Thuon Chen

How to install Googlebar for Firefox 9 and beyond

2012-01-04T19:29:00.000-08:00

Rather than editing an XML file, I highly recommend installing Nightly Tester Tools. I did so for Firefox 7, and when I upgraded to Firefox 8, Nightly Tester Tools helped to make googlebar compatible, without a hitch. Now we're on version 9, and it worked for a little bit, but after a browser crash, no more googlebar, so you may want to use the instructions below. This blog post was originally published in June 2011, in response to the release of Firefox 5, then deleted and reposted in August 2011 to account for Firefox 6, and is now updated to account for the upgrade to Firefox 9.

Within the span of April of 2011 to the present, Firefox went from version 3.5 to versions 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and now version 9. This has wreaked havoc on those of us who use the Firefox add-on Googlebar, one of the best interfaces on Firefox to Google, "with an emphasis on easy access to many types of specialized searches". The problem is, the maintainers, John Woods, Andy Boughton, and Francis Turner, don't seem to stay on top of the version changes; while the add-on is a very useful tool, the maintainers don't seem to be very useful when it comes to applying an incredibly simple fix, so that Googlebar can be installed on Firefox versions 8, 9 and beyond. We will now correct their oversight:

Right-click on the following link and "Save Link As..." to download Googlebar 0.9.20.05 locally to your computer:
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/downloads/latest/33/addon-33-latest.xpi?src=addondetail
If you simply click on the link, your browser will try to install it, and the attempt will fail.
What you downloaded has a file extension of xpi, Cross Platform Install, which is basically a package of files that has been compressed. What we want to do now is decompress the xpi, in order to access a file inside named install.rdf. Since xpi is a compressed file, you can easily decompress it, using your operating system's default decompressor, by changing the file extension from .xpi to .zip. Then you click on the renamed file to display its contents, and open install.rdf with a text editor.
Scroll down the file, and look for the section for Firefox:

<em:targetApplication>
<Description>
  <em:id>{ec8030f7-c20a-464f-9b0e-13a3a9e97384}</em:id>
  <em:minVersion>2.0</em:minVersion>
  <em:maxVersion>5.*</em:maxVersion>
</Description>
</em:targetApplication>
In the line that says maxVersion:
<em:maxVersion>5.*</em:maxVersion>
replace 5.* with the latest version of Firefox, which, as of today, is 9.*
Save the install.rdf file, and add it back to the zip file.
Rename the file extension, from zip, back to xpi.
In your browser, click Firefox, Add-ons, Gear button, "Install Add-on From File..." and install the xpi file that you just modified.

Editor's note: my friend David McIntyre, in the comment below, suggests, rather than editing an XML file, to install Nightly Tester Tools, which I shall now do, and will report back if there are any problems.

Update: I still highly recommend Nightly Tester Tools, but there was a problem for me when upgrading to Firefox 9, where I found, initially there was googlebar, but after a browser crash, it disappeared, and I had to follow the instructions above.

The Danger in Selling Digital Goods on Ebay & Accepting Paypal as Payment

2011-12-29T15:53:00.000-08:00

Many of you casual gamers on Facebook may know how popular digital goods are in the online marketplace, where people pay lots of real money to buy items used in video games and online transactions. Digital goods can range from cell phone ringtones, music, movies and shows, electronic books (ebooks), rights to domain names, online accessories and characters (avatars) in video games, electronic gift certificates and coupon codes, online electronic currencies like Linden dollars and bitcoins (btc), financial & cash services like ukash, moneypak, pecunix and more, secure, encrypted web browsing and software packages, sometimes written to a flash drive that you can use to boot from, and I'm sure there is much that I missed and am not aware of. I'm not going to identify what I sold, because it's embarrassing that I not only got scammed, but that I spend so much time online acquiring digital goods. Maybe it's because my fear is I am socially inept in crowds and I would rather be indoors playing video games than out mingling and meeting people. Suffice it to say that, yesterday, around this time, I felt richer. 24 hours later, I feel poorer. Here's the story:

I poured quite a bit of time and effort into acquiring an online digital good. At the same time, I decided to take advantage of a temporary promotion on ebay where you can list items for free for the next 3 days. Among the many items that I listed, I decided to take a chance and list that particular digital good, my asking price for it about 25% higher than what I paid for it, after ebay and paypal fees. I had done my due diligence, looked at competitors, saw many people buying and selling the same item on ebay, and thought, with my account in good standing and lots of positive feedback, why not see if it might sell? Well, imagine my pleasant surprise when I got out of bed in the morning, checked my email, and saw that my item had sold through Buy It Now for a couple of thousand dollars, hand to God. The buyer also seemed good, with 76 feedback and a rating of 95.4%, and he paid me with paypal, in the amount of $2736 after ebay and paypal fees. The buyer used ebay messages to specify the online address where I could deliver the item, and after confirming the money was in my paypal account, I promptly sent the item to him.

I was feeling high for about most of the day, happy that all the money, time and effort I had spent in my online community was beginning to pay off. The ebay buyer had told me the item had been received, and had even given me positive feedback. Imagine my surprise and horror when, around 10 pm yesternight, about 11 hours after I delivered the digital good, I received 2 messages, one from ebay, one from paypal, with the Subjects: "MC143 eBay Listing Removed", and "Notification of Cancelled Withdrawal", respectively. The first message said:

We recently learned that someone was using an account to bid on items without the account owner's permission. For this reason, we have canceled all bids on the following listing...All associated fees have been credited to your account. Please note that we're working with the account owner to prevent any additional unauthorized activity.

If you have any concerns or questions, click "Customer Support" at the top of most eBay pages.

We're sorry for any inconvenience, and we thank you for your patience and cooperation.

Sincerely,

eBay Customer Support

The second message, from Paypal, came about because I was trying to transfer the money sent by the buyer for my digital good into my bank account, and it read:

Recently, your account balance became negative. To cover your negative balance, we have reversed "Pending" electronic funds transactions that you had initiated from your PayPal account. This is to confirm that the following transaction(s) have been cancelled...Thanks,

PayPal Finance Department

Long story short, I called ebay, told them the buyer was making a false claim, because I had been in touch with the buyer by the hotmail email address associated with the buyer's Paypal account, and also by ebay messages, and I had an email from the buyer saying the digital good had been received, and the buyer had even given me positive feedback. My protests had no effect. In the eyes of the ebay customer service agent, Dustin, the account that bid on and won my item was accessed by a third party, without the account holder's permission, and for security reasons, Dustin could not tell me what the criteria or proof was that ebay possessed showing them the account had been accessed by a third party. When I told Dustin that the problem was I had lost the item I sent to the buyer, Dustin put me on hold, then said he was going to advise me to contact law enforcement about this. When I told Dustin that the buyer was in a different country, Dustin said "that's the only way we can resolve it." When I asked for the payment back, Dustin said they could not do that, because the items were purchased by a third party. At this point Dustin must have heard me typing, because he asked me if I was recording this call, and when I said yes, Dustin said at this point he is forced to disconnect this call. Click. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the embarrassing story of how I got scammed out of the digital good I had, and the money I paid for it.

Actual Telephone Numbers Made Famous by Artists in Popular Music

2011-12-27T21:54:00.000-08:00

As someone who has lived in rental units as a tenant since leaving home at age 19, numerous times I've had to move to a new area and relinquish an old phone number. In picking a new one, I've always put some time, thought and care into it, wanting my new phone number to be easy for me to remember when giving out to people, and difficult for people to misdial. One thing that has always amazed me is how contemporary artists will include what I believe to be their actual telephone number in their music. Google Answers has a subject, "famous telephone numbers in songs", that shows people have been singing about phone numbers since the 1960s, back when the format was, to place a call, you had to dial a live operator, say a place name first, then say a five-digit number, before being connected by the operator. Now that we are in the age of seven digits (or age of ten digits if you include area code), one of the more famous phone numbers may be 867-5309, and hearkens back to the early 1980s, for which there is an entire Wikipedia page devoted to it.

If you ever are in the position to pick a new phone number, you might wish to steer clear of these, or contrarily, you may try to seek out these phone numbers, as they are easier to remember when set to a catchy tune (but be sure to expect multiple people trying to call you asking for somebody other than you):

Tony! Toni! Toné! - Whatever (1991): "Whatever you want, girl you know I can provide. Whatever you need, call 632 2135"

Alicia Keys - Diary (2004): "Oooh baby if there's anything that you fear, call 489 4608 and I'll be here"

Mike Jones - Back Then (2005): "281 330 8004, hit Mike Jones up on the low, cause Mike Jones about to blow"

Scientists have conjectured that the reason why every human culture that has been studied has music, why music appreciation is innate in almost all of us, is because the early man that was musical was more in tune with other early humans and more willing to cooperate with those that could appreciate music; musical human societies were more cohesive and likely to stick together than societies made of non-musical humans. Even if you don't accept that premise, music can be seen as a kind of social glue that binds us all together. The person who devotes him or her self to making new forms of music, if s/he is lucky, can step into the role of entertainer, and as an added benefit, when performing, that performance and song can serve as a sort of mating call, if you will, demonstrating to the audience his or her social and sexual value. The next time you feel lonely, pining for a mate, you could do a lot worse than create something, be it music, art, technology or science, that includes, or is based on, your actual telephone number.

New Study Shows No Link Between Road Traffic Collisions & Daylight Saving Time

2011-11-29T18:52:00.000-08:00

People who follow the news know that every year, around this time, there seem to be an increase in trusted information sources warning us about bicycles and pedestrians colliding with cars, and the correlation with Daylight Savings Time. Some of these vehicle collisions are fatal, and we remember when someone dies. Invariably the reports quote police officers and traffic safety officials attributing said automobile collisions to the twice-a-year annual changing of the clocks, the explanation being that either the onset of darkness is sooner and people are in a rush to get home, or there's not enough light early in the morning when people are in a rush to get to work, or people have to wake up earlier than they are used to, and this disruption in the body's Circadian rhythm means people are less aware at the wheel. In many cases, you add on the idea that some motorists have problems adjusting their eyes to the new light level, or the sun may be in their eyes, or it's too dark, and one can readily see why accidents might abound around the changing of the clock. The idea then that there is a correlation between Daylight Saving Time and an increased rate of accidents sounds plausible, even somewhat convincing. But what if there is no increase in traffic accidents around Daylight Savings Time? In order to avoid confirmation bias (the notion that "people see what they want to see", in that it is a particular human weakness that we all remember the purported evidence that supports an idea we want to believe, and we discard any suspect evidence that threatens that belief), one should approach an answer to this question using the power of science.

In the past, there've been studies to support this claim. However, the latest study, culled from Wikipedia, seems to show, at the very least, the jury is still out, and that there may even be no connection:

According to earlier studies, this change in time-schedule leads to sleep disruption and fragmentation of the circadian rhythm. Since sleep deprivation decreases motivation, attention, and alertness, transitions into and out of daylight saving time may increase the amount of accidents during the following days after the transition. We studied the amount of road traffic accidents one week before and one week after transitions into and out of daylight saving time during years from 1981 to 2006. Our results demonstrated that transitions into and out of daylight saving time did not increase the number of traffic road accidents.

2010 Jun 27.
Daylight saving time transitions and road traffic accidents.
Lahti T, Nysten E, Haukka J, Sulander P, Partonen T.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20652036

How to Sue a Corporation in Small Claims Court

2011-11-26T16:17:00.000-08:00

Several years back, I sued AT&T in small claims court, and the judge ruled in my favor for $1000. My complaint was that AT&T (back then they were doing business as Pacific Bell) had never notified me, as a DSL subscriber, that I could have availed myself of a number of features of their DSL package, including a nationwide network of local dialup phone numbers, and free web hosting and 3 email addresses. I was never given notice of these parts of their package, and felt that I very much could have used those services if only I had known. I had subscribed to DSL for 2 years by the time I found out, and believed I was due some sort of credit for the services the company had failed to notify me of, and I had never used. I called the company, detailing my complaint, and asked for free DSL for a year (back then AT&T was the only game in town in terms of providing DSL service in my area). The representative I spoke to declined to give me free DSL, but offered me a discounted rate per month. Hard-head that I was back then, I decided to reject their counter-offer, and began to prepare my case. It was a lot of work, and after I had served the corporation with the suit, I even got a call from another representative, offering me 3 free months of DSL service; I decided to reject that offer and proceed with my lawsuit. In court, no one showed up to contest the charges (a corporation usually must pay a lawyer much more than a potential liability of $10,000 to represent the company in a small claims case), but that doesn't mean you automatically win. In my case, the judge wanted to hear the basis for my lawsuit, and I argued that, at the time I discovered I was due the extras that I was never notified of, given Pacific Bell's monopoly on DSL service, I couldn't have simply moved my business elsewhere if I was dissatisfied with their customer service. The phone companies that owned the infrastructure were only just beginning to lease their lines to competitors at the time I argued my case, but the judge agreed with my logic and ruled in my favor.

Flash forward to the present: last year, I was operating my motor vehicle, a Honda Accord, and discovered that the seatbelt alarm for my car was starting to flash and emit a continuous beep, even though I made sure I had my seatbelt properly secured. Now, it's important to clarify that, by seatbelt alarm, what I'm talking about is actually a warning system that has a flashing light and audible alarm, indicating my seatbelt is not secure during operation of the vehicle (hence seatbelt alarm). I told my local mechanic about the problem, and he suggested I take the car into the dealership, as what I was describing seemed to indicate a problem with the seatbelt system, and since Honda has a lifetime warranty on seatbelts, I could get the problem repaired for free. I did as my mechanic suggested, but then I got a call from the dealership repair shop that the problem I had would not be covered under warranty, as their mechanic had deemed the problem to be an electrical issue, and not a seatbelt issue, so Honda would not pay for the cost of repair. As explained to me by the dealership mechanic Chuck, for my particular model of vehicle, the seat belt system is one of the most complicated ever made. To fix the problem, which is probably a wire that is shaved or touching the body of the car somewhere, the mechanics would have to take the panels off, including the dash panels and door panels, and trace the wiring from the sensors to everything that's involved with the system to find out where a wire is touching the body of the car somewhere. So even though Honda says in their warranty booklet that "a seat belt that fails to function properly is covered for the life of the vehicle," I am apparently out of luck.

I believe Honda is being disingenuous. If the problem is electrical, it's still manifest by the seat belt alarm beeping and flashing for no apparent reason, and it was a mechanic who first suggested that the problem might fall under Honda's limited lifetime warranty for seat belts. That's why I plan to sue them. Stay tuned.

Make sure your claim is not invalid under the statute of limitations: http://www.dca.ca.gov/publications/small_claims/file.shtml
Ascertain the proper jurisdiction. If you don't file your lawsuit papers in the proper county, your lawsuit will be dismissed by the judge. To figure out the correct jurisdiction, ask yourself, where was the agreement between you and the corporation entered into? Where was the agreement broken? When I purchased DSL from AT&T, I did so for my home in Berkeley, and I filed in the Berkeley small claims court (which has since been moved to Oakland). When I purchased my used car, I did so in Oakland, so I plan to file in Oakland at the Wiley Manuel Court.
Ask the corporation for the amount of damages you are seeking, either in writing, or in person (if in person, note the date and time you do this)
Find the agent of process for the corporation, at http://www.sos.ca.gov/, click on Business Entities, under 'Online Services' click on Business Search, type in the name of the corporation
File the lawsuit papers in court, then notify the corporation you are suing them by serving the lawsuit papers on the agent of process
Prepare to argue your case in court, making sure to organize your ideas as legal arguments, and have documentation in hand showing damages, and evidence to support your claim of damages
If you win, i.e., if the judge rules in your favor and awards you damages, serve the judgment on the agent of process, so that your paperwork will be forwarded to the corporation's Accounts Payable department, where a check should be cut out to you

How to Appeal a Red Light Camera Ticket When You've Been Found Guilty: Filing an Opening Brief

2011-10-30T20:38:00.000-07:00

Recent news about red light cameras, like the cities of Loma Linda in California, then Houston, Texas, and now the city of Los Angeles doing away with them, have been disturbing for those concerned with road safety, and encouraging for those who believe red light camera tickets have become an aggressive tactic by municipal government to squeeze money out of motorists. The cities did away with the automated ticketing systems, despite evidence that the cameras prevent the most horrific and fatal type of accidents, the ones where a driver barrels through an intersection on a red light and gets into a side-impact collision. I appreciate the technology of an automated system to record by video and photograph the people who violate traffic laws, and I even believe the technology can be used to bring safety to people on the road. The implementation so far, however, leaves a lot to be desired.

On Monday, December 13, 2010, during the 2pm hour, Gil Gross, news-talk host on KGO radio, interviewed Los Angeles City Controller Wendy Greuel on her 77 page critique of the red light camera program. She made the point that 2/3 of red light camera tickets are for rolling right-on-reds, i.e., turning right on a red without coming to a complete stop. Wendy came to the conclusion that red light cameras cost Los Angeles more than the city collects in fines; the state of California taking a portion of these fines is one reason, but another reason is people are not paying the fines, and getting away with this because they can still renew their licenses with the DMV. In a damning rebuke of municipal greed, Wendy found that where the city puts these cameras are not where the most dangerous intersections are, but where they are easiest to install, i.e., where the city didn't have to work through a state process for an intersection near a state highway, or where there was the same kind of physical infrastructure at an intersection that the equipment installers had worked with before, and could easily work with again.

I was convicted of a red light camera traffic ticket on Tuesday, July 12, 2011, even though at trial I felt I presented a strong case with convincing arguments. As I mentioned in a previous blog post, how to file a stay of judgment, my read of the judge was he just didn't want to hear what I had to say. Fair enough, judges can do whatever they want in their courtroom, and he certainly wouldn't be the first person to reject whatever may be contradictory to what he wants to believe, but the great thing about the criminal justice system (yes, a traffic ticket means you are being charged with a crime) is you can appeal your conviction when you've been found guilty of an infraction, which most traffic tickets are. If you don't want to pay the ticket, you either have to hire a lawyer, or invest a lot of time learning how to do this on your own. The first step to an appeal is filing a proposed notice of appeal, but before you can do so, you must do a lot of research, reading, writing, and preparation, using resources like highwayrobbery.net and Fight Your Ticket & Win in California.

One of the main pillars of my defense at trial was the rule of "best evidence", which means in court the government has to submit their sharpest photos and video, and not some fuzzy copies, as evidence. Under California Evidence Code 1520, otherwise known as the Secondary Evidence Rule, if submitting a document, the government has to provide an uncondensed version, not a summary or memo. On the website, at photonotice.com, where you can view your alleged violation, there is a disclaimer (which as of 5pm today, I've confirmed is still there) which states: "Due to formatting constraints this video is a representation of the original evidence and is not intended for court purposes...The video you are viewing on this website is provided as a courtesy and convenience to you. The video is in no way purported to be a true and correct copy of evidence that will be presented in court."

Because I asked the government numerous times to give me their best evidence, which are the high-resolution photos and video captured by the Redflex cameras, and said evidence was never provided to me, then for the purposes of trial, the rule of best evidence was never satisfied. At trial, the police service technician may have, on her laptop, access to the evidence you requested, and she may offer to show it to you, but since you asked for the evidence before trial, so you could prepare for your defense, and said evidence was never given to you, you can ask the judge to throw out the high-resolution copy that the police have and plan to use against you. If the judge throws out the high-resolution copy (which, in my case, did not happen), the police have no evidence against you, unless they decide to submit a lower resolution copy, or the officer might refer to the low res copy given to you in discovery. However, you can object to the admission of the low res copy under the rule of "best evidence".

The second step in an appeal is to file an opening brief, which the district attorney can respond to by filing a respondent's brief (this is unlikely in an infraction case). Filing an opening brief is mandatory, and after all the briefs have been filed, or the time to to serve and file them has passed, the court will schedule a date for oral argument. Below is what I submitted as my opening brief:

Red light cameras depend heavily on legal faith in a certificate that claims to confirm the total reliability of a machine's calibration and accuracy in detection, tracking, and overall synchronicity with the system of lights and cameras. Despite the possible hassle involved in confirming each fact at trial, it is essential to the integrity of the court system that questioning of the evidence be allowed. On the basis of my right to challenge the human elements of the evidentiary chain, I submit this appeal.

Commissioner Culver's trial court ruling was not supported by substantial evidence because there was no live testimony by any person actually involved in the preparation or production of the crucial evidence. I have a right to confront witnesses under the 6th Amendment, as affirmed by the Supreme Court in Melendez-Diaz versus Massachusetts. In addition, the website where representations of the evidence can be reviewed, photonotice.com, states the following (copied verbatim, and current as of October 12, 2011): "Due to formatting constraints this video is a representation of the original evidence and is not intended for court purposes." I made multiple requests to the police and the city for the best evidence, i.e., the high resolution photos and video recorded by the Redflex cameras, by serving Dominique Burton, the agent of process for the city of Emeryville, by asking Rebecca Sylvester, Emeryville police technician, in person at the police station for said evidence, and by asking Sergeant Mike Allen, Ms. Sylvester's superior, in emails. When my requests were not fulfilled, I twice asked Judge Culver during arraignment to schedule a motion hearing to hear my motion to compel discovery, and during the second time I requested a motion hearing, I submitted a printed copy of said motion to the court that asked the city of Emeryville to either provide me with the best evidence, or else preclude the evidence that would be used against me during trial. None of my requests were fulfilled. The evidence used against me in trial should have been precluded, because the city of Emeryville did not comply with my discovery request.

Commissioner Culver made the following errors:
refused or ignored my numerous requests for a motion hearing to compel the city of Emeryville to provide me with the best evidence.
did not preclude the evidence when I asked him to, under California Evidence Code 1520
called up a witness, Sarah Rutherford, co-custodian of records for Redflex, when I as the defense was never notified in advance (according to rules of discovery) that she was going to testify.
did not want to see or consider the 2 rulings of the higher court in Alameda County, copies of which I brought with me and which I attempted to show Commissioner Culver. Both of these appeals cases, People v Singh (January 2010) and People v Blankenship (May 2010), overturned similar trial court rulings resulting in convictions for said defendants in red light camera photo trials. In both of these cases, the appellate court reversed the lower court ruling due to violation of the defendant's right to confront witnesses under the 6th Amendment.
denied my motion to dismiss based on violation of my right to due process under the 5th Amendment, i.e., no motion hearing was scheduled for me when I requested it.

How to Use Google Prediction API to Estimate a Sale Price for Your Home

2011-10-27T16:47:00.000-07:00

This blog post is based on Martin Omander's workshop at Silicon Valley Code Camp, which I attended on Saturday, October 8:
Store your data, predict the future

Speaker: Martin Omander
Level: Intermediate | Room: 3525 | 9:45 AM Saturday

Make your smart applications smarter with Google's Prediction API. Take advantage of Google's machine learning algorithms to make recommendations, analyze Twitter, detect spam, classify documents, identify languages and more.
Store your applications' data securely and efficiently in Google's data centers with the Storage API.
The real estate home price data file mentioned below was compiled by Martin from Redfin data for the Rex Manor neighborhood of Mountain View, California.

If you've ever wanted to buy a house or sell your home, and would like a reasonable estimate for what the ultimate sale price will be in this market, you can get a real estate agent's take, or you can use Google Prediction API (henceforth Prediction) to give you another estimated price, given available market data. The idea is, you grab a number of sale price records for the ZIP code you want to buy or sell in, feed the data into Prediction, and Prediction will spit out a number based on the data you fed it. Besides spitting out scalar values, Prediction also does classification. To get your feet wet, here is a beginner tutorial that figures out, in an automated way, whether some text you pass in is English, French or Spanish:

http://code.google.com/apis/predict/docs/hello_world.html

Assuming you were able to successfully use Google's Prediction API, in conjunction with Google Storage and Google's APIs Explorer Tool, to classify samples of text that you pass in, the next step is to predict a sale price for your home.

Download Martin's houses.csv data here
Using the same steps in the tutorial above, upload the houses.csv data into Google Storage, and then use the data to train Prediction
After training is complete, we want to get a predicted price. To do this, we want to pass in the values for a house that we want to buy or sell. Let's say we're trying to sell a 3 bedroom, 3 bathroom, 1800 square foot, built in 1960, single family residence. I found that when I tried to pass in the following as a value for the csvInstance key, I got an error:
```
3 3 1800 1960 house
```
I then tried the same thing with commas, but that didn't work either. What I found finally worked is, in the APIs Explorer tool, when specifying the value of the csvInstance, you need to count how many field values you are putting in, let's call it n (in this case, n equals 5), then provision that same number by clicking on "Add" n times, and manually insert the values in order, like so:
```
 {
   "input": {
     "csvInstance": [
       "3",
       "3",
       "1800",
       "1960",
       "house"
     ]
   }
 }
```

Caveat for those who want to read in or import additional data sets: if you want Prediction to spit out a number, i.e., a scalar value, one thing to remember is that the column associated with the scalar value that you want a prediction on (in this case, home sale price) should be the first column inside the data file you feed into Prediction. Martin said that when he was putting together the home sale price data, he had to manually copy and paste from Redfin into his spreadsheet program, then move the column for the home sale price to be the first column, and then exported the spreadsheet as a csv, i.e., comma separated values, file.

Heather, Rachel, Michelle, Casey or Ann from Account Services or Cardholder Services

2011-09-30T22:06:00.000-07:00

From phonespam.blogspot.com:

Hello. This is Heather at account services. And we're calling in reference to your current credit card account. There's no problems currently with your account. It is urgent however that you contact us concerning your eligibility for lowering your interest rate. Your eligibility expires shortly. So please consider this your final notice. Please press one now on your phone to speak with a live operator and lower your interest rate. Or press two to discontinue further notices. Thank you and have a great day.

I've been roused from sleep by these unsolicited, automated phone calls, all having to do with card member services, or account services, relating to your credit card debt, lowering your interest rates across all lines of credit, repair your credit, financial services counseling, or debt negotiation. These robocalls piss me off, and if you want to do something more than just hang up, you can get even. I've pressed '1' to get connected to a live agent. The people who get paid by the telephone marketing scammers have learned to be wary of giving out too much information, especially to an angry caller, because they know if too many people complain, the money will stop coming in. However, if you have a little time, you can employ the following strategy to make yourself some money fighting crime, and help bring down these organizations who try to scam people. The next time you get one of these calls, here's what you should do:

Pretend that you are interested. The first two things the representative may ask you are your name and how much credit card debt you have. You can use a variant of your name, or create a new name for yourself (in order to not arouse suspicion, try to make your new name similar to your real name, so that it's easier to remember, such as starting with the same sound or letter), and tell the representative you have credit card debt of $16,000 (which is about the national average), so that he or she will get excited about possibly doing a balance transfer with you over the phone, or getting your credit card number so he or she can bill your credit card for "services".
Do not give out any of your personal information, such as your credit card number. Inform the representative that you have some discomfort doing business over the phone, and you would like to do some research before you go forward. Tell the telemarketer, "I have a fear of scams, and would like to make sure this is a legitimate business", and "I would like to take advantage of that 4 to 8% rate, but before I do, can you tell me what is your company's name and physical location?" To lull the scammer into thinking you are sincere, I might go so far as to give out my ZIP code and the toll-free number of my credit card company, but when you are prompted for your credit card number, go to step 3.
Ask for, and record, the company's name, the name of the person you are talking to, get a call-back number and an address, and note the time and the date of the call.
Report the call and any of the information you have to the authorities.

Enough people who complained were finally able to identify and bring down three telephone scammer companies, including Mutual Consolidated Services in Tacoma, Washington, and multiple companies in Florida:

http://blogs2.startribune.com/blogs/whistleblower/2009/06/26/hunt-for-rachel-from-cardholder-services-takes-me-to-a-company-in-florida-but-she-wasnt-there/
http://www.kirotv.com/money/18910460/detail.html
http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2010/07/mutualconsol.shtm
http://www.ftc.gov/os/caselist/0923190/index.shtm

These are three URLs I've used to lodge complaints about the calls:

https://esupport.fcc.gov/ccmsforms/form1088.action
https://complaints.donotcall.gov/complaint/complaintcheck.aspx
https://www.ftccomplaintassistant.gov/

Depending on your state, you can possibly make yourself some extra cash by suing the telemarketing company in small claims court if you are on the "do not call" registry:According to the California Attorney General:

In order to file a complaint, you must know either the name or the phone number of the company that called you. Our office cannot trace the phone call you received and obtain this information on your behalf. You also must provide the date that the company called you and your registered phone number. You may provide your name and address, but it's not required for you to submit a complaint.

According to the FCC:

Some states permit you to file law suits in state court against persons or entities violating the do-not-call rules. You may be awarded $500 in damages or actual monetary loss, whichever is greater. The amount may be tripled if you are able to show that the caller violated the rules willfully and knowingly. Filing a complaint with the FCC does not prevent you from also bringing a suit in state court.
States also can bring a civil law suit against any person or entity that engages in a pattern or practice of violating the TCPA or FCC rules. You can contact your state Attorney General’s office or consumer protection agency with particular complaints, or to encourage such suits.

Happy hunting!

how to file a stay of judgment when you've been found guilty of a traffic violation

2011-09-28T23:53:00.000-07:00

Let's say you got a traffic ticket, a red light camera photo ticket, and you decide to fight it. You do your due diligence, poring over the resources available at Fight Your Ticket & Win in California and highwayrobbery.net, and the first two times you appear for arraignment, in front of the same judge, you request that a motion hearing be scheduled so you can compel the city of Emeryville to provide discovery, in the form of the high resolution photos and video captured by the Redflex cameras. Both times, the judge either ignores or refuses your request, and continues the matter, i.e., gives you an additional 30 to 60 days before you have to reappear during arraignment in order to enter a plea. The third time, the judge is exasperated that you persist in your request for a motion hearing, and he demands that you enter a plea. You plead Not Guilty, and the judge, perhaps cognizant that you won't skip town, since you showed up all 3 times like you were supposed to, does not order you to put up bail (i.e., the fine of $446 in order to clear the citation), but instead, does you the favor of releasing you on 'O' 'R', i.e., on your own recognizance (most people try to ask the judge for no bail, and are usually denied, although the judge may grant you extra time to put up the bail). You have a trial, where you are found guilty, and the judge orders you to pay the fine, and gives you one month to do so. You may now want to appeal the trial court ruling, because you believe the trial court judge made one or more errors when deciding to rule against you. If you plan to appeal the ruling, you may want to avoid paying the fine until the appeals process is over, hopefully with the appeals court judge ruling in your favor.

The government alleges that, last year, on June 1, 2010, I didn't stop before turning right at the intersection of 40th Street and Horton Street in Emeryville. 17 days later, on June 18, I received a citation in the mail, a notice of traffic violation of California Vehicle Code 21453a, "Failure to Stop at Red Light". Since this case is still on appeal, I have to be wary of what I say, for fear of hurting my case (the government can read, just as well as you or I can). I pled Not Guilty, and appeared in court a total of 8 times, 6 out of 8 in front of the same judge, Commissioner Taylor Culver, to argue my case and lose, then ask for a stay of judgment, and then for a hearing on settlement of the statement on appeal. I spent quite a bit of time reading and writing to get a sense of what my legal foundation is and what obstacles I might face, as I carefully prepared my case. Often, you'll find that when you're arguing a case in traffic court, the system is set up against you, and you will need all the help you can to navigate a process that seems prejudiced in favor of the police, the municipality where the alleged violation took place, and the corporations, such as Redflex, that the cities and the municipalities are in contract with. Eventually, despite all your preparation and strong arguments, the judge may be unresponsive to what you have to say, and very well rule against you (the logic may be, perhaps, that if the trial court were to actually listen to your arguments, then that may only encourage people to fight their tickets, instead of swallowing your pride and forcing yourself to submit to what I believe is an aggressive government tactic to squeeze money out of motorists). Well, during trial, despite my preparation and what I thought to be strong arguments for why my case should be dismissed, or at the very least why I should be found not guilty, the judge ruled against me, and I was ordered to pay $466 in one month.

You can now do one of two things: pay the fine, and when you win, petition to get your money back, or avoid paying the fine by filing a stay of judgment, asking the court to postpone the sentence while you appeal the trial court's ruling. I opted for the latter, as paying such a large amount for me would be a hardship. At first I asked the trial court to stay the judgment, and not surprisingly, the same trial court judge denied my motion. I then submitted a motion to the appeals court to stay the judgment, the template of which was provided to me by the editor of highwayrobbery.net, but the court sent me a letter saying the motion was denied, without prejudice ('without prejudice' means you are allowed to resubmit the motion to the court). The appeals court's given reason for why my motion was denied had to do with my not following the procedure spelled out by the California Rules of Court, which lays out the rules you must abide by, i.e., the technicalities you must follow, when you want the higher court to consider your motion. In this case, this is the denial letter that I got, copied verbatim:

Petitioner Chen's "Application for Stay of Sentence Pending Resolution Of Appeal To the Appellate Department" is denied, without prejudice. CRC 8.930 et seq. governs proceedings in the appellate division for writs of mandate, certiorari, or prohibition.

I was left scratching my head, wondering what I did wrong. I went to my local law library, where I was able to obtain a copy of the specific passage pointed at by the reference California Rules of Court 8.930. Reading further into the rule, in 8.931, I found the following:

A person who is not represented by an attorney and who petitions the appellate division for a writ under this chapter must file the petition on Petition for Writ (Misdemeanor, Infraction, or Limited Civil Case) (form APP-151). For good cause the court may permit an unrepresented party to file a petition that is not on form APP-151.

Reading it over, I finally figured out I had to file what is known as a writ of mandate. After some googling, particularly for california appeals, writ of mandate, I was led to the proper form, APP-151:

http://www.courts.ca.gov/documents/app151.pdf

I went ahead and filled out the form, resubmitted my motion, crossed my fingers, and hoped for the best. Four weeks later, I got the following letter in the mail, copied verbatim:

Petitioner Chen's Petition for Writ is granted.
IT IS ORDERED that the judgment and payment of the $466.00 fine be stayed pending resolution of Petitioner Chen's appeal to the appellate division.

The best thing about filing for a stay of judgment, and appealing a traffic court ruling, is that a traffic infraction technically falls under the aegis of the criminal justice system, where you are entitled to a free defense. Therefore, all the paperwork described herein, such as the appeal or the writ of mandate, is free to file. Unlike the paperwork you file in civil court, where you do have to pay, sometimes hundreds of dollars per filing, filing the aforementioned paperwork with the appeals court regarding a traffic violation incurs no fees.

Flower Thieves

2011-08-30T22:43:00.000-07:00

On a Thursday afternoon of last year, August 19, 2010, I walked outside and noticed that the pretty light-pink flowers in the pictures above had been removed without my permission and were now conspicuously absent. I have these plants growing in my front yard, and somebody had taken the blooms while they were still flower buds, before they had a chance to open up and blossom. Where the flower buds had been, I saw only the headless portion of remaining stalk, the flower bud and long stem missing. I suspected then that someone may have come onto the property, possibly in the dark of night or early morning, and stolen the budding flowers from the bulbous plants growing on the property, and that's why my flower buds were no longer there. Upon further examination, I saw that the top ends of some of the headless stalks had uneven edges, whereas some had clean cut edges, indicating that whoever stole the flower buds from the property used two different methods to remove the desired items, perhaps knife, scissors, or other sharp-bladed object on some, and snapping off a few of the others. The person(s) who did this left one stalk already in bloom, possibly because the buds are of greatest value when they have not bloomed yet. Flower thief? Flower poacher? Blossom bandit? Bloom burglar? I'm not sure, but in researching why someone would take my flowers, I ascertained that the scientific name for the plant in question is Lycoris squamigera, otherwise known as surprise lily, resurrection lily, or naked lady, and the ones pictured are the short-stamen variety. I tried to take a photo of what happened to my plants, but at the time my digital camera was not working correctly. Even though the perpetrator would unlikely ever be caught (I mean, how do you trace stolen flowers when I didn't do anything to mark them in any way) and it would probably be a waste of time, I went online and filed an Oakland police report. Then I stewed in my own righteous anger, mad at whoever would do such a dastardly thing as steal someone else's flowers from their front yard. I counted 11 of my flower buds taken from me.

Upon further investigation, I discovered I am not the only one this has happened to. Many parties, besides me, from people in homes with flowers in their gardens to destinations like the San Francisco Golden Gate Park, have reported flower theft, or flower poaching, or bloom snipping, or blossom burglary. Apparently, flowers can bring you $1 to $5 each, and the unscrupulous florists who buy the ill-gotten goods may not want to ask a lot of questions. Whoever thought your friendly neighborhood floral arrangement specialist and bouquet shopkeeper might be some shady criminal dealing in stolen goods? The police are onto the thefts, though. Thieves and the florists who buy from them have gotten caught with covertly-marked stems, and some plants worth as much as $1000 per have microchips embedded inside to indicate that they belong to someone else.

Canon is awesome

2011-08-27T19:50:00.000-07:00

I want to let you all know about some pleasantly surprising, then, rather amazing, customer service I received, from the consumer and business technology company Canon. Back in October 10, 2003, I purchased a Canon Powershot S400 digital camera with $300 my parents had given me for my birthday. I really liked the camera, and got to use it a lot, but then last year, I started noticing some problems. The problem I was having was, whenever I tried to take a picture, I saw something like this (thanks, Deepak Prakash, for the photo):

The image on the LCD monitor on the camera, and in subsequent photographs I took, was smeared, blurred, washed-out, and tinted pinkish-red. Other times, I noted a warped, noisy, false-color image, then the LCD monitor would go dark on me.

I was ready to toss the camera and buy a new one, but in a last bid attempt to save money and salvage what I had, on Friday, August 20, 2010, I called Canon, and from a conversation I had with Canon representative Mike, in Chesapeake, Virginia, he told me the following (and I paraphrase):

This particular camera has a service notice, for an issue with an image sensor, a CCD, charge-coupled device. That sensor can fail. What I need to do is send the camera to Canon, and they will repair it for free. I need to give Mike my information, and get a case created for me. Before I send the camera in, remove the battery, memory card, and strap from the device. Wrap camera in bubble wrap, and put in a cardboard box. Mike will send 2 emails to you, the first has instructions on what to do and where to send it to, along with an evaluation form that I print out and put inside the box, and the 2nd email will come from UPS, with a free shipping label, prepaid and insured. Once the camera is received, it will take 2 to 3 days for the Canon technicians to check in the camera and evaluate it; they will send me an email with a repair order and status, and then 5 to 7 days to repair and return to you. Return shipping is via Fedex, and I will need to sign for it. The advisory for this service notice went out in 2007, but you weren't registered, so you didn't receive the notice

Lo and behold, on Thursday, September 9, 2010, I received a repaired Canon S400 camera, which has been working for me just fine since then. I thought it was worth mentioning that, other than the inconvenience of my not having the camera during the time it was in transit, being repaired, and shipped back to me, the whole repair process cost me nothing, and even the shipping was completely paid for by Canon. I've come to find that the problem I encountered was common to many digital cameras from many brands that contained a particular Sony-made part:

http://www.imaging-resource.com/badccds.html

I've also come to find out that Canon is slowly phasing out the cameras they will repair, according to a timeline. So if you have a Canon Powershot S400, it looks like you may be out of luck:

http://camerarepair.blogspot.com/2007/11/canon-digital-cameras-showing-black.html

How to Add Google +1 to Your Blogger/Blogspot Presence

2011-07-25T18:22:00.000-07:00

The Google Plus social network has been fun to play with so far, and I understand that even though Google+ has been growing really fast, it still has a ways to go before it catches up with Facebook and Twitter. Unlike the latter two, one thing that takes getting used to in Google+ is the lack of a system to send a direct or private message to who you're connected with. There is a work-around, where you can publish to your intended recipient's stream: you click on "Share what's new...", type something, but then when it comes time to 'Share', instead of specifying a circle, you type out the name of the person who you're connected to. Your message then gets published to that person's plus.google.com stream. The problem with this method of approximating direct messaging is, as Google+ warns:

Your content may be shared beyond the bounds which you originally intended if your post is reshared or if someone is mentioned on your post. For instance, if someone is mentioned in a comment, they'll be able to see the entire post even if the post wasn't originally shared with them.

So if you mention someone else in the content of the post, and happen to prepend that third person's name with a '+' or '@', then that person can now read your message, which defeats the purpose of a private, direct message.

That said, Google+ is still pretty cool, and one can argue that because there is this limitation of no direct messaging, Google+ is cleaner and leaner, akin to Twitter's self-imposed 140 character limit (which I, and Farhad Manjoo, think has outlived its usefulness, especially for Twitter conversations).

Before Google Plus came out, Google introduced +1, which is their version of the Facebook 'Like' button. In addition to Google's how to add +1 to your blog, for those on blogger/blogspot, here's what I did:

As stated in the Google document above, you need to copy and paste one of the following 3 possible pairs of XML elements into your blog template:

<script> and <g:plusone> elements
<script> and <div> elements
Two <script> elements, the latter of which makes a call to the render function, as explained in the section Javascript API

They all accomplish the same thing, but if you don't know which one to use, I'd go with the first, or the second, one, either of which are easy to copy, as Google provides the boilerplate for you, without the need for any additional changes from you. Our next steps are for where to paste what we copied:

In Blogger's tabs console, click on 'Design'
Click on 'Edit HTML', and in the section 'Edit Template', click on 'Expand Widget Templates'
Paste anywhere inside. I recommend that you provision a section inside the template so you can keep track of all the changes you've made to the default.

Leccion de Español Tres o Spanish Lesson 3

2011-07-19T17:14:00.000-07:00

The Yards (1999, directed by James Gray) with Joaquin Phoenix (as Willie Gutierrez) and Robert Montano (as Hector), where they are speaking in Spanish. Mark Wahlberg is silent onlooker.
Notice how Robert's character code-switches, i.e., changes the language he is using, from English to Spanish. In this context, Joaquin's character, who was conversing in the more familiar Spanish, reverts to English, to distance himself emotionally from the person who he was addressing. We later find out why, as Willie Gutierrez and his crew are, and have been, intentionally sabotaging the trains operated by Hector's company, in order to secure lucrative city contracts.

Hey, Gutierrez, quiero hablar contigo.
Yo tengo nada que decir, Hector.
Oye, yo soy tu amigo, chico. Yo se, uh, lo que tu estas haciendo.
<Willie reverts from Spanish to English>
Hey, nunca vas a ser tan blanco como ellos.

Back in February of last year, I was listening to talk radio, and had a chance to hear an interview with Audrey Nelson, author of Code Switching. I took some notes:

Code switching came out of linguistics, and it refers to someone who is good at and has knowledge of two cultures. Good communicators know how to switch gears. When speaking to audiences predominantly of one typical gender role, Audrey will use different styles; with men: statistics, research, be much more direct. With women: stories, relationship talk, very high level of disclosure within a couple of minutes, i.e., talking about your insecurities, fears and doubts. Women are in the business of social maintenance, to take care of people and relationships. Chit chat initiated by women before a meeting serves a purpose: to relax, make people feel freer, less on-edge, feel connected and bonded, be more civil to each other. When men chit chat, they talk about safe topics like work, sports. You spend more time at work than any other organization. If the verbal and nonverbal contradict, human nature is to base decisions on the observation of non-verbal behavior. Women are much better readers of nonverbal cues than men; excellence in social maintenance means excellence in observing people's feelings, relationships, emotions.

Although her book is mainly about how to communicate effectively in the workplace to a mostly male (or female) audience, the take-away message is to know the needs of your audience (which is what I was referring to in Why You Should Learn Black English). Ms. Nelson went on to state that we make 6 to 8 stereotype conclusions in the first 6 to 8 seconds that we meet each other. Assuming you are fluent enough to pull it off convincingly (one of the biggest hurdles of code-switching), once you demonstrate that you can speak their language, your audience will feel connected and bonded, and be more civil to each other, and more comfortable with you.

one of the best computer deals out there right now

2011-06-17T20:40:00.000-07:00

This past Memorial day, I got a brand new computer. It took Dell about a week to assemble and ship to me, and about a week for me and machine to get friendly. Coming up for air, here's one thing I really love about mi computador nuevo: the place where you rest your hands on your wrists, as you are about to type, feels really good. It's never too cool, which is what you might expect from a smooth metal surface, and it's also never too hot, which is what you'd expect from metal sitting just millimeters above powerful circuitry. The wrist rests on my new machine have a high-quality brushed metal finish, that feels almost silky, and the fact that you can rest your palms before typing, and not have the coolness transfer from the metal to your body, is a nice touch, and feels just right. It's kind of like you were shipped a computer with the luxury upgrade of hand-and-wrist-rest warmers, and evokes in me a great deal of confidence in my recent purchase. Those Dell engineers, artists and designers thought of everything, and presumably come from the same school of thought as the geniuses who gave you the ability to keep your cooked rice hot, your favorite massage chair heated, your toilet seat warm, your movie theater seats toasty, your car's front seats comfy in that morning chill, heck, yes, even your steering wheel warm:

Sure, it's a minor detail, as can be said about any luxury, and I'm not quite sure how they did it, but it speaks to the finesse of a homegrown company that has been at it for years, and has finally come into its own. My new laptop is also energy star 5.0 compliant, unlike your tv set-top box or DVR, meaning when it comes to your utility bill, this laptop uses less electricity when idle, and very little power when you've got it asleep, or hibernating.

My previous computer, an Acer Aspire 9410-2028, was purchased back in August of 2007, and did not have any hand/wrist warmers. It was a good computer for its time, at a good price, but fast forward to the present, about 3.5 years later, and now getting anything done on the same computer is a real slog. First, the hinges broke about a year and a half ago, which meant I had to find a way to prop up my screen or else it wouldn't stay up by itself. Then, for the past year, if I ran my operating system for a while without rebooting, I noticed extreme latency, lots of disk spinning, very slow response time, and often my screen would suddenly go dark for a minute or more because of my graphics driver crashing (this occurred sometimes multiple times an hour). If I tried to switch between web browser tabs or web browser windows, I dreaded having to endure 6 second to several minute waits while the computer finished what it was doing and caught up to me. Trying to switch between a browser window to my desktop, or playing a movie, were bitterly negative experiences, evoking in me a range of responses from impatience, to taking the Lord's name in vain, to prolonged bouts of swearing and exasperation, sometimes leading to existential cries that made me doubt my commitment to sparkle motion:
If you're in the market, looking to buy, or have been shopping for a new computer, you could do a lot worse than what I got for $1239.61 ($1,123.99 + $6 environmental disposal fee + $109.62 tax):

Dell XPS 17 (L702X), Windows® 7 Home Premium, 64-Bit
PROCESSOR               2nd generation Intel® Core i7-2720QM processor 2.20 GHz with Turbo Boost 2.0 up to 3.30 GHz
OPERATING SYSTEM        Genuine Windows® Home Premium, 64-Bit, English
SERVICE PLAN            1 Year Limited Hardware Warranty (Mail-in repair in 10-14 business days - Shipping not included)
HD DISPLAY              17.3" FHD (1080p) with 2.0MP HD Webcam
MEMORY                  8GB Shared Dual Channel DDR3 Memory
VIDEO CARD              NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 550M 1GB graphics with Optimus
BATTERY OPTIONS         90 WHr 9-cell Lithium Ion Primary Battery
HARD DRIVE              1.0TB 500GB 7.2k HDD x 2
OFFICE SOFTWARE         Microsoft® Office Starter: reduced-functionality Word & Excel w/ ads. No PowerPoint or Outlook
SECURITY SOFTWARE       McAfee Security Center with VirusScan, Firewall, Spyware Removal, 30-Day Trial
INTERNAL OPTICAL DRIVE  Tray Load Blu-ray Disc BD-Combo (Reads BD and Writes to DVD/CD)
WIRELESS + BLUETOOTH    Intel® Centrino® Wireless-N 1000
SOUND OPTIONS           JBL 2.1 Speakers with Waves Maxx Audio 3

Dell XPS 17 for:
Order Subtotal:          $1,123.99
Shipping and Handling:   $9.00
Shipping Discount:      -$9.00
Environmental Disposal Fee: $6.00
Tax Total:               $109.62
Total Amount:            $1,239.61

What was important for me was the 64-bit quad-core Core^TM i7 2720qm CPU, only 1 or 2 steps below the state-of-the-art, most advanced chip currently out on the market. Also, I needed my next computer to have 8 gigabytes of RAM, 1 terabyte of hard drive space, a 17-inch high-resolution 1920 x 1080 screen (yes, high definition), and the ability to play Blu-ray DVDs. To get this computer at such a great price, I had to make two sacrifices and apply two coupon codes:

opt for the limited hardware warranty (essentially, I am betting Dell won't send me a lemon) of "Mail-in repair in 10-14 business days - Shipping not included" instead of the standard 1 Year Home Express Service of "Mail-in repair in 1-2 business days - Shipping included"

decide against the 3D capable screen and the 3D glasses

These codes subtract an additional $500 off. Both codes expire June 30, 2011, but you can always search for dell coupon codes to find the combination that gives you the most money off:
- 8GHR80Q1PLLCF7
- 7WR1C2?HTTQQ11

Perhaps the economy has people spooked about spending $1200 on a computer, but I was surprised I wasn't able to find this deal advertised anywhere else. I found this deal on my own, meaning I took the time to pick out which computer I wanted, and, through trial and error research, which applicable coupon codes were stackable, as many of the codes have restrictions. At first I looked on techbargains.com, then on Costco's website and in their stores, and I was contemplating buying an HP Pavilion dv7t Quad Edition customizable Notebook PC for $1484.14 ($1,344.99 + $8 recycling fee + $131.14 tax), but that tax rate of almost 10% seemed exorbitant to me. In a defiant act of tax avoidance (remember, Jesus votes Republican), I decided to do some research on computers being offered for sale on ebay, where sometimes you can buy items tax-free. At one point I was willing to pay $1600 for the right configuration of parts, but not being able to find what I wanted from ebay, I decided to go on Dell's site directly. There, I found I still had to pay tax, but Dell's grand total price was almost $300 less than the HP I was first expecting to buy, for an upgrade on the CPU, hard drive spin from 5400 rpm to 7200 rpm, 17.3 inch screen with resolution increase from 1600 x 900 to 1920 x 1080, and I was able to throw in a 50% upgrade in battery life, from 6 to 9 battery cells.

Until the end of the year, Dell is taking an additional $20 off, and throwing in free shipping. You can actually get this computer for $20 less than what I paid! Here's the link to what it looks like:

http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/xps-17?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=corp&~lt=popup

Bruce Ivins, maybe a creep, but the anthrax killer?

2011-05-31T11:00:00.000-07:00

So the world hasn't ended yet, despite the bold and confident prediction of my former employer Harold Camping. On May 23rd, Harold declared that Judgment Day did occur, but only spiritually, and revised his doomsday prediction, moving it up to October 21. Harold's rationale was that sometimes God doesn't open our eyes and reveal everything to us, and it was good that the prediction was made, even if it didn't happen, because now the whole world knows about Judgment Day, and the Word of God. As I observed Harold on his Open Forum television program in the days leading up to May 21, and on May 23 and days after, I couldn't help but notice the resemblance between Harold Camping and the kind of person being spoken of in Man and superman; a comedy and a philosophy (1903) by George Bernard Shaw:

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world : the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

Sometimes, a person can be so fixated on the conclusion that s/he wants, that the possibility of a mistake, an error, or even reasonable doubt, cannot be tolerated. If the person represents not just himself, but is the face of an institution, sometimes the expense, wholesale investment, and senselessness of a wasted effort is magnified. I am reminded of an interview on Slate's The Wrong Stuff on what it's like trying to free people who have been wrongly convicted of crimes:

You become more certain over time; that's just the way the mind works. With the passage of time, your story becomes your reality... They're so convinced that they are right that they feel exempt from behaving right... There's still a whole category of prosecutors and detectives who say, "No, I'm sure [the guy I convicted] is guilty. I can't tell you how, I can't give you a logical explanation, but he's guilty." What's scary is that these people are part of a system that's predicated on logic and reasoning to see that justice is done. Yet they will ignore all logic and reason to protect their egos and their psyches. And it requires a complete disconnect, too, because these guys rely on DNA to convict bad guys all the time. But when the DNA works against them, they say something must have gone wrong.
...based on my own experience, about half the time police and prosecutors bury their heads in the sand and insist that they were right no matter what the evidence says.
If a prosecutor or a detective is totally unable to admit they're wrong in one case, what that tells you is that they will be making dozens and dozens more erroneous decisions, because they're not allowing new information to affect their views... -- Peter Neufeld

I think the best way to gauge whether the person you're dealing with is being unreasonable is to ask him if there's anything you or anyone can say or do that will make him change his mind. If he deflects, doesn't answer, or says 'no', then you have someone who probably cannot be swayed (least of all by reality).

A couple of days ago, an excerpt was published in the Los Angeles Times, written by LA Times reporter David Willman. From the soon-to-be-published The Mirage Man, the excerpt reads like a hatchet job on Bruce Ivins, the supposed anthrax killer who struck shortly after 9/11 (when it really did seem like the world was going to end), painting a picture of the man as a major creep who was obsessed with the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority. With no citations or references to sources, the excerpt describes in vivid detail how the man broke into KKG sorority houses in North Carolina and West Virginia and stole a cipher used to decode secret rituals, and a book of rituals used by the young women, respectively. But a McClatchy News article, published 20 days before the LA Times excerpt, painted an entirely different picture of the whole story:

In ending the inquiry last year, the Justice Department said that a genetic fingerprint had pointed investigators to Ivins' lab, and gumshoe investigative techniques enabled them to compile considerable circumstantial evidence that demonstrated his guilt.

Among these proofs, prosecutors cited Ivins' alleged attempt to steer investigators away from a flask of anthrax in his lab that genetically matched the mailed powder — anthrax that had been shared with other researchers. They also noted his anger over a looming congressional cut in funds for his research on a new anthrax vaccine.

However, the FBI never found hard evidence that Ivins produced the anthrax or that he scrawled threatening letters seemingly meant to resemble those of Islamic terrorists. Or that he secretly took late-night drives to Princeton, N.J., to mail them.

The FBI declared Ivins the killer soon after paying $5.8 million to settle a suit filed by another former USAMRIID researcher, Steven Hatfill, whom the agency mistakenly had targeted earlier in its investigation.

While there is certainly circumstantial evidence that the FBI was correct in trying to pin the crime on Bruce Ivins, my fear is that there was too much at stake, especially after the FBI mistakenly focused on Hatfill; once Ivins committed suicide, there was a need for everyone at the Bureau to unify and say with one voice that Ivins was the guilty party, rather than deal with the possibility that they were responsible for a second tragedy.

Thanks to Art Diamond for pointing me to the source for the Shaw quote.

The Gays and The End of the World

2011-05-17T15:43:00.000-07:00

My former employer Harold Camping, a UC Berkeley graduate in civil engineering who sold his construction business and retired early so he could devote his life to studying the Bible and sharing the gospel, is predicting the world will end on May 21, 2011. Unlike many religious leaders who preach a prosperity gospel or claim that Jesus would have wanted us to invade Iraq, two messages that I believe are contrary to what Jesus taught, Harold, a lay preacher who lacks any formal training in theology and is proud of that fact, lives humbly, does not take a salary, drives the same brown pickup truck he's driven for many years, and usually tries to distance his religious non-profit, Family Radio, from political questions like what candidates and issues you should support and vote for. One thing he's done recently, though, that worries me a bit, is Harold has started to claim that the gay rights movement, and social acknowledgement of homosexuality in human society, is a sign that the world is becoming the embodiment of wickedness, and since God cannot stand the sight of uncleanliness, He will soon destroy us all, much like wiping dirt off the floor. Now, I no longer work for Harold, so I no longer have a vested interest in obeying the political instinct we all have of trying to please the man who signs our paychecks, but you have to give the guy credit for being bold enough to stake his reputation on something he insists, very authoritatively, "absolutely will happen"; this new behavior of his, where Harold says that the increasing political and social acceptance of homosexuals openly serving in the military and as religious leaders somehow is a sign that the world will end soon, is troubling to me, and reeks of desperation:

It's almost as if Harold is grabbing at straws, trying to pander to an ugly theme in popular religion of bigotry, in an effort to rally the troops, who would otherwise question why none of the other foretold signs of judgment day and world destruction are literally happening, such as the sun and the moon turning dark, and the stars falling from the sky.

Harold Camping's moment of truth will come in a few days, no matter what. Either the end of the world will ruin your Saturday, May 21st, at 6pm standard time, or there will be no great earthquakes, nor bodies of true believers flying out of their graves to meet up with Jesus Christ in Heaven. If it's all business as usual, then Harold will have some explaining to do.

The matter of Armageddon Day aside, when I was last there, Family Stations Incorporated was taking in approximately $15 million in donations every year. If you ever wanted to start your own religion, here's what the Economist has to say:

FANCY founding a religion? Keen to reform a flagging faith? Here a few tips on how to attract and retain followers, thus ensuring that your gospel spreads far and wide, affording spiritual solace to as many souls as possible.

At the outset, you must realise that success is unlikely if you go wholly against the grain of human nature. Granted, religion is all about forging the perfect man, or at least ensuring that, as far as possible, he lives up to divine expectations. But preternatural power has forged man in such a way that he will swallow some of your ideas about how to achieve this more easily than others.
...
As in the case of states, your principal concern is to encourage co-operation among your flock. In the long run, groups that co-operate more have an advantage over those whose members are less willing to do so. This also means limiting the number of actual and potential shirkers. People, it seems, are naturally inclined to do this anyway, but you can egg them on with a few simple tricks.

First, you are better off plumping for a personal god, rather than some sort of indeterminate life force. Research shows that people who profess a belief in such a deity judge moral transgressions more harshly, which in turn tends to make them more willing to abide by the rules, and expend resources on enforcing them. This may be down to a conviction that they are being incessantly watched over by an attentive minder, who tallies their contributions (or lack thereof) and rewards (or punishments) in a cosmic ledger. Speaking of which, incorporating the idea of just deserts is a fine plan, too. Apparently, people are born with an intuition to that effect. Just remember to keep the misfortunes visited on wrongdoers commensurate with their misdeeds. Otherwise people will think it unfair and won't buy it. No fire and brimstone for littering, and suchlike.
...

Green Travel: Bring a Folding Bicycle on an Airplane

2011-04-30T13:44:00.000-07:00

I was in Los Angeles last week to attend an event; a friend from high school had gotten married, and his wife was having a baby shower. Shortly after I received the invitation, the best deal I could find was 3 weeks away, and so I booked the first flight leaving Oakland on a Tuesday morning, and the last flight coming back to Oakland the following week on a Wednesday night. My sister, who lives in LA, being a mother of an almost 4-year-old girl, hadn't been getting much sleep, and she balked at picking me up when my plane arrived at Burbank airport at 7:15 am. I decided that, when I arrived at my destination airport, I was not going to jump into a rented car, but get on my bike and, depending on the grace and mercy of the public transit system, ride to where I needed to go. The last time I was in Los Angeles was 4 years ago, for my sister's own baby shower, and I had a rental car for a week; by the time I came back to the Bay Area, I had gained 10 pounds, due to increased caloric intake and lack of physical activity. This time I was going to save money and get some more exercise. Here's what I did to become a green traveler (or, a green traveller, as they say in the United Kingdom):

What you will need:

tape measure
folding bike
bicycle lock
clear plastic garbage bag
bungee cord, also known as a shock cord

Confirm your airline's baggage policy. I was allowed to check-in two bags for free, in accordance with the Southwest Airlines checked bags policy:
Weight and Size Allowance:
Maximum weight is 50 pounds and maximum size is 62 inches (length + width + height) per checked piece of luggage. ...[O]verweight items from 50 to 100 pounds and oversized items in excess of 62 inches but not more than 80 inches (e.g.; surfboards, bicycles, vaulting poles) will be accepted for a charge of $50 per item.
If you don't want to be forced to pay $50 at the ticket counter, use measuring tape and a scale to make sure your bicycle conforms to the size and weight limitations. Besides your folding bike, I recommend you bring a backpack as your other bag, because your folding bike's wheels are smaller than your standard bicycle, and you don't want to make your ride even more unstable by having a heavy bag slung around your neck, hanging off one side, making your bicycle ride unpleasant and unsafe.

If your bicycle lock is a U-lock, it's likely the TSA agent may consider that it can be used as a weapon, so don't try to bring it onto the airplane cabin in your carry-on; rather, lock your U-lock to your bicycle during the check-in.

Pack light. Erykah Badu, in her famous "Bag Lady", exhorts, "Bag Lady, you're going to miss your bus. You can't hurry up, cause you got too much stuff."

Do not be the bag lady, who would surely hurt her back, draggin' all her bags like that! Besides my folding bike, I had one backpack, into which I put my laptop computer, a change of underwear and an extra pair of shorts, an extra 16-inch inner-tube, and hard plastic steel-core tire levers, in case I got a flat tire. I got a lot of my tips for how to pack light from this article.

I decided to enclose my bike in a plastic bag in an effort to conform to Southwest's Sports Equipment Policy:
Non-motorized Bicycles, including Bike Friday and Co-Pilot, will be accepted in substitution of a free piece of checked baggage at no additional charge provided the bicycle is properly packaged and the box containing the bicycle fits within the 62-inch sizing limit and weighs 50 lbs or less... Bicycles packaged in a cardboard box or soft-sided case will be transported as a conditionally accepted item.
"Conditionally accepted" means Southwest assumes no liability for damage sustained during transport. I decided on a see-through transparent bag because I imagine the airport baggage handlers will be a bit more careful if they are able to see that it's a bicycle they are handling, than if the bicycle was in a canvas bag or hard-sided case. Once your bike is unfolded at your destination airport, you can easily store the plastic bag in your backpack.

You will also want to bring a spare inner tube that is in your folding bike's tire size, and tire levers, in case you get a flat tire. Los Angeles has a lot of gas stations, bike shops, and people with bicycles and tire pumps in their garages, where you can use a pump if need be, but if you will not be in a densely populated area, you may also want to bring along a bike pump. By the way, for those of you concerned with how the change in air pressure during a flight may or may not affect the compressed air in your bicycle tires: before I began my voyage, I had my tires inflated beyond the recommended upper limit, and at both of my destination airports, when I received my bike, there was never any problem with my tires or inner tubes.

My 2005 Dahon Presto Lite. This model is no longer available for retail sale. I bought mine second-hand. It came without mud guards.

Folded size, without right pedal, is 30 x 20 x 11, for a total of 61 linear inches. The right pedal is easily removable. Folded size, with right pedal, is 30 x 20 x 17, for a total of 67 linear inches. Weight is about 18 pounds.

Folded bike with U-lock, locked to frame.

Folded bike with U-lock, locked to frame, covered by clear plastic garbage bag, and secured with bungee cord.

Did you ever have any problems, or unexpected events or hiccups, with checking-in your bike at the airport?
On my recent flight, during both check-ins, with my removable right pedal affixed, neither Southwest ticket counter agent made an issue of the extra few linear inches or, for that matter, ever took out a measuring tape. There was one incident where, during my first check-in, a Southwest ticket counter agent said she would have to charge me $50 to transport a bicycle. However, I pointed out that, on their website, the Southwest policy is that bikes under the size and weight limit count as checked-in baggage and are not subject to a fee. The agent looked up the policy, gave my folding bike a once-over, looked at the bike's weight, and said it was ok.

If you're looking to buy a folding bike, I recommend:

http://foldingcyclist.com/folding-bike-buyers-guide.html

though one drawback is the guide doesn't have folded-size dimensions. If you have the time to look for a second-hand, well-maintained bike for a good price, I recommend Craigslist, which is how I found mine.

Conceivably, you could also bring a folding bike with you on a boat cruise, or sight-seeing in an RV or tour bus. So now you have another option as a green tourist. Next time you travel, don't rent a car; bring a bicycle.

How to Pack Light, for Men and Women

2011-04-29T16:40:00.000-07:00

In preparation for a recent trip to Los Angeles, I read up on some tips on how to travel smart and avoid baggage fees. Debra Saunders advises people to pack heavy, but this part of her column I definitely agree with:

European travel guru Rick Steves has recommended that, regardless of the length of a trip, that the savvy male tourist pack only three pairs of socks and underwear, a pair of shorts, two short-sleeved shirts, a long-sleeved shirt, a sweater, a windbreaker and one pair of shoes. On his Web site he tells vacationers they should fit everything they are taking into one "carry-on size bag."

A tip for couples traveling with a small child or children, from John Flinn:

"But you can't pack light if you're traveling with small children," protested several readers. Apparently no one told Andy Sedik of South San Francisco: "My wife and I just returned from a two-week trip to Eastern Europe with our 14-month-old daughter using only two carry-ons, an umbrella stroller and a diaper bag. Not only is it possible, it makes life on the road so much easier. Once you travel light, you never go back."

Tips for men from John Flinn (Note the sidebar, "The Art of Packing", which covers 'Packing for Cruises' and 'What Women Want'):

This is everything I pack for a typical three-week trip to Europe or South America, riding trains and buses and splitting my time between town and country. It all fits easily into a carry-on bag, with room left over for a bottle of Côtes du Rhône, a baguette and a few souvenirs.

Tips for women from Eliza Hussman:

I had carried around heavy suitcases for years, mostly because I always seemed to get a bad case of the "what ifs" while packing: "What if someone spills something on my dress and I need a backup?" or "What if it stops raining while I'm there and I need a swimsuit - or three?" or the dreaded "What if those sandals don't look as cute with that dress as I'd thought and my friend asks me if I brought a different pair?"

Tips for women from Christine Delsol

Two pairs of shoes is the maximum: Good walking shoes that will hold up for eight or 10 hours at a stretch, and a lighter pair -- comfortable sandals that can go with skirts for more formal outings in hot climates, or perhaps stylish flats in cooler weather.
A light, longish skirt is the best staple for hot climates. Unlike shorts, skirts can dress up or down, they are as welcome in restaurants and cathedrals as at the beach, they ward off sunburn and require little space. Take several.

How to use Perl, PHP, Python, R, and Ruby to find Euclidean distance between two points

2011-03-25T21:33:00.000-07:00

According to Wikipedia:

In the Euclidean plane, if p = (p1, p2) and q = (q1, q2) then the distance is given by:

Assuming you are using the Cartesian coordinate system, your two coordinates must both be of length n, where n can be any non-zero positive integer. So if the two points in question, p and q, each had 3 values:

p = (p₁, p₂, p₃), q = (q₁, q₂, q₃)

Then n would equal 3, and the distance formula would be:

The hardest part for me, when putting this all together, was figuring out, for each scripting language, how to iterate over, i.e., step through, the respective elements of both coordinates, simultaneously:

Perl 5 (5.12.2):

use List::Util qw(sum);
use List::MoreUtils qw{ any pairwise };

sub get_distance_between
{
  if (scalar(@_) != 2)
  {
    die "You must supply 2, and only 2, coordinates, no more, no less.  Stopped";
  }

  my $a_ref = shift;
  my $b_ref = shift;

  if (@$a_ref != @$b_ref)
  {
    die "Coordinates do not have the same number of elements, stopped";
  }
  else
  {
    @x = pairwise { ($a - $b)**2 } @a, @b;
    return sqrt(sum(@x));
  }
}

# Usage:
@a = (1008, 2243, 976), @b = (1005, 2249, 974);
$ad = get_distance_between(\@a, \@b);
print "\$ad == $ad";

PHP 5.3.6:

function subtract_and_square($n, $m)
{
  return(pow($n - $m, 2));
}

function find_distance_between($p, $q)
{
  $numargs = func_num_args();
  if ($numargs != 2)
  {
    die("You must supply 2, and only 2, coordinates, no more, no less.\n");
  }
  else if (sizeof($p) != sizeof($q))
  {
    die("Coordinates do not have the same number of elements.\n");
  }
  else
  {
    $c = array_map("subtract_and_square", $p, $q);
    return pow(array_sum($c), .5);
  }
}

Python 2 (2.5.4):

def get_distance_between(p, q):
  if len(p) != len(q):
    raise Exception
  else:
    sum = 0
    for pval, qval in zip(p, q):
      sum += (pval - qval)**2
  return sum**(.5)

R (2.12.1):

get_distance_between = function(p, q)
{
  if (length(p) != length(q))
  { 
    stop("\nCoordinates do not have the same number of elements.") 
  }
  else
  {
    element_products = mapply(function(a,b) (a - b)**2, p, q)
    sqrt(sum(element_products))
  }
}

Ruby 1.9.2:

require 'generator'

def get_distance_between(p, q)
  if p.length != q.length
    raise Exception
  else
    sum = 0
    syen = SyncEnumerator.new(p, q)
    for pval, qval in syen
      sum += (pval - qval)**2
    end
  end
  return Math.sqrt(sum)
end

In the Perl example, thanks to Miller Hall and Jon Bjornstad for their review and suggestions on how to improve my Perl code to make it more readable.
In the R example, thanks to Spencer Graves and Nicholas Lewin-Koh for pointing me to mapply and plyr (which I did not have time to research and use).

Update: On October 31, 2011, my friend Nikita Borisov, assistant professor in Computer Science, offered the following suggestion on facebook re the R and Python code:

This person clearly hasn't used these languages very much. In R, you can say sqrt(sum((p-q)**2)). Similarly, in Python you can write sqrt(sum([(x-y)**2 for (x,y) in zip(p,q)]))

Thanks, Nikita!

The 3 Most Important Things a Programmer Must Know

2011-03-21T23:41:00.000-07:00

Write code, run code, fix code is essentially what a programmer does, said the speaker at an intriguing talk I recently attended, hosted by the Perl Mongers group. Zed Shaw is the author of Learning Python the Hard Way and in review, I have to agree with this user-generated comment:

Very knowledgeable not just with Python, but he has a deep understanding of programming. He inspired me to be a better thinker and programmer.

I was interested in this talk because Zed Shaw made a name for himself by coding the Mongrel web server, as well as Mongrel2, both of which were and are integral parts of Ruby on Rails. I looked forward to the rather unique confluence of a core Ruby on Rails programmer giving a talk about Python at a Perl meetup. I had a prior discussion with a female attendee at a Ruby on Rails Workshop for Women on why religious wars in technology were so prevalent; some people get worked-up over a particular choice of scripting language (Perl vs Python vs Ruby) or text editor, and soon flame wars ensue on the internet about which technology is best. Rodney King asked us after the Los Angeles riots, and Zed is living proof that we can all get along, at least when it comes to scripting languages.

Zed took a year off to learn jazz guitar. He realized, when learning music, you have the concept of a trainer, who tells you to play individual chords multiple times until you get better at it. Then the trainer tells you to play another chord, and then play a song in both chords, in a progression, until you have some experience under your belt. Whenever you want to learn something difficult, it's hard to explain the ideas unless you have some experience under your belt. Using this same principle, Zed decided to introduce the beginner to simple coding exercises, until you get better at writing computer programs, and then he slowly introduces the concepts to you.

The fact that Zed was able to use an analogy from music learning in explaining hard-to-grasp concepts in computer programming makes his experience valuable and his book a must-read for me. Zed strikes me as hard-working, dedicated to his craft, and he knows something about how to get beginner programmers engaged in a new, complex, but rewarding venture. One last thing he said that really hit home for me: Zed recommends learning parsing and lexing, the two most important things, other than algorithms, that a programmer must know. Right now, Zed is doing C and Lua, and he mentioned software called Corona that enables the Lua programmer to write iPhone games.

Reality Television's 'Cheaters' is Fake

2011-02-28T18:11:00.000-08:00

I'm someone who has lived in Oakland for about 3.5 years now. I love what I do everyday. I like hanging out with my friends, and maybe having a few drinks on the weekend. That's it really. Well, I'll also admit to enjoying so-called "reality" television, which sometimes caters to the dark human desire to live out revenge fantasies. Most anyone who's been jilted, especially in love, has dreamed of getting even. It's why shows like Cheaters are so readily watched: you locate your significant other and have them followed by private investigators, who covertly record their rendezvous. Then you surround the target with a television crew of 15-20, along with a vocal leading man who takes charge for you and orchestrates the ambush of the person you feel has hurt you. You overcome the protestations of your target with a video recording of the infidelity, embarrass the heck out of that denying, unfaithful, lying liar, and, if the planets are aligned correctly, a shoving match or physical altercation may ensue. As I grew accustomed to watching the show, I realized the real payoff was the thrill of not knowing what would happen next, and I'll confess to craning my neck, out of morbid curiosity, to see if the confrontation would turn violent, much like you might expect fisticuffs or a brawl at a hockey game, crashes at a race-car event, or some other dramatic development of extreme behavior we humans can all process and talk about the next day.

The host of Cheaters who leads the charge to surprise your cheating lover, and plead your case, was once Tommy Habeeb (stage name Tommy Grand), but, since 2002, it's been Joey Greco. Joey was present during some episodes I still remember, such as the one where Steve French, caught, spooked, cornered and insulted, kicked in a car's passenger window, and then decked his accusatory girlfriend Rene Reardon in the face, or the episode where entrepreneur Aaron Rodriguez, in a relationship with a subordinate female employee, discovers he had kissed his girlfriend Emily Cruz's mouth, just after she had performed a sex act on her male coworker, Aaron's subordinate employee, right under his nose. Earlier, we saw the subordinate male urinate in the office coffee; we then see the man-being-cheated-on, Aaron, drink the very same coffee laced with urine. Let's not forget the explosive confrontation that interrupted Dalia Santiago's outdoor marriage ceremony, as it slowly dawns on the bride in her wedding dress that the man she was about to marry had been carrying on with Jamie Isaacs and had been recorded picking up a one-night stand at a saloon:
Good times, good times... Yet, come to find we the Cheaters audience may all have been cheated on, by Cheaters! According to the Houston Press:

Actors don't need to be tailed by Gomez for weeks on end. They don't present security risks, and they don't need counseling. They also tend to be younger and better looking than real cheaters, who often will not consent to allow the show to air their faces.

The bogus cheaters interviewed for this story say they've never heard of Goldstein and that Gomez stressed to them never to reveal to Grand or the camera crew that they were acting.

One of the actors, Michelle, met Gomez last fall. "What he told me was that some of the episodes are real, but...a lot of people didn't want to be on the show once they'd been busted, so they would do these ringer episodes to supplement the show," says Michelle, who asked not to be identified by her last name.

If the reports are true, it's all very troubling, for it means Bobby Goldstein was trying to hide information from his business partner, Tommy Habeeb. I think it's telling that when the Houston Press report first came out in 2002, alleging falsehood on the part of Cheaters, Tommy Habeeb and Bobby Goldstein parted ways shortly after because Tommy had "differences with the production company"; I can even imagine the confrontation that occurred between Habeeb and Goldstein, with Tommy demanding that Bobby be straight with him, then Tommy and Bobby have their falling out, and Tommy leaves the company. Two reports from Inside Edition in 2009 seem to indicate that the infamous program where Tommy's replacement Joey Greco got stabbed was also staged, and when Inside Edition sets upon the man himself, rolling up on and presenting to this frequent accuser apparent evidence that seems to support the accusations of fakery and cheating, Joey Greco would neither confirm or deny any specific allegations, such as whether the blood was fake.

I would prefer not to believe these revelations, as I then would need to accept that some of my favorite Cheaters episodes are no more real than professional wrestling. If Cheaters is scripted, then this means that the voyeuristic thrill we get in watching people being secretly captured on camera is based on a false premise, and that it is we, the viewers, who are being had, led on by actors, who knew they were on camera, playing a role. But how can a reality television program broadcast fiction and claim that it's the truth? The same Houston Press article reports:

According to a Federal Communications Commission spokesman, there's no law or regulation against presenting acted-out scenarios as reality on television.

In response to the quiz show scandals of the 1950s, when impropriety was uncovered in rigged game shows, Congress did pass a law, in 1960, amending the Communications Act of 1934, and preventing anyone from fixing quiz shows. Well, apparently, it's not illegal to portray scripted shows as "actual true stories filmed live", even as said program, to this day, claims nothing is staged and every broadcast episode starts out with language reiterating the show is not fake. So, on television at least, you can call it non-fiction and sell it as non-fiction, even if, the truth is, Cheaters is fiction.

The Almost Perfect, Guilt-Free, Shrimp to Eat

2011-02-12T15:56:00.000-08:00

Pandalus platyceros. Spot Prawns range all along the Pacific coast, but mostly in the North Pacific.

Courtesy of The Atlantic:

But one shrimp has it all: the spot prawn caught off the coast of British Columbia. The species is big, luscious, and caught in a completely sustainable manner. Its only drawback is that Canadians have recently awakened to these virtues, and devour most of the catch before it can be exported...Instead of dragging nets, spot-prawn fishermen use round, washtub-sized traps that operate on the same principle as lobster pots—prawns are lured in by containers of fishmeal and are unable to get out.

I remembered these live shrimp being offered for sale at New Sang Chong Market in Oakland Chinatown, so I went this morning and took some pictures:

Why You Should Learn Black English

2011-01-23T22:12:00.000-08:00

Many of my friends are new parents now, married, in long-term careers, and looking to buy their second homes. As for me, I'm on my last unemployment extension, with no job in sight, have been single for decades, and I mutter to myself on the street like a crazy man. And I don't have a cellphone. What I do have, though, is the gift of gab, and I find myself befriending homeless people, just for the conversation. We humans need the company of other human beings, which is why it's important for me that I know the language of the street. What some call black English, ebonics, African American vernacular (Harry Reid racily termed it "negro dialect", before he had to apologize for the trouble he got in) is remarkably the same almost anywhere you go. In a pinch, black English helps me establish rapport and connect with everyday people I might meet, who remain important sources of information. This is true if the person you're looking at is starting out (or starting over) at the bottom, and may lack the peace-of-mind and sophistication we associate with the highly-educated, wealthy and the wise. Once you're out on the street, whether we like it or not, black English intrudes on our lives, sometimes unexpectedly. For instance, the distinguished Alfred Mann, a man I highly respect, had to do a double-take, at 2:05:Now, I'm not black, and you may not be, but I'm not white, either. There is a popular concept that really popular entertainers like Eminem, and Elvis, or comics like Lenny Bruce, either stole the language of black people or their language was stolen from black people:I think this notion is mistaken. By the same logic, since this piece was composed using the King's English, I must have stolen English from white people. I think an argument can be made that what is known on Wikipedia as African American vernacular English borrows heavily, if not outright steals, from the language of low-class white people from the South, many perhaps dirt-poor indentured servants.

If speaking black English is a crime, then may God forgive me. And now that America has a black president, it's high time Americans learn about black English. Barack Obama intuitively knows that you have to be likeable with regular people if you want to get things done. Like the President, I come from an elite school, but it took me 30 years of going to and from this earth, and up and down it, before I learned that I am no more elite than the guy digging through the trash for recyclable bottles and cans. If, by definition, most people are of average measure, wouldn't it be important to know how most people feel and live ? I think learning about black English, and learning how to pull off speaking it convincingly, is part of learning how to be ordinary, or, at least, appearing to be. These men have the right idea:

Top 5 Best Covers or Musical Examples of White People Speaking Black English

Dynamite Hack - Boyz in the Hood

The Gourds - Gin & Juice

Jonathan Coulton - Baby Got Back

Mickey Avalon - Waiting to Die

Todd Rundgren - Bang on the Ukulele Daily

Honorable mentions should go to songs like Crazy Town - Only When I'm Drunk, which is a perfectly good rock band cover, but doesn't have that quirky cuteness that transforms the covers in my Top 5 into softened, almost folksy, American ballads that, despite their white-washed veneers, remain subversive at their heart. You may find yourself humming these seemingly harmless tunes without a second thought, such as the easy-listening, elevator music paean to the female derriere (complete with a singular quack of a duck) by Jonathan Coulton, or the quick ditty at the end of Dynamite Hack's track, referencing moonlight howls by an addict who has acquired a large amount of narcotic:

Punk ass tripping in the dead of night.
Homie scored a key, he's gonna fly.
Punk ass, fly

along with the mutterings of the fiend in question: "They're ripping off everybody man, they're ripping off everybody", or the understated banjo-mandolin bluegrass cover, by The Gourds, of the 'G' Funk classic on the joys of consuming hard liquor and cannabis, whilst operating a motor vehicle on the streets of Los Angeles.

What are your favorite examples of white people speaking black English ?

Año Nuevo Felicidad

2011-01-01T16:45:00.000-08:00

My first new year in the Fruitvale, an extremely noisy, raucous, firecracker and gunfire peppered midnight. Oh, and I found a bullet on my driveway this morning:

Spanish Lesson 2, or Leccion de Español Dos

2010-12-27T19:26:00.001-08:00

Thanks to a friendly USPS female employee who works at my local post office, I found out that locos gatos potones means crazy big-footed cat:

sick fearless bastard
Originally uploaded by Crazy Ivory

Rails3: Migrating from MySQL to PostgreSQL

2010-11-01T16:12:00.000-07:00

I encountered an error even though I had successfully run:

gem install pg

I googled:

install postgresql rails windows "no such file to load -- pg"

and Peter Mac helped me out. In your Rails 3 Gemfile, make the following change:

#  gem 'mysql'
  gem 'pg', :require => 'pg'

California Academy of Sciences, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco

2010-08-19T13:06:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I finally had the chance to visit the California Academy of Sciences, motivated by my desire to see the Living Roof. They say if you live near a landmark, you tend to not make an effort to see it, and I believe that's what happened with me. Luckily, a friend from Belgium was in town, and I had the idea to show him and his wife the facility; unfortunately, plans fell through, but I decided to go alone. Every third Wednesday is Free Day. My advice: get in line as early as you can. I got in line at 8:40am, and the line was already fairly long. Doors open at 9:30am, and close at 5pm. By the time I left, at 2:45pm. the line was still extremely long, and people at the front had been waiting for 50 minutes.

http://www.calacademy.org/visit/

Photos are courtesy of SharpShooters.

Outside the entrance, doing my best scuba diver impression

Outside the "Extreme Mammals" exhibit, doing my best wooly mammoth impression (we're all showing our teeth)

Are you a sociopath, or just an extreme narcissist ?

2010-06-22T00:22:00.000-07:00

Jenna meets a paramedic. He thinks she's incredible, and they seem perfect for each other. He leaves before they can plan to meet later, and now, at her wit's end, Jenna tells her coworker Pete the story. This reminds Pete of a book he once read, a question psychiatrists ask in order to ascertain whether a person is a sociopath:

Recently, a friend recommended a book, The Sociopath Next Door, which he says will keep you up at night, thinking how 1 out of every 25 people you meet would just as soon kill you as tell you to get out of the way. A fellow 30 Rock fan said on his blog:

...the basic principle of sociopaths viewing others as tools instead of people is entirely correct. Sociopathy is more than just a lack of emotion, they literally don’t connect to people the way human beings are supposed to.

Reference: http://www.fearfulsymmetry.net/?p=179

All this talk of sociopathy (psychopathy is the outdated term) makes me wonder whether sociopath is the latest incarnation of witch, Communist, racist, or even terrorist. Who in their right mind, when accused of such a despicable thing, even labeled as such by an expert or authority, can figure out what to do or say to disprove it ?

Neon Signs on Korean Storefront from Nabbeun namja (2001)

2010-06-11T20:33:00.000-07:00

After the Bad Guy gets beat up by the soldiers, he sees the girl's boyfriend meet up with the girl, and the Bad Guy covertly follows them around on their date. Towards the end of the evening, the boyfriend tries to lead the girl to a Korean storefront, but she hesitates, then refuses, and kicks her boyfriend in the leg before running off. The Korean storefront had neon signs in front. What do the neon signs say ?

**UPDATE**
This question has been answered by sonofberzerk on imdb:

It says "motel."
It's a love motel.
They're all over Seoul for couples who want to have sex, but can't get privacy at home because of living with parents or they're having affairs or something like that.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0307213/board/nest/164747758

In Memoriam: Alicia Scott Lee, 17, of Mill Valley, California

2010-03-21T23:55:00.000-07:00

My heart goes out to Alicia's family. The photograph being referred to in the last sentence of the article is here:

[Alicia] was the subject of a published photograph herself recently, when a Chronicle photographer captured her examining a puddle at Crissy Field after a rainstorm in January.

The photo, which she adopted as her Facebook profile picture, shows her traipsing ankle-deep through the water, studying the ripples, camera around her neck.

Reference:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/03/21/MNB41CJAEO.DTL&tsp=1

The Influence of the Stars

2009-12-21T17:46:00.000-08:00

Right around the time I found out Brittany Murphy died yesterday, I finished reading Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer. In an eye-opening piece on the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic (which killed more humans faster than any other disease, or any other anything, has before or since), the author goes into the history behind the word 'influenza':

Much like the virus it names, the word influenza comes to us by way of a mutation. The word itself was first used in Italian and originally referred to the influence of the stars - that is, astral or occult influences that would have been felt by many people at once. By the 16th century, though, the word has begun mixing and blending with the meanings of other words and come to refer to epidemic and pandemic flues that simultaneously strike multiple communities (as if the result of some malevolent will).

Reference: page 13 in Eating Animals.

Much like an Italian villager in the 1500s, I feel like the universe is conspiring against me, trying to prevent me from discovering more about three Asian American actresses in a movie with Brittany. I searched IMDB, on Google, and even posted a question on Yahoo Answers, all to no avail. So I ask you, Gentle Reader, what are the names of the actresses who portrayed Janet Hong and 2 other unnamed Asian female characters in the movie Clueless (1995) ?

how to import data into R and SAS

2009-09-23T17:25:00.000-07:00

What is bio-statistics and how does it relate to me ? I am often asked this question, and now I think I may have an answer. With the advent of the Internet, we are now in the Age of Information, and when it comes to "statistical data analysis", a rather imposing mouthful, to quote a recent article in the New York Times (and I paraphrase):

In field after field, computing and the Web are creating new realms of data to explore - sensor signals, surveillance tapes, social network chatter, public records and more. We're rapidly entering a world where everything can be monitored and measured, but the big problem is going to be the ability of humans to use, analyze and make sense of the data. Strong correlations of data do not necessarily prove a cause-and-effect link. For example, in the late 1940s, before there was a polio vaccine, public health experts in America noted that polio cases increased in step with the consumption of ice cream and soft drinks. Eliminating such treats was even recommended as part of an anti-polio diet. It turned out that polio outbreaks were most common in the hot months of summer, when people naturally ate more ice cream, showing only an association. Computers do what they are good at, which is trawling these massive data sets for something that is mathematically odd, and humans do what they are good at and explain these anomalies.

To analyze statistical data, we use computer programs as tools to work with such information as biological data. Yet another recent article in the New York Times compares and contrasts two of these computer programs, R and SAS (and again I paraphrase):

SAS Institute (the privately held business software company that specializes in data analysis)'s namesake SAS has been the preferred tool of scholars and corporate managers. But the R Project has also quickly found a following because statisticians, engineers and scientists without computer programming skills find it easy to use.

Reference:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/06/technology/06stats.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/technology/business-computing/07program.html?pagewanted=all

So "Statistical Data Analysis" in the abstract sense is a formidable journey of a thousand miles, but the bite-size journey's first step involves importing a set of data into the tool (I'm assuming you already obtained, installed, and are running the software). For purposes of demonstration, I've created a data set using the actual previous year's receipts I had gathered and saved from each and every time I filled my car's tank with gasoline:

    18AUG2009  6 12.815 37.66
    14JUL2009 12  4.340 11.8
    28MAY2009  6  9.532 24.39
    22APR2009  4  7.348 16.01
    25MAR2009  2  5.509 11.12
    15MAR2009  7  4.230  8.62
    04MAR2009  3 11.989 25.16
    21FEB2009  7 13.298 27.91
    29JAN2009 15 13.989 27.68
    03JAN2009  6 12.620 22.70
    29NOV2008 16 11.239 20.78
    25SEP2008  8 13.929 51.80

Note that on the tail end of the second line, in the last figure, 11.8, I omitted a zero ('0') when I was typing the data in. We'll come back to that later. I decided to record the following four fields for each time I filled the gas tank (all took place at Costco in San Leandro):

date of purchase
pump number
quantity of gas obtained, in gallons
cost of the transaction

In both tools, R and SAS, we will then divide cost by quantity and generate a fifth field, price per gallon.

To import a dataset into your software, you can either read from a file, or copy and paste it in (although for R, you will copy the data set, but you won't actually paste anything). The following scripts have been tested on R versions 2.8.1, 2.9.2 and SAS version 9.1.3 Service Pack 4.

To read data from a file within R and SAS:
1. identify the path to the file containing your data set. Let's say the path is:
```
G:\tpc247\petrol.txt
```
  if you're on Windows, the convention is to delimit or separate folders with a backslash, but this poses a problem for software that is trained to recognize tabs and carriage returns and newlines as '\t', '\r' and '\n' respectively. For reasons of cross-platform compatibility, if there are backslashes in your Windows path, add another one right next to it:
```
G:\\tpc247\\petrol.txt
```
  or replace the backslash with a forward slash:
```
G:/tpc247/petrol.txt
```
2. at the command prompt, input and run the following incantations:
  - R:
```
petrol_01 = read.table("G:/tpc247/petrol.txt", header=FALSE, col.names=c('date', 'pump', 'quantity', 'cost'))
petrol_01$per_gallon <- petrol_01$cost / petrol_01$quantity
petrol_01
```
  - SAS:
```
data petrol_01;
   infile "G:/tpc247/petrol.txt";
   input date_of_sale$ 5-13 pump_number$ 16-17 quantity 20-25 cost 28-32;
   per_gallon = cost / quantity;
   proc print data=petrol_01;
   title 'Unleaded gasoline purchase history for 1 year, San Leandro, California Costco';
run;
```

To read data from computer memory in R and SAS:

R:
1. copy and paste this into R, but don't actually run the incantation yet:
```
petrol_01 = read.table("clipboard", col.names=c('date', 'pump', 'quantity', 'cost'))
```
2. copy your data set, then run the previous incantation
3. run the rest as you normally would:
```
petrol_01$price_per_gallon <- petrol_01$cost / petrol_01$quantity
petrol_01
```

SAS:

data petrol_01;
  input date_of_sale$ 5-13 pump_number$ 15-16 quantity 18-23 cost 25-29;
  per_gallon = cost / quantity;
  datalines;
    18AUG2009  6 12.815 37.66
    14JUL2009 12  4.340 11.8
    28MAY2009  6  9.532 24.39
    22APR2009  4  7.348 16.01
    25MAR2009  2  5.509 11.12
    15MAR2009  7  4.230  8.62
    04MAR2009  3 11.989 25.16
    21FEB2009  7 13.298 27.91
    29JAN2009 15 13.989 27.68
    03JAN2009  6 12.620 22.70
    29NOV2008 16 11.239 20.78
    25SEP2008  8 13.929 51.80
  proc print data=petrol_01;
  title 'Unleaded gasoline purchase history for 1 year, Costco in San Leandro, California';
run;

Coming back to the omitted zero ('0') on the second line in our last figure, 11.8, you might find it amusing how finicky R and SAS are about what they eat. Putting this tutorial together gave me the opportunity to learn some valuable things about the two tools. Just like a toddler can be very picky about the food she feels like taking in her, feeding data to R and SAS and ensuring they digest the data correctly may require some forethought and planning. When importing the dataset into both tools from a file, I noticed that in:

R, if I didn't include in my incantation:
```
header = FALSE
```
I would find the first record in my dataset on file would be missing from my dataset in R
SAS, omitting the zero ('0') when I typed the following into my dataset, for July 14, 2009:
```
14JUL2009 12  4.340 11.8
```
did not pose a problem, as long as I ran a previous incarnation of my SAS script:
```
data petrol_01;
   infile "G:/tpc247/petrol.txt";
   input date_of_sale$ pump_number$ quantity cost;
   per_gallon = cost / quantity;
   proc print data=petrol_01;
run;
```
However, I didn't like the resulting output in SAS. I have developed a preference for a specific way of representing dates that is 9 characters long and in a format that, to my eyes, is more easy to read. However, when I ran the aforementioned script on my data set, my dates were truncated:

It seemed that SAS preferred data in columns to be 8 characters or less, or else it would truncate any value greater than 8 characters. So even though running my SAS script resulted in SAS correctly reading in my data, and there was no problem with my omitting the zero ('0'), I decided to modify the incantations in my script and specify the columns so that the dates in my desired format would not be cut off. When I did this, I noticed that data in SAS was different from the data on file:

As you can see, the information from the fill_the_gas_tank event for 28MAY2009 has disappeared, and the line in my dataset on file:
```
14JUL2009 12  4.340 11.8
```
has been replaced in SAS with
```
14JUL2009 12  4.340 2.00 0.46083
```
I imagine SAS would read 11.8 and then be confused because there were no more numbers and I had told it to expect one more, but I can't explain how SAS computed a cost of 2.00. However, I can explain that the price_per_gallon of around 46 cents is simply derived from dividing 2.00 dollars by 4.34 gallons. The fact that the record for May 28, 2009 is missing leads me to conclude that when reading data from file, and your SAS statement specifies columns, SAS seems to expect values for the entire range of columns you specify. I've confirmed this phenomenon, of a missing record when you specify in your SAS statement the columns where values can be found, manifests itself in SAS only when reading data from file, and not from the copy and paste of data.

Other separators and delimiters

If you have commas separating your data:

    18AUG2009,  6, 12.815, 37.66
    14JUL2009, 12,  4.340, 11.8
    28MAY2009,  6,  9.532, 24.39
    22APR2009,  4,  7.348, 16.01
    25MAR2009,  2,  5.509, 11.12
    15MAR2009,  7,  4.230,  8.62
    04MAR2009,  3, 11.989, 25.16
    21FEB2009,  7, 13.298, 27.91
    29JAN2009, 15, 13.989, 27.68
    03JAN2009,  6, 12.620, 22.70
    29NOV2008, 16, 11.239, 20.78
    25SEP2008,  8, 13.929, 51.80

In:

R: replace read.table() with read.csv()
Reference: http://pbil.univ-lyon1.fr/library/base/html/read.table.htm
SAS: simply update the existing column information to reflect the new column values, or, modify your script to specify the column range for where the values can be

When importing data into R or SAS, you need to look at your dataset, and tell R or SAS exactly what to expect, or your statistical data analysis software may complain.

Reference: http://www.stat.psu.edu/online/program/stat481/01importingI/02importingI_styles.html

how to install a seat leash to prevent theft of saddle & seat post

2009-09-10T13:53:00.000-07:00

Protect your bike from those who may see an opportunity to abscond with the valuable, quick-released perch for your peachy derriere.


a tempting target for a would-be thief	Foiled again! Thanks seat leash

Were anyone to happen upon this scene, look around and see no one watching, the thought might cross your mind to simply loosen the quick release and walk off with someone else's property like it was yours. The Great Recession created lean and mean times, changing the way Americans spend. With such general apprehension and fear, you can find some amazing bargains in the bicycle market right now. I decided to overcome my reluctance to spend and make the big purchase that, as an avid bicyclist, you might be saving for as well. My new second-hand bicycle is a lightly used 1997 Marin Team Titanium that has a quick release binder bolt for adjusting the height of the seat post.

Let's start by getting our vocabulary straight (thanks to Sheldon Brown for helping me put names to bike parts):

saddle (also called bicycle seat)
saddle clamp (also called seat sandwich)
seat leash (also seat security cable)
seatpost or seat post (also called seat mast, seat pillar, or seat pin)
stolen (also pilfered, nicked, or made off with)
Y hex wrench (also 3 way hex wrench. This is a tool, commonly seen in bike repair shops, that has the 3 wrench sizes to fit the socket heads on most modern bicycles. 'Hex wrench' can be used interchangeably with Allen wrench or L wrench)

Reference:
http://www.sheldonbrown.com/gloss_sa-o.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_wrench

To prevent your seatpost and saddle from being stolen, you will need:

I tried numerous times to figure out a way to use a seat leash to secure my bicycle seat and seat-post, but the closest I got was a half-baked solution where I added the end-loop as an ingredient into the seat clamp mechanism, so that the clamp was gripping a combination of saddle rail and seat leash loop. This made for not the best grip on the saddle rails, and, while you were riding, the bicycle seat was prone to moving horizontally back and forth, a rather unpleasant event for any rider. The light bulb flashed atop my head last Sunday, September 6, at around 11:25am, when I stepped into the Missing Link repair shop and spoke with Andy Renteria, who told me it's possible to secure the saddle and seatpost to the bike with a security cable. He used his forefinger and thumb as an analog for the end-point loop of the seat security cable, and wrapped it around the saddle clamp, between the seatpost and the saddle rail. The breakthrough for me was using the saddle clamp itself as the focal point on which to anchor the endpoint loop:

Thanks Andy, at Missing Link repair shop

The seat security cable has end loop which uses the saddle clamp (I call it a seat sandwich) as a focal point. Also in the picture is my beloved Planet Bike Superflash Stealth Tail Rear Light

From start to finish:

use the Y hex wrench, or any appropriate Allen or 'L' wrench, to remove the saddle
insert one loop through the other and wrap your seat security cable around the seat stay, or any focal point that has stops and forms a closed area. Take care when wrapping your security cable around the seat stay that you avoid the part of the frame closest to the tire
with the remainder of the bike security cable in your hands, visualize the saddle clamp itself as the focal point on which to anchor the endpoint loop, and affix said loop on the clamp
now install (or rather, reinstall) the saddle into the seat clamp mechanism, making sure the seat leash end-point loop is between, and stopped by, the seat rail and the seat post.

how to use Google's mail server to send email

2009-08-24T14:15:00.000-07:00

Just a little over 2 years ago I enrolled in a 3 month course from Wesley Chun in Intermediate Python, held in Los Altos Hills on the main campus of Foothill College. I found Wesley's lesson plan to be very challenging, but in my journey as a computer programmer since, one of the nuggets of wisdom I come back to is his lesson on writing internet clients. One small task he prompted us with was a valuable exercise on how to write clients that use the servers run by free email providers (yahoo, aol, hotmail, gmail). First, a little history on the instruction leading up to the in-class assignment... Why, I remember like it was yesterday (swirling, squiggly lines as harp strings are plucked & played by unseen angels should now be occupying your visual and aural landscape):

Internet Client programming
All internet clients are built on top of TCP

We talked about four internet clients: ftp, nntp, pop3, smtp
After covering ftp and nntp, Wesley began with an overview of email, how electronic mail as a system is complex and to operate it requires lots of working pieces:

Message Transport Agent

responsible for moving email, routing, queueing, sending of email.
sendmail, postfix, qmail, exim (unix)
exchange (windows)

Message Transport System

protocol used by MTAs to transfer email host-to-host
Simple Mail Transfer Protocol

Message User Agent

protocol used to get email from servers client-to-host
post office protocols
internet message access protocols

At one time, every desk with a workstation had an email server, but this framework was not scalable. Wesley talked about Python's poplib, and about the SMTP interface in smtplib:

connect
login
send email
quit

then he challenged us to write our own POP and SMTP clients.

As we go to press, the code below, tailored specifically to work with Google's SMTP server, was tested to work on Windows 2000 & Vista, and Debian Linux 5.0 (Lenny):

def use_gmail_smtp(te, tffn, ttfs, subject, msg_body):
  from smtplib import SMTP
  from email.MIMEText import MIMEText
  from email.MIMEMultipart import MIMEMultipart
  SMTP_server = 'smtp.gmail.com'
  username = 'your gmail handle'
  passwd = 'your gmail password'
  msg = MIMEMultipart()
  msg['From'] = tffn
  msg['To'] = ttfs
  msg['Subject'] = subject
  msg.attach(MIMEText(msg_body))
  server = SMTP(SMTP_server, 587)
  server.ehlo() # see note below for Python 2.5 and 2.6 users
  ssl_connection_errors = server.starttls()
  ehlo_connection_errors = server.ehlo()
  server.login(username, passwd)
  server.sendmail('tpc247', (te, ), msg.as_string())
  server.close()

A primer for the acronyms in the use_gmail_smtp() argument list:

te is the target_email, the email address where you want the message to arrive
tffn is the_from_field_name, what you want the user to see in the From: field's name portion. To tffn, Gmail will append <your_gmail_handle@gmail.com>
ttfs is the_to_field_string, what you want the user to see in the To: field, usually in the format:
"Your Name <yourname@company.com>"

A previous incarnation of the code behaved correctly on Python 2.5, but strangely enough, not on Python 2.6, because it called:

...
server.helo()
ssl_connection_errors = server.starttls()
...

resulting in the error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
...
File "", line 11, in use_gmail_smtp
ssl_connection_errors = send_server.starttls()
File "C:\Python26\lib\smtplib.py", line 611, in starttls
...
SMTPException: STARTTLS extension not supported by server.

It's a mystery to me why this error is only on the aforementioned version of Python, but switching the call out was the answer.

I tested my script on 3 different operating systems, each running at least two different versions of Python:

Windows

2000: Python 2.6.1, 2.6.2
Vista: Python 2.5.4, 2.6.1, 2.6.2

Debian Linux 5.0 Lenny: Python 2.5.2, 2.6.1, 2.6.2

Other notes: when installing Python 2.6.1 on Windows Vista, for the first time ever I saw:

Please wait while the installer finishes
determining your disk space requirements

and then the installation would stall and never complete. The workaround is to open a command prompt, and type:

msiexec.exe -package <mypackage.msi> –qr

Reference: http://bloggingabout.net/blogs/jpsmit/archive/2009/08/28/please-wait-while-the-installer-finishes-determining-your-disk-space-requirements-message-drives-me-nuts.aspx

For you who would like to use gmail to send emails that look like they come from your workplace, you can now do so without the "on behalf of" that make you look less than authentic.

Reference: http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/31/gmail-drops-the-dreaded-on-behalf-of-lingo/

Spanish Lesson 1, or Leccion de Español Uno

2009-08-20T17:12:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Tim Goodman, two of my favorite television shows are Breaking Bad, and Dexter. Both take place in cities with a relatively large percentage of native Spanish speakers: Albuquerque, New Mexico and Miami, Florida. As someone who has made a living with associates who grew up speaking a different language, knowing the native tongue of your coworkers can serve as a social lubricant and engender a degree of respect and consideration from your bilingual colleagues when it comes time for a promotion, or, who to invite to that party. I was fortunate to walk into my first Spanish class at a young age, in my preteen years, and with the teacher talking very fast in her foreign language (then immediately in English to translate). From that point forth it was almost a settled matter: two years of Spanish in high school, the community college summer course in conversational Spanish, and two summer trips in Mexico to help erect a church in a small village near the border, were foundational events that made me want to build on that knowledge and spend time figuring out and understanding what exactly people were saying (sometimes about me).

For your benefit and mine, I have transcribed and translated two pieces of content where the characters are talking rapidly in a foreign language:

In this scene, Hank has just been promoted to a Drug Enforcement Administration tri-state task force based in Texas near the Mexican border. The three speaking roles are, in order of speech, Dean Norris as Hank, Todd Terry as the SAC (Special Agent in Charge), and J.D. Garfield as Vanco:

voy atravesar sobre esos bastardos como caca pasando pato, fijate (or fija te).
I'm going to run through those bastards like feces through a duck, you watch.

The two leads in this scene are Jimmy Smits as Miguel Prado (seated) and Michael C. Hall as Dexter Morgan. The shopkeeper Francisco is played by Rudy Quintanilla.

Olvida te, que ese pide lo de siempre
Forget it, that one always orders the same thing.

One might substitute "that one" with "he" but doing that wouldn't tell you the whole story. In context, the shopkeeper understands that Miguel is talking about Dexter, but the shopkeeper also would have known that in Spanish, he is el, but you use ese, meaning that one, when you point to someone, or indicate a person, you don't particularly care for.

Thanks to the lovely and pregnant custodian Sandra Barron, and to mi bibliotecaria preferida Patricia Medina, for the respective transcription and translation. I should also mention David Montgomery for the heads up about Scott Aaronson and the following piece of wisdom:

Why do native speakers of the language you’re studying talk too fast for you to understand them? Because otherwise, they could talk faster and still understand each other.

Reference: http://scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=418

Isabella at Disneyland, post 9/11

2009-08-15T16:14:00.000-07:00

On July 21 and 22, my sister and brother-in-law took a trip to celebrate my beautiful niece turning the terrible 2. At the Magic Kingdom, the little princess explored a potential career as a freedom fighter in the war on terror.

Marine Corps sniper (223rd Battalion, Mickey Mouse company) Monica Wickman-Mroch spots a possible jihadist and instructs Isabella, private-in-training, on the finer points of target shooting:

Breathe in
Breathe out
Aim
Squeeze

The next day, at Dumpling House in Artesia, Monica Wickman-Mroch mulls a run for her assault rifle (not pictured) as my niece, in her dress blues, poses with my sister.

Isabella discovers an affinity for this thing called 'cake'. Seconds before, she performed a visual sweep of the table for any sugar packets, her favorite IED (improvised entertainment device).

Light, fluffy & sweet (don't think Isabella wouldn't hesitate taking your eye out with that fork!), cake is a refreshing change from the relentless battlefield stressors of people in costume, clowns, and tea cup rides.

The life of a patriot can make a freedom fighter hungry for food and company, as evidenced in this photo, seated with (left to right) Monica Wickman-Mroch, brother-in-law Brian Moffat, my dad, step-mom & half-sister, and Walter Mroch.

how to host and serve your audio files on Youtube

2009-08-08T14:20:00.000-07:00

I recently created this video:

Reference: http://tpc247.blogspot.com/2009/07/while-on-my-bike-i-recently-hit-car.html

It's not really a video per se, more of a slide-show with narration. As we go to press, Youtube does not allow uploading of audio files, even if your song, radio program, or interview recording is in mp3, wma or wav file format. If you have aural content you'd like to share with members of the general public, and you'd like to use Youtube, you might as well have hit a dead end. However, there is a way around the restriction so that one of the most popular video sharing services can host and serve your file:

create a video with your audio file content as the soundtrack.

It's easier than it sounds. You'll need uMusic (free open-source software):

If you have a set of photographs or images, and an audio file, you have all you need for uMusic to create a Windows Media Video (wmv) file which you upload to Youtube. However, to prepare your images for public consumption, you may want to give proper attribution to the owners of the photos, or enhance your brand by imprinting a visible watermark that lets users know about you. Also, your audio file may contain commercials, announcements, or something unrelated to what your audience may want to hear, so you'd like to edit your content to remove unwanted blocks of time and extract only what you desire. In either case, you'll need the following free tools, respectively:

How to insert text into an image in Irfanview

First open the image in Irfanview

Select an area, an outline rectangle, wherein your text will sit
Select 'Edit'/'Insert text into selection'
Type in your text
'Choose Font' and determine the proper font face, size and color

The negative about using this method is Irfanview doesn't give you a way to undo the text you insert into the outline rectangle. If you don't like the result, you have to start over at step 1.

If you're new to Audacity, we showed earlier how to use Audacity to edit an audio file

Reference: http://www.pcworld.com/article/136089/top_10_video_sharing_sites.html

how to use Audacity to edit an audio file

2009-08-06T15:38:00.000-07:00

This tutorial covers how to use Audacity 1.3 beta, free open-source software, to edit an audio file. Because of patent restrictions, Audacity does not come with the ability to save your audio file as an MP3. After you install Audacity, make sure you install the free LAME encoder to enable Audacity to export to the MP3 digital audio encoding format.

Reference: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/help/faq?s=install&item=lame-mp3

Our goal is to extract only desired content from a larger audio file and save it all into a smaller audio clip. Let's say we desire audio content that is concerned with a single topic, in this case, who is at fault when a bicyclist collides with a car door:

The soundtrack to the video above is a clip that actually consists of two segments. Each segment consists of multiple smaller pieces. The first of two segments involves a caller named Sunny, the second a caller named Jim. Each segment is comprised of pieces that were first selected, roughly around two predetermined times denoting beginning and end, then copied into a new work area, where they were then sculpted (i.e., extraneous slices removed). Finally the pieces were ready to be set aside, each prepared for the task of joining into a segment. The segments were then merged into a clip, following the same process.

Here we begin with an hour-long audio file recently imported into Audacity:

At this point I should note during this tutorial there will be prodigious use within Audacity of:

the keyboard space bar
the mouse left button

to determine during playback where the desired content starts and stops. Once you load the audio file into Audacity, click anywhere within the waveform of the file, and depress the left-click button to indicate where you want to start play. Press the space bar to start and stop.

To edit the audio content, we first make the rough cuts, then the fine cuts. When you've become well-practiced with Audacity, after this tutorial, you can skip the rough cuts, and use the zoom feature to make fine cuts from, say, an hour-long audio file. For now, since we're just getting acquainted with Audacity, we don't want to overwhelm the new user with zooming in & out and dragging the mouse across multiple views of the audio file.

Let's say that, from what my eyes and ears perceive, the first piece of our Sunny segment is from 11:32 to 16:39. Once you've identified the approximate beginning and stop points, the rough boundaries, train your eyes on the "Selection Start" and "End" boxes next to 'Audio Position':

Note that if you click on the 'Length' radio button, the 'Selection End' box becomes a 'Length of Selection' box. As luck would have it, my mouse landed just 2 seconds before the estimated beginning of our desired content, and we make sure to end our selection on or slightly after what our ears had earlier perceived to be the stop of the track. Now that we have our first rough piece of our desired content segment, our next step involves using the analogy of finding a clean table or workspace to put our pieces of desired content for the purposes of sculpture and assembly into a single segment. Click on File/New and open a brand new Audacity window (for you users of audio editing software Soundforge, this is akin to creating a new stage). Now paste your copied audio content into the empty window. Notice that since the audio content in question is much shorter than an hour, you can easily select the slices you want to throw away, and delete them.

To wrap up this tutorial's editing portion, repeat the following steps for the other pieces of the segments:

Open your audio content file and play it
Note to yourself, or better yet, write down the start and end boundaries of your desired piece of content. Be ready with a pen and piece of paper to record where the start and stop points are.
Click on File/New to create an Audacity window that you have purposed for sculpting and joining pieces of a segment
Select, from the primary Audacity window, the rough piece of desired content; it's ok if you're off by a few seconds. Paste the copied content into the new Audacity window.
Carefully sculpt the rough piece. Remove extraneous slices, such as dead air and fragments of unwanted content.

Once the pieces of audio content have been prepared, our concern is joining them into a larger segment. Go to your secondary Audacity window, and follow these steps from the Audacity website to splice two files together:

Select the second file by clicking on its label (the area around the mute/solo buttons).
Choose “Find Zero Crossings” from the Edit menu.
Choose “Cut” from the Edit menu.
Place the cursor by clicking in the first track, after the end of the audio.
Choose “Paste” from the Edit menu.

Reference: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/help/faq?s=editing&i=join

At some point you might select some content in your audio file, and see now you're not able to cut, copy, paste or delete:

You notice the edit toolbar is not functional and will say "I'm not able to edit" or "Audacity won't let me edit", and ask "is the edit toolbar not enabled ?", "why can't I edit ?", or "how do I enable the edit toolbar ?". All good questions, seeing as how the options are grayed out, so you're unable to edit your audio file. There's a simple solution: make sure the playback is stopped.

Now that you have an audio file containing only what you want and need, you may like to know how to host and serve your audio files on Youtube.

while on my bike, I recently hit a car door

2009-07-28T15:33:00.000-07:00

On a Tuesday morning, May 12, 2009, around 7am, I was bicycling on this stretch of road, just leaving North Oakland and crossing into South Berkeley:

View Larger Map

Traveling at a high rate of speed, I was on the right side of the road northbound on Martin Luther King Jr Way, having just passed Angel Light Books & Gifts. I crossed in front of the fenced playground area of Shelton's Primary Education Center (Since I wrote this, Shelton's moved, and the building is now occupied by American International Montessori) when suddenly a car door flipped open directly in front of me. My right shoulder caught the top of the door corner and my right pedal the edge of the lower door, and I was thrown off my bike, landing on my back in the middle of the street. After I heard a female voice ask if I was alright, I got up, dusted myself off, and took notice of the driver standing before me, dressed for an early summer morning and ready for work, possibly at the very school we had collided in front of; on the other side of the vehicle stood another woman, who may have been a passenger, dressed similarly and carrying her purse and some papers. I made sure I was ok, asked the driver if she was ok, and picked up my bike to inspect for damage. The African American female driver seemed genuinely concerned about my well-being, and I noticed that the tip of the lower metal edge of her car door was bent and protruding, having clearly been struck by something, which I later surmised had been the right pedal of my bike, the force of which had spun me around and thrown me out onto the street on my back. I seemed to be in one piece, though my bike had some minor damage; I was still in a hurry to get to Kinko's in downtown Berkeley to print out a document before riding into work. I felt embarrassed for not being more attentive to the parked vehicle immediately ahead of me and to my right, whether there were any occupants to worry about, and I remarked to the woman that I was ok, but that the repair to her car door would cost a lot more than the repair to my bike. I was operating under the assumption we were both at fault for the incident, and given the possibility in the back of my mind I might be held liable for any damages to the woman's car door as a result of my haste, I didn't see the need to exchange information with the driver. I remarked to both ladies that it was an interesting way to start the day, got back on my bike and rode off, noticing the slight wobble in my now out-of-true front wheel.

Over the next two weeks I saw a noticeable dark bruise appear on the upper part of my right chest where it had caught the car door's corner and felt severe pain in my right shoulder area whenever I picked up my bike and lifted it, or made certain motions with my right arm; luckily for me, gradually the sharpness lessened and over time the ache in my shoulder disappeared.

On Saturday morning, July 18, 2009 at 11:15am I was at Missing Link's repair shop to get my wheel trued. I asked the bike mechanic Bill about his summer plans for his two kids, then described the incident that led to my being in his shop, and was surprised to hear from him that the woman was almost surely responsible for the incident, that a driver is almost always at fault for a bicyclist being "doored". This idea was reinforced when on Thursday, July 23, 2009 I was listening to my favorite radio personality Len Tillem's noon to 1pm call-in radio show. A woman named Sunny called saying her daughter, who was driving, had opened her car door and a female cyclist had collided with the door, breaking her wrist. Sunny claimed the bicycle rider, a woman in her early 40s, caused the accident and so was liable for any damages resulting from the impact of the bicycle against the car door when her daughter opened it. Sunny explained her rationale for defending her daughter as not motivated by the expected protective instinct a mother might have for her child, but simply that the woman on her bike was riding too close to the vehicles. In her daughter's defense, Sunny, herself a cyclist, pointed out how some states have the door zone law, but in California there is unfortunately no such law, only a pending statute. Len seemed skeptical, saying Sunny's daughter, if she had just checked over her shoulder, would have seen the cyclist, and was in a better position than the woman on the bicycle to prevent the collision. Later, Jim, a retired California Highway Patrol officer, called in to confirm Len's initial assessment, saying that whenever a bicyclist hits a car door that opens into traffic, the person who opened the car door is at fault, quoting California Vehicle Code section 22517. In response to Sunny's rationale, Jim added that a bike rider is required to ride as close as possible to the right side of the roadway:

determine your prorated share of the utility bill

2009-07-23T15:13:00.000-07:00

Americans are scared, for these are lean and mean times, for anyone who has read the news, though we may be encouraged by signs that the economy has hit bottom and the downturn could be due for an upswing. With experts saying the unemployment rate is likely to go up past 10% before companies start hiring again, the sheer number of unemployed Americans in the middle of a jobs recession will likely provide the necessary heat to make people change their debt-accumulating, hypomanic ways. What I mean by "necessary heat" is, in a recent Lehrer News Hour segment analyzing the latest political events (concerning David Souter's retirement and Arlen Specter changing party affiliation), David Brooks offers a profound insight that, after turning it over in my head, I would tend to agree with more than not:

You don't change when you see the light. You change when you feel the heat.

Reference: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/politics/jan-june09/politicalwrap_05-01.html

Because this economic slump may be severe and prolonged, an article on how Americans need to start consuming again makes the following points:

We've gone from an age of entitlement to an age of thrift.

the American population, continually infused with immigrants, has self-selected for hypomania, i.e., a tendency to action, an appetite for risk, an endless belief in human possibilities

Reference: http://www.slate.com/id/2213595/pagenum/all/#p2

Ever since I turned 19 and left home for college, I've lived with other people (and still do). This has not only expanded my social repertoire, but saves me a lot of money. In the spirit of the age of thrift, you, former sole occupant of the 1 bedroom or studio apartment, now may be in a shared housing situation, via Craigslist, living with one or more mates in a room, flat or house. When it comes time for roommates to divvy up the gas and electricity bill by figuring out who owes what, one of the more difficult tasks to settle may be how to fairly apportion the amount you owe, given that the day you move in may be after the day the billing period begins (or the day you move out before the date the billing period ends). In either case, you may not feel it's entirely fair to divide the gas & electricity bill, which accounts for energy usage in the unit, evenly among you and your fellow tenants under the lease, because then you would be liable for days when you could not possibly have drawn power from the grid or gas from the line. Now, courtesy of my former housemate Kimberly Scott (now Kimberly Lightholder), who provided this formula to me after a bit of trial and error, here's a simple and easy way for you to fairly prorate your share of the utilities (assuming, of course, that there are no other issues involved in the fair split, or prorating, of the monthly bill, such as one or more flatmates' constant use of a high energy consuming device, such as the central gas heater, or an electric heater, air conditioner, mini-refrigerator, grow lights, and/or aquarium):

The test for this formula is, if you add up the amount that each person is calculated to owe, for all residents, that should equal the amount in the electric & gas bill.

ascertain the number of billing days in the billing period. Let's call this b. For example, if your billing period is from June 7 to July 8, b should be 32 days

count the number of days you lived in the residence. Let's call this a.

determine the number of total billing days. That is, add up the number of days each person lived in the unit, for all residents. For example, let's say 4 people were already residing in the 5 bedroom house you just moved into:

total billing days = b + b + b + b + a

divide the bill amount by the total billing days. The quotient let us call k. k is what you will multiply by the number of days you lived in the residence in order to arrive at your prorated share:

amount of power bill
-------------------------- = k
total billing days

k * a = your prorated share of the utility bill

Freebase Hack Day

2009-07-11T20:40:00.001-07:00

today was my third time in the offices of Metaweb, which operates freebase. 80 of us met on the 4^th floor of a building off of Hawthorne Street in downtown San Francisco to learn how to interact with freebase, a database of structured data which currently has 6 million topics (a topic is a thing in Freebase). Besides being a database, Freebase is also an API and development platform. In other words, you can use freebase as a source of information for your software, say, Microsoft Excel or Google Spreadsheet or MySQL database, but you can also issue commands to freebase and it will behave in a predictable way, and you can use freebase to create new kinds of software. Any given topic in freebase has one or more types assigned to it, e.g., Queen Latifah, when considered as a topic on freebase, has at least 3 types assigned to her: person, musical artist, film actor. A type in freebase has one or more properties, e.g., the musical artist type has at least 3 properties: genre, instruments played, music recorded.

Thuon Chen with Kirrily Robert, Freebase Community Director

When one lands on freebase, there is so much to take in it may seem overwhelming at first, and it took some time for me to wrap my head around it. When freebase finally made sense was when I spoke with a Metaweb employee, Alex Botero-Lowry, about our mutual interest. At the beginning of Hack Day, Alex announced in front of the group he was working on television data, specifically liberating the extraction of said data. My curiosity piqued, I approached Alex and said I believe we are living in the Golden Age of television. One of my favorite writers, Tim Goodman, expounds beautifully on the sheer number of high-quality, well written and expertly produced recent television programs in a very compelling piece he put together containing lists of exceptional series sorted into categories:

Reference: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/12/30/DDDGU66SJ.DTL

So if we wanted, we could ask Freebase to give us the list of episodes for a given tv program, sorted primarily by season number, secondarily by episode number:

go to http://www.freebase.com/app/queryeditor

now we want to query the vast resources of freebase (imagine yourself face-to-face with a large machine with blinking lights). The most important things to know at this point are:
1. the position of the blinking cursor within the query data structure, i.e., [{ }]
2. the 'Tab' key
If we wanted all the episodes for a given tv program, we would simply type in:
```
[{
  "type": "/tv/tv_program",
  "name": "The Wire",
  "episodes" : [{}]
}]
```
If you click within the data structure for episode, [{ }], i.e., click in the area between the curly braces inside the square brackets, and press the 'Tab' key, you will get a set of properties for 'episodes', and you can find out such information as the person who was credited as the writer or director.

Just to give you a sense of how there's more than one way to get the same or a similar result in freebase, the following are two paths to our destination: for a given tv program, get all the episodes, in ascending order, categorized by season, in ascending order. Nick and Jason at Metaweb helped me formulate my first query, and the latter query is courtesy of Alex Botero-Lowry:

[{
  "type": "/tv/tv_program",
  "name": "the sopranos",
  "episodes": [{
    "episode_number": null,
    "season_number": null,
    "sort":          ["season_number", "episode_number"]
  }]
}]

or:

[{
  "name": "30 rock",
  "type":  "/tv/tv_program",
  "seasons": [{
    "id":            null,
    "name":          null,
    "season_number": null,
    "sort":          "season_number",
    "episodes": [{
      "name":          null,
      "id":            null,
      "episode_number": null,
      "sort":          "episode_number"
    }]
  }]
}]

taking the police at their word

2009-07-07T15:15:00.000-07:00

Confirmation hearings for Sonia Sotomayor's Supreme Court nomination begin next week, and I wanted to share an article on the Obama nominee's powers of persuasion in a previous ruling that hinges on her taking the police at their word, then asks how broad are the grounds for arrest; Sotomayor's ruling nullified the decision of a jury that saw a process rife with police abuse of power:

A semi-truck breaks down on an expressway, with about 4 feet of the trailer jutting out into the right-hand lane. Worried about causing an accident, the truck driver runs almost a mile to the nearest gas station, which has a payphone with an extra long cord attached to the receiver that, at the time, was being used by a man sitting inside his car.

The truck driver claims he ran up and told the man there was an emergency because his truck was jutting out onto the expressway. The man told him to find another phone. The truck driver repeats it's an emergency, the man swears at the truck driver, the truck driver hangs up the phone, and soon the man in the car (who turns out to be an off-duty police officer) has a gun pointed at the back of the truck driver's head. Eventually another officer formally arrests the truck driver.

The man in the car claims he was asked for the phone by the truck driver, but there was never any mention of an emergency, and that the truck driver hit him in the face with the receiver, at which point the off-duty police officer pulled out his gun, and made the arrest.

Reference: http://www.slate.com/id/2219251/pagenum/all/

where is journalism going ?

2009-07-02T16:26:00.000-07:00

I find myself habitually navigating to one website (sfgate.com) for local breaking news and weather forecasts. Other fountains that I drink deeply from are The New York Times, Slate and The Economist. With the latter three, the content is more like steak and requires sitting down and more leisurely-paced chewing than the former, which is a bit like a quick bite of pesto and olive tapenade on toasted sourdough over the kitchen counter. Like most of you, I don't pay for what I read, and if you're like me, you feel a pang of guilt when reading of the troubles in the newspaper industry. Journalists need to eat, and the good ones usually need to go to college in order to speak, read and write well. Food requires money, and who will pay these journalists for their sweat and labor at the sites I mention if we all contribute nary a red cent for the carefully prepared content that we consume ? This was the question I struggled with as what a journalist friend said turned over in my head, specifically her lament that newspapers were "in a death spiral", with every single major national paper having "major, devastating layoffs".

After this sobering assessment, one would think newspapers really were going the way of the Neanderthal. To the contrary, Jack Shafer, Slate's editor at large, believes we may be entering the Golden Age of journalism. He compares what's going on now with the newspaper industry in 1938, when Mark Sullivan, a journalist, then 64, published his memoirs lamenting the state of his trade amidst all the upheaval caused by a new technology then coming into its own, the radio:

But just when you're ready to dismiss Sullivan as another doom and gloomer, carping about modern-era disappointments and disruptions, he zigs from the normal zag to find opportunity in the decline of newspapers. He writes:

Not only did the market for writing shrink. New means of expression, of conveying thought and facts and description and narrative, came into the world. …

I felt as if I were like one of those old monks, the scriveners, who continued to copy by hand long after printing had been invented. To young writers looking forward the lesson is as plain, and even more important, than to old writers looking backward. Learn the art of writing, of course, but learn also the art of the motion picture, and of the radio.

Reference: http://www.slate.com/id/2221856/pagenum/all/

Michael Jackson is my Lord and Savior

2009-06-26T14:16:00.000-07:00

For those who don't know, Michael Jackson's breakout moment came in 1983 when he performed at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium for the Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever reunion. The moment the lights dimmed on his breathtaking solo performance, Michael Jackson was no longer just a multi-regional (not quite national) celebrity, but an international superstar, as well-known as Coca Cola, McDonald's, and Mickey Mouse the world over. No one had ever seen a person, let alone a scrawny young black man with a single white glove, move like that, sing like that, do that thing with his feet like that, and dance in a way that made you want to join him. Even though Michael was lip-sync'ing throughout the performance, it didn't matter, because the moment was his, and Michael Jackson was showing us the way:

On a personal note, I have actually suffered in the name of Michael Jackson. In grade school my parents enrolled me in a religious private school called Heritage Baptist Academy that to this day may still practice corporal punishment. Once a person in a position of authority determined you deserved to be punished, you were called as your classmates' eyes tracked you out of the classroom and into the principal's office, where usually one or two authority figures were waiting. You were told what you were being held to account for, that you were about to be spanked because the authority figure loved you, and then you had to stand, put your hands on the edge of a desk, bend slightly over, and wait for the adult, usually a teacher or someone in a position of authority, to swat you several times on your clothed buttocks with the flat surface of a large wooden paddle. Depending on who the authority figure was, the experience could be absolutely terrifying, or merely shameful. There was a teacher, Mr. Hilton, who we all suspected would smack your behind with the crack of a baseball bat because he was tall, strong, with glasses and hairy forearms, who proudly swatted his toddler daughter. Then you had to go back to class with a red face and watery eyes and try to make it through the day knowing everyone knew what had happened to you.

Well, one morning during recess I found myself trying to copy Michael Jackson's trademark moonwalk, and was spotted by a fellow student, who told an authority figure about my behavior. Soon I was called into the principal's office, and you know the rest of the story. As it was explained to me at the time, the figure of authority who was about to strike me was doing so because he loved me; Michael Jackson was a worldly figure, and moonwalking was dancing, and dancing is of the world, and since being worldly was a sure path to hell, and as Christians, in this world, we must behave as if we are not of the world, I would be punished for trying to be like Michael Jackson. Afterward, the authority figure prayed that God would teach me that the most dangerous way to be was like this worldly figure. In retrospect, it was probably good advice, since we all know Michael Jackson was reported to be involved in some very strange things, such as trying to buy the bones of the Elephant Man Joseph Merrick, hanging around with a chimp, sleeping with young kids in his bed, and trying to look like a white woman.

yesterday I was laid off

2009-06-25T15:26:00.001-07:00

so now I join the ranks of those without a corporate sponsor, the wretched masses yearning to breathe free in an air-conditioned cubicle. It's weird, when I had gainful employment, I felt bad for those who I expected would soon try to hit me up for a job. Now that I am one of the very same in-between jobs, I'm going to take this crisis-opportunity to build up my online references, so that when the economy does turn people will know me for something useful and, Lord willing, employable. One way to do this is to focus on what I do best. I have lots of experience using (installing, testing and submitting bugs for) statistical analysis software.

The following is my own personal take on installing SAS® 9.1.3 Service Pack 4 on Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium. Apparently, as of today's date, June 25, 2009, there is no published solution on the web about how to get these two working together. SAS effectively tells you that it's impossible:


SAS does NOT support Windows Vista 32-bit Home Editions: Premium         
Basic 
Reference: http://support.sas.com/techsup/pcn/vista.html

but, as No Limit Soldier Master P says, I got the hook-up !

For those who haven't even installed SAS 9.1.3 yet, follow this guide:

http://www.cropsci.illinois.edu/csmyth/documents/InstallingSAS91.htm

Of course, along with the SAS software you will also need a SAS license in text file format. Fortunately for me, this was provided by my educational institution, though the license you have may be out-of-date (for me, the license expired in 2008), in which case you'll see the following error:


The current date is past the final expiration date

Reference: http://support.sas.com/kb/17/635.html

SAS addresses this in their documentation; you simply need to "Renew SAS Software", which is a program that comes with the freshly installed SAS on your computer. Unfortunately, like yours truly, you are one of the losers running a version of Vista that isn't supported by SAS 9.1.x. What to do ? At this point you'd see the following error (or something like it):

Error: Update lock is not available, lock held by another process

First, you'd think that the words "Home Premium" in Windows Vista meant you didn't have to see or deal with B.S. like SAS not being supported. Then you turn that loser frown upside down - while thanking your lucky stars I was given the pink slip ("walking papers" as I like to call it) by my employer yesterday - because you can make everything right with the following procedure:

right-click on "Renew SAS Software"
select "Run as administrator"

For me, that seemed to be the piece I was missing.

This first blog post is dedicated to my friends Raymond Barglow and Janet Somers, my brother-in-law Brian Moffat, and in memory of all those recently unemployed or looking for work. Congratulations to my friend JJ Behrens on recently getting hired. On a sad note, my heart goes out to the memory of Michael Jackson, who died before I could publish this blog post, and whose much anticipated comeback will not be.