Brandon's Blog

6/25/2012 #

Debunk Delight

I’m all for dramatizing IT in television and movies. Mostly television; movies tend to have a little more time to make things realistic, where television is generally on a serious time crunch. But, as a general rule, I don’t mind that each keypress makes a beep and that somehow the Des Moines city bus system has a high-tech tracking portal with blinky dots for each bus, but yet is hackable within five seconds by the right cyberpunk genius. By the way, the movie The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 has one of the best dramatized IT platforms I’ve ever seen.

What does bother me is the complete mischaracterization of stuff like GPS. If you watch the average whodunnit show, anything with a GPS receiver (note that it is not called a transmitter!) will broadcast your location through some kind of cloud, providing yet another blinky beepy tracking dot to anyone with the skills to listen.

GPS satellites are positional beacons. They go “ping” but not “pong.” Wikipedia says it takes four satellites (the fourth one, while not mathematically required to resolve three dimensional space, eliminates a significant amount of potential instrument error) to resolve one’s position. The satellites are effectively screaming “I’M AT POINT X1 AT TIME Y1! I’M AT POINT X2 AT TIME Y2! I’M AT POINT X3 AT TIME Y3!” and based on the time it takes the messages to arrive from each satellite the receiver assembles all that evidence into a good picture of his own location.

It’s an elegant and very one-way process. Now, if that “receiver” connects to the internet via 3G and publishes the location it calculates, you’re looking at a tracking device. But that’s separate from the core function of a GPS receiver.

So, in summary, “His phone has GPS!” does not necessarily mean the case is in the bag. Maybe if he has one of those kiddie tracker apps installed, but otherwise, keep searching, buddy.

Interestingly, while not as accurate as GPS, tracking via cell tower proximity is a much more realistic way to track someone whose phone has not been otherwise compromised. I’ve seen that a few times on shows, but GPS is often chosen even though there’s a more realistic actual method available. I think a lot of show writers think the cell tower triangulation is the same thing as GPS. This is probably further egged on by the continuing misconception that cell phones communicate directly with satellites for their basic operation.

The whole digital picture “enhance” thing has survived a surprising lot of popular ridicule. It’s of course possible to attempt to “sharpen” an image using an algorithm, but all an algorithm does is create and/or destroy information using a certain assumption.

For example, if you see a 350-sided polygon whose outside border is never that far from its center, we might assume that in real life this is a circle, only perceived as being jagged due to the limitations of a camera’s sensor (resolution). It’s a lot easier to zoom in on a circle (mathematically increase the radius) than it is to “digitally zoom” in on a 350-sided polygon (interpolate, pixellate, etc.).

Calculus will tell you that a circle can be drawn as a polygon with an infinite number of sides, all the same distance away from its center. Therefore, correctly identifying a perceived n-polygon as a circle means that the information created by the algorithm’s assumptions is useful, providing an “enhancement” to the picture when resizing. If it turns out that the polygon was in fact a sawblade, you’ve just destroyed good information (the geometry perceived by the camera would be overwritten by the computer with a “smooth” circle).

Economics’s “no free lunch” policy applies strongly to data. An algorithm like the above hypothetical one is only as good as its assumptions are applicable to the current situation.

6/21/2012 #

Tints of Jade

Question: “We have to split growth versus base for the plan. How do you define base?”

My Answer: “Base is defined as ‘not growth.’”

My Thought: “Why is everybody laughing now?”

I consider myself to be a systems-thinker, which is normally an asset but can get me into trouble. I at times have trouble making sure I’m sufficiently straddling the in-/out-of-box line, such that I think practically and openly at the same time.

The system that is my job environment appears to have infiltrated me enough that I am not feeling when things get wacky. I forget that, in some distant world, “base” might actually mean something to someone, not simply the yang of some elsewhere-defined yin. To me, “growth” is a constructed figure that implies the definition of “base.”

This is probably the financial equivalent of sociopathy, where one feels a sort of disconnection from the numbers. The numbers think, therefore they are, but their relationship back to some kind of meaty reality is fuzzy at best. I don’t like this aspect of things, so I’m challenging myself to maintain an enlightened perspective on what this stuff really means, not just how it renders to paper and charts.

But some nonsense is just nonsense.

6/21/2012 #

Clarity

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been trying to devise some kind of lightweight photoblogging system that would allow me to mostly effortlessly post and briefly document photos of Claire.

I don’t know if I’ve ever had so much trouble designing the basic specifications for how such a simple app would work. Do you store the pictures in the database, or in the filesystem? Is sorting done by date added, arbitrary order, or the date the picture was taken according to the metadata? Are IDs randomly generated, or ordinal based on insertion? Generate and display thumbnails?

The phrase “When in doubt, do without” recently resonated with me, and since then I’ve been interpreting a lot of uncertainty to be signals to suspend an impulse to take some action.

My basic fear is that I will “go enterprise” and over-design the crazy thing. But I might also inadvertently flip and under-design it. What am I really trying to get here?

I want to be able to share photos, a sort of instant photo album. This precludes me just posting pictures on my blog; I want the pictures unsullied by vacuous discussions of how to design picture sharing systems. This makes Picasa and Flickr unappealing, because I don’t want the album/photo hierarchy. I also want to be able to merge the photos as a feed into Efendi for insertion between blog entries, using my fancy system for such things.

I want to be able to put a little description of the photos, but I don’t care about commenting, taxonomy, or any of that stuff.

I also want it to look nice and simple, which also boxes out Picasa and Flickr.

This shouldn’t be so hard for me. Maybe I’ll do without.

6/20/2012 #

Maybe

I haven’t written in a long time for obvious reasons. Perhaps the gravity of new fatherhood makes yammering on about whatever might be on my mind seem a little odd. Not that I don’t waste time anymore; I still manage to waste plenty of time – probably more than I should in the scheme of things – but I suppose what I do with my wasted time and noggin cycles often seems less noteworthy somehow.

However, I think it’s good to keep the dialogue up. I would say that over the years this blog has largely avoided the practical issues, the documentary element, of a diary… to its benefit. Therefore, it is a somewhat amusing but intentionally incomplete record of what actually is going on in my head. I have no intent to change this.

I am launching maybe 75%-heartedly into a little photoblog app that will record the more consequential and adorable aspects of my new life. This blog, on the other hand, will generally represent a sort of porous interface between the wheat and the chaff. Efendi, ever the gentleman, will relay to you when something appears in this photoblog, assuming the project comes off successfully at some point.

Cluster will be updated at some juncture as well.

Brightlamp languishes with a few bugs and actually is not currently installed on my recently un-hosed server.

I may not get e-mails when comments are posted here, now that I think of it. For reasons related technically to the current absence of Brightlamp.

I don’t like this new blog design, which might actually be a blocker for writing. That will have to change.

So, in general, there are things to do. That’s a good thing!

6/10/2012 #

Back Again!

Somehow, my server got trashed. Not sure what happened, but all the data was okay. I think my aging kernel got hosed by an update or something. It wasn’t worth troubleshooting, so I just started a fresh Debian 6 installation and migrated the data over. Everything but Brightlamp should be working now, and I’ll get it up and running soon.

1/18/2012 #

Monkey Milk

I’ve found that getting back into posting after a long break is best accomplished with something stupid.

Delaying taking out the trash and making the lunches, I did some research into why vegans won’t drink milk. Turns out that their problem is “consent.” If the product is freely and willingly given it’s not a problem.

I understand that cows barely have the sense to avoid even an avoidable death, so the idea of getting consent from one is pretty far-fetched. However, I do believe that monkeys may be able to provide consent with the proper communication facilities and training.

This is going to be a tough start-up with heavy capital requirements, but my line of “Free Will Monkey Milk” will be appearing in stores shortly.

12/16/2011 #

Time Management

I submit the justification of my awful sleeping habits at times. Although I’m not doing much programming right now, which means I’m just an idiot.

12/8/2011 #

Intelligent and Unintelligent Design

I pulled out two gnarly whiskers this morning, as I am paying the price for doing the electric shave in the car yesterday. They were those defective ones where multiple whiskers grow together in a triple helix-type pattern. You might somewhat harshly consider that to be a defective genetic feature of the face, but the fact that a snafu like that doesn’t just cause your face to permanently mar itself or something is another small little TMI miracle for the day.

We need a Christmas tree; the “wrapped gift bedroom floor space” and “unwrapped gift chair” are quickly filling up, and it’s the smallest chair in the living room. Christmas or not, the bigger chairs are for lounging.

The Best Buy commercials where the woman heckles Santa are only marginally better than the ones from years past where a slave-driving Santa makes the elves work holidays and weekends.

I saw my first “dad of the house was smart” commercials in a long time. The doofus guy from the “doublemyspeed.com” ad now has a second scenario where he takes the information previously gifted to him by his wife and has a nice father-daughter moment on the couch fixing her college PC. The daughter was either grateful for the help or silently disgusted that he had rooted out her hustle to get an Apple laptop as a replacement. Either way, he was victorious, saved money, looked like the big man of the house, and didn’t take guff from anybody.

… Unlike that poor sap who gets berated in his wife’s greenhouse for saving money on a phone plan. That one is awful. My devious side always wants him to just go nuts, smashing her windows, maybe getting the kids (who I’m sure are on his side due to the new unlimited mobile plan) to destroy all her plants. Salt the soil so nothing else will ever grow. That type of thing. Maybe the new trend is that commercial dads are reserved while the women are more, well, evil and aggressive.

AT&T was again rated the worst mobile provider. Knock on formica, but we haven’t had a lot of issues. You occasionally have to wave a dead chicken over Kristin’s iPhone to make an outbound call, and sans MicroCell we get one bar at the house when we’re not standing askew a brick wall, but otherwise quite good. Much fewer dropped calls, but that’s a city-to-city thing they’re working on.

I always enjoy those kind of “First World Problems” Amazon reviews, like where they say a box of Christmas cookies is “inedible.” We watch our fair share (yeah, Obama) of chef shows on TV, and it’s pretty funny to see some portly snob stare down a well-cooked slice of veal and say, “this is inedible.” These are probably people who think tap water is “undrinkable,” and we’ve seen people refuse to cook with canned beans.

Not related, but when boiling water I still think of the poor moron on Hell’s Kitchen who thought cold water boiled faster.