination address that inspired this exercise is more generic.)

Posted by Matt Bruce at 07:26 PM

June 18, 2007

Waste of Space of the Day

I should know better than to even look at any Fark thread involving outsourcing, and what frustrates me isn't even the asinine bigotry (no longer surprising) so much as just how superfluous some people's jobs were before they got (mercifully) outsourced.

("Anyone need a good VB/SQL programmer in Phoenix?" I don't actually know the person who posted that -- for all I know could be some misunderstood genius -- but the follow-up of "No such thing" is correct on so many levels!)

Posted by Matt Bruce at 04:49 PM

June 13, 2007

Does the Internet Help the Socially Awkward?

One of the most interesting lines of this post (actually quoted by that post and originally here is "In a similar vein, have you ever noticed how some very socially awkward people have charming Internet personalities?"

In my experience "great in person, horrible on-line" people far outnumber the other way around. In one particular on-line forum of the 1990s I apparently gained a reputation as one of the nicest people in person but one of the rottenest on the forum itself.

That said, among my peers I immediately thought of both someone whose on-line personality is amazing even though many people have trouble getting along with him in person, and someone who's amazing in person despite being insufferable on-line.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 09:20 PM

May 23, 2007

The Most Soul-Sucking Web 2.0 Thing I've Seen

(Calling it "Web 2.0" is a stretch, but then anything I can do to make that buzzword even less meaningful than it used to be, I'll take perverse pleasure in doing.)

Does the world really need message boards about fantasy sports? I frequently view at least two web sites (one is ESPN.com, one isn't) that both have these. Just the subject lines alone make me feel fatigue.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 10:58 AM

Two of Life's Most Underrated Skills

These are also closely related to each other:

1. Clear & Precise Knowledge. Three of the most knowledgeable people I've ever met comment here reasonably often: Chad, Paul & west coast dork. In each case, what's impressive isn't even the breadth and depth of knowledge so much as the careful choice of words and source material -- they all very reliably just know what they're talking about.

2. Connections Made & Knowledge Imparted. You learn something from/about Person A that Person B would find to be a godsend. (Assume this doesn't involve personal secrets, malicious gossip, industrial espionage, etc.) How efficiently can you clue Person B in on what he needs to know?

I feel moderately smug about #2 right now, or rather felt that way last night. About to plow through some e-mail that might confirm or deny whether that smugness is warranted.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 10:55 AM

May 09, 2007

Where Have Pivot Reports Been All My Life?

One paradoxical consequence of understanding pretty well how to crunch numbers is that I tend to "roll my own" in situations where a wizard (as Microsoft likes to call them) wants to put the easy solution in my lap.

Do you have any idea how much time I've wasted over the years manually fabricating the things that a pivot table gives you in two seconds?

Why did it take me so long to say "Hmm, I wonder how Pivot Tables actually do what they supposedly do" and actually bother to teach myself how to use them? (That process took maybe 15 minutes.)

Posted by Matt Bruce at 01:08 PM

April 26, 2007

Name an E-mail Service Provider of the Early 1990s

My wife can't remember who hosted her first e-mail account and it's driving us both nuts. We have a winner: It was on Juno. (But I'm happy Tom mentioned Panix because I knew someone in the early 1990s with a Panix account.)

She's certain it's none of:

Compuserve
Prodigy
GEnie
Delphi
AOL
Mindspring
Earthlink
Geocities
Netcom
The World (world.std.com)
The Well
Freenet
Fidonet ("it wasn't any of the nets!")
Hotmail
MSN.com
att.com

I'm running out of possibilities. This was years before Yahoo! existed to say nothing of gmail or the ubiquity of comcast.net addresses.

It's definitely not an .edu account (the first e-mail address I ever had was @husc8.harvard.edu). By the time she got to college everyone in her class automatically got an e-mail account.

My class year ('96) had one of the biggest jumps, possibly the biggest jump, from percent of previous year's freshman class who signed up for an e-mail account to percent of my year's freshman class to sign up for an e-mail account. I think less than half of '95 had an e-mail account in 1991-92 but more than half of '96 had one in 1992-93.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 07:09 PM

April 18, 2007

Communication Device Back-Up Plans

This guy is better off without his ex.

My sophomore year of college (fall of 1993 if you're counting) I got an e-mail inviting me to dinner. Well, the e-mail was sent in the morning but only arrived an hour after the invitation, because of a mail server issue.

It amazes me sometimes what people take for granted.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 04:50 PM

March 31, 2007

TiSP

As annual Google announcements go, TiSP doesn't quite live up to the high standard set by Pigeon Rank, Google Moon, et al, but I liked it all the same.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 11:46 PM

March 27, 2007

Web-Based E-mail vs. Hard Drive E-Mail

Resolved: E-mail clients that store messages on your hard drive are roughly analogous to a land line, in this day and age of cellphone ubiquity.

Even stronger form of that resolution: For non-business* users, web-based programs like Gmail and Yahoo! Mail are far superior to computer-specific e-mail software.

*- Business users obviously can't have sensitive e-mail on the Internet, though in that case it belongs on a company server.

I had dinner a couple nights ago with someone who'd probably disagree (given what he does for a living).

Meanwhile, my wife recently got an e-mail account related to her theater directing vocation. The tech guy she talked to tried to get her to use Thunderbird and it was a complete fustercluck. Once it reached the point that I knew about it, I set everything up to forward to/from her Gmail and now it's all fine.

(If I ever send you a message from matt-at-naqt, it actually came from the Yahoo! Mail web interface. I assume this is obvious if you look at expanded headers. Oh, while we're here, the incredibly lame new #1 reason why I still use Yahoo! despite Gmail's evident superiority is so that on our computer at home I never have to sign my wife out from Google to check my mail.)

Anyhow, please discuss this at length.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 04:40 PM

March 13, 2007

A Rather Odd Math Test

I did seven of these in my head, answering almost instantly. I claim that as written the eighth doesn't have enough information (and the sixth has a mistake?). Read on.

(And check my work: I was too lazy ever to click "show")

1. Yes (2+3 = 5 > 4)

2. 120 degrees

3. 1 (8 - 4.5 = 3.5, 3.5 x 2 = 7)

4. 3 p.m.

5. At the halfway point, so 15 minutes after I left (20 minutes after he left)

6. If they don't really mean "right triangle" then 1 cm; if they DO mean "right triangle" then it's impossible?

7. 8 (the four obvious ones, then both halves of both of the two ways to chop the thing in half)

8. The graphics editor left out the total amount spent on the books. Let's say it was $N. Then 20R + 10(80-R) = N, 10R + 800 = N, so R = ($N - $8)/10

Posted by Matt Bruce at 02:31 PM

March 11, 2007

Quoted for Truth

The blame for [Daylight Saving Time computer problems] lies squarely with Fred Upton, a Michigan Republican, and Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, for sponsoring the amendment to the Energy Policy Act of 2005. The amount of energy saved is miniscule at this time of year (unlike in summer with its longer days) and the disruption they have caused to computer systems and transportation schedules (especially airlines) is phenomenal.
--Scott Wickham, my cousin-in-law (who is apparently running for president)

Posted by Matt Bruce at 12:54 AM

Google Maps

Am I the only person NOT to have had a bad experience with Google Maps? Lots of inexplicable horror stories on the Scott Adams weblog. (Lots of inexplicable things in general: The post from 9:30 p.m. March 10 just sounds deranged.)

I suspect that the biggest mistake people make is typing in a landmark and taking for granted that this will infallibly lead to the landmark they actually mean. Cut the ambiguity and learn the correct street address first, and you'll be fine.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 12:23 AM

March 09, 2007

These Pipes Are Clean!

Please try the pipes shown above, especially if you hate blog entries about sports (or blog entries about politics).

I think I'd have to lose about 100 pounds to look like that avatar.

Oh, major kudos to David Weigel (as well as the metafilter user who hated him enough to do something about it) for, depending on how you look at it, either having a great sense of humor or pulling the supreme asshole move (or both).

Posted by Matt Bruce at 05:24 PM

March 08, 2007

Get Your dada Fix

People write the darnedest things on the Wikipedia Introduction page, which explicitly exhorts you to edit it. (Scroll all the way down.)

Posted by Matt Bruce at 02:02 PM

March 07, 2007

A Perl Chindogu

I've been meaning to share this for awhile.

For a quick 10 points what is the purpose of this code? (Bonus points for the purpose of each inelegant kludge.)

Is this too anal to bother with? (And wouldn't it be cooler if I'd just made it a one-liner?)

use strict;

my $fn = "in";
$fn = $ARGV[0] if ($ARGV[0] ne "");

open MYIN, "<$fn.txt";
open MYOUT, ">>$fn-2.txt";

while (<MYIN>) {
my $s = $_;
$s =~ s/>\s*//g;
if ($s =~ m/ROUND/) {
#do nothing
} else {
$s =~ s/\s+(\d[^B])/ \t$1/g;
}
print MYOUT $s;
}

Posted by Matt Bruce at 07:12 PM

March 05, 2007

Should You Dress Your Zwinky?

"Dress your zwinky" sounds vaguely risque but I'm not quite sure what it would mean. It benefits from that "dreaded rear admiral" form of ambiguity.

Anyhow, an anti-spyware outfit found that Zwinky is not badware, although it does engage in behaviors that users should be aware of, mainly through its "MyWebSearch" toolbar.

You may or may not have known that Zwinky was created by the same people behind Ask.com and Match.com.

Zwinky 1, Jeeves 0.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 01:19 PM

March 03, 2007

They Finally Got Their pr0n-bot Working

Sonia Belle (warning: explicit images) is no longer a Google AdSense customer. She got (and posted) a form letter reading in part:

As stated in our program policies, AdSense publishers are not permitted to place Google ads on pages with adult or mature content.

Her response, in part: I was surprised that it took them so long to realize the true, naked nature of my blog.

AdSense has so many customers that I doubt anyone has time to review them all manually. I suppose maybe someone reported her, but it seems more likely that explicit content was crawled somehow. And if the tool finally exists to do that (at least for AdSense customers)...

...nah. I suppose a company that won't let its ads appear on sites with adult content, certainly wouldn't attempt to make money selling a script that helps you find such sites.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 01:52 PM

February 22, 2007

Web Site Redesigns Are Often Painful, But...

The new Yahoo! Sports is an unspeakable eyesore. I am once again a free agent when it comes to primary sports web portals. Leaning towards Fox Sports. Not CBS Sportsline (something doesn't look right, maybe too much ad space on the right nav bar), probably not ESPN (page is too busy/text-y, the opposite of the current box-on-box all picture Yahoo! problem). And on a surface level I give a slight edge to Fox over NBC.

Oh, and CNN? That page is just a mess.

Ah, the last good site design for a sports portal. Too bad the content is all scattershot the way you'd expect from robots.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 05:06 PM

February 15, 2007

Digg

In theory you can now (more easily) submit* any posts from my main page to Digg. I have yet to attempt this though.

*- You always had the ability to do this, if you felt like copying and pasting an URL.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 03:32 PM

February 10, 2007

I Stopped Reading At...

(Google in particular, a growing icon in politically left-leaning circles, gives high priority to Wikipedia entries.)

Apparently this guy didn't like the content of some politically charged Wikipedia pages, didn't like the arguments that ensued when he made edits, and didn't like how the pages stood when they were locked to non-registered users.

He's probably better at preaching to choirs than at winning converts.

Other Wikipedia news: Are they in financial trouble?

Interview with Jimmy Wales here. (You've already seen the photo at the top of that link, but my new favorite part is the photo credit.)

Posted by Matt Bruce at 12:10 PM

February 05, 2007

Stereotypical Math Geeks Have Their Priorities Screwed Up

"I just don't think the expansion of 1/7 is something that is commonly known anywhere near as often as the first digits of pi, e, or radical 2."
--claim made in a recent e-mail thread

Can this really be true? I'd be shocked and appalled if so. The digit sequence of any given decimal expansion is FAR more useful in everyday life (at least the everyday life of a scientist) than then nth digit (at least for n > 5) of any of the constants mentioned above.

Yeah sure, knowing "142857" over and over again isn't as "sexy" as knowing hundreds or thousands of digits of a sequence with no obvious rhyme or reason to it, but for crying out loud, what difference would it actually make in the grand scheme of things if the 777th digit of pi were 7 instead of whatever it actually is?

Full disclosure: I was a math major. I know cold that pi begins "3.14159", that root 2 begins "1.41", and that e begins "2.7" (next digit might be "8" but don't quote me on that). I specifically deride and impugn those misguided souls who wasted time and brain cells committing digits of pi to memory, for (in my opinion) spectacularly missing the point of even theoretical mathematics.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 03:18 PM

February 01, 2007

A Tremendously Productive Week

Lots of amazing things happening. Accomplishing things at work (I wonder whether anyone has tracked the correlation between canceled/postponed meetings and higher real productivity), catching up on (perhaps even meeting!) seemingly impossible, "OMFG we're hosed" deadlines elsewhere.

I also just noticed that I hadn't looked at the Baseball Prospectus site since Friday.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 12:29 PM

January 30, 2007

still shopping jason jennings?

No matter how good your spam filter is you probably have to make split-second decisions as you go through your e-mail inbox. (Well, they don't *have* to be split-second decisions but once you've seen enough spam, the subject lines are obvious enough.)

Of all the legitimate e-mail you've received recently, which subject lines were you closest to mistaking for spam? (Exclude "hi" or [no subject] or anything else so generic.)

Mine is the title of this post, though I must admit "Why can't Hentzel make good decisions?" takes honorable mention.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 01:34 PM

January 03, 2007

"Real responses, from real people": So?

Based on an ad I just saw on a web page, apparently on "Windows Live" you can type "Who has the best mullet in Rock?" [sic] into a text box and get back "Real responses, from real people."

...but how does this differ from Internet Relay Chat?

Posted by Matt Bruce at 05:49 PM

Google Patent Searches

Google Patent Searches

(Thank you, Slate!)

My father-in-law invented the optimum screw, among other things.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 05:05 PM

January 02, 2007

Hexagonal Graph Paper in Excel

Microsoft has an Excel template (requires Internet Explorer, and obviously also Excel).

Now who can explain why I find this especially exciting? One general answer, three specific examples (two of which are close to the same thing). I predict Greg completely nails this, though you might beat him to the punch if you see this first.

UPDATE: I actually find the template underwhelming. Oh well.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 03:40 PM

December 29, 2006

Fun With Normalized Text

In a parallel universe, The Roots rot, Chris Brown goes Popin' (with the miter, I would hope), and Broke Valentine is self-explanatory.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 12:21 PM

December 28, 2006

E-Mails Without Subject Lines

How embarrassing: I inadvertently sent one of those, even though an obvious subject line existed (and I thought for sure I'd put it in).

In fact the message body makes a lot less sense w/o that subject line, though everyone made the right assumptions from context.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 01:03 PM

December 27, 2006

Mewelde Computer Trick of the Day

Queensryche? Crank the volume up full!

"...brother killin' brother for the profit of another: Game point, nobody wins..."

Posted by Matt Bruce at 09:42 PM

December 26, 2006

Dynamic HTML

I definitely don't know (at the moment) how to show/hide content in Firefox 2.0 but oddly I might know how to hide/show it in Explorer. Might. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Okay, this isn't going to happen any time soon (better things to do). Post a comment if you clamor for the implied functionality, or if there are other topics worth a show/hide toggle.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 01:12 PM

December 24, 2006

Dear Samsung,

One of your ads consistently causes my browser to crash. That ad seems to be in heavy rotation on various Yahoo! pages. Perhaps the fault lies with them, not you, but either way the ad for your product crashes my browser, and makes me much less inclined to buy anything from you.

Please fix at your earliest convenience.

Text-based Google ads are genius.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 04:56 PM

December 21, 2006

Spammers Imitate Dick Wolfe

Who else out there is getting spam subject lines parsed directly from wire service news stories?

I'd noticed this complete-sentence trend for awhile but didn't realize until "We're certainly better with Eric and Aki both at the back of our pen." that this was hot-off-the-presses news the spammers were cherry-picking.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 04:06 PM

TV.com Can Get Down On Its Knees [etc.]

Apparently I'm unworthy of enhancing the content at TV.com (which is astonishingly spotty as it stands) until I reach "Level 2."

How does one reach Level 2 (you might ask)? It says here simply: All registered users on the site have a level attached to them. Levels are a fun and fair way to reward and identify prominent community members. All users start at level 1 and must reach level 2 to gain the ability to submit content to the site.

Thanks a million. I'd have never figured that part out.

If I lack the privilege to edit a faulty piece of "Trivia" THEN WHY BOTHER GIVING ME THE "EDIT" HYPERLINK TO BEGIN WITH? Hire some developers who don't suck, and improve your user interface.

(Even more astonishingly, this misuse of web UI and waste of my time is part of the CNET network.)

So... because I neither know nor care how to reach "Level 2," anyone who goes to TV.com for more information about a particular episode of The Bob Newhart Show will "learn" that:

Early on the episode, Jerry admits that he failed to get tickets for the sold out Bears-Packers game, then suggests driving all the way to Peoria to watch the game. Granted, it was not uncommon to black out football games back in the 70's and 80's, but if it's Bears-Packers, it's being played in Chicago, and the game is sold out, why in the heck would it be blacked out? If you live in Chicago like I do, that would not make sense at all.

...instead of learning that, in fact, Prior to 1973, all [NFL] home games were blacked out locally regardless if they were sold out or not.

Thus, Bob would have never been able to watch a Bears home game on TV; one presumes that (with this sole exception) he'd have always gone to the game with Jerry after Jerry acquired the tickets.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 03:47 PM

December 19, 2006

How Many Times Have You Edited Wikipedia?

My cousin-in-law has, at least once.

I've done it several times, most recently the Tacoma Rainiers page on November 30.

(The "wow, they updated it really fast!" nature of Wikipedia is self-reinforcing:
1. I wonder if page X will already reflect news Y?
2. What, it doesn't?!
3. Well, I'll just add that part myself.)

Posted by Matt Bruce at 03:48 PM

December 17, 2006

How Many Metaphorical Patches Have to Come Out...

...before cliche-ridden journalists describe the latest on-line trends as "Web 2.1"?

Speaking of computers, as of today apparently Dilbert works in an office that doesn't use Outlook (or any competing mail server) for meeting invitations. He also apparently doesn't bother physically looking for the most important absent meeting attendee.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 07:47 AM

December 13, 2006

"Good Morning..."

I like it when spam subject line memes use a common starting phrase.

(The ones that use a common ending phrase (like "[X] wrote") are far less convenient.)

Posted by Matt Bruce at 09:38 PM

November 30, 2006

Excel Deduping Macro

I've typed this out by hand from scratch shamefully many times (usually without bothering to turn off screen updatings or reset the cell selection).

This assumes that you're on the first row of real data in a column that acts as a primary key, that data is already sorted by that key, and that you want the first row of data (only) for any given key.

Sub DeDupe()
Application.ScreenUpdating = False
Dim i As Integer
i = 0
While ActiveCell.Value <> ""
If (ActiveCell.Offset(1, 0).Value = ActiveCell.Value) Then
ActiveCell.Offset(1, 0).EntireRow.Delete
Else
ActiveCell.Offset(1, 0).Activate
i = i + 1
End If
Wend

ActiveCell.Offset(-i, 0).Activate
End Sub

Posted by Matt Bruce at 03:26 PM

November 23, 2006

Cat Update

From the looks of it, Mewelde somehow managed to bookmark Gmail. Unless it was Julia herself who named the link ||}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}"{P;

Posted by Matt Bruce at 01:41 AM

November 22, 2006

My Biggest Complaint About Local Web Portals

This story is outrageous, but almost outrageous is the fact that neither the story itself nor (most of) the rest of the web page user interface gives you any clue WHERE this happened.

Okay, poring over the left nav bar I found "Finding Minnesota" and "Minnesota Living," but this shouldn't have been that hard. Show some local pride, people! If I stumble onto your neck of the woods from Volokh or Fark or whoever, tell me where the heck you actually are.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 02:24 PM

November 21, 2006

Me again [...]

Is anyone else getting an astounding amount of spam with a subject line like that?

Posted by Matt Bruce at 11:15 AM

November 13, 2006

Gracenote in Wired

Interesting interview here.

I know there are a lot of Slashdotters (including one of my wife's relatives) to whom both IMDB and CDDB have been dirty words (dirty acronyms?) since the late 1990s. (Two otherwise unrelated projects/people/companies that were accepting user data about pop cultural phenomena, then became commercial while still accepting user submits. Note that I've never had any connection whatsoever to IMDB, nor any to CDDB until about three years ago.)

WN: What do you make of opinions that Gracenote privatized two public goods: the original open-sourced software that CDDB was based on, and song information input by unpaid volunteers?

Scherf: This is a popular opinion in certain circles. At first, there wasn't a negative reaction to the sale, and I took this to mean that people weren't fundamentally opposed to CDDB finding a commercial home. People only started complaining around the time certain folks at the company started mishandling developer relations. (None of the people directly responsible for this behavior remain at Gracenote, and thankfully there's a much better understanding of how to treat customers now).

This episode poisoned some peoples' view of CDDB, and I do not particularly blame them. Discussions abounded on the net for a good while, but the company was close-mouthed, deciding it was better not to feed the trolls any further. Since then, a lot of misinformation sprinkled amongst the true things has taken root and become part of the Gracenote lore.

The plain fact is, you can't close something that has been released under the GPL. The CDDB source-code genie was out of the bottle. Even today, there's nothing stopping anyone from using the source code to start a business. But just because I released the code to the public up to a point does not mean that I am obliged to build this code for the rest of my life and hand it over to whoever wants it.

As for the data, I can only point out that all of the data ever submitted to CDDB before it became "privatized" has been released to the public. You can go to freedb.org any time and download that entire database, including all the data that users entered before CDDB became commercial.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 11:46 AM

November 10, 2006

The Power of Branding

Google can assist with medical diagnoses.

Well, yeah... and I presume Yahoo! Search or even MSN could accomplish roughly the same thing (I'd actually be curious to see benchmarks among the top N engines by market share).

Conversely, the Captivate Network in our office elevator system often shows how frequently particular terms are entered in Yahoo! Search.

Incidentally, I assume there's still wide consensus (maybe not universal but wide) consensus that Yahoo! is the best provider of free fantasy sports hosting. (With caveats: For example, ESPN seems to handle Individual Defensive Players better than Yahoo! does.) If the consensus is still that Google has the best search technology (rather than just the best-known), then -- granting that search engines and fantasy sports are radically different beasts -- I idly wonder how well Google would do with fantasy sports.

I had a grand scheme once to spend 20% of my work week on the programming side of fantasy sports, but certain preconditions failed* before that even became an option.

*- Compare and contrast "rejected by Google" to "rejected by Harvard."

(True: The latter doesn't apply to me, though it's not obvious what I had that many rejects lacked.)

Posted by Matt Bruce at 03:33 PM

November 07, 2006

Login Screens That Take Forever To Load, Yet Have the Gall to Autofocus You

Dear Yahoo! Mail (cc: Fox Fantasy Sports),

Thank you for the attempted assistance but once I've already clicked on the name field myself, typed in my handle, and tabbed into the password field, I do not need you to autofocus me right back to where I started from. THAT SHIP HAS SAILED.

The real problem of course is that you're trying to accomplish way too much on your stupid login screen. THAT SCREEN IS NOT MY DESTINATION. All I need on that screen is the username field, the password field, and (obviously) some indication that this is actually your site and not some phisher's front page.

For a small fee I'm sure your colleagues at Google could educate you on these finer points of page simplicity (read: instant page load).

Posted by Matt Bruce at 01:54 PM

November 01, 2006

Technology, Journalists, and Language Ambiguity

I [verb] [plural nouns].

Does that mean I [verb] ALL [plural nouns]? Most of them? Some? More than zero? It depends on context, though if a reasonable reader doesn't know what I mean then the sentence didn't serve much purpose.

Someone quite correctly pointed out on Slashdot that a system to filter literally all copyrighted content would obviously be impractical, even though a lot of recent headlines have seemed to imply that YouTube and/or MySpace had systems like that.

Rather, if you have some instances of waveform information and the ability to search a file system then you can find particular files that match the particular waveforms you have. So if specific copyright owners are worried about violations involving specific works, then [you get the idea].

Posted by Matt Bruce at 05:18 PM

October 31, 2006

A Technological Contradiction

I'm posting this through the Firefox 2.0 browser, which I just downloaded and installed to... a machine running Windows 98. (Not just any machine running Windows 98: "My" machine. (Ooh: Firefox has built-in spell checking as you type.) The desktop machine that I used extensively until Memorial Day weekend 2005, when I finally bought a notebook computer.) How old is this machine? It was incompatible with a Samsung SyncMaster 204t monitor: That monitor displayed an error message and refused to render anything else.

The wife and I have between us four obsolete hard drives whose relevant contents we'd like to port, as quickly and painlessly as possible, to either my new computer itself or some form of storage (zip drive or password-protected Internet storage). Suggestions welcome.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 06:14 PM

October 05, 2006

Metapost: Comment Weirdness

As you may have noticed in the past day or so, apparently now some comments are visible if you click "Talk At Me" (and see them in a popup window) but not visible if you click "Link to This" (and see the post's Extended Entry). Greg's prediction about Brad Radke is one example.

Please excuse the inconvenience (I have no idea why it's doing that).

Posted by Matt Bruce at 12:00 PM

September 25, 2006

I Hate it When Widgets Auto-Dock

That title will mean nothing to most of you.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 01:44 PM

July 20, 2006

Fun With Google Maps

This is where I work (on the 13th floor).

Here's where we live (just to the left of that green-roofed building).

And the drive home.

Some of you made this drive about a month ago. Or this drive.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 07:36 PM

May 01, 2006

Low Content: Post an Error Message You've Seen Today

Bonus points if you knew what it meant and it made you feel stupid.

(I guess double-bonus points if you didn't know what it meant.)

ORA-01427: single-row subquery returns more than one row 

(As you might guess, I knew what it meant and it made me feel stupid.)

Posted by Matt Bruce at 11:36 AM

April 15, 2006

Today's Spam Koan

Full of health? Then don't click!

I'm sure you've seen it word for word a million times (figuratively). Still, it's quite catchy. Like Snakes on a Plane.

So why is the concept of a "mystery shopper" thought to be so popular that it approaches ink toner status in spam volume? And are people so eager to "make their opinion count" that they salivate that much over expressing a preference for one big rival over another? (Coke, Leno, etc.)

Posted by Matt Bruce at 11:34 PM

April 09, 2006

Yahoo vs. Google: Another Data Point

(I idly wonder what prompted the puff piece on Yahoo! in this month's Southwest in-flight maagzine. A big focus of the article was the company's strategy shift as a market #2 to the publicity-soaking Google. As someone with stock in both I have no particular horse there.)

Anyhow, Yahoo! Mail does not correctly render the UTF-8 characters in Asian spam. GMail on the other hand does display them correctly. (There's probably some setting I'm supposed to tweak in Yahoo! to get UTF-8.)

Posted by Matt Bruce at 11:17 PM

February 28, 2006

Trite Code Snippet OTD

s/^0+//g ;

Feel free to submit your own trite code snippet. A code snippet qualifies as trite if it's likely that at least one reader will recognize the language and know what it does, and if what it does is useful but boring.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 02:53 PM

February 24, 2006

Silly Windows Knowledge Blindspots

Is it foolish of me to have been previously unaware that you can open as many command prompts as you want to at the same time and run separate routines from each of them?

Posted by Matt Bruce at 04:07 PM

January 31, 2006

Zen Koan

(more rows exist)

Think about that for a bit; it's more applicable and more profound than you might at first realize.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 06:19 PM

January 25, 2006

Alfalfa

Line by line, the first letters of the console print statements of this one script of mine spell out "ALFALFA." Actually they spell out "LFALFALFALFA[...]" but it's nice to look over, see the Alfalfa, and at the end of the lines see a monotone increase of a given number at a satisfactory rate.

First pass: "At that rate it would take about 48 hours." Back to the drawing board...

Second pass: "Did that really just take five seconds?!" Well, what it actually did took five seconds. As for what it was supposed to do...

Third pass: Looks like about an hour, maybe even with correct behavior.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 05:46 PM

Booth Babes Banned

This particular trade show apparently won't be as fun as typical trade shows.

Something I heard fourth-hand about one of Microsoft's demos at CES: You may already know I work for a company whose data is used by (among others) Apple, Yahoo!, Napster, RealNetworks (i.e. Rhapsody), AOL (Winamp), et al. A list of companies that use our data would include a lot of major players but would not include (that I know of) Microsoft, because Microsoft uses data from a company that Mike B. works for.

Apparently Microsoft had a booth assistant who didn't realize this, because as the main spokesguy was explaining a particular product, she interjected "So it goes to [my company] and downloads data from [my company's best-known database]?"

Posted by Matt Bruce at 02:57 PM

Google Breaches Own Corporate Mantra

This is indeed evil (the China part, not the U.S. part).

At some point the headline writers at The Register agreed with me, though the headline has since been changed from "Google: We'll be a bit evil" to its current form.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 12:54 PM

January 20, 2006

Polyglot

What other words and phrases have the same meaning and usage as "Option Explicit" and "use strict;"?

Posted by Matt Bruce at 02:24 PM

Today's Syntax Complaint

If your code makes legitimate use of three consecutive double-quote marks, it's still not going to be clean or readable.

This one's Microsoft's fault. (VBA macro that sets ActiveCell.Formula to something that uses INDIRECT.)

Posted by Matt Bruce at 02:20 PM

January 13, 2006

Spam Tide Spam

Oops.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 02:46 PM

January 05, 2006

Misleading headline of the Day

Researchers discover largest prime number [sic]

Ahem: Largest known prime number. It's obviously not the largest prime number because there is no largest prime number.

(I wonder how much thinner the ranks of journalism would be if you had to prove that to get your communications degree. So what's your favorite proof that there are infinitely many primes? I'm partial to "Let N be the largest prime, now attempt to factor (N! + 1)" myself.)

Posted by Matt Bruce at 04:21 PM

December 23, 2005

Google Maps Violates Triangle Inequality?

This 11-minute drive uses Webster Tube.

This 6-minute drive uses 880.

This 2-minute drive continues over the drawbridge.

Note that the second and third routes combine to 8 minutes; that the first two routes have the same origin; that the first and third routes have the same destination; and that the second routes' destination is the third route's origin.

(Aside from traffic the 880-and-drawbridge combo would be empirically correct, as the 8-minute total time suggests. Factor in traffic on 880, and I'd been curious whether 7th Street all the way was faster than taking the Tube; I'll have to find a reliable answer elsewhere (i.e. real life).)

Posted by Matt Bruce at 07:35 PM

December 15, 2005

Blogroll

If you've noticed those empty categories at least, it's because I haven't gotten around to paying the money to re-up my Blogroll Premium subscription and may just not bother to. Although I have no beef with Tucows, somehow supporting them isn't as compelling as it was when Blogrolling was basically a home project of a relative of DEK's.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 03:29 PM

December 12, 2005

TeleCell

The main room for yesterday's high school quiz tournament was a business classroom, with various project output on the walls. One post, written and illustrated in magic marker colored Sharpie(?), explained that "Our Invention" was the TeleCell, a cell phone with TV screen "so that you can see who you're talking to."

I suppose it would have been rude to find a thick red marker and write out "PRIOR ART" in big letters across the page.

Five years ago the company I worked for had office space (and other dealings) with this Internet incubator, whose marketing team sent out a weekly(?) e-mail solicitation for people's great ideas. (Some prize would go to the best idea they had.) My big idea was customized ringtones, so that you could hear your favorite song whenever your phone rang.

Ringtones already did exist at this point, though the industry is several orders of magnitude more profitable now than circa 2000. Even though my own idea as expressed was clearly non-novel, I feel vindicated that ringtones did take off at the same time that I regret not having a convenient way to invest in the proposition that this would happen.

Maybe thoe high school business students will get a hand or a tip in putting their money into the advance of videophone tech.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 10:17 AM

December 06, 2005

Reply vs. "Reply to All"

I don't understand how people confuse these so frequently, and yet they do: Certainly in MS Outlook and also in every commonly used e-mail program I've seen.

Is there some simple UI improvement that would nip this problem in the bud?

(N.B. I claim never to have "replied to all" by mistake, though I've made the opposite mistake more than once, writing back to the sender only when I intended a recipient-wide response.)

Posted by Matt Bruce at 11:33 AM

November 29, 2005

Bad Pseudocode in Banner Ads for On-Line Job Sites

Does this bother anyone other than me?

In SQL, "SELECT *" is typically a waste of resources unless you're truly interested in every single column of every single table in your query.

Meanwhile Job_Sucks is unlikely as a variable name. Maybe in some procedural language, though something like Job.sucks is a lot more likely to be clean, robust, and useful.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 01:36 PM

September 16, 2005

Flavors of Compugeek Flamewar

How many are these (and I guess where do you stand)?

Emacs vs. vi (vi)
Toad vs. SQLPlus (SQLPlus)
*nix vs. Mac vs. Windows (despite what the above choices might imply, Windows for me if only for the self-reinforcing circle-of-something idea that it's more commonly available)

As programming languages go I have no absolute preference, though both JavaScript and VBA seem underrated relative to what they can accomplish (the syntax does nothing to promote either of them, given that they were designed neither by fastidious people nor by Larry Wall).

Posted by Matt Bruce at 09:43 AM

September 15, 2005

What Is Your Text Editor of Choice?

I somehow managed to go from the time I bought this computer until now without ever downloading Crimson Editor, even though it's my source code editor of choice at work.

You're not going to find a better freeware editor, and even the best of the payment-requiring editors (probably UltraEdit) doesn't offer enough of an advantage over Crimson Editor to be worth the money.

Also, the combination of "Crimson" with a canine mascot always reminds me of the Crimson Puppy Chow quiz-bowl juniorbird whose name resulted from a Harvard-BU collaboration.

Mind, one little foible of Crimson Editor is that (paraphrasing) "File corrupted! (But ignore this message if this your first time using this installation)" message you get the very first time you fire it up.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 10:11 PM

September 09, 2005

Hey, ESR, Tell Us How You Really Feel

The hubris shown in this narrative would eventually come back to haunt a lesser man, but that's not what interested me enough to devote a blog entry.

Rather, go here and scroll to the Che reference. It's priceless.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 05:35 PM

September 01, 2005

Phishing HTML of the Day

Some guy in Australia wants your eBay account details:

<A HREF="https://signin.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?SignIn&sid=verify&co_partnerId=2&siteid=0"><map name="maidttd"><area coords="0, 0, 646, 569" shape="rect" href="http://210.75.207.62:680/rock/eBayIsap/index.htm"></map><img SRC="cid:part1.09010709.01050801@support_num_226628645917@ebay.com" border="0" usemap="#maidttd"></A></a>

Suffice to say 210.75.207.62 ain't eBay. The map thing is pretty clever, since right-clicking for the "real" URL will still show a link to the real eBay.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 11:00 AM

August 16, 2005

Blogger Oddity

Do I infer correctly from recent usage that if you FTP from Blogger.com to your own domain and also use Blogger's own comments system, then new comments don't appear until the next time you republish?

That seems suboptimal, though it's certainly incentive to publish more often. Three people that I know of have successfully found the weblog in question -- two commented, one e-mailed. All are deeply appreciated.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 05:48 PM

July 29, 2005

Daylight Saving and Leap Seconds: On Second Thought

Software glitches aren't a good enough reason to oppose Daylight Saving Time reform. They're certainly not a good enough reason to support doing away with leap seconds and the like, as the U.S. apparently wants to do.

There's a lot to be gained from our having as stable schedules as possible with regard to "time of day" (position of the sun) and "time of year" (season, hours of daylight, etc.). Of course this is why daylight saving originated. (Otherwise why even bother: If it's all just an accounting system, learn to live with doing things at 6 p.m. in the winter and then happening to shift them to 7 p.m. in the summer.) That's certainly a better alternative than letting things drift until e.g. July 4 is in the Northern Hempishere's winter.

As for software, in general that should standardize on actual elapsed time in milliseconds since January 1, 1970. Of course people make assumptions based on a fixed # of milliseconds per year, in terms of which particular millisecond will correspond to a time of day or time of year, but at that: We learned how to handle leap years; we even got through Y2K with much less mayhem than doomsayers predicted. Designing around this particular wrinkle isn't the end of the world.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 03:26 PM

July 25, 2005

BU Law symposium on weblogs

This might be interesting if you're in the neighborhood.

On the subject of weblogs with Boston University School of Law connections, I wonder who's third most famous of bloggers that fit the category. (The first two seem pretty obvious to me. I'll default to "myself" Coen for #3, though surely it isn't me or him.)

Posted by Matt Bruce at 02:42 PM

July 16, 2005

An Abstract Wager

Suppose Bill Gates came to you tomorrow (with your economic state being identical to what it is as you read this, and Gates's choice of you over some other person completely arbitrary - maybe he was behind you in line for coffee) with a gift -- and a proposition.

The gift is a check that he has made out to you for some amount of money. You have no idea how much, and as far as you know the amount reflects his personal whim. (It's arbitary, NOT random.) However, in the ensuing conversation he encourages you to refer to the amount on the check as $X.

The proposition is this: He has generated a random number (with billions of significant figures) between 0 and 1 (with uniform probability). He will allow you to bet any amount of money, between {nothing} and $X itself, on whether the next random number he generates (also between 0 and 1 with uniform probability and billions of sig figs) is greater than less than or equal to the first. (The intent being for p to represent your probability of winning the wager, as the rest of this post takes it to.)

He encourages you to refer to the first randomly generated number as p; its value has already been determined (randomly, NOT arbitrarily) but there's no way for you to discern it.

He gives you an hour to determine a formula for how much you want to wager, in terms of p and/or X and/or any constants you wish to employ. He makes clear that this is your ONLY opportunity to play this game.

Assume for the moment that it's not feasible to obtain insurance (if it were then it'd be obvious how you'd wager but the question of how to structure your insurance is very similar to the original problem anyway).

How much do you wager?

In the extended entry I have an answer that makes sense to me, that took me surprisingly long to formulate (less than an hour but close enough to it that I'd have run out of time to mentally QA all the ramifications of my answer). Obviously I'm interested in hearing your own.

Even though this is partly a psychological question of risk aversion (and risk aversion itself isn't just psychological: I assume for most of us, $500,000 guaranteed would be significantly more desirable than a 55% chance at a million but 45% chance at zero), I wondered how close one could get to a mathematically sound answer.

With that in mind:
1. If p were less than 1/2, then don't risk anything whatsoever. This is intuitive enough, and obviously correct if you're not a risk lover. (Julia actually turns out to love risk to some extent; in this exact hypo she'd risk some small portion if p were as low as .4).

2. If p were literally 1 then trivially you'd risk the full value of X. Perhaps this means as p approaches 1, the amount your risk approaches X.

3. Let's stipulate for the moment (in my own answer) that the order of magnitude of X doesn't affect anything. I'm not entirely convinced that this is true but I'm just brave enough on a first pass to act as though it is.

4. Because of #3 above, we can pretend X is a constant that we simply refer to without worrying about its having any variance (X has been determined already anyway). So we (I) really have a fraction of X, as a function of p.

5. The actual f(p) should be continuous. That is, if there's an optimum strategy then I'm pretty sure it never entails a nontrivial difference between how to handle p = i versus how to handle p = i + .00000001. f(p) won't be differentiable at p = 1/2 but so it goes.

6. A reasonable first-pass is, as p ranges from 1/2 to 1, for our wager to range linearly from 0 of X to 1 of X. So the fraction of X I'd wager is 2*(p-1/2).

As a hypothetical application of this: Suppose it turned out Gates was offering me $100,000 and a 98% winning probability. By the above I wagered $96,000. Then I get a "bad beat" and am left with $4,000. All things considered, do I wish now that I'd stipulated "Set aside at least $20,000 no matter what" or "Set aside at least 10% no matter what"? Well, after the beat obviously yes, but just applying hindsight... I can't really second-guess myself.

Or it may have turned out Gates was offering me $500,000 and a 75% winning probability. In that case I'm risking $250,000 on my wager. Too much? Too little? Just right? For the sake of finally posting this I'll very tentatively say "satisfactory."

(For Julia's part, there's a concrete fraction of X that she'd hold onto (and refuse to wager) regardless of how closely p approached 1.)

Posted by Matt Bruce at 10:40 PM

Pokernomics

Those of you who play poker on-line, this might interest you.

Coincidentally, I'd just written some perl earlier this week to make poker hand reports more readable. I assume that Levitt et al are way ahead of me on the software end of things.

(N.B. I've played poker on-line but way fewer than 10,000 hands.)

Posted by Matt Bruce at 12:02 PM

May 02, 2005

Bulk Mail

Two false positives in my Yahoo! Bulk folder today.

Both addressed to me personally. One was a business proposal (real, not spam, no $10 million bank accounts involved) attached in a 3-meg document. I have no idea why the other one got flagged, perhaps something to do with CC or BCC?

I'm copied on a variety of naqt-dot-com e-mail aliases and apparently my filtering those into separate folders removes the Bulk folder from that whole equation.

Yes, I look at all my spam (well, "look at" their senders and subject lines.) It's not as time-consuming as you'd fear.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 01:26 PM

April 12, 2005

Links From While I Was Gone: Slashdot Portion

Like a normal link roundup blown up from daily to weekly...

Slashdot portion
I like the factual answer atop this query, but what does that have to do with the (you get the idea)?

How much TV do you watch? Well, define "watch". The question vaguely reminds me of the Sesame Street chapter from Blink (which I read on the plane back last night). For my part I do effectively zero TV-in-the-background nonwatching. Any given week I might watch one syndicated Simpsons, a few minutes of Jeopardy! (depending on when I'm home from work and if I'm busy that evening), and/or part of some major sporting event if it comes in on the local stations.

Caltech made my day here. Given how much I love being in California now, I wish for the life of me I understood what I was thinking as a high school senior when I opted against that part of the country. Didn't even apply to Caltech or Stanford. Well, technically, didn't apply anywhere other than Harvard, MIT, or Rice, as "I just got into A" plus "I'd rather go to A than B" plus "I haven't sent in the B application yet" yielded the drafting of a short, polite "Thank you for considering me but I withdraw my application" letter to various other places.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 11:43 AM

March 30, 2005

What Am I Missing?

What does this site offer that Blogrolling doesn't?

I assume I'm missing some crucial functionality gap, but I either can't get my head around it or can't get my head around why it matters.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 12:47 AM

March 22, 2005

Google News News

Two Google employees are known to read this site (hi to both of you!); I have no idea how many others do, and I have no idea what connection (if any) those two have to Google News.

I suspect Jeff Jarvis has more influence at Google than I do, even given the above, but just in case it's worth a mention.

On the theory that information always has positive value (especially if it's interesting), I'm glad somebody's assessing the quality of sites Google News won't index (or lack of quality of sites Google News will index). That said, I think the call for "transparency" (seen here) is amusing overkill. It's not going to happen, nor is it necessary.

(And I certainly don't think that an "anything-goes" policy could be implemented without seriously reducing the product quality. I suspect Google has already tried this behind the scenes, or at least considered it, or otherwise modeled it somehow.)

All the same, if you're reading this and you have some "in" at Google News - just suggest to them that it looks like quality control needs a tweak or two.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 03:40 PM

March 18, 2005

Portfolio Update

(I a