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January 31, 2007
My Life as an XKCD strip (part 1) 
I had a particularly humbling moment just now that made me feel like I was trapped in an XKCD strip.
I even drew it out on a notecard and scanned it in, to see if it looked like i was.
sadly, it did.
I'm titling this part 1, because I fear this could happen again. i so hope it doesn't.
10minutes later:
bob: I had a similar moment when I was playing brain age on the nintendo ds and I sucked cause it didn't recognize my handwriting
me: did you realize that you don't recognize your own handwriting too ? cos that happens to me
bob: haha
Posted by Jonathan at 7:50 PM | Comments (0)
MochiMedia Interviewed
Bob Ippolito, good friend / ex-boss / internet rockstar, and his business partner Jameson Hsu have just been featured on LunchMeet
http://www.podtech.net/lunchmeet/technology/1813/lunchmeet-fueling-creativity-with-mochi-media
It's nice to see a ridiculously useful piece of software and 2.0 company run by talented people get some publicity. No marketing , no bullshit , just a great product.
Posted by Jonathan at 4:08 PM | Comments (0)
January 29, 2007
McDonalds: Bad For Your Body, Bad For Your Mind
Over at BoingBoing there's this wonderful posting of some particularly bad science on a Happy Meal bag:
"You can jump 6 times higher in space!"
BoingBoing: http://www.boingboing.net/2007/01/28/bad_science_fact_on_.html
Image (Flickr): http://www.flickr.com/photos/frauenfelder/372873815/
Posted by Jonathan at 10:08 AM | Comments (0)
Not About Me
I've recently become amazed by how so many blogs don't have an "About Me" page. Then I became amazed at how blogging platforms don't support a simple 'About Me' page out-of-the box.
The FindMeOn blog ( http://blog.findmeon.com ) runs on wordpress. Wordpress lets you quickly create a page that it pushes into the template. There's no default 'about' -- but its easy to use.
Movable Type, on the other hand, is a bit of a nightmare. One needs to master their configuration and site layout system to make a static about me page.
WordPress and MovableType are just two of dozens of platforms - I'm sure some are better, and I'm sure many are worse.
But it's 2007 and every-other-person has a blog. All these systems should have a default 'about' page. Perhaps even default pages for site policies ( copyright/left , privacy ), and contact. One hour of developer time to support these common features saves hundreds of hours of user time.
Posted by Jonathan at 1:01 AM
January 25, 2007
Buck Hunt
I've been a fan of Buck Hunt for too long. Somehow MSNBC thought it newsworthy today - http://msnbc.msn.com/id/14030610/ - and even went to my favorite watering hole and gaming arena, Ace Bar, for some interviews.
Buck Hunt speaks for itself - you have a light gun and you shoot things like animals and targets. Its fun.
Three things in the article troubled me though:
(i) The 'PC Platform' spoken of is Linux (or perhaps BSD). whatever it is, it boots into X. i know that for a fact, as it once rebooted 2 'frames' into a 4 person full trek. few people know the disappointment of 4 drunken people kissing a rounds worth of drinks in buck hunt goodbye.
(ii) The writer assumes that liberals and urbanites wouldn't like games about guns or hunting. Thats insane. Its a game. Its PRETEND. By the same logic, only mythical elven people would be play role playing games, and everyone who played GTA should be profiled for being a car-jacking gun-running coke addict. its a game. its pretend.
(iii) The writer, and an interviewee, alluded to concerns by people who like animals. Well, I like animals. I've been a vegetarian for 10years. I don't buy leather goods. I don't even buy gelcaps for tylenol when i need it. And I play Buck Hunt , a lot. Once a Vegan came up to some friends and I complaining how barbaric and evil the game was. She shuddered when I said "um, they're not real deer. they're PRETEND". She also didn't like my argument when I asked her if she complained like that to people who play fighting games, war games, plane-shooting games, ms pac man (she eats ghosts , etc ). Then she made some comment about us being meat eaters. My response : "I've been a vegetarian for 9 years". I was also playing with 2 other vegetarians and one of those fake-vegetarians (he only eats fish). She was dumbfouned and said "I bet you're one of those vegetarians who wears leather, " to which I replied "nope. new balance -- all synthetic and made in the USA by workers with benefits and fair compensation". Suffice to say, i shut her up.
People need to stop jumping to conclusions. Especially about things like games. They're games. They're pretend. THEY ARE NOT REAL.
Posted by Jonathan at 2:55 PM | Comments (0)
January 24, 2007
Microsoft vs Wikipedia - Can you really blame them?
People are in an uproar because Microsoft offered to pay someone to alter a Wikipedia article they felt was wrong.
Bloggers and reporters keep harping on the audactity of Microsoft for trying to do that. No one has really addressed why MS would have done that. If people bothered addressing that fact, I doubt you could really blame them.
First off I should say this: I hate Microsoft products. In college I abandoned Word and wrote all my papers in ASCII - Word crashed like crazy. When I worked in the computer labs for a campus job, I fiercely advocated everyone using ASCII - or at least learning to automatically type the 'save' shortcut at the end of every sentence. Their software , in my experience, was unreliable , unusable, and dangerous.
Today I use Mac and BSD desktops. I barely touch Windows. When I'm asked to consult on a project that is already running on .NET or slated to, I turn down the offer unless they'll run it on a *nix/bsd platform. I don't like MS products, I don't trust them, and I'm not fond of their business ethics.
That said, I see little wrong in their Wikipedia dealings. Wikipedia and its users are incredibly biased against MS. Articles related to MS almost always have an uneven tinge. Even their quality standards are sub-par. The default entry, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft , is ridden with typos and abberations, suggesting a monkey chained to a typewriter wrote the article... mainly by banging its head on the keyboard.
This must be my favorite line:
The company's first international office was founded on November 1, 1978, in Japan, entitled "ASCII Microsoft" (now called "Microsoft Japan"fsdfsfaf).[23]
Google seems to know little about a company named '"Microsoft Japan"fsdfsfaf'. Perhaps wikipedia can chime in.
Whether or not MS is ethical or makes good products, or anything like that at all , is irrelevant. The whole situation reflects more on Wikipedia than anything else. It makes me wonder if the Wikipedia PR crew is really trying to blow up this MS situation as Microsoft's fault to combat the simple fact that it shows a blatant double standard in Wikipedia.
In all honesty, everything in Wikipedia is amateur and should be taken with a grain of salt. There's no accountability in articles- anyone can write/edit. Sure , something might be written by a professional, but there's no large review process like you see in newspapers and encyclopedias where everything is fact checked and approved before publication. Instead people leave footnotes and things can get flagged as 'ok' or 'needs proof' - but they're published as-is, live -- ready to inform or misinform viewers.
The model of wikipedia is a cause for concern too. In a real encyclopedia or journal , you have a staff writer who is assigned something and paid, and sometimes you'll have an expert draft an article, which is then edited to standards and fact-checked by the staff. In wikipedia you have no 'market' force compelling people to write, just people wanting to contribute of their own free will. As such, you get fans / anti-fans / and experts writing everything - or, as i like to call them, the most biased people you can imagine. Its only until people fight enough that articles become more neutral - but neutrality is not something inherent or automatic in wikipedia.
Microsoft claimed that a lot of articles on wikipedia had an anti-microsoft tinge. Aside from people pointing out how their software sucks where it does actually suck, I think they're right. And I'll go further: Wikipedia will probably never be able to have a legtimately neutral article about microsoft, because the audience that reads and writes for Wikipedia overwhelmingly hates microsoft. At the most basic level, you have an open source foundation with open source writers and content , writing ( for nothing in return ) about a for-profit/capitalist/litigious group that makes competing products. You'd need to live in a land of magical unicorns and candy cane trees, or be on a morphine drip, to expect a fair and neutral article to come out of that.
So I don't blame MS. And i'll still read Wikipedia. But I take everything I read in Wikipedia as an allegation - not a fact. When it comes to the internet, I think there's only one rule : 'The notion that "well, if its on the internet, then it MUST be true!" is the mantra of idiots. Don't believe everything you read.'
Posted by Jonathan at 4:14 PM | Comments (0)
January 21, 2007
Pissing off the left and the right in as few sentences as possible
Reading today's news headlines, I feel the need to address some topics with a touch of common sense:
The US War in Iraq:
I was against it from the start, I'm against it now. But Bush and friends have completlely fucked over the armed services. We need to bring our troops home, but pulling them out will only make it easier for them to get killed , and further destabilize the region we destabilized. We need to signifcantly increase - probably DOUBLE - our troop commitment, and make it safe for a withdrawal. We also need to cut military spending patterns - not the the amount we spend, but how we spend it. So much is going to Halliburton and misc contractors that inflate budgets and price gouge. That money should be going for bulletproof armor that works , and should be going to reopen all the veterans services that Bush and friends decimated.
Immigration:
Anti-immigration people keep joking "If the world hates america, then why does everyone want to live here?" Simple - America is the only country in the entire world where the US doesn't arbitrarily bomb the population, train/fund terrorist leaders to destabilize the government, or invade. Would you rather live in Country A, or Country B which Country A routinely bombs or runs foreign policy programs to keep from developing on a real timeline? I choose A.
Hugo Chavez:
All this 'bush is the devil' and 'down with america' stuff is cute. But liberals need a better person to embrace as the happy Bush hater. Almost half of Venezuela lives in poverty while Chavez and other government officials lead lavish lifestyles funded by the nationalized oil exports and an industrial sector that gets more political patronage than Tom Delay's wet dreams. Venezula also has some of the most caustic environmental policies and practices in the world. Having Chavez in your corner is really nothing to be proud of.
Posted by Jonathan at 5:26 PM | Comments (0)
January 13, 2007
Norwich Porn Case
BoingBoing recently posted this: http://www.boingboing.net/2007/01/13/teacher_faces_40_yea.html
A substitute teacher was convicted of exposing children to pornography.
Her defense: she went to a hair website , which launched a slew of popup ads. The school's firewall filter expired, so it didn't block porn. She even complained to other treachers and the principal. The state was quick to prosecute, and didn't even test the box for adware.
The following link suggests why she was probably convicted -- and I'm dumbfounded:
http://www.norwichbulletin.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070106/NEWS01/701060312/1002/NEWS17
But Smith countered Horner's testimony with that of Norwich Police Detective Mark Lounsbury, a computer crimes investigator. On a projected image of the list of Web sites visited while Amero was working, Lounsbury pointed out several highlighted links."You have to physically click on it to get to those sites," Smith said. "I think the evidence is overwhelming that she did intend to access those Web sites."
Mark Lounsbury is an idiot - as are the offense. Either that, or they're crooked pieces of shit deliberately misleading the jury and public ( I live in Brooklyn -- so I'm used to corrupt politicians, thats all we have.)
Highlighted links mean that you've visited the url the link points to- they do not mean that you clicked on that exact link (ie, the link on that page). I've yet to encounter a browser that highlights links based on a 'click origin'. All that proves is that her browser had visited the URL for the link -- it could very well have gotten there because of a popup , popunder, or one of those indidious endless redirect cycles. No clicking is necessary.
Don't believe me?
Copy/Paste the text below into a file named "a.html" , and copy that file into b.html and c.html
Open a.html in your browser - "a" will be highlighted. Then change the url in the location bar to b.html -- note how "a" and "b" are highlighted. click on "c" -- now all 3 are highlighted.
I've also set up a demo here: a.html
Posted by Jonathan at 6:23 PM | Comments (2)