dynamic index

utopia.irs.gov

2011-04-17T20:04:00.000-07:00

A while ago I got a fat envelope from IRS in the mail; they wanted me to write back. I filed and paid everything, have not tried to cheat or game the system, and have an accountant that I can rely on: so this was only a nuisance. However, it got me thinking.

The envelope contained a three-page letter mentioning the documents they request, along with seven pages of scary forms. It took me some time to realize that the scary forms are detailed calculations describing the adjustments to my tax return in the worst-case scenario: if I am a liar and have no documentation to support my deductions whatsoever, I will have to pay a considerable sum. A table describing penalties and interest was included.

First, wouldn't years of timely and professionally filed returns, accompanied by large checks that always cleared, earn me some credibility with the IRS? If Uncle Sam was an airline, I am sure I would have a frequent flier status. I am not asking for free drinks, but I would expect that the customer service, while clarifying a billing issue, will not start by threatening me.

Second, obviously the forms were generated by software. So the IRS has The One True Tax Program. I already paid for it; it probably cost a lot, knowing how government procurement process works. Why then do I pay a second time for whatever tax software my accountant uses? Open source the IRS code!

Resources will be saved by removing the duplicated software development effort done by US Government, Quicken, TaxACT, H&R Block etc. More importantly, it will completely eliminate any potential incompatibilities that cost time and money for everyone involved, and produce no economic benefit whatsoever.

There will be an additional investment required to clean up and document the IRS code before public release; but this investment will pay off. Imagine the effort saved by being able to cross-reference the tax publications and unambiguously described algorithms. Or—in a dream world—have the two together, literate programming-style. Surely, if the government really strives for transparency and efficiency, open source is the way to go.

(Of course, I am skipping over the larger issues: whether the tax code should be drastically simplified, and whether the income tax should exist at all. I have some perspective though, as I grew up in a country that at the time had no income tax. There are worse things that a government can do to you: I will take IRS over KGB any day.)

Software / Art, part I

2009-03-20T21:52:00.000-07:00

While running into images created in the style of the iconic Obama "Hope" poster, I wondered whether there is software that can help create such images. Wikipedia to the rescue! There are step-by-step instructions for Illustrator, as well as a fully automated "Obamify" plugin for Mac that works with realtime video.

How long until artists start selling software components instead of static works? I guess we are already there...

Time? Will tell.

2009-03-11T22:23:00.000-07:00

Here's my attempt to build a better ~~mousetrap~~ clock.

There are two main ways to visualize time: using digital display, or an analog dial. Each one has its advantages: digital display is precise, while analog is more intuitive. Some watches have both displays, but this results in clutter. Why not combine the best of both worlds?

With the clock face on a fully programmable screen, there is no need to display irrelevant information. I had this idea back in October 2004; the flash demo was implemented by Will Law of Hostcast. Technology—such as electronic ink—is catching up and making it practical.

This can be marketed as a dedicated clock with several "skins", as a feature of a digital picture frame, or perhaps as a screensaver for Kindle. It may be especially useful in helping kids learn to tell time.

Somewhat related: visualizing weather forecasts.

99.99% off

2009-03-01T22:16:00.000-08:00

Recently I bought 3TB of storage for my home machine at a cost of $260. When I was buying my first PC, the sweet spot was $1/MB. The same amount of hard drive space would set me back $3,000,000. Three million dollars. Not adjusted for inflation.

It would be even more impressive if our sense of awe at numbers with lots of zeros was not blunted by the news reports.

200 PS3s = RIP MD5

2008-12-30T17:05:00.000-08:00

The story of how a rogue CA certificate has been obtained reads like a crime novel.

Very smart people do very dumb things

2008-09-16T21:47:00.000-07:00

Somehow, the satisfaction of linking to my post from March 2006 doesn't make up for the impact of this financial hurricane. From the same Berkshire Hathaway 2005 Annual Report, p.11:

It could be a different story for others in the future. Imagine, if you will, one or more firms (troubles often spread) with positions that are many multiples of ours attempting to liquidate in chaotic markets and under extreme, and well-publicized, pressures. This is a scenario to which much attention should be given now rather than after the fact. The time to have considered – and improved – the reliability of New Orleans’ levees was before Katrina.

Buffett warned us in 2003, few listened.

The physics of slacking

2008-08-28T16:30:00.000-07:00

Here's a physics problem that bugged me for the last twenty years. Two people have to carry a large object up a narrow staircase. (Twenty years ago, that was a tub full of firewood for the furnace on the second floor of our dacha. Today, it's a big screen TV for my grandma.) Whose job is more difficult: the person who goes first and holds the top end of the object, or the second person who carries the bottom end?

Experimental results are inconclusive. "Difficulty" is admittedly somewhat subjective. But there should be a good physical model that leads to the answer.

My two cents

2008-08-26T17:23:00.000-07:00

I've wondered where did the expression "my two cents" come from. There is a Wikipedia page on the subject, but it doesn't definitively answer the question.

Battery made of water

2008-08-21T20:40:00.000-07:00

In this month's Wired front page story about electric cars, Roth brings up one of the problems with wind and solar power:

DONG [Denmark's largest utility] makes a higher portion of energy from wind—18 percent—than any other power company in the world. Danish politicians want to see that figure doubled, which is good and green but completely impractical: Some days the wind blows, and some days it doesn't. Banking wind energy is expensive and inefficient—DONG would have to buy fields of batteries.

Turns out there is a neat solution to this problem: use hydroelectric plants' reservoirs to accumulate potential energy of water. It is possible to control the amount of water that goes to turbines and whether the level in reservoirs rises or falls. By tuning hydroelectric energy production in response to supply and demand of the grid, you can "smooth out" short- and medium-term fluctuations with near-perfect efficiency.

They probably don't have many hydroelectric plants in Denmark, but Soviet Union has built a bunch of them. In 1991, I wrote Fortran code to simulate USSR's power grid and optimize the use of power plants and transmission lines. My grandfather, Anatoly Zeyliger, got me the gig: he worked on the energy infrastructure. This might be one of the domains where free market principles should be applied with caution, and central planning is not such a bad idea: global optimizations lead to huge savings. My grandfather declared California's deregulation plan "a bad mistake" long before Enron's traders exploited loopholes to rip off taxpayers.

Compression

2008-07-12T21:59:00.000-07:00

Waves are compressed information about particles.

Compression is intelligence: Hutter prize is a superior Turing Test.

The number 11982

2007-08-07T17:28:00.000-07:00

31999 out of 32000 FreeCell games can be solved.

Kinetic Sculpture

2007-06-06T16:06:00.001-07:00

"The walls between art and engineering exist only in our minds."

Cosmonaut Charles

2007-04-05T21:24:00.000-07:00

It takes guts to strap oneself on top of two hundred tons of fuel and light up the fuse. In Soviet Union, they used to print stamps commemorating flights to space, with names and photos of cosmonauts.

On April 7, Charles Simonyi will be on board of a Soyuz rocket. The coverage is complete with YouTube trailer and a feed. The site gives a glimpse at the Russian space program, which remains a source of national pride.

Sunbeam

2006-12-29T20:47:00.000-08:00

If a man is called a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, “Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.”

Martin Luther King Jr.
(via The Sun Magazine)

Is UN deprecated?

2006-11-19T22:42:00.000-08:00

Wall Street Journal: Where Money Buys Diplomacy

Enlightenment

2006-11-19T19:25:00.000-08:00

My lucky number is 68.

German Engineering

2006-11-18T20:57:00.000-08:00

BMW has built a practical hydrogen-powered car.

And I have to manually add align="center" to images in Blogger because Web-based aggregators strip out "style" attributes for fear of malicious CSS hijacking the browser.

Software engineers are behind auto engineers.

One sigma, two sigmas...

2006-09-27T01:52:00.000-07:00

John H.Lienhead: "You cannot be inventive and live a normal life."

Scary movie

2006-08-22T01:50:00.000-07:00

"The Root Of All Evil" — a horror flick about bad software.

Tailgating is bad for you health

2006-08-05T22:14:00.000-07:00

From an online driving school:

Think of the safety of your maneuver. Tailgating is extremely dangerous especially for tailgaters themselves. Sudden braking by the car ahead often leads to a collision. The higher the speed, the more severe the damage. Another danger lies in the ubiquity of firearms: How safe would you be if the driver you were tailgating made you stop at a shoulder and had a handgun?

It's a great course, BTW--much more useful than the comedy traffic school I went to last time I was caught speeding.

Epigrams on programming

2006-07-21T15:15:00.000-07:00

Alan J. Perlis in September 1982 SIGPAN Notices:

Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.

and 129 more epigrams.

Self-aware music

2006-06-29T01:30:00.000-07:00

Sean Conlon: "The resonant vibration of conscious unity will become louder and louder until all can hear the self aware music of life."

Java's expiration date

2006-06-06T14:40:00.000-07:00

Joshua Bloch writes about a bug in the binary search implementatuion. Turns out

int mid = (low + high) / 2;

gives unexpected results for sufficiently large values of low and high due to integer overflow. Ouch.

So let's fix it. Joshua suggests rewriting the expression as

int mid = low + ((high - low) / 2);

However, this is just a kludge that makes the code less readable and doesn't address the root cause of the bug.

The underlying problem is Java's 32-bit integer arithmetic. Why does adding two large integers cause an overflow instead of returning a bignum? The answer is, no doubt, that it's a performance optimization. It's more efficient to always use native addition instead of sometimes using bignums.

At the time of Java release, 32-bit integers provided the best performance on mainstream CPUs, but that's no longer true today: 64 bit is the native word size of state-of-the-art processors. As is the case with many optimizations, it's brittle: changes to the execution environment cause performance to degrade. Java's optimizations are now obsolete and counterproductive.

This is yet another demonstration that it is easier to optimize correct code than to correct optimized code. It's unfortunate that many language designers continue to follow the same path: Fortress programming language also has a fixed size integer type, only it's 64 bit. The overflow bugs will take a while longer to be triggered, but they'll be triggered eventually.

...In order for a programmer to write correct code that can be later optimized, the platform must provide:

A base integer abstraction that hides the word size, implemented using bignums if the value is large;
Several integer types of fixed size that support arithemetic with overflow: int8, int16, int32, int64, int128, plus the unsigned versions—primarily for interoperability with other systems;
A way for the programmer to provide the information that can be used for optimizing the base integer implementation. This can take a form of annotating invariants, such as specifying a range of a variable; if an invariant is violated, an exceptional condition is generated.

The Scala programming language

2006-04-01T14:38:00.000-08:00

Scala rationale: "There are hundreds of programming languages in active use, and many more are being designed each year. It is therefore hard to justify the development of yet another language. Nevertheless, this is what we attempt to do here." I am not convinced.

I found Scala while looking up covariance and contravariance on a lazy Saturday afternoon. Scala happens to have variance annotations which are missing from Java 5. It doesn't appear to have const annotations though, which are arguably more widely needed.

Entrepreneurial Proverbs

2006-03-10T12:06:00.000-08:00

Marc Hedlund quotes Howard Aiken: "Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats."

Derivatives: a disaster waiting to happen?

2006-03-04T21:27:00.000-08:00

Warren Buffett: 'Long ago, Mark Twain said: “A man who tries to carry a cat home by its tail will learn a lesson that can be learned in no other way.” If Twain were around now, he might try winding up a derivatives business. After a few days, he would opt for cats.' 2005 BRK Annual Report (PDF), p.10.

QWERTY blues

2006-02-20T11:49:00.000-08:00

My keyboards fail in mysterious ways. After a firmware "upgrade", the Bluetooth keyboard that came with my computer started to generate five garbage keystrokes about every twentieth keypress. I tried to ignore the problem in the hope it will go away. The most annoying part was when backspace generated yet another set of junk characters.

In a box in the closet, I found a replacement. It seemed to work ok. Turns out it has a subtler problem: the "left arrow" and "down arrow" keys don't work; everything else is fine. Over the last two weeks, I watched my brain rewire itself to avoid hitting those two keys. Who needs arrows in vi anyway?

I'll get off my butt and buy a new keyboard today. Should I get two?

On philosophy

2006-02-14T22:38:00.000-08:00

"Purpose of life" is a fun query to googlebomb.

Visualizing weather forecasts

2006-02-08T18:14:00.000-08:00

Click on the image for full view.

Missing service?

2005-11-23T21:43:00.000-08:00

I wanted to write about something I couldn't find on the Web: a language recognizer. You paste a few sentences, and it tells you what language they are in.

Of course, I wasn't looking hard enough. [language identifier] led me to a service that does what I want, courtesy of Xerox.

Soviet computer industry

2005-11-10T23:56:00.000-08:00

Few tidbits from a presentation by Alexander Galitsky that I wanted to write down:

The Soviet industry was pretty advanced, but most of it was for space and defence. If you are building a computer for a space station, you don't need to mass-produce a chip: just a few good ones will do. Radiation-hardening is important though.
In later stages they mostly used reference designs available from the libraries, although some people present still believed they copied chips layer-by-layer.
Initially there was a lot of original research, but then there was a decision to just copy IBM. "No one gets fired for buying IBM" worked in Soviet Union too! (Only s/buying/stealing/)
They copied chip designs because they didn't want to invest in software! I thought the hardware was the bottleneck, but apparently no.
The language of choice of the Soviet space and defense indsutry was Modula-2.
In 1980s some portion of Soviet defense network standardized on Unix and TCP/IP.

Don Knuth asked two questions; the second one was about mass storage.

Earth Rotation Service

2005-11-10T23:51:00.000-08:00

Americans want to abolish the leap second:

Among those upset by the idea is Daniel Gambis who works for the intriguingly named Earth Rotation Service. His job is to decide when to add a leap second.

Of course he is upset: his job is threatened.

Zelenograd, the Soviet Silicon Valley

2005-11-06T00:39:00.000-08:00

An interesting lecture at the computer history museum:

Author and BioCentury Publications Senior Editor Steve Usdin tells the fascinating story of two American engineers, Joel Barr and Alfred Sarant, who were recruited into espionage by Julius Rosenberg, and, driven by ideology, evaded the FBI and escaped to carry on their work on behalf of the Soviet state. Barr and Sarant rose to the pinnacle of power in the Soviet establishment and managed the building of the postwar modern Soviet military machine and microelectronics industry.

Fittingly it's on November 7th—the anniversary of the Soviet Union. (via sfbayarea_ru)

Why you can't fix the WWW.

2005-11-02T20:34:00.000-08:00

If you are involved in web development, you should read about five paradoxes of the web.

(via Evhead)

Bird's Nest

2005-10-30T01:31:00.000-08:00

China's Olympic stadium is going to look like this:

I like it.

MediaBank

2005-10-25T22:32:00.000-07:00

I found a firewire hardware RAID 1 to put my photos on. RAID 5 would be more 31331 but also louder. MediaBank allows hot-swap of drives—and in fact encourages it as an offsite backup solution. The only drawback (besides price) so far are the strange limitations on the drives: IBM/Hitachi recommended while WD/Seagate are not compatible (why?); and 250GB max. I've ordered one anyway.

Harddrives always cost around $200. I remember when I bought my first one: 170MB for $170. Three orders of magnitude later, the price/performance sweet spot remains the same.

update: it's out of stock for a month.

Educating spammers

2005-10-15T19:40:00.000-07:00

When will the comment spammers realize that it's pointless to continue? Those who use comment spam bots should ask for their money back.

On progress, part two

2005-10-15T19:11:00.000-07:00

I just forgot my keys in a restaurant. Which brings me to another future I am waiting for: when instead of the three things I have to carry with me—keys, wallet and cellphone—I'll need just the latter, and all the functionality of multiple physical tokens will be absorbed by a single one.

From a brilliant class taught by David Wagner and Ian Goldberg (it was a long time ago, so I might be misquoting):

In computer security, the best strategy is often to put all eggs in one basket—and watch that basket!

I'll never forget my cellphone in a restaurant if I need it to open my car.

Cellphones and "Do What I Mean"

2005-10-14T18:53:00.000-07:00

My cellphone is in the 510 area code. Alice's phone number is 650.555.1242. I have it in my addressbook. When I dial "5551242 send", I mean to call Alice. But I end up calling Bob at 510.555.1242.

What's better: a consistent interface that consistently makes you call the wrong person, or a "do what i mean" interface that is inconsistent but does the right thing 99.99% of the time?

To complicate things further, the phone displays "Calling Alice..." even if I dial Bob's number. So the phonebook look up procedure is "do what I mean", whereas the dialing itself is "consistent".

Any pointers to comparisons of cellphones based on human interface are appreciated.

On progress

2005-10-08T01:44:00.000-07:00

When will we reach the promised techological paradise? When we have spaceships? Skycars? Long-distance brain surgery? (I am sure I've seen all of these somewhere...)

I have a different benchmark. When a ten-dollar alarm clock I buy will automatically set itself to a correct time as soon as I plug it in, then I'll believe in progress.

All that's needed is to transmit correct time and correct timezone. There are literally dozens of networks and protocols that can do the job. From radio, GPS, cellphone, WiFi, wired networking to IP, NTP and the rest. Yet, I can't buy the self-setting alarm clock for ten bucks.

How long do I have to wait? And, specifically, what for?

update: Steve J says there's already one for $9.50—and I just ordered it. But I wonder, do you have to set the timzeone manually?

update 2: the $9.50 phone failed to figure out the correct time after 24 hours. I am still waiting.

English as a second language

2005-10-04T13:05:00.000-07:00

Very recently I ran into the word "lisp" in a regular English text, and was surprised to find out that it actually meant something besides "LISt Processing."

A long time ago, a friend of mine was absolutely certain that "beetle" is spelled with an "ea".

You live you learn.

For real

2005-10-02T13:11:00.000-07:00

Yahoo! is running an IM contest, with prizes. (Now long-distance relationship is a sport.) Three couples stay in touch via Y! Messenger; you get to eavesdrop. Which is fascinating to me, since I never got the hang of the whole IM thing: call me a dinosaur.

The exchanges are enitirely devoid of content. This illustrates my theory that in an electronic human-to-human communication the most important field is neither body nor Subject, but Date.

Genius bar

2005-10-01T23:19:00.000-07:00

I finally connected a power cord back to my iMac. The computer was at Apple Store because the harddrive crashed. I bet my cousin five bucks that there would be no software on the disk. That was foolish: the iMac boot up into Tiger, even though the computer originally came with OS X 10.3.

But the real surprise came when I ran Software Update. It offered to install this:

The iMac G5 Sleep Light Update adjusts the brightness of your iMac G5 sleep indicator light so it's not as bright during the evening. The daytime brightness remains the same.

I bet Steve will put a light sensor in the next revision of hardware: the heuristic doesn't work if you live in a cave.

More to the point: does anyone know of a RAID solution in a 1TB range for a small Mac network? I will not lose my photos again, no sir.

HAL

2005-09-28T18:54:00.000-07:00

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from having a personal secretary.

Mixed message

2005-09-28T00:03:00.000-07:00

I haven't watched Putin's three-hour call-in show. But the NY Times correspondent apparently did, and wrote an article titled Putin Won't Rule Out Third Term in 2008. At the same time, Washington Post reports that Putin Says He Won't Seek 3rd Term.

Both of the articles were in the same Google News cluster. Click to vote.

I want my back button back!

2005-09-19T12:32:00.000-07:00

Many of the new-style Javascript apps don't correctly handle the back button. This is at least annoying and at most disastrous (when you lose your data and there's no way to go back to it.) And all I can do is rant about it.

The word of the day

2005-09-18T23:03:00.000-07:00

Re-reading the email I just sent, I noticed the word trigerred. According to Google, it can be found on about 11,500 webpages.

Can someone point me to a comprehensive analysis of typos? They should provide a glimpse of how the brain is wired.

New from O'Reily

2005-09-09T23:56:00.000-07:00

Refactoring with sed, 2nd Ed.

Real Life - Dilbert 1:0

2005-09-08T23:04:00.000-07:00

"Ascentium Corporation is an award-winning, integrated technology and marketing consultancy with a proven track record in delivering information-driven business solutions to achieve our client's strategic objectives." The question "what do they do?" is fully addressed in the second sentence: "As a trusted advisor to our customers, Ascentium partners with our clients to plan and execute on their portfolio of marketing and technology investments to drive exceptional returns."

Copied verbatim from Bellevue Downtown, issue no. 3 2005.

static typing is unittesting

2005-08-21T19:02:00.001-07:00

I'm surprised when people advocate unittests while disliking static typing. From pythonforum:

IMHO it helps to think about static typing as a special kind of unit tests. Like unit tests, they verify that for some input values, the function in question will produce the correct output values.

assert 2*2 == 5

2005-08-20T18:14:00.000-07:00

I just realized that in Java, assertions are disabled by default. That is not unlike advertising a safety lock on a gun and then, on page 17 of the manual, providing instructions on how to enable it. Performance considerations or RTFM don't provide an excuse: this is just bad user experience.

Procyon Lotor

2005-08-18T22:35:00.000-07:00

When I grew up, racoon was an exotic animal. I went to the zoo to see racoons -- they looked smart and were almost as exciting as tigers and zebras (stripes are really cool when you are seven years old.) Both English and Russian names for the animal sound funny (Russian name, енот, has an unusual phonetic structure.) As a teenager, I listened to "Rocky Racoon", although I didn't quite understand what it meant.

When I drive by the trash bin at night, I often see a couple of racoons there. What a letdown.

SHA-(n+1)

2005-08-18T22:14:00.000-07:00

There is an even faster attack on SHA-1. It's major news for cryptanalysts. But why do I have to care? Choosing a hash function is orthogonal to other system decisions. Why is it not possible to transparently upgrade the hash function on all the computers in the world, once a replacement is designed and before the attacks become truely practical?

Enabling graceful software evolution would help address many security problems. Cryptanalysis can be done by small team -- making systems evolvable requires coordination by large companies. Unfortunately the problem is more political than technical.

The Humane Interface

2005-08-17T12:59:00.000-07:00

I've been reading Jef Raskin's "The Humane Interface" with mixed feelings. On the one hand, Raskin's Laws of Interaction should decorate every office of every computer company.

A computer shall not harm your work or, through inaction, allow your work to come to harm.

He is just right: about getting rid of all the modes, unlimited undo forever, file systems as a broken metaphor etc. It's funny how most of commercial UI goes in exactly the wrong direction -- with more chrome and less efficiency. Unfortunately Apple is moving in this direction to, with the most recent dashboard fad.

On the other hand it doesn't help that the book is badly edited and he jumps from topic to topic all the time. And it doesn't help that from time to time he's wrong. For example, suggesting that the user types just the password instead of username/password, and that the passwords would be system-assigned, is ridiculous. First, nobody would use a system rude enough to prevent them from picking a password. Second, to be both secure and memorable, the system-assigned passwords have to be long, which negates the savings of not having to type the username in the first place. The correct solution is simple: use two-factor authentication, with a token (such as a smartcard) that knows your username so you just have to type in the password.

Unfortunately I can't play with Archy since there's no Mac version. But there's a problem, right in the first paragraph:

a system that effortlessly boosts your speed and productivity by 20 percent or more.

20 percent is not big enough to make me switch. Revolutionary technologies must offer a 10x improvement to be successful. I hope that the Humane Interface catches on nevertheless.

vi users, rejoice

2005-08-12T17:37:00.000-07:00

Mac OS X 10.4 allows you to reprogram modifier keys in the "Keyboard and Mouse" control panel. Evil CapsLock key, you are a "no action" from now on!

Ctrl-Alt-Del hell

2005-08-07T21:25:00.000-07:00

I connected a USB mouse to my parents' 3-year-old Windows 98 computer. It started freezing, first two minutes after boot up, then thirty seconds, eventually stopped working at all. Msgsrv32 [Not responding] is self-explanatory.

In safe mode, at least the keyboard worked. Using the keyboard shortcuts, I've unistalled the Logitech driver, which I had no business installing in the first place. It appears to work better, although the mouse just froze again.

This post can end in one of two ways:

I can mention that I need the USB mouse so I can plug into a KVM switch which would allow me to gradually transition my Mom to a Mac mini. This would imply that switching to a Mac would be a solution to software quality problems -- unfortunately that isn't true.

Or I can write that dealing with a screwed up Windows 98 install is a punishment for writing buggy code over the years. It isn't, really -- it's yet another reminder that our tradeoffs are wrong. I'll pick correctness over performance in most applications -- definitely in a mouse driver.

DEFCON 13, day 1

2005-07-30T03:00:00.000-07:00

Level of organization, number of attendees greatly exceeded expectations. "Spot the Fed" and CTF are fun. I've bought a sticker that says "hacker" in Russian.

I obviously should have brought the laptop. I had to resort to using a 25c/min Internet terminal at the hotel. By the end of the day, there was a free Internet Explorer window open, circumventing the kiosk security. The browser was pointing to defcon.org

Blogger is...

2005-07-30T02:56:00.000-07:00

Wonderful: rescued my post completely intact when the browser was brutally killed by the evil daemon that wanted my money.
...but it is still slow on login.

From the Strip

2005-07-30T02:45:00.000-07:00

Treasure Island's efforts to rebrand itself as "ti" are hilarious. Well, it's fairly obvious that they would be better off keeping the name and changing other identity elements -- that's not the funny part. A casino with the same name as calculators and microchips -- most people wouldn't get it. The amateurish new logo -- it's just bad taste. But: paying tons of money for the new identity, and neglecting to change the logo on the top of the hotel, 10-foot letters, lights and all -- that's a wonderful way to throw away tons of money.

But the best part is the "The Sirens of TI": the update of the free pirate show. It's great, especially if you are a father who brought his seven-year-old son to see the pirates, and instead got a gang of half-naked "singing" showgirls.

DEF CON 13

2005-07-29T05:48:00.000-07:00

Packing paper, leaving the laptop behind. Paper is less crack-prone.

Colorado

2005-07-23T18:11:00.000-07:00

Synchronized grasshopper jumping is the sport of the day.

TLAs

2005-07-21T21:54:00.000-07:00

After encountering "HBP" for the third time, I realized that that it stands for HP6.

... but do they get stock options?

2005-07-21T21:39:00.000-07:00

The salary for the chief justice is $202,900 per year; associate justices make $194,200. (washington post)

the price of peace

2005-02-14T16:08:00.000-08:00

For a $100 billion upfront investment plus some operating expenses, you could theoretically build a system that remotely disables nuclear weapons. Less than two market caps of Google — and you buy world peace. Tempting, very tempting.

Suppose for a second that such a system is indeed physically possible. Will it be built? If US starts unilaterally constructing one, every other current nuclear power will get very upset. An alternative is an international consortium of some sort, that would enforce the NPT but would never disarm the existing nuclear club members. I wonder who would authorize the use of the device under this scenario.

(via mulki)

(too much sql)

2005-02-02T19:32:00.000-08:00

Normalize life.

metastandard

2005-01-28T19:05:00.000-08:00

Over a dozen companies get money for each DVD player produced.

Various licensing fees add up to over $20 in royalties for a $200 DVD player, and about $0.20 per disc.

The price of the DVD player hardware has fallen well below $200, yet the cost of intellectual property likely hasn't gone down as fast. In the PC world, the share of the IP cost — the portion that goes to Microsoft for the Windows license — also rises with time.

Is it the right model for the intellectual property? It seems that the problem with this system is that it disproportionately rewards established players. Can a more liquid market exist for IP contributions, where technical merit plays more role, and politics — less?

A metastandard would allow interoperability without limiting competition for the core licensing revenue. This is possible with software. We'll see what happens to MPEG-4.

chef's choice computing

2005-01-27T21:42:00.000-08:00

Computer product specs are confusing. All this Megahertz, Gigahertz, Gigabytes, Megabytes, AMD PR, fps... Benchmark numbers, model numbers — do they mean anything?

All this can be simplified and converted into one number, expressed in $/hr. You should buy Model 25 if you value your time at $25/hr, and Model 50 — if you value your time at $50/hr. The optimal configuration is then selected for you based on economic factors: the current market prices of components, and the cost of time you are expected to waste waiting for the computer to respond.

The system makes computer buying a breeze. It's like chef's choice sushi — you accept that the person selling is more knowledgeable than the person buying.

Ordering a Model 100 doesn't mean that you are earning $200k — it just proves that you are a technology connoisseur. And you can get a Model 0 — it is an empty box.

leverage

2005-01-27T17:54:00.000-08:00

Douglas Engelbart classifies organizational activities:

A-B-C's of bootstrapping. Any organization's stock in trade is called here an A-activity; its ordinary R&D work to improve on A is called a B-activity. The bootstrapping strategy serves to improve on B and is called a C-activity. The value of C may be perceived as garnering compound interest on an organization's intellectual capital.

Blogging is not an A-activitiy, so it must be a B-activity. Developing blogging software is therefore a C-activity. But what do you call the activity of creating tools — databases or programming languages — that improve C?

archival computing

2005-01-24T14:57:00.000-08:00

How do I write a program that's still runnable in 100 years? The concern is not preserving the media -- the code can survive on a piece of archival paper, if necessary. But will the platform be around? Would the translator and APIs exist? Should I include source code, or supply a binary and hope that emulators for Win32 are going to survive until the twenty-second century?

happily ever after

2005-01-12T15:04:00.000-08:00

Do you enjoy fairy tales? Do you like typography? Here's a historic tale and a historic tale construction kit.

CCCP.mp3

2005-01-12T14:14:00.000-08:00

Here are some soundbites from the Soviet history — speeches of leaders and announcements of major events. Visual images of Lenin and Stalin are well-known, but the voices were not part of the mainstream propaganda. I would expect Lenin to have a more powerful voice -- he sounds more like my idea of Dzerzhinsky. Trotsky is the best speaker. (via lesoto)

will to live

2005-01-05T16:08:00.000-08:00

In this photo released by Durban Bridge, tsunami survivor Acehnese Rizal Shahputra stands on the tree branches and waves to a cargo ship after being spotted by the crew of a container vessel in the Indian Ocean, 100 nautical miles (160 kilometers) from the shores of Aceh province Monday, Jan. 3, 2005. (AP Photo/Huang Wen Feng)

resolutions (draft)

2004-12-31T03:43:00.000-08:00

More exercise. More writing. More music.

sex in the mountains

2004-12-31T02:41:00.000-08:00

Sex in the City is stylish. We watched 4 and 1/2 episodes while stuck in traffic on i-80 in Sierra mountains. They showed the Prada store I visited while in New York. The rows of mannequins. A connection.

The trip took around 14 hours, not counting some light shoveling time. The house has wireless internet access; and a washing machine, darling. That's a new feature.

"non-standard and extreme technologies"

2004-12-27T22:33:00.000-08:00

I am struggling how to translate "mulki" into English. "Widgets" doesn't cut it.

Anyway, my friend started a community about interesting technological thingies, from modern clones of Victorian bicycles to extracting Uranium from seawater. And with everything in between.

The community is in Russian. Most of the linked pages are in English.

pathetic

2004-12-21T01:25:00.000-08:00

About a month ago, I bought a used car. A Porsche. (This becomes important later on.) The Porsche, among other features, has an alarm that was mostly disabled - except for an annoying beep when the car door is opened.

Today I left my Porsche with the lights on. Tow truck guy thought that was funny. Tow truck guy also jumpstarted the car, and soon I was on my way to the meeting with a friend at a bar.

My friend and I drank almost no alcohol. Really.

After opening the car door, I start hearing intermittent beeping of the alarm. The beeping doesn't go away but increases in frequency, ultimately escalating to full alarm horn sounds.

Investigation leads to the following discoveries:

If left alone, the alarm turns itself off after a minute. Any activity causes the alarm to restart signaling.
Even if driving with a horn blasting were an option, the alarm is capable of shutting down the engine.
Pressing random digits on alarm's keypad has no effect.

To recap: the alarm was reset by the jumpstart. I don't know the code. The alarm was designed to prevent all obvious ways to work around it.

It's midnight, I am standing in a parking lot of a bar, waiting for a $80 taxi ride home, away from the fully functional but unfriendly Porsche. And I am completely sober.

for the articles

2004-12-11T17:53:00.000-08:00

Russian Playboy predicts that by 2015, Sergey Brin will lead the Forbes' list of the richest people in the world. "In the beginnig of the 10s, he started to work on global technologies of structurung information." Sounds like fun.

2 months free!

2004-12-11T16:47:00.000-08:00

The passwords that come on AOL disks are the 21st century fortune cookies. Today I got CAVIAR-GULPS. Time to open that can in the fridge...

geek humor

2004-12-01T11:51:00.000-08:00

Dear valued user,

You have reached the error page for the error page...
You win!!

Love, The [product code] Team

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl

2004-11-27T18:16:00.000-08:00

One wrong step — and it is a lousy movie.
But it worked. 3 stars. Johny Depp kicks ass.

The DaVinci Code-Breakers

2004-11-27T17:50:00.000-08:00

There's a series of books dedicated to debunking the Da Vinci Code.

Breaking the Da Vinci Code
Cracking Da Vinci's Code - You've Read the Fiction, Now Read the Facts
Truth Behind the Da Vinci Code
The Da Vinci Code: Fact or Fiction?
Cracking The Da Vinci Code (DVD)
The Real History behind the Da Vinci Code
The Da Vinci Code Deception
The Truth Behind the Da Vinci Code
Da Vinci Code Decoded
...

I thought that the Da Vinci Code was mildly entertaining.

November 25th

2004-11-25T16:05:00.000-08:00

Turkey in the United States. Revolution in the Ukraine.

Sorry...

2004-11-18T17:38:00.000-08:00

When does a collection become more than a sum of its parts?

Nochnoj Dozor (aka Night Watch)

2004-11-07T20:36:00.000-08:00

In Nochnoj Dozor, Timur Bekmambetov juggles media with fantastic ease. Over the course of the movie, we see an animation sequence, ballet and a computer game — and all of them are essential.

The genre laws are not so much broken, as ignored. The distinction between the good guys and the bad guys, already ambiguous in the book, is further blurred in the screenplay.

I give it 4 stars. But I've read the book, and I get most of the cultural references.

define SMART. part II

2004-11-06T20:15:00.000-08:00

hukuma linked to a few hundred definitions of SMART, for those who didn't like the last definition.

Incredibles, The

2004-11-06T01:07:00.000-08:00

I had a strange deja vu while watching The Incredibles. I distinctly remembered the joy of running on water, as one of the superkids, Dash, discovered he can do the same. The trick is to run fast.

The movie is great. I completely forgot that it's animated. The story, the characters, the facial expressions, the James Bond references. 3.5 stars (a little taken off for a couple of sequences that look too much like a computer game.)

red vs. blue

2004-11-04T22:10:00.000-08:00

"Both Republican and red start with the letter R," he said. And so we have it — blue is the new donkey.

2004-10-31T22:46:00.000-08:00

The Internets Vets for Truth: Pretty fast mirror of just about every recent political QuickTime of the last few months (including "Fahrenheit 9/11", "Going Upriver", John Stewart on Crossfire, etc.) I watched the John Stewart clip twice. (via jwz)

SMOP

2004-10-26T13:29:00.000-07:00

In the future, every storage component will be like iDisk — synchronized mirror of an online drive.
In the present, iDisk lost two weeks of my data.

Good Apple. Bad Apple.

forget the hemisphere

2004-10-25T20:53:00.000-07:00

The box is unexpectedly small and easy to carry. Tools needed to setup the computer: a knife and a penny. A knife cuts the round transparent seals, a penny opens a battery compartment on the keyboard.

There is one wire — from the power outlet to the computer. Wireless power doesn't scale.

The screen is just the right aspect ratio and the right size. And it does have two degrees of freedom, if you count turning the computer.

Estimated setup time, from opening the box to listening to music from an iDisk: less than ten minutes.

The hiccups: BlueTooth handshake with the keyboard takes too long. The annoying registration form. No screen-cleaning cloth! iTunes skipping a few times and crashing once (that's serious, but I'll completely replace the memory chips anyway.)

I start to sound like an Apple groupie.

Team America: World Police

2004-10-15T22:22:00.000-07:00

I liked the puppets (but I am a fan of puppet sex — I enjoyed Avenue Q as well.) Good songs. Uneven screenplay. I really wanted them to avoid a happy ending somehow, but oh well. 3 stars.

information wants to be free

2004-10-12T17:52:00.000-07:00

The US News ranking of the best graduate schools in Computer Science is freely available from a Berkeley site. No premium subscription required.

Go Bears!

brandname etymology

2004-10-11T16:05:00.000-07:00

Reading through a list of required materials for a drawing workshop, I discovered that Caran d'Ache is a Swiss writing materials brand. In Russian, karandash means pencil. There even was a famous clown whose stage name was Karandash. I always thought it was a Turkish word.

Meanwhile Blogger is getting closer to Xerox.

Update: it gets interesting. Karandash, originally karatas, is indeed a tyurksk or Turkish word meaning "black stone", according to this well-researched article. Company name was secondary. Thanks albars.

the odds

2004-10-10T23:40:00.000-07:00

JFK -> Manhattan and Manhattan -> JFK rides both featured a Russian-speaking driver. Both played the market. One was a full-time trader until the market crashed and wiped him out. The other believed that the market was controlled by men who didn't like George W. Bush (evidence: economic slump just in time for Bush's presidency.)

At least I safely got there and back.

all the base belong to...

2004-10-05T23:29:00.000-07:00

but youforgotpoland.com!

An alphanumeric universal namespace. First-come, first-served. Get your dotcom while they last. (via alicez)

wall time

2004-10-04T21:15:00.000-07:00

An atomic, radio-controlled clock on the wall says it's 4:03. Everybody else and their Powerbooks think it's 4:07. Who do you trust?

pyra lives

2004-10-04T19:08:00.000-07:00

Throughout my career, I have been lucky: I had good bosses. Ev, good luck in whatever you choose to do next.

logotype

2004-10-01T17:24:00.000-07:00

:Dynin

(prompted by turchanka)

6.0

2004-09-28T11:40:00.000-07:00

California is at the center of the world — see map. The world sometimes shakes. (via iaia)

All the Kids

2004-09-27T23:02:00.000-07:00

I personally know two rock stars: Zak and Chris. Both are remarkable human beings. Chris stars in a music video as the drummer. Zak used to have video clips somewhere, but I can't find them now.