Ray J. Greenwell

• 13:41 My first Apple was a 2GS, but now I have a 3GS. #

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• 05:35 Back in the USA. #

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• 20:32 @ciaweth bit.ly/xPSFX #

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You gotta love my crazy ideas. The things that I post are so random. Sometimes I have a funny story or a strange position on some current event and I think about the post while I'm out and about. I end up thinking about it for so long while away from the computer that I never can muster the will to type it in all the greatness that it has become in my head. The only posts I ever do do are those that I dash out with no forethought.

Anyway, no songs of the week lately, but something that's been in the rotation for months now is Soul Wax, particularly their album "Nite Visions", and especially Compute and NY Lipps. Great working music.

Dang, do I still play AOM? What is it about RTSs? And while I'm at it, what about my home computer worsens up my RSIs?

This week it's Paper Planes by M.I.A.

Last week it was Someone Great by LCD Soundsystem.

EPA cleanup instructions for mercury spills: read it.

PG&E has been giving away CFLs, but I wonder how many people know how to dispose of them? They have a link on the top of their CFL promotional page: http://www.pge-cfl.com/


So.. I remember when I was young, one time my mom broke a thermometer by accident. She called me over and we caught the mercury in some paper and then into my hand. I played with it for a while, dumping it back and forth and fingering it with my other hand, eventually dropping it into the carpet below us.

It just burns me up that this is even up for debate. I sent the following letter this morning. I have been a supporter of the Open Voting Consortium and urge you, dear reader, to make a donation today.


To : <SF Board of supervisors>
Cc : <Mayor Gavin Newsom>
Subject : Voting machines: There's nothing PROPRIETARY about COUNTING.
----- Message Text -----
You start at 1... then you go to 2.. on to 3...

Or at least, that's how we hope it works.

But software is tricky business. I should know, I've been a software
developer for most of my life after getting hooked when I was 12 years
old. Even if one's code is very straightforward, there's always the
possibility of bugs or other unexpected behavior. The best solution to
this is peer review.

Voting machine companies that claim that their source is full of
proprietary secrets are scared. They're scared that their software can't
stand on its own merits, or more sinisterly, that we'll find something we
won't like. Even if they're being honest now, we can't give them a free
pass for the future: software can be changed and updated at the blink of
an eye. If we don't know how the machines work, how would we know when
they've made a change under the hood?

Imagine if we were seeking vote-counting services from companies that used
Oompa-Loompas to do the counting. Open source voting is analogous to a
company allowing observers to watch the Oompa-Loompas load the votes
into big plastic bins. The bins are loaded into vans and the observers
ride along too, so that they can watch what happens to the bins inside the
vans. The Oompa-Loompas drive to the central warehouse and start counting
all the votes, with the observers carefully watching every step.

Or: we can use the company that picks up the bins in secret, drives them
to an undisclosed location and simply announces the results. Even if we
are allowed one ride-along, there's nothing to stop them from changing
their procedure in the future.

Software is merely instructions for a computer. There's nothing
proprietary about counting! We have to take a stand, and say: If you want
us to use your software then, so sorry, you'll have to let us see how it
works. That's the business you've chosen, and that's the way it's going to
have to be!

Please do whatever you can to improve the transparency and security of our
voting systems, whether choosing to have software count the votes, or
Oompa-Loompas.

Thanks for listening,
Ray Greenwell

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/11/071105-dino-volcanoes.html

Why can't both theories be right? I've been wondering this for a while, but this article doesn't even bring up the possibility. I mean, if a giant asteroid hits the planet, is too much to assume that it will deform the crust and place pressure on the mantle and possibly cause a spike in volcanic activity? India is pretty much on the other side of the planet from the Yucatan.

- I am getting a Mac Mini. I'm excited, and will try to use it as my primary email/browser machine and see if I can get to like it for software development.

- My sidekick's network actually seems faster now. Maybe it's just a network upgrade in my area, maybe T-Mobile has a certain bandwidth allocation and there's more for me now that people are jumping ship for iphone. That's unlikely, actually.

- I'm still holding off on an iphone. It needs instant messenging and ssh before I'll be ready, and yes: I know you can get those now if you hack the phone, but I don't want to have to hack anything. Besides, I think I've got 8 months left on my T-Mobile contract.

- Bravo to Amazon and the other legit mp3 stores popping up. I may actually move away from my current music acquisition model, which is to subscribe to rhapsody and strip off the DRM on files I download. Yes, I know: I'm screwing their play count tracking and potentially screwing artists out of revenue, but removing the DRM made everything better: the files are smaller (so more fit on my fauxpod), they start playing faster, and I don't have to synch every 2 weeks to update the licenses. Having the files in mp3 format would be a bigger win, but I still love rhapsody's feature of letting me listen to any song all the way through. I simply don't have the time or skill to listen to 30-second clips and decide if I want an album. Let's say there's a song I like by an artist I never heard of. On most music stores you can listen to a bunch of clips of their other songs and try to figure out if you should get the whole album or just the song. Well, on rhapsody I just download the album, throw it into my 'evaluate' playlist, and can decide at my leisure if it's good or if I want to delete it.

- Zelda for the DS has wonderful controls.

I bought a book that I ended up hating. I wish I could undo the money I sent the author's way, as well as discourage this book from being in circulation. What is more effective?

- throw the book away, removing a copy from circulation.
OR
- sell it to a used book store, recouping some of my money and potentially depriving the author of future profit if someone seeking the book buys it used.

http://www.alphagalileo.org/index.cfm?_rss=1&fuseaction=readrelease&releaseid=523454

I'm planning on sticking with my sidekick 3 for the time being. That I can just throw that out there with no context speaks a lot about iPhone mania.

So T-mobile doesn't even have their own network, at least not around where I live. I'm actually on AT&T's network, the very same EDGE network that all these iphones are shortly going to be clogging. I'm curious to see if I notice an impact on data performance.

Yeah, it looks pretty funny.

But, this is a *comedy* about God deciding that every human, except Evan and his family, needs to die? They seem to gloss over that in the previews.

This is where I work.



BoingBoing links to a Wired photo essay showing it all off.

My desk is actually in the front room, which isn't pictured anywhere because it's a pretty standard office setup. I don't mind: when I'm working I'm staring at 3 monitors, so there's no room to see my surroundings, and I like it that way. But you know that when I need a break I take a running dive into beanbag tentacles!

I found a page of adages named after people on wikipedia. I love these, and now have more at my disposal.

There are two self-referential laws: Hofstadter's Law, which is well known to me as I'm a software engineer; and Stigler's Law, which is new to me, but not that useful in my everyday life.

I have a law of my own:

- Any sufficiently confusing feature is indistinguishable from a bug.

I suppose this is a version of the K.I.S.S principle, but it goes a little beyond that. When developing software (or hardware!), obviously one has to keep in mind the engineering realities going on behind the scenes, but one should also continually keep in mind the mental model that the user will construct as to how the software works. This mental model is simple and may be no deeper than a connection between a button onscreen and a result. The point is that if something was done because of engineering realities, it must also make sense in the user's mental model of how things work. If it doesn't, you will get bug reports. This is most notable in "missing features", when a useful feature is omitted because it would run too slowly or because it could open things up to abuse (in a multi-user system). The user does not know why the feature was omitted, and their mental model of the software suggests that it would be an easy thing to add, so they helpfully suggest it be added.

We've known that Kurt's had an * by his name for a bit maybe. It's still sad.

I love Cat's Cradle and recommend it to everyone. If you like that, read Galapagos. S5 is usually recommended as a first read, but I love those two.

Peace.

http://www.pbfcomics.com/

My recent favorite is Guntron Alliance Force.

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/05/26/iriver_gives_custome.html


It sounds like iriver updated their firmware so that their devices could be connected in regular looks-like-a-hard-drive mode. What's the big deal? I own two Sandisk brand mp3 faux pods and both have always been switchable between MTP and MSC mode, depending on whether one needs to talk to a PlaysForSure program or if you just want the damn thing to look like a thumb drive that you can drop mp3s on.

Right now my spankin' new Sansa e270 has regular mp3s, and music from two different competing music stores: Rhapsody and URGE. How many music stores does an ipod work with?

Supposedly this is only audible to people under 25 or so.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/wiltshire/content/articles/2006/04/04/mosquito_sound_wave_feature.shtml

I'm 32 and was so happy I could hear it- until I ripped the headphones off in annoyance.

I saw this headline on CNN the other day:

MedPage: Study: Mercury in fillings harmless

It caught my eye because one of my uncles is a crusader against dental mercury. Harmless, eh? That doesn't sound right..

Reading the article, you can see that the researchers don't even really consider it harmless:

  At five years of follow-up, the New England study found significantly
  higher mean urine mercury levels in the amalgam group compared with the
  resin group (0.9 versus 0.6 micrograms per gram of creatinine; P<.001).
  But according to David C. Bellinger Ph.D., M.Sc., of department of
  neurology at Children's Hospital in Boston and Harvard Medical School, and
  colleagues, the increased mercury exposure was still "well within
  established background population levels."

   ...

  The Portuguese study, which ran seven years, also found that urine
  mercury levels were higher in the amalgam group than the resin group (up
  to 1.5 micrograms per gram of creatinine higher; P<.001).

The big thing is that none of these trials are really long-term. What's tracking an eight-year-old for 7 years when they'll have these fillings, leaking mercury, for their entire lives?

  "Under the conditions of use represented in this trial, there is no
  reason to discontinue use of mercury amalgam as the standard of care for
  caries in posterior teeth."

Read: "Don't draw any big conclusions, oh and we're only talking about the back teeth."

Then follows a huge disclaimer with all the other scientists saying "yeah, don't draw any big conclusions" and repeating my bit about the lifetime of exposure and yadda yadda,

  "It is predictable that some outside interests will expand the modest
  conclusions of these studies to assert that use of mercury amalgam in
  dentistry is risk free," he cautioned. "This conclusion would be
  unfortunate and unscientific."

And with that, I remind you of the headline.. "Mercury in fillings harmless".