Results tagged “gripes” from KPAO

I have four general-purpose computers running three different operating systems on my desk at work. At home I also have four computers, though I "only" run two different operating systems.

At work and at home, the computers are connected together using commercial-grade switched Gigabit Ethernet, with gobs of dedicated NAS-based storage. Both home and work networks are connected to the Internet via good quality dedicated DSL and other technologies. The WiFi signal is strong everywhere. I design networking software for a living, have a degree in computer science,  speak HTTP fluently, and am the primary inventor of a bunch of patents related to computer networking.

So when I want to copy a single, simple file from one computer to another what do I do? Reach for a handy USB-stick, of course! The perfect utility, predictable behavior, and universal support for the FAT-formatted USB storage stick trumps all the networking in the world.

Yes, for some cases 'scp' 'rsync' 'smbtar' and friends can't be beat, especially when you already know how to name and authenticate to the destination (i.e. is it 192.168.5.32 ? smb://fooobar/baz ? \\skippy\flazzle\foo ? sftp://jokers:wild@server.snip.snap.com/home/me ?) None of that matters to the USB stick.

The closest replacement I've seen so far is DropCopy -- but that's not cross platform (yet!?). Someday we will sort all this out. Until then, I always keep a 4G stick handy.

This past week the Associated Press announced that they were sick of being a relevant, widely quoted and important news source, and that the internet is clearly a passing fad, full of criminals who need to be annoyed, harassed and sued. They didn't used those words of course, but that's the upshot. By taking legal action against the Drudge Retort for quoting headlines and a sections of an AP article, they have clearly stated that fair-use has no place on the internet as far as they're concerned. Worse, their response to the backlash has been to announce forthcoming guidelines on how to quote from the AP and avoid getting sued.

Not that we're a big media outlet, but we have occasionally linked to an AP article or two here at KPAO. Until the AP changes their policy and issues a statement indicating that they were wrong and have gone back on their medication, I have decided to update KPAO's policy¹ on referencing AP articles. It used to be "stay within established fair use case law." It now reads "go fuck yourself."

Many far more influential bloggers are taking a similar stance .

¹ Copies of our policy manual are available for review in our New York office.

Here's a conversation I imagine taking place in 30 years:

Kid: Grandpa, let's look at those old "digital" pictures of mom when she was a kid
Grandpa: Sure kid. Here's some now.
Kid: Holy crap grandpa, what the hell are those things on her feet?
Grandpa: They're called Crocs kid; quite the fashion at the time. Lots of people wore them -- even the president.
Kid: Which president?
Grandpa: Bush, Jr.
Kid: (!)
Grandpa: People are much smarter now

Bad Astronomy blog has a very succinct summary of the crap surrounding the non-link between childhood vaccines and the "increase" in autism. I'll summarize the summary here: no link has ever been found, despite massive attempts to fine one.

I'm linking to that post and reminding us all about this issue, not just because it's a good thing to fight for the forces of reason against pseudo-scientific BS. The vaccine "debate" is especially important because the misinformation it generates gets implanted in the brains of otherwise rational people, who at some point might make an unfortunate decision with horrible consequences. We are (happily) quite removed from the days of many children dying from measles and rubella. Can we not let sleeping dogs lie?

This is not a theoretical topic to me. I understand exactly what it means to have that tiny bit of doubt in my mind as I sign the form allowing my second child to be vaccinated, despite the diagnosis of the first. We all want to find a cause for autism -- vaccines aren't it. Keep looking elsewhere. Can we instead focus this misdirected energy on looking for a cure? In the meantime, I propose a new name for those considering skipping a vaccine or worse propagating this misinformation: child abusers.

I recently purchased a Motorola T505 Bluetooth speaker phone for my car. It works well enough, but there are these little annoyances that get in the way of truly seamless use. Sometimes my phone will get "stuck" in a mode where it thinks it is still connected to the speakerphone long after I have walked away. The speakerphone refuses to play audio when the phone is in "silent" mode. Sometimes the call pickup or disconnect functions don't work quite right, and so on.

Interestingly, I've noticed these sort of annoyances since the beginning with Bluetooth based products. There are very, very few Bluetooth connections that "just work" and continue to do so. On top of that, the model is fairly complex: many people probably don't understand all of the subtleties of "discover," "pair," "passcode," and "authorize." I don't think any of these concepts are super difficult, but it seems that almost no implementation gets everything right, and I think that is a clue to an underlying problem.

Bluetooth as a specification seems to be very complex for real humans to implement well. It has been around for about a decade, so by this point the basics should be very mature, and I'm sure they are. But all of these annoyances indicate to me that maybe important parts of the specification are too complex or poorly defined. It's easy to point fingers are the implementations and just say that the chip vendors or driver writers or operating system engineers made mistakes. It's also easy to say the the user interface designers did a poor job of integrating the technology into the user experience.

All of those engineers are undoubtedly guilty of making mistakes -- they (we) always do. Unfortunately with some technologies it just seems easier than otherwise to stumble.

For a variety of unimportant reasons, I took a look at a product called Gypsii this evening. I got stuck looking at their web site because it was just to painful to drive. The product as something to do with geo location information. (That's great but I think geo location for the web isn't a company it's a feature, but that is another story). I clicked on their web site and took a look at one of the places features on their "Places" page. At this point I still don't know what the product does mind you, but I figured I would click around and explore and see if I could figure things out.

I long time ago I came up with a concept called "NPREM". That's the odd combination of NPR and REM-sleep that happens when my alarm goes off in the morning, and I begin to dream about the news. NPREM is a bad place to be. I get neither a decent NPR morning newscast -- as my dreaming brain is twisting the stories around, nor do I actually get up on time.

Two things came into my life and changed all that. First is the Chumby, about which I have written much already. When I got the Chumby, I gave my nice alarm clock radio to my wife. The second "thing" is my wife (should I have started with her?), and especially her unnatural love of country music. My father once explained that he listened to country music while jogging because "it was good music to try to run away from." It certainly is. Every weekday I now hear my awesome Boston Acoustics Receptor Radio erasing the morning's peaceful silence with the latest "fresh country hits" from "95.7 The Wolf" with "Ken and Corey" and the "Y'all-Turnative Morning" show (no -- really, search for it); and the OFF button is on the wrong side of the bed.

The Wolf most definitely gets me up and out of bed in the morning -- there is no incorporating the "y'all-turnative" music into my dreams. I think I'm glad about all of this.

Welcome back to "Tales from the Diploma Mills," and today's episode is a hot one! You'll recall how we spoke before of CEO's of major corporations, government officials, and best selling authors who all decided that school -- but not the diploma, was for clueless morons.

Here's a fun experiment -- next time you're in New York, drop by the library at NYU, and ask to see a copy of former Federal Reserve Board of Governors chairman Alan Greenspan's Ph.D. dissertation. Since he was awarded a Ph.D. from that institution in 1977 (not an "honorary doctorate" -- the real deal) you'd think they would have a copy. Nope. Anyone else? Nope. Greenspan himself? He's not talking about it. How long did he attend NYU? According to this article -- which is the primary source for this blog entry -- about three months.

I'm sure there's a perfectly honest, reasonably explanation for all this, and that Greenspan is not a lying fraud. Perhaps the article is a bit -- to use "Dr." Greenspan's own words -- "frothy" in it's conclusions. I hope so. Make up your own mind by reading the source article. Too bad I can't link to a certain 1977 Ph.D. thesis to provide some balance.

This article points out just about the craziest thing I have seen about Microsoft Windows. I know that Microsoft in
Read the linked article if you're really interested in the details, but basically Windows XP and friends are designed to pretend to be certain kinds of WiFi networks that you might have connected to in the past (a so-called AdHoc or peer-to-peer WiFi network). AdHoc networks aren't that common, but the point is that if you ever tried to connect to one with your WinXP laptop, later on it will broadcast to the world that it is that network.

Then other laptops will see that network, and some will try to connect, and they are then "infected" with this broadcasting "virus." It's not a traditional computer virus of course, just a set of behaviors that spread virally. The most widely spread early names will continue to spread even more because of the nature of this system. Ever see a network called "Free Public WiFi" but when you connect, it didn't work? Congratulations, you are now part of the problem....

This isn't a bug -- it was designed to work that way. Dumb. Now folks with WiFi enabled laptops -- nearly everyone -- try to connect to "Free Public WiFi" and it doesn't work. They are not only spreading the behavior virus, but are convincing themselves and others that public WiFi must be rife with evil people setting up nasty WiFi access points to infect computers with a real virus, and they have just been duped. They tell others "don't connect to open public WiFi networks." Fear of public WiFi spreads, and so it becomes less used and hence less valued and so less valuable, and then goes away.

For some reason I stumbled on the biography of "Dr." John Gray on Wikipedia yesterday. He's the author of the famous (and lucrative) "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" series of self-help books. I put "Dr." in quotes above because it seems Mr. Gray acquired his degree from a diploma mill.

This reminded me of a controversy that erupted in 2004, about Hamilton University -- another diploma mill that counted a senior government IT manager and the CEO of Cessna Aircraft among its graduates. The government official at least had the decency to resign in disgrace. And Jack Pelton (the Cessna CEO) at least removed the degrees from his official biography.

Mr. Gray however continues to publish as "John Gray, Ph.D." and refers to himself as "Dr. John Gray" on his web site.

All this crap is really too bad -- Cessna makes some nice planes under Jack Pelton, and maybe John Gray has a some interesting things to say. I will never trust either of them however, as they both thought it was perfectly OK to lie in a big, big way.

This week's newsletter from the Skeptic's Society has a great feature article on why the US TV news media sucks, and how it is harming the country. It's a quick read, well written, with lots of illustrative points. Here's just one example:

On June 9, 2005, as part of its ongoing series of “Security Updates,” CNN airs a special report titled “Keeping Milk Safe.” Over shots of adorable first-graders sipping from their pint cartons, CNN tells viewers that the farm-to-shelf supply chain is vulnerable at every point, beginning with the cow; with great drama, the report emphasizes the terrifying consequences such tampering could have. Nowhere does CNN mention that in the history of the milk industry, no incident of supply-chain tampering has ever been confirmed, due to terrorism or anything else.

There are many, many others -- all following the same pattern of grossly misrepresenting reality for no other purpose that to keep the sheep (that would be us) watching. American broadcast news has completely and utterly become at best irrelevant and at worst a danger to the health of our society. Turn it off. Even the worst print or online news sources at least give us the time to pause and contemplate the information we're receiving.

For several years I have been hearing reports that describe a strong correlation between regularly sitting down as a family for dinner, and all sorts of positive benefits for the kids (like better health, self esteem, lower drug use, etc). Just for the record, I have nothing against having dinner as a family, and in fact I like it, and we generally do just that in our home.

What bothers me is that I hear again and again the assertion that having the dinner together as a family creates better, healthier kids. I have never seen a study that claims this -- though I would certainly welcome it. Most studies that I have seen show clear correlation, but not causality. Correlation does not imply causation, no matter how much you want it to. Nor does it refute it. Correlation just doesn't say anything at all, other than, well, that the two things are correlated to some degree.

This misconception has been a pet peeve of mine for a while, and I'm happy to hear a report that takes a reasonable view. This morning I heard a report on the family dinner on NPR, and as it began, I braced myself against hearing the same claim with no evidence. But surprise -- the reporter knew her stuff! What was refreshing to me about this report is that it explored the question of causality. So far it seems, there is no clear evidence demonstrating that family dinners cause better kids. Most people seem to believe so, and want to find clear evidence of this. That's great -- but we can't yet claim that changing this behavior will result in the desired outcomes. Anyone making this claim is either guessing or doesn't get how science works.

"The total average time a household watched television during the 2005-2006 television year was 8 hours and 14 minutes per day, a 3-minute increase from the 2004-2005 season and a record high. The average amount of television watched by an individual viewer increased 3 minutes per day to 4 hours and 35 minutes..."