June 09, 2009

Eleven Especially Good Daily WTFs

(main page here)

Chosen purely by my personal preference:

11. Connect Betterer

10. Open Sesame

9. Journey to the Center of the Database

8. The 8 Report

7. The Revealing Spreadsheet

6. Waiting to Excel

5. Dollars and Sense

4. A Function to Quit For

3. The Mod Out System

2. Some Crazy Reason

1. Curiosity, Ignorance, Malice

In fairness, #5-3 are basically the same flavor of stupidity. #2 will probably always crack me up; conversely, #1 could plausibly lead to criminal prosecution.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 11:21 AM

May 18, 2009

Wolfram Alpha Might Be Overxtended in Some Cases

This post led me to try this query (basically a fail).

Not that Google does any better, though I must point out that the correct context, correct answer, and even a relevant video are in the first few results.

(On this particular test case, Wikipedia actually wins going down, though Google continues to be a better way to search Wikipedia than Wikipedia itself.)

UPDATE: Wolfram -50, Google +100.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 02:43 PM

May 17, 2009

Computer Health Notes

In no particular order:

1. It's a bad sign if you have any executable files in C:\Documents and Settings\[your name]\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files

2. It's a bad sign if any of those executable files came from the site described here (link goes to Google) or the site described here (link goes to Norton Safe Web).

3. If you are at any risk of misspelling a popular domain name name (for example icanhascheezburger.com, much better to follow a link to it (or at least Google it) then go to a similarly spelled URL that might have malicious code.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 08:04 AM

May 10, 2009

Worm of the Day

Symptoms: Saw a command window open unexpectedly with an unfamiliar process name. Then clicking through Google search results caused a redirect to an unfamiliar site. (hqsearchmatch [something])

Caused by: ?? Fark was open at the time, could've been a nasty thing in an ad. I suspect Fark rather than sports.yahoo.com

Fixes: Searched for all files modified about the time I noticed this. Deleted some, was denied access to deleting others. Had to kill (CTRL-ALT-DEL > Processes) a bad process named SYS32DLL.exe before the file with that name could be deleted.

Upgraded Firefox (from 3.0.8 to 3.0.10) and under Tools > Options > Advanced > Network had to unclick a malware "Connect by Proxy" instruction involving port 7171.

P.S. (added Monday but based on the Saturday night repair work) I think Malware Bytes anti-malware scan also fixed a couple registry settings, and HijackThis! fixed a couple more.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 02:07 AM

April 22, 2009

Give Yourself A Five-Minute Javascript Lesson

Do you have a "Share on Facebook" browser button? (If you use Facebook, you've probably been prompted to add one at some point.)

Hover your mouse over it. Whoa! See all that source code? Right-click (sorry, Mac people, I have no idea what your equivalent is), Properties, and you'll see that same source code in the Location box (at least on Firefox: other browsers might have similar look and feel here).

Specifically it's
javascript:var%20d=document,f='http://www.new.facebook.com/share',l=d.location,e=encodeURIComponent,p='.php?src=bm&v=4&i=1220571322&u='+e(l.href)+'&t='+e(d.title);1;try{if%20(!/^(.*\.)?facebook\.[^.]*$/.test(l.host))throw(0);share_internal_bookmarklet(p)}catch(z)%20{a=function()%20{if%20(!window.open(f+'r'+p,'sharer','toolbar=0,status=0,resizable=1,width=626,height=436'))l.href=f+p};if%20(/Firefox/.test(navigator.userAgent))setTimeout(a,0);else{a()}}void(0)

(some linebreaks added by MovableType)

Remembering that "%20" is HTML-ese for a space, you can clean that up a bit, take the elements apart, and figure out other cool ways to use javascript to choose web links.

Congratulations! You're maybe 5% of the way towards a mastery of Ajax. (i.e. to some extent "web 2.0") Just kidding (sort of).

Posted by Matt Bruce at 11:59 AM

April 19, 2009

Obviously He Meant nSheep

(In the tooltip text. Maybe better yet lSheep so that the tooltip punchline is even terser. Unless you mistake the lower-case l for a capital I, I guess.)

This is still brilliant, with or without Hungarian notation.

(Despite the redundancy I'm a big fan of $s_strings and @a_arrays and %h_hashes and so on, despite how few people would ever see what I've written. But I can't be too dogmatic about it, since by the same token my SQL should probably have a lot more with-as usage and a lot fewer nested parentheses.)

Posted by Matt Bruce at 10:27 PM

March 31, 2009

CADIE

Lame. (Then again not every year can be Pigeon Rank.)

Posted by Matt Bruce at 10:40 PM

March 18, 2009

Blogroll Ennui

At some point my blogroll not only stopped being alphabetized but also started coming in with ads on top. I think it's because years ago I paid either a donation or a subscription fee for Blogrolling Premium, but decided not to keep that up.

Anyway, one of the ads just how was a way for people to "learn Facebook" with a free and easy video tutorial.

Maybe both this post and the one right below reflect way too low a tolerance level, but... really? This is necessary?

Posted by Matt Bruce at 03:59 PM

Strange Parenthetical of the Day

"(Let me be clear, these assumptions are not intended to be realistic. I was trying to craft one question that could be answered in Excel in three hours. I doubt that, even in the best of times, the property was worth $5 million. And in all likelihood, the lease payments may be subject to an escalator clause that increases them overtime.)"
--a real-life Coasean bargaining problem cited in Freakonomics Blog (emphasis added)

Now, my background isn't finance (maybe it should have been?) but I can do a thing or two in Excel. What exactly are you doing that makes three hours the right order of magnitude?

May I safely assume that this includes roughly 2 hours, 50 minutes to frame the problem correctly, plus nine minutes, 55 seconds to double-check that none of your formulas contain typos or one-off cell references?

Posted by Matt Bruce at 02:24 PM

January 29, 2009

Yayrobot Convergence

Doesn't this cartoon (moreso the tooltip addition) remind you a lot of the Yahoo! Soul-Search Engine theorized by The Onion?

More importantly, isn't this Neil Patrick Harris anecdote a lot like what Jack Donaghy did in the most recent episode of 30 Rock?

(The second one is all the more ironic given this post.)

Posted by Matt Bruce at 04:21 PM

January 28, 2009

Tooltip Text, and Your Favorite Web Sites

Just last week I accidentally discovered that XKCD makes really good use of tooltip text for additional gags.

Just now I discovered that I Can Has Cheezburger also uses tooltip, though in a seemingly lame and suboptimal fashion (just saying).

Posted by Matt Bruce at 05:50 PM

January 10, 2009

Thinly Veiled Marketing

In a couple years you'll be able to buy cars with audio navigation systems in the voices of celebrities.

1. Which celebrity voice would you most want in your car?

2. If the field were restricted to musicians currently signed with major labels, which musician's voice would you most want in your car?

1. So help me, Barack Obama.

2. One of the Barenaked Ladies (I can't easily associate the voice to the name, but if you can think of two especially memorable BNL voices, I'm thinking of the slightly higher timbre).

Or maybe Bruce Springsteen. Speaking of which, search for "Bruce Springsteen" in this column and tell me the impression isn't dead-on. (This almost makes up for his falsely claiming that Champ Bailey's interception return went for a touchdown, or for his bizarrely outdated (or just location-specific? - but then it would seem he still doesn't drive in Los Angeles much as opposed to Mass.) rant about 55 MPH.)

Posted by Matt Bruce at 01:09 PM

December 14, 2008

As If This Blog Didn't Have Enough Reasons to Be Obsolete

Two of the reasons a weblog exists are now no longer contexts where I think of this blog first:

1. Sharing links that speak for themselves: Now I generally do that on Facebook (though I need to work on reducing the political to apolitical ratio).

2. Quick, ephemeral updates below 140 characters: yes, I finally Twitter (perhaps: there's a 10-15% chance that I end up never updating that again, no?)

Posted by Matt Bruce at 02:28 PM

November 30, 2008

This is Why Six Sigma Exists

(That is, why it's not just an annoying corporate-tech buzzword.)

Denver lost a $2 million grant because of a clerical error.

Years ago I had to attend a meeting at work where some vendor presented its Six Sigma solution. For the specific context, they spent way too much time in their presentation on why Six Sigma was important. They would otherwise have been preaching to the choir, but without getting too work-geeky, for hypothetical example, "R.E.M" versus "R.E.M." is a whole lot less potentially catastrophic than munging an ID or a serial number (especially for people who are accustomed to bringing some level of sanity to outside feeds that are sometimes a lot less consistent, much less coherent, than one would have expected).

Posted by Matt Bruce at 12:02 AM

November 29, 2008

An Ad Campaign I Just Don't Get

Yahoo! seems to be targeting an audience of people with these properties:

1. Interested in sports statistics.

2. Too stupid to add "stats" to a search term

3. Unaware of NFL.com, ESPN.com, or even sports.yahoo.com

Maybe I'm a pernicious elitist but is there really an epidemic of people confused and alienated by Google result pages?

Posted by Matt Bruce at 06:19 PM

November 28, 2008

Google Redirect Virus

(Technically it's a trojan, and it also affects other search engine URLs, but the point is I hadn't encountered one of these in years!)

Have you, using Windows XP, recently experienced any or all of these symptoms?

1. Internet connection suddenly becomes ungodly slow, with lots of lag, on your machine (but not other machines using the same wireless router).

2. You frequent some web site but can't be bothered to bookmark it or put a hyperlink somewhere, so you just Google it (e.g. "Fail Blog"). The first result looks like exactly what you want, but clicking it takes you somewhere unexpected.

3. You reboot (mistakenly believing it would solve some random connection issue), after which things get even worse.

4. You notice lots of connections to (or attempts to connect to) "go.google.com" or "client1.google.com" [if your favorite search engine isn't Google, substitute as appropriate]

5. You try a different browser in case your issue is browser-specific, only to find that the backup browser (i.e. IE) won't even load: keeps wanting to shut down and send an error report

6. URLs for certain tech support sites are blocked (the names, not the IP addresses)

Fixing the symptom:
I found this eventually - would give you the URL of the thread where I saw it, except the URL is on another machine two feet away from me:

Start > Control Panel > System > Hardware > Device Manager > View > Show hidden devices > Non plug-n-play. If you see something that begins like TDSS, disable it. DO NOT uninstall (it would just be reinstalled), just disable. Then reboot.

Fixing the problem
Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware got good reviews. We'll give it a go...

Posted by Matt Bruce at 04:22 PM

November 26, 2008

Stupid Perl Question

Is there an easier (i.e. single-command) way to do what this code does?

#assume $obj is in scope and has an anonymous hash

my @a_unsorted = ();
foreach(keys (%$obj)) {
push(@a_unsorted,$_);
}
my @a_sorted = sort(@a_unsorted);
for(my $i = 0; $i < @a_sorted; $i++) {
#do something with $a_sorted[$i] and $obj->{$a_sorted[$i]}
}

Posted by Matt Bruce at 06:38 PM

November 18, 2008

The New Way to Brag That One Doesn't Have a TV

...is to post a comment to a weblog that boasts of one's detachment from the Internet and patronizes the blogger's imagined motivation.

Mostly unrelated: some large companies have been sued by employees whom the companies refused to pay while their computers were booting. Aside from the litigation (despite the typecast, I hope and expect that employees would generally win here), isn't the real problem here a faulty design that wastes a criminal amount of people's time? The step at which one must enter a password should come last.

Coming back into type, with a vengeance, I'm surprised that so many of these operations would still be in the U.S. at all. In the long they should be in India, or whatever developing country shows enough American dialect fluency to supersede India.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 08:42 AM

November 07, 2008

A Much More Harmless Pet Peeve of Mine: DST

It turns out Daylight Saving Time does not actually reduce energy consumption!

For what it's worth, the three plausible options, in order of my personal preference:

1a. Standard Time, year-round

1b. Daylight Time, year-round

(It's effectively a tie, since I changed my mind twice while writing this post.)

[tremendous chasm]

3. This madness of springing forward, falling back, fixing various devices, kludging around that one-hour interval that "happens" twice or not at all...

Posted by Matt Bruce at 01:12 PM

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 am not a financial analyst, past success does not guarantee future results, none of this should be construed as advice, I know nothing more than you know, etc.)

Should've done this way back when Howard Stern made his announcement (though I don't seem to have lost out by holding off) - I finally dumped my CCU, the evil monopolist whose radio monopoly is a year away from being worth a lot less than currently. (Sure, they still have the billboards and ticket sales and so on, but I long for the day when billboards are obsolete - as for ticket sales, the options are vast.)

So ignoring 401(K) et al and considering only companies in which I have invested more than one would plausibly take out in any given ATM withdrawal, the positions look like this:

Internet commerce companies who are the market leader (by a vast margin) in fields where the business plan is painfully obvious:
AMZN, EBAY

Internet search/portal giants who will fight each other viciously for market share but all end up doing pretty well:
GOOG, YHOO, MSFT

Next big thing - satellite radio:
SIRI, XMSR

Airlines who are better than the competition (but still hammered like the rest of them by fuel prices):
JBLU, LUV

Big, "safe" companies whose make a ton of product:
BUD, GE

Posted by Matt Bruce at 05:30 PM

March 17, 2005

March Mathness: Now With Fancy Spreadsheet

Track our progress at http://www.geocities.com/matt979/NCAAPool2005.xls

John, Joshua, or Mark, let me know if I got any of your allocations wrong - I could easily have mistyped.

Everyone else, let me know if you see any formula errors. (My huge lead is an illusion caused by the upset kitty being most of the points reflect so far.)

If you're too lazy to grab the spreadsheet: Joshua's fortunes rest entirely on Duke and Illinois. As the most "spread out" player, mine depend on how many huge upsets ensue. (Given that there's a fixed kitty of upset points to be hand, John and Mark need smaller and/or more predictable upsets to dilute the effects of any big gain I corner.)

Depending on how well Duke and Illinois do and how upset points are distributed, it could come down to how teams that Mark liked better than John compare to teams that John liked better than Mark.

And now some math:
Thinking about how you'd allocate your points in this thing, imagine if there were only one player. It'd be pointless and stupid, of course - he'd put his 256 chits in and get all 256 back out (as each team's 100% owner). Or rather, he'd get all 256 back unlesssome team won that he hadn't put anything on at all.

Point redemption by team (if it were a one-entry pool): 63 for the overall winner, 31 for the runner up, 15 for the other two final four teams, then 7, 3, and 1. 64 more points divvied among teams that pulled upsets. So you'd think a reasonable way to allocate your units (if you didn't even bother to guess how other people would allocate theirs) might be:
63 to the team you think will win it all
31 to the team you think will finish second
(I guess you could hedge and go 47 apiece on the two above)
15 each, 7 each, 3 each, 1 each... then split 64 points among teams you think have a good shot at upsets. Or, since upsets are hard to predict, maybe divert some of those 64 to firm up your hold on the championship contenders.

You want to find the teams that will give you back more than you put in on them; then again you also gain a lot if you're right about teams that you liked more than other people liked.

In a much larger pool I imagine there'd be an even distribution from corner-the-market entries like Joshua's to cover-all-bases entries like mine.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 01:13 PM

March 15, 2005

The Real "Pi" Day

Everyone who thinks the 14th of March is worth a geeky celebration, sit down and shut up until the 22nd of July.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 11:25 AM

March 08, 2005

Project Implicit

These are just as fascinating now as they were when I found them two years ago.

Today I learned I have no implicit association of Science (versus Liberal Arts) with either Male or Female. (This isn't fully reliable: I noticed myself getting confused when Female and Science were on the same side, but apparently my frequent attempts to peg Philosophy as a Science also skewed my results.)

Posted by Matt Bruce at 12:20 PM

iPods

You'd think we've have bought them sooner.

How can Apple have such egregiously bad setup user interfaces given their UI reputation (and the superb iTunes UI)? To pick two examples:

1. As far as I can tell, running the iPod installation CD was a must despite my iTunes installation. At some point the CD gave me "Serious error: Later version of iTunes already installed. Cannot continue." Um, guys, that's totally a contingency you should plan for and correctly handle, or at least not whip the user up into unnecessary panic.

2. In the process of not only making my iPod friendly but also registering it on-line, I had to type multiple pieces of information twice, everything from the serial number (that thing in 4-point type in white text on a blue background) to my contact information. Especially irksome: Registering my new product should not have required me to create a so-called "Apple ID."

And that's not even penalizing them for my iPod initially defaulting to Spanish (I found highly amusing, especially as the Troubleshooting guide even told you what to do about it), or the non-obvious way in which the entire front of your iPod works like a touchpad, or whatever the heck menu screen Julia's ended up on to begin with.

(Hers wouldn't turn off. It was on some funky meta-screen with options all in capital letters. This secret-seeming screen looked like exactly the place to hack this mass storage device into something useful, amusing, or both. Under the circumstances we just wanted a normal iPod, though, hence the hitting the Menu button a few times to restore a semblance of normalcy.)

As I type my music library is being copied to my iPod. Not bad.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 12:51 AM

March 07, 2005

Links: Sports/Tech Edition

My favorite Google story ever, with a nod to the (at least) two Google employees known to be in the readership.

I have yet to see one of these jerseys but it'll happen. Demographic fun fact: I have no impression at all on the extent to which any Raider fan stereotypes are racially motivated but you'd be surprised how many of the people who live up to the carictaure are mullet-wearing, classic-rock-listening, quasi-redneck folk who commute to Oakland from parts east.

Coming soon: The Average Wright. I can't wait.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 12:15 PM

March 01, 2005

67

I'll take a test like this but don't ask me to copy their HTML if it loads an image...

Posted by Matt Bruce at 07:31 AM

February 25, 2005

The Set Whose Only Member Is The Empty Set

(I need to rename my "Computers" category to "Geek.")

My new favorite entity is the set whose only member is the empty set. You see why this is distinct from the empty set itself of course, right?

This all stems from the joke proof that a ham sandwich is better than sex. You've heard this, I hope? Well, nothing is better than sex but a ham sandwich is better than nothing.

It's tempting to claim that you can generalize from this joke proof to joke-prove that for all things A, A > A. (C is better than A. Nothing is better than C. B is better than nothing. A is better than B.)

Aside from the obvious flaw (and the necessary assumption that our preferences are invariant), you can easily defeat the "nothing is better than C" step in a realm where for anything you come up with, something better exists. (Blindingly obvious example: The integers, where "better" is just "greater than.")

Anyhow, it's an interesting problem of language: "Nothing is better than sex." "A ham sandwich is better than nothing." The set of things better than sex is empty. It is the empty set, as opposed to containing the empty set. But the set of things inferior to a ham sandwich contains the empty set.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 10:59 AM

February 24, 2005

Fraught: Geopolitics Edition

Two things that shouldn't be in the same news story: Homeland security and Gator software.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 11:11 AM

February 22, 2005

Two Computer Links

This lingo guide is funny mainly because of the company hosting it.

Meanwhile, you can read Maoist video game reviews from the MIM web site.

MIM favors games such as Sim City, even when the assumptions of the simulations are completely bourgeois, because among existing games that the mostly imperialist country people play, the mindless militarist games are the worst of all. "Sim City" has no sex or violence displayed and yet it can entertain for weeks on end. That is an accomplishment by itself. It's not hard to see how tweaking this game slightly would make it progressive.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 08:49 AM

February 19, 2005

Google Maps

(Having dissed Google just below this post, might as well make up for it.)

This beta is the coolest thing I've ever seen on-line. If you're not careful it will suck up all your free time.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 06:52 PM

Windows File Extensions

Another geek tangent:

In MS world, your three-letter file extension is your destiny. Combine this with another bug (not sure where it lies, either with Firefox or Windows 2003 or both) and we have:
Filename_With_Underscores.doc - attachment sent to my Yahoo! account - gets saved to my desktop as just Filename (no extension). My machine has no idea how to open it. But when I rename to Filename.doc, suddenly the thumnail image on my desktop is of the shiny happy "W", and Word likes the file after all.

Is this file-extension-as-destiny design brilliant? Insane? Idiotic? Some combination? (In other words, how many Mac fanatics are reading this and raring to comment along these lines? :-))

Posted by Matt Bruce at 05:55 PM

One Geek's Opinion

Don't send a Word document to do the job of an Excel workbook.

The personal bias here is that I can do fairly clever things in Excel but get flummoxed by Word table formatting issues. Why would you cripple yourself that way just for the relatively minor style gains Word gives you?

All the stuff I don't know, everyone else probably learned in a class somewhere. It's especially common of lawyers, consultants, and otherwise well-paid professionals. The things I do best in Excel are self-taught (by way of a lot of Google searches, free "experts'" web sites, and trial and error).

If I'd spent even a fraction of the time teaching myself perl that I've spent teaching myself Visual Basic for Applications, then I could truthfully call myself well versed in perl and get the ensuing career boost. Then again, I regret surprisingly little: It's just really really convenient to have the grid format handy.

(Among other things, I'll claim - exaggerating, but only a little - that there's nothing you can do in MS Access that you couldn't have done in Excel, although admittedly Access is harder to "break" just from typing something the wrong place.)

Posted by Matt Bruce at 05:46 PM

February 15, 2005

Usenet

Slashdotters mourn its potential passing.

Even aside from my bad experiences several years ago, it surprises me in hindsight that people value something so convoluted and resource-expensive. It was great when it was really the best you could do, yet the World Wide Web itself seems to make this kind of relay obsolete, no?

Slashdot posters mention particular features that web forums haven't emulated well (mainly the automatic "hiding" of messages once you've already read them) but surely those features aren't worth the marginal resource use.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 05:12 PM

February 06, 2005

Those Ads Disguised As Polls

They're so ubiquitous now, they must work. But who's actually falling for them?

Can you get a mental image of the sort of person who'd have a strong enough opinion on "Who's late more often, men or women?" or "Are you proud of George W. Bush?" to click through an ad just to make themselves heard? Am I a total snob or does that image just make you despair for our future?

Posted by Matt Bruce at 11:02 AM

February 04, 2005

Spam

Heard about this study on the radio on the way to work.

I get effectively zero spam in my work account inbox, with two exceptions: Williams-Sonoma sends me something now and then (dating back to a wedding gift purchase, I think), as does the company that got me my gym membership discount (the promotion was work-related somehow). Those are trivial to delete and anything that doesn't even get to me is handled even more easily.

Various NAQT aliases that forward to me (among others) get tons of spam, on the order of 300 to 400 a day. It takes about 15 seconds to skim the subject lines on a screen of 100 of those (with "check all" clicked), uncheck the non-spam, and delete.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 09:47 AM

February 01, 2005

Disturbing, Idiotic, Take Your Pick

You've no doubt already seen the e-mail forward (pizza delivery in the age of non-privacy) but now you can watch the video!

Slight problem, though: In a free market economy this literally couldn't happen. Why is an exercise for the reader. (Hint: It involves taking your business elsewhere.) The only things I found truly objectionable about the video (other than the vague call to "Take Action" at the end without any concrete idea of what action to take) were things that "work" only through government coercion, to wit the idea of an all-powerful health care plan.

On a minute's further review, okay yeah, I can see why one would object to price discrimination based on deliveries to crime-ridden neighborhoods. That said, I utterly don't share this objection. If you were a pizza delivery driver you'd want to have the capacity to discriminate like that.

Anyhow, the obligatory response to the original e-mail forward was much better. Too lazy to seek it out but the gist of it was just how broken technology actually is, and it involved some idiot at a call center whose instructions required him to keep calling this guy's second line even though he'd had the line deactivated.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 08:03 PM

January 31, 2005

This Will Make Your Head Spin

The anti-spam proposal here is probably sound, but my goodness it results in a fair bit of manual effort that I can't see real human beings adapting to.

(Granted, hand-deleting whatever spam gets through your filters is itself annoying.)

For lack of an intelligent comment I'll settle for mocking the guy for having a Lycos address.

Actually I do have fairly intelligent comments. One is just to quote verbatim what someone said here:
"Decoding the 5-letter example in the article took waaay too long when compared to current techniques (i.e. 30 seconds as opposed to 3), regardless of how good it is at eliminating nonhuman respondants.
It seems a very good idea, but all that flicking back-and-forth of the eyes is to compute-intensive for my grey matter."

Also, last dinner party I was at somehow this book came up in conversation. Some of the principles from that book explain why I doubt the solution above woudl ever become widely adopted.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 06:20 PM

January 30, 2005

Document Format Wars

If you care about this then you've already read this thread.

My default assumption is that this OpenDocument movement will remain as irrelevant as it already seems to be.

If you're in the publishing industry then you already need to use PDF. Otherwise, whichever is most situation appropriate of (TXT, XML, RTF, DOC) should suffice.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 05:23 PM

January 29, 2005

"Your Rights On-Line" vs. "Holy Roman Empire"

Given who posted this story, I should probably chalk it up as more of the same, but some things in life are just irksome.

The story: A firefighter was charged with arson after somebody set fire to his house with his wife and children in it. Among the evidence against him (and the reason for this to hit Slashdot): On his Safeway Club card, purchases of firestarters similar to the one used to start this fire.

The Slashdot post was categorized as "Your Rights On-Line." Think this through:
Your Rights: Well, you have every right not to shop at Safeway, or to shop at Safeway but decline to save money (your privacy being worth more than whatever the discounts would been).

Online: Duh. I suppose you could go with the bad pun on the linguistic abomination some New Yorkers used even before the Internet prevailed.

Anyhow, I've known forever that this Michael guy is an idiot, but lacked any reason to elaborate until now.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 12:36 PM

January 28, 2005

This Used To Be My Favorite Browser!

Now it can get you (mistakenly) arrested.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 11:02 AM

January 27, 2005

Dumbest Idea of 2005 (So Far)

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find a way to be held in contempt by this airhead Australian judge.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 09:44 AM

January 24, 2005

Ads vs. Search Results

Apparently people really are this stupid.

Bonus points if you see the potential trademark law implications here. It's almost enough to make you want to short GOOG. Not enough, but almost.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 12:20 PM

January 20, 2005

I Dare You To Make This Your Background Image

You've seen this elsewhere anyway, but just in case:

Guess who once posed as a teen heartthrob.

This guy's soliciting captions (e.g. ""I made the screen blue ... to match my eyes").

Posted by Matt Bruce at 01:53 PM

Literally The Most Money I've Ever Lost

...at anything, anywhere.

(Not counting college tuition, which was arguably money well spent. No, I'm talking out-and-out loss, like if someone stole your wallet or you had to pay a traffic ticket only more "expensive.")

This was the top story on the rightmost column of Google News just now. Couldn't figure out why until I saw the actual decline ($18/share, 18%).

Now's your golden opportunity to help me make it back and earn a little yourself. I Am Not A Financial Adviser, "past results do not guarantee future performance," etc., but look at it this way:

1. They take a cut from the seller.
2. They take a cut from the buyer.
3. Their marginal cost per auction hosted is effectively zero.
4. They're the company you think of when you think of on-line auctions.

As business plans go, what's not to like?

UPDATE: This article doesn't explain the plunge, but it does show signs of a bit of corporate arrogance. I suppose when you're that dominant you can be a little aggressive, but still, that's how empires fall.

The real reason it cratered? Oh, heavens, they missed their numbers. Funny thing about those numbers; Arlo & Janis nailed it a few weeks back.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 12:58 PM

Voice-Activated Music Player

This is where I work (though not what I work on).

Nice shot of Bill Gates in an article about the same product.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 09:52 AM

January 12, 2005

Watching the Detectives

Slashdot roundup:
GMail may be insecure.

Yahoo! Mail may be too secure.

T-Mobile 0wnz3r3d.

Do you think the ambiguity in this thread's headline ("Malicious Software Removal Tool") was on purpose? I assumed at first it was a malicious tool that removed software, rather than a tool that removed malicious software.

This call may be monitored... I can't imagine a form of voyeurism more banal. I could see someone getting hooked on this but hating himself for it.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 10:27 AM

January 10, 2005

Intentionally Stupid Question

Do you think a computer will ever be good enough to beat human players at Scrabble?

For some reason Matt L's latest travelogue (wherein he plays in a Scrabble tournament) reminded me of this, something I'd thought about over Christmas break.

Of course, I assume computers can very easily beat humans at Scrabble already, if only because a computer could very easily find the best possible single play for any board layout and rack. (Also a computer would be 100% accurate, if so programmed, with its decision whether to challenge a word. I assume it wouldn't even need ever to make illegal plays, since it could demolish a human on legal plays alone.)

This is assuming that the Greedy Algorithm is the best way to play Scrabble, though based on player comments in WordFreak (especially the experts who like a wide-open board), I expect that the point-maximizing play is the best play for a given rack/board situation 99 times out of 100.

The reason I ask this: Assuming such a Scrabble program exists, nobody seems to be concerned about it. Computers have long since been able to beat humans at checkers. And yet, the idea that a computer could consistently beat humans at chess makes a few people really paranoid and leads to all sorts of unwarranted apocalyptic jumping to conclusions about artificial intelligence.

Why is this? Is chess that exalted a game?

(On the flip side, I presume even the most probabilistically flawless computer would get destroyed by even intermediate level Hold Em poker players, and that this will continue to be true until, say, we can analyze an image or air sample with enough sophistication to detect "tells" among human players.)

Posted by Matt Bruce at 05:08 PM

Information Wants To Be Free

But the New York Times wants to charge web users for the privilege of reading it on-line.

There are a few good reasons to charge money for information (some of these overlap):
1. You have information that's available literally nowhere else. (Or available only other places that happen also to charge, though eventually someone will give it away if they have, or think they have, a workable ad-revenue-based model.)

2. Your collection of information is so superior to the alternatives (in accuracy, completeness, or both) that people will find the marginal quality gain worth paying for.

3. The transaction costs of gathering or delivering this information are so high that nobody's going to offer it for free any time soon. (Think of the overhead for newspapers' print editions compared to on-line.)

For the New York Times (on-line edition), I don't think any of these apply, unless your esteem for R.W. Apple, Maureen Dowd, et al, is really that high.

Come to think of it, in my life I've worked for at least two companies that, in essence, charge money for information. If you wanted minor league baseball statistics, time was you'd have to pay Howe Sportsdata (later part of SportsTicker) for the privilege. This was mainly a transaction costs issue; now, of course, you can get at least the current season's stats by player or team at Baseball America. Most companies that get a profit margin from charging for information-with-transaction costs will probably be hurt as competitors find ways to lower the transaction costs.

That leaves the situation where your justification to charge is your relative accuracy and completeness. This one's probably sustainable (if it's content providers licensing your data rather than end users), but only to the extent that your data is not only uniquely good but also perceived to be uniquely good by the people who pay for it.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 09:37 AM

January 06, 2005

Two Sheepish E-Mail Confessions

Despite its practically being a spam magnet, I've drifted back into using my Yahoo! handle as my primary non-work e-mail. The GMail UI just never took for me, though I have a bunch of invitations to give out again if anyone wants a free gig of storage.

(Mind, as a legacy paid Yahoo! Mail user, I ended up getting 2G storage for no additional cost, as their way of trying desperately to keep me in the paying fold -- and probably succeeding at it.)

Irony: The various NAQT aliases that forward to me (among other people) get so much spam themselves that I didn't want any of that spam going to GMail posterity. And yet, if I wasn't using GMail to receive NAQT mail (sending is another thing completely: since I never set up a mail client for explicit matt-at-naqt aliasing, in lieu of that I decided GMail seemed more "professional" than Yahoo!).

Confession #2: While Julia fastidiously empties her Bulk Mail folder (usually without looking; not sure if this is better or worse than combing over the contents), I equally fastidiously ignore mine. Based on several weeks' observation, I apparently get almost exactly 5,000 obvious spam mails every 30 days, or whatever time period Yahoo! actually holds onto bulk (they claim 30 days; probably about right).

There's a method to my madness, mainly paranoia about misdefining filters. For several weeks my question-rewrite e-mails weren't going to the folder they were supposed to and all instead were going to Bulk. By the time I caught onto this I'd already lost a few. Oh well; odds are the questions were unsalvageable enough not to lose any sleep over my failure to attempt rehabilitation.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 08:53 PM

Geek Breakup Lines

Right here. Best are #11 and #1 but I'm old-fashioned.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 12:53 PM

January 05, 2005

The LiveJournal Culture Clash

Read about the rumored buyout, and then the worlds-collide cultural imact.

Yep. I try too hard. Okay, from now on, no substantive posts here, just a mood emoticon and a plug for whatever band I'm listening to.

And an "OMG WTF" as I tell you about which classmate I have a crush on today and how much homework we got.

You know who else "tries too hard"? All those stupid nerds who found other ways to get on the Internet because they were too good for AOL.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 11:25 AM

A Variant On The James Bond Villain Who Keeps Talking Until Bond Foils Him

...is the guy who's so proud of his highly sensitive data that he can't keep a secret.

If some underling had posted this data instead of Mark Cuban himself, the underling would have been fired in minutes.

If I were a Mav's fan, I'd have much rather that data like this be anonymous and lead to a championship than be leaked and lead to the usual second-round exit.

This is also how I feel whenever I read insider looks at how the U.S. military fights its battles these days.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 11:20 AM

January 01, 2005

Comment Spam

UPDATE: Comments back up again. Bogg and I had e-mail streams cross, and so hours after sending me the fix, he went ahead and implemented it himself. The reasons why I owe him at least one meal next time we see each other are almost innumerable.

Noticing the comment spam last night ruined my evening (especially since before I realized the scope of the spam - maybe a dozen per post - I'd been trying manual delete), though I did also catch two real comments that were wiped in the purge.

> Subject: Comment Spam
> Date: Sat, 1 Jan 2005 11:08:04 -0500
>
> Matt -
>
> We got hit with hundreds of comment spams last night. I've closed
> comments on entries older than 5 days, deleted the entries directly
> from the database (DELETE FROM mt_comment WHERE comment_created_on >
> '2005-01-01 00:00:00' so sorry if you lost a real one in the purge) and
> am putting in captcha later today.
>
> Thought you should know.
>
> Thanks!
> Matt

Posted by Matt Bruce at 12:58 PM

December 31, 2004

I Type Faster Than You Think

(Someone once said of me, "He types faster than I think.")

So based on what's below, we have 3,435 words in at most 87 minutes. Not bad.

Even if I'd known exactly what I wanted to say that's 39.4 words a minute. Then consider I really wasn't too sure what I'd say. The strange irony is that I'd been pondering January and February earlier today but March onward is stone cold "what pops into my head right now?"

Odd in that March onward was a million times better than the first two months.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 04:50 PM

December 26, 2004

Wouldn't You Just Fact-Check The Raw Data?

...and a sample of each formula, I suppose.

Trying to overanalyze today's Dilbert may have brought the headache back (it never truly went away, just receded a bit).

Posted by Matt Bruce at 07:08 AM

December 20, 2004

RSS

How hard is it to set up RSS? How many people use it?

I'm actually asking not just for me but someone else (hi, you know who you are), several days after being asked myself.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 12:12 PM

December 15, 2004

What's Your Favorite Form Of Workplace Communication?

Apparently I'm an e-mailer, to an extent that'd make Mark Cuban blush.

Someone else I've begun to work with is also an e-mailer. We've had an interesting thread; maybe one day we'll meet in real-time.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 01:16 PM

Firefox Musings

Am I missing much if I choose not to use the "tabs" feature? I already am accustomed to something I think of as "tabbing", i.e. the serial use of ALT-TAB to flip between various browser windows and other applications.

I still perceive Firefox to be slower than IE but seemingly every Internet-related change I've ever made has had the illusion of being slower than things were before (notable exception: dialup -> DSL).

CTRL-N in IE opens a new browser window to the same address as your current window. CTRL-N in Firefox opens a new browser window to your homepage. I like the former functionality better; any trivially convenient way to replicate it (i.e. easier than just going to the old window and copying from the address bar)?

Posted by Matt Bruce at 11:29 AM

December 14, 2004

I Switched Browsers Today

As far as I can tell you should too. It's a very tiny bit slower than IE but with no other inconveniences that I can see and certainly fewer security risks.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 06:18 PM

December 11, 2004

Another Data Mining Breakdown

Fark's headline about this WalMart lawsuit reads, "Personal responsibility curls up, dies and is blown away in the wind."

I dunno, though. Seems to me that as policies go, WalMart's about to lie in the bed it made. (Then again, so are the people filing the suit.) From a legal angle, this is exactly why a vast majority of entities with a lot of content (read: Internet Service Providers, though it's not just an on-line thing) do anything they can to avoid being in a position to censor. Once you start censoring to begin with, you're vulnerable to the consequences of failing to apply your own policies. Then again, you can't file a lawsuit like this without having what first amendment buffs would call "a chilling effect" on anyone else's future attempts to censor content.

Musical side note: Of all the groups to drop an F-bomb, Evanescence? They're a quasi-Christian band, you know. Not DC Talk Christian, but not just U2 Christian either. Should we call bands like this "Creedstian"? (I have a sudden urge to listen to some Stryper.)

The most important point of all actually comes down to geekery (hence the title and primary category): What moron designed a system where the web people can end up censoring lyrics without an automatic alert filtering down to the inventory people?

BONUS TORT REFORM NOTE: Do you really think these asshat plaintiffs would be doing what they're doing if there weren't a cut in it for them?

Posted by Matt Bruce at 11:23 AM

December 10, 2004

Issues With Data Mining

Sad, sad story here.

This is a major problem to be fixed, although as someone who works with data a lot (obviously a vastly different type of data) I'd say the issue isn't too much data but rather too little. Also, incompetent or intransigent operators (incompetence or intransigence from a government agency? never) who apparently can't be bothered to cross-check...

(I idly wonder, in any given sex offender database, how many of the offenders are there only because of an act with a date prior to [whatever year that state decriminalized various now-known-to-be-innocuous acts]? How hard would it be to flag just those records and go through them one by one?)

Posted by Matt Bruce at 05:34 PM

December 09, 2004

I Hate Comment Spam

This probably isn't for the faint of heart but if you had a really really ironclad virus-protected, exploit-protected, whatever-else-protected computer, you could try hitting zweree dot com (supposedly registered to a gentleman in Russia) and see whether the content there is anywhere near as offensive as the spam comments were.

And then if it really is that explicit, call someone in law enforcement and go from there. Good luck with that though. Worth pursuing if you know someone who actually investigates/prosecutes on-line kiddie stuff, probably not worth pursuing if it means trying to explain to some local deputy what the heck you're talking about.

That it's registered to some guy in Russia is the red flag for me as to its likely content. Otherwise I'd have just assumed it was just some spyware or web browser hijacker or other nastiness that ruins your computer for awhile but at least doesn't ruin the life of a child.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 01:07 PM

December 01, 2004

Devil's Advocate: Geek Edition

So it's okay to prosecute entrepreneurs but not thieves or pornographers?

(You also know them as spammers, file sharers (of copyrighted material), and (ahem) purveyors of free speech, respectively. In all three cases, I think most conceivable forms of government coercion are a horrible idea. But I'm intrigued at just how many of the /. crowd want the iron fist of government in the first case but correctly perceive its dangers in the other two cases.)

Posted by Matt Bruce at 10:31 AM

November 30, 2004

Gratuitous Asimov Reference

(My category list is woefully inadequate but I'm too lazy to redefine them or add new ones. This relates to the "Political" post right below it, if only for the "2 + 2 = 4" digression.)

As recounted in one of his non-fiction books, Isaac Asimov had a friend who was studying philosophy while he himself studied math. He sat in on a friend's class at which the professor derided mathematicians for dealing in illusionary things divorced from reality. To back up his scorn, the professor challenged Asimov to give him the square root of negative one pieces of chalk.

Asimov in reply challenged the professor to give him half a piece of chalk. Taken aback, the professor broke a particular unit of chalk somewhere around its midpoint and handed one of the roughly equally long pieces to Asimov. Long story short (mainly since I don't have the book handy to retell this faithfully), Asimov argued that depending on how you define things, the professor had just handed him either one piece of chalk or 0.48 pieces of chalk. (I guess the piece handed to Asimov was observably shorter than the other one.)

There's something in here about the difference between mathematical rigor and empirical scientific research, but I'm too lazy to distill it to any particular premise. Suffice to say, in its foundation theoretical math really does have its dogmatic elements (more precisely its axiomatic elements), where any given proof generally boils down to If these are true Then those are true, with something axiomatic or definitional (or both) at the beginning. (Of course, some really cutting-edge math involves seeing what mischief will ensue if you take some seemingly crucial axiom and just play around with the consequences of removing it.)

Remember, though, A = A, and not because Ayn Rand insists on it (or not just because she does). (Expected number of readers who fully appreciate this paragraph: Zero. Inside reference here that if I tried to explain, I'd get subtly wrong. Reasonably good explanation here -- you can take the author's opinions or leave 'em -- probably the most useful hit from among the first 10 of this search.)

Posted by Matt Bruce at 01:39 PM

November 29, 2004

Meta-Blog Question

Would anyone out there find it especially useful to read a special incarnation of this blog that happened to exclude particular categories?

Including is easy - see also the finally-reimplemented Category archives at left (I'd never noticed they were missing, an artifact of relocating from the old domain) - for exclusion, the easiest answer I see (aside from messing with a plug-in, which I'm too lazy to do and too nice to foist onto the humble sysadmin known as Bogg) is a blog template whose MTENTRIES tag defines every category except the excluded ones.

Anyhow, if anyone in particular wanted a politics-free blog, or a sports-free blog (or politics-free and sports-free?), just holler and I'd make that available, one click away from the page you're reading now (at least if you're reading the main index; presumably I'd also futz with the left navigation to make it one click away from the individual entry page and the category and date archives as well).

Posted by Matt Bruce at 05:42 PM

Target's Work of Genius

Did you know you could buy Marijuana from the Target web site? (This isn't what you think it is.) For that matter, save 10% on Anal Massage on the Target web site.

As stupid as these things look, it shouldn't take you too long to realize what's going on. And in the end... well, if it weren't for examples like this, would you have been immediately aware that Target had an on-line retail presence to begin with?

This is marketing at its finest.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 03:17 PM

November 19, 2004

Last Friday Of The Month

Last non-holiday Friday of the month that is, going by the work calendar here. Exercise for the reader: Assuming a company takes reasonable U.S.-based holidays off (an old boss's rule: "If it's something you'd think of, we're off; if it's not something you would have thought of, we're not"), and always has its monthly birthday celebration on the last Friday of work that month (never non-Friday), what day marks the earliest possible end-of-month celebration and when's the last time it happened (and when's the next time it will happen)?

ANSWER: November 17, 2000; December 17, 2004 (only for companies that take December 31st off, which I don't think include my own).

I don't think the 16th is possible ever.

UPDATE: There's some ambiguity about whether in practice we'll have the 31st off. I predict that this does not get resolved until after December 17, but that ultimately we do take off the 31st, resulting in a last-"Friday" birthday celebration on Thursday, December 30. But then I'm a nitpicking dork.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 10:36 AM

November 18, 2004

The Consequences Of Job Failure

Here's a contrast for you:
There's the Marine who had to decide whether the insurgent guy was really dead or just faking it, and either way whether to kill him...

...and then there are the people who filter Bil Gates's spam e-mail.

In the grand scheme of things, no disrespect to my company or its products or data, I think I'm somewhere near the "Bill Gates's spam" end of the spectrum. My sister works with mentally ill, chemically dependent homeless people; put her near the other end. I'm acquainted with more than one doctor or near-doctor, just through NAQT.

My girlfriend has an editorial position with a major textbook publisher. I suppose if she truly messed up at work, a typo might make it into the next Campbell biology textbook.

Her dad invented this bed, whose utility I can't emphasize enough, especially if you the reader happen to have access to venture capital. Every day that this bed isn't marketed, produced, and sold, is another day that N particular patients get worse bedsores than they would have, and M particular nurses risk literal back-breaking injury from having to lift their patients to change the sheets, bathe them, etc.

(Incidentally, like the hand-rolled utilitarian homage-to-Google HTML? I have it on good authority that those web pages were "developed" for free by someone who feels mildly guilty sometimes about not doing even more to expedite this whole bed thing. Well, not totally free: The work resulted in being treated to a really good Indian buffet, not to mention intangible goodwill that will come in handy on the road to (potentially) becoming literally family.)

Posted by Matt Bruce at 06:28 PM

Geekiest Thing Ever

(By the way, Maribeth was correct to complain many posts below here that the product identified as "Robo-Dump" wasn't even remotely a robot, just a tape recorder with feet. Anyhow...)

RF connectors as chess pieces!

Here sadly I have to admit how ungeeky I am: Never used RF connectors in my life. Never been remotely proficient on the hardware side. Some particular of the IT guys here get to play with physical computers for a living - I see them in the server room sometimes, or cross-legged on the floor assembling or disassembling something. Not me at all. Sysadmin work? Please.

Instead of a true geek I'm really just a trash geek. I wish I could tell you more about how I inadvertently sidetracked a meeting just now into a 15-minute digression/argument about particular content handling, all based on a throwaway comment involving a cheesy '80s singer.

(Well, it wasn't just a throwaway comment, there was something I was honestly curious about, even though the curiosity was idle in that the issue involved had roughly zero chance of affecting the work I do myself.)

Posted by Matt Bruce at 05:35 PM

Weblog Navel Gazing

Yet another what she said.

Blogging is such an inherently navel-gazing activity to begin with that when people who do it start talking about themselves collectively, it leads to this disturbing degree of meta-navel-gazing. So please don't talk about yourselves (ourselves? them?) collectively.

There are individuals who happen to post on-line a lot. Aside from the medium, as a whole they have little else in common. (Compare some random LiveJournal to Instapundit.) Even if you reduce it to armchair political pundits writing explicitly for a nationwide audience, the difference in competence and effectiveness is vast.

The ironic thing about weblogs, or the Internet generally, or any place where you have fingertip access to so much raw data, is that despite all the crap, the worthwhile stuff eventually does filter through and from sources you never could have guessed. As information theory and communications go, I'm still really impressed at how the Rathergate story brought together different sources of types of expertise from people that CBS ignored, not on purpose but just because of the different possibility frontiers between a major television network and a computer network.

That doesn't make any one weblogger god's gift to journalism, much less any collective sense of bloggers. Quoting from Pulp Fiction via Bill Simmons: "Let's not go sucking each other's [popsicles] just yet."

Posted by Matt Bruce at 10:11 AM

November 13, 2004

The RoboDump

(speechless)

Posted by Matt Bruce at 11:37 PM

Most Obvious "Pi" Ever

I suddenly wish I were a Fark member already, especially since there's a 24-hour waiting period to post after signing up. So despite the blindingly obvious gimmick for this photoshop contest, and despite my actually having the skills to do it, I guess I'll have to wait for someone else to make pi sometime tomorrow....

Posted by Matt Bruce at 11:35 PM

November 01, 2004

ESR Is Back!

If you haven't been reading Eric S. Raymond's weblog lately, you should be. He had a long hiatus from February to September but since then, he'd:

Credibly accused John Kerry of treason (where by "credibly" I just mean I agree with him).

Put forth a radical new idea about free will and imperfect observation.

Reviewed Team America.

Explained why he might vote for Bush (of all things to push him over the limit, it's the thuggish behavior of Democrats).

Reposted a great screed: 10 reasons why he's neither liberal nor conservative.

That and a lot of stuff about art or media bias that wasn't worth singularly linking to but that you might still find edifying.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 06:51 PM

October 25, 2004

What Is Your Favorite Equation?

Interesting article here (via Slashdot).

My favorite equation is
1 = 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + [...]

Posted by Matt Bruce at 09:22 AM

October 21, 2004

GOOG

"Uh, yeah, we had twice the profit we thought we would..."

Funny what that'll do to a stock.

Oh, and EBAY also had strong quarterly earnings.

Weird to contemplate those days where you gain more on the stock market than you did at your full-time job. Of course, all of this is only on paper unless/until I sold something or otherwise recorded a taxable event. Then again, today (Thursday the 21st) will account for, what, maybe a week's worth of a college education for some hypothetical child of mine? If not a week then at least a day or two.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 04:21 PM

October 16, 2004

Speaking Of Privacy...

Oh dear god. The commentary on this thread was even worse than I thought it would be. It devolves into a flamewar over government, "privatization" as a buzzword, and some Canadian dipwad who wants us all to enjoy "free" health care but either isn't aware of or chooses not to dwell on the nastier consequences of rationed care (speaking of which...).

But anyway, getting back to the original article and the original post, we have: "I'm waiting for somebody to publish the private data (financial, medical, legal) of federal officials and their families on an open internet web server out of the Bahamas. Is this what it will take for the US to enact stringent privacy rules?"

This is a problem with people behaving badly via Internet, and some Slashdot moderator thinks this Internet problem can be solved by government fiat? After all, we all know how well attempts at U.S. laws against pr0n or copyright violations have worked out.

Whatever you think about data like this being collected, a "privacy" law isn't going to do anything to solve the problem unless it's very very carefully drafted, and a whole lot of resources put on enforcement, resources that I honestly believe would be better spent elsewhere.

Maybe I'm myopic, but short of people who do really truly astoundingly extreme things, I don't think any one of us has to fear our individual records being misused. There are just too darn many of us, and for any given even remotely mainstream behavior, just too darn many people doing it for someone to care about any one person.

Funny thing is, there were two stories on the front page of the Metro section of the Chronicle earlier this week that immediately made me think, "data mining is a Good Thing." One involved a property tax assessor who had mysteriously deeply cut the rate on some guy who'd given her a sweet deal on contract work. The other was a cop busted for filing false police reports, since he'd had a bunch of DUI stops where (according to his written report), the guy just happened to stumble on exactly the second step and happened to say the exact words, "Now what?" after sticking out his arm for balance.

The articles didn't really get into what it took to catch these people, but you can bet some really clever data mining was at work.

Here's more on the original topic from someone as not-worried as I am.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 11:21 PM

October 15, 2004

Siding With The Slashdot Curmudgeons

I think I agree with the overwhelming sentiment against this search-by-email idea.

If I ever get a request sent to me indirectly via Yelp! - well, not "if I ever," because it would be deleted unread, the first time by me, subsequent times automatically. (Not the end user, just whatever markings make a Yelp! message obvious.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 05:15 PM

October 10, 2004

Bogg Is Back

...and perpetually jet-lagged!

"Cooch's World" makes absolutely no sense in this context, unless I'm a woman writing from the perspective of my own pudenda. Which, thankfully, I'm not.

One of my classmates once didn't think pudenda was a real word. See... it is too!

Posted by Matt Bruce at 11:52 PM

October 04, 2004

Office Move Deadweight Loss

We just expanded here and a whole lot of people moved, mainly to ease some overcrowding that had led to temporary workstations set up on corridors.

My team had to move, much to our surprise. In theory my boss would have told me, except that it surprised him too. It even surprised my boss's boss, and he's the one who moved into our old space.

We're in a space four doors down from our old space, with the exact dimensions of the old space. My boss's boss had to move two doors down, as a department head moved from a corner cube to an office and needed to be much closer to his team than he would have been had we avoided the domino effect and just stuck him where my team is now.

I think I'm sitting at the very same desk where the previous occupant of this office (who had it to himself) sat. At least, this room has a very inegalitarian layout compared to the room we vacated. In there, I just took the seat of one of my people when he left the company and when the cube I'd been in was needed for a new person. Now, anyone who wants physical contact with me has to walk around "my" desk, past both my peeps. A straight line runs through the doorway, one of my colleagues, and myself, though tablespace separates the two of us. (He faces sideways after some last-second rearrangement; previously he was to have his back to the open doorway, which has to be some of the worst feng shui ever.) My other colleague faces the same wall that the doorway's on. Her back is to the window, which I sort of feel bad about, although she hasn't complained.

(Of all the things for my people to have reason to complain about - suffice to say she'd have bigger fish to fry.)

Anyhow, getting on-topic enough to justify this as a post rather than a pointless ramble, for some reason this office had no proper Internet connection; in fact a lot of the people who've moved have had connectivity issues, some of them still unresolved.

Tentatively I'll give benefit of the doubt that the sheer extent of this move will have been more productive in the long run.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 02:50 PM

October 01, 2004

Sellout

A lot of weblogs have tip jars, a concept I vehemently oppose since the vast majority of you readers know me personally and I couldn't look you in the eye and feel right after you donated to me.

With ads, on the other hand, you click and Google gives me money. It's foolproof. So, with the blessing of our fine webmaster (and extremely perfunctory fine print)... well, you've already noticed the stuff at the top.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 03:15 PM

September 29, 2004

Make A Name For Yourself

This one unfortuante ad placement is a more convincing, more damning case against Microsoft than a thousand posts by rabid Slashdotters could ever be.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 11:48 AM

September 22, 2004

Can I Skip The Ads And Cut A Check Instead?

From Scott Monty (yes, I do read my blogroll when I get a chance) comes word of a special charitable promotion over at Ask Jeeves. You can play along if you're feeling generous (in more ways than one), or you can indulge me as I explain to you my pathological hatred of both Ask Jeeves and this type of promotion.

First: Ask Jeeves. It's a simple choice I guess -- you can either do your web searches at the site that, by general consensus, gives you the best results and the fastest search times. Or you can go to the one with the user interface designed around a butler. After all, who needs a superior product when you have a butler?

Don't get me wrong, this isn't an argument against attempts at style. One of my favorite writers just published a book about how aesthetics are playing ever more of a role in consumer choices. Two problems with this:

1. Style generally can't overcome a strictly inferior product.

2. Note that I said "attempt at" style. The ask.com butler just doesn't work for me.

So that's everything I hate about the Jeeves part (and I could have actually just written one word instead: Clippy), without even getting to what's obnoxious about phrasing your queries in the form of a question. Maybe humans deal with questions better, but for computer search algorithms the idea of a question structure is needless complication. And given that I don't think of things in question form myself (I rarely have a specific question, rather just want background material on a topic), it seems weird to put both me and the computer on unfamiliar turf.

And finally... stipulating at this point that Ask Jeves is in inferior product (maybe it isn't; maybe you don't believe me - but if it isn't, then why were you already using Google, other than either herd instinct or "they're all the same" arbitrariness?), why would you use an inferior product just based on claims that some percentage of their profit will go to charity? Screw the middleman: Both you and your charitable destination are a lot better off if you stick with the most cost-effective goods and services, make a quick estimate of the dollar figure that matches how much better off you are, and donate a little less than that.

Of course, if search engines really are that interchangeable to you, then you quit reading this post three paragraphs ago.

(And another thing: Why the rigamarole of having a parallel site? Surely the idea isn't that there would be people who so object to hurricane relief that they'd rather just keep using the old site and letting Ask.com keep 100% of its profits. No, by setting up the parallel site, they make sure that even their faithful users won't accidentally cut into their profits.)

Now Ask.com is in Emeryville, as am I. Many of their employees probably eat at that same Public Market food court. Would I be out of line buttonholing one of them at random and telling them in person everything that sucks about their company? I presume so, but wouldnt it be sorely tempting?

Posted by Matt Bruce at 10:27 AM

September 08, 2004

Yahoo! Messenger Feature Request

Can I find whoever decided the "e-mail alert" function was a good idea and throttle him? Best part: Turning the function off (via Messenger > Preferences > Alerts and...) doesn't seem to've done the trick after all.

Posted by Matt Bruce at 06:28 PM

September 03, 2004

Excel "Striping" Question

Consider a spreadsheet sorted on one particular column of data, in which any particular value in that column will appear in a handful of different rows. Is there some trivially easy way to format the spreadsheet so that the background color alternates between white and (some non-white color) each time the value in that column changes from row to row?

The extended entry includes VBA (probably mangled as the tabs won't make it through to HTML... or will they?) for a "hard" way to accomplish the same thing by macro, but I'd have hoped it wouldn't come down to macros.

Sub Stripe()
    Application.ScreenUpdating = False
    GoToFirstRow
    Dim bShade As Boolean
    Dim sPrevKey As String
    Dim sNextKey As String
    sPrevKey = Selection.Value
    bShade = False
    While MoreData
        sNextKey = Selection.Value
        If sNextKey <> sPrevKey Then
            sPrevKey = sNextKey
            If bShade = True Then
                bShade = False
            Else
                bShade = True
            End If
        End If
        BG bShade
        NextRow
    Wend
End Sub

Function BG(argShade As Boolean)
If argShade Then
Rows(Selection.Row).Interior.ColorIndex = 15
Else
Rows(Selection.Row).Interior.ColorIndex = 2
End If
End Function

Function MoreData() As Boolean
MoreData = (Selection.Value <> "")
End Function

Function NextRow()
Selection.Offset(1, 0).Select
End Function

'Change C2 to be the cell containing the first data value in the column
'on which you want this "group by" kind of striping
Function GoToFirstRow()
Range("C2").Select
End Function

Posted by Matt Bruce at 12:30 PM