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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Mark Gritter's LiveJournal:
| Thursday, July 9th, 2009 | |||||
| 1:20 am | "...where everything is made up and the points don't matter." I got an email from soon-to-be-extinct Northwest Airlines awarding me 10,000 miles toward Elite status. That seemed... rather generous? As it only takes 25K to reach Silver Elite. I checked on the web site, and it only showed a 5K award, but that was still enough to requalify me as Silver Elite, much earlier in the year. I probably can't make it to 50K miles this year; that is about 16 round trips to SFO, and I usually only take around 12 (and not all on Northwest.) Maybe I can find a work-related reason I need to go visit Australia, or twice to Hawaii... I expect the net effect is that my usual flights will now be even more full of Elite (or Medallion, as of December) flyers. | ||||
| Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 | |||||
| 11:27 am | Vanity TLDs ICANN has decided to open the floodgates and approve many new top-level domain names. (Note the gratuitous confusion between IPv4 addresses and domain names towards the end of the article!) I've ranted about this on and off over the years: TLD expansion has always seemed more like fundraising for ICANN, and a windfall for their anointed "sponsor". The current proposal seems at least somewhat better, but ICANN still sees itself as responsible for "ways of blocking certain domain names based on security or moral grounds". Farhad Manjoo of Slate asks whether it's worth it, which aligns pretty well with my thinking. ".com" is the entrenched default, and the new TLDs we've seen so far simply haven't had a great deal of success. I very much doubt that the ability to register "transformers.movie" will substitute for "transformers.com" and "transformersmovie.com". The ability of well-known Internet brands to shorten their URLs (.ebay or .facebook) seems marginal as well--- those brands are already easy to find. I wrote in 2002: For example, if there was a .consulting top-level domain, then Andersen Consulting might want to register andersen.consulting. But if andersen-consulting.com is available, this is no harder to remember and equally distinctive. Further, Andersen Consulting would not want to own andersen.consulting if another party owns andersen-consulting.com, given that many customers would try the .com version first, or confuse the two names. [***] As of 2009, this is no longer true. The Minneapolis Institute of Arts has artsmia.org (which I never would have guessed) and also the corresponding .com, but not .museum. If I were an economist instead of a networking geek, I might rephrase this as domain names being complements rather than substitutes. | ||||
| Monday, July 6th, 2009 | |||||
| 9:28 pm | Boo KadoKado removed the game "Tubulo", evidently because some people were using software to assist their play.
Repeat after me: "The client is in the hands of the enemy." There are YouTube videos of people using Flash debuggers to cheat at KadoKado games, so it's not at all clear to me where to draw the line between "this game is too easy to solve in real time" and "this game is vulnerable because it's running in the player's browser." I liked playing Tubulo a lot, and didn't feel that my solver ruined it for me. Probably because I didn't have a screen scraper, so it was a strategic decision whether to take the time entering the problem into my solver. | ||||
| Sunday, June 28th, 2009 | |||||
| 12:27 pm | Mad Science! Eagan's 4th of July festivities include a "Mad Science Lab", but I can't find any other details. How will I be able to create an appropriate entry in time?!? To the lab, Igor! (OK, it appears to be these guys. I guess that they probably wouldn't appreciate it if I brought along an army of clanks.) | ||||
| Thursday, June 25th, 2009 | |||||
| 11:23 pm | Features I hear Microsoft has a new search engine, and they're dumping $100m on ads to convince people to use it. I'm sure it has all sorts of improvements that would make me want to switch, like, say, this one:  GMAFB. I'm supposed to use your search engine because it will connect me with my horoscope more efficiently? | ||||
| Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009 | |||||
| 1:39 am | I Love Python More Than Ever At Kealia, we had a debug interface to our system, consisting of an embedded Tcl interpreter, accessible via a telnet server written in Tcl. "Mark", I said to myself, "what are the odds that somebody has done this in Python?" Pretty good, it turns out. The Twisted framework, in addition to making it easy to write your own telnet/SSH/whatever server, also provides exactly this functionality--- you can connect to a running Twisted instance and run python commands in a read/eval/print loop. (There's even a GUI if telnet or ssh isn't sufficient.) Unfortunately while I can get the obsolete "twisted.protocols.telnet" class to work fine, the newer Conch-based "manhole" won't correctly authenticate me. It wants to use /etc/passwd or another passwd file, but I use shadow passwords (duh!) so /etc/passwd doesn't have the necessary information, and the file I pasted together with mkpasswd didn't work either. | ||||
| Saturday, June 20th, 2009 | |||||
| 2:10 pm | No more Figlio The Star Trib reported today that Parasole is closing Figlio's in September to reopen with "a new look, a new name and a new menu." A company spokesman said that it will be more "purely Italian". Parasole is also opening a second restaurant in Calhoun Square next summer. | ||||
| Friday, June 19th, 2009 | |||||
| 6:14 pm | Make a Lap, Monkey-Boy
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| Sunday, June 14th, 2009 | |||||
| 10:47 pm | Mount Diablo's Still There I took my trip to Mount Diablo today. The weather was wonderful and the sky was fairly clear. I had no difficulty seeing the Golden Gate Bridge from the peak. I am used to coming in from the north gate and leaving through the south gate, but this time I got to see the reverse of all the usual scenery. I really hadn't appreciated how much easier the circular trail around the peak is, compared to all the other options. I went down the first stretch of the Summit Trail to start, but found that going back up was much, much harder than going down. This could not, of course, have anything to do with the fact that I am out of shape. I was pleasantly surprised to see a fair variety of wildflowers left, but I'd be hard-pressed to identify any of them. I'm not even sure I'd seen these particular ones on previous trips. Reds and yellows and purples and even something with dandelion-like puffballs. I went to Walnut Creek for dinner, and ate at Lark Creek which was good as usual (but unfortunately none of their desserts spoke to me.) However, I was somewhat saddened that the shopping center there has become more boring, with no used bookstore, no Ghirardelli, and really very little for somebody not buying clothes. There was a wine-accessory store with racks and glasses and such but even that was closed by the time I got to it. | ||||
| Thursday, June 11th, 2009 | |||||
| 5:22 pm | Staying the weekend I'm in CA over the weekend; I need to attend a meeting on Monday. I'm not planning on driving to Las Vegas to occupy myself, however tempting that might be. Probably will call a few friends, maybe go up Mount Diablo. | ||||
| 12:40 am | Up and Out of Gas I saw "Up" tonight. It's very emotionally manipulative. Also callously dismissive of the laws of physics. On the way out of the Palo Alto parking garage I was approached by an elderly man who started explaining how he worked at MacArthur Park (a Palo Alto restaurant), and his wife had dropped him off, and now his car was out of gas on... I told him I had heard this story before. I should have interrupted with the rest of the story at the point where he said he worked for MacArthur Park. | ||||
| Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 | |||||
| 3:23 pm | Mount Diablo Via Andrew Leonard I learned that Mount Diablo State Park is one of the 200 parks Mount Diablo views and flowers, around open letters by Marissa. (3 pages) Visiting Mount Diablo with a friend from Minnesota bonus pictures: Angel Island ETA: It's not clear why the parks department is talking about closures rather than raising entrance fees, as has been done in the past. | ||||
| Sunday, June 7th, 2009 | |||||
| 3:14 pm | ACM/WGBH study on teenage interest in Computer Science The Association for Computing Machinerry and the WGBH Educational Foundation are working on "a project to improve the image of computer science among high school students." The released some preliminary results about high-school student attitudes to computer science. Full report (PDF). Interesting tidbits: Computer science is a very popular field for high schoolers over all, ranking as a "very good" or "good" choice for a college major for 52%, more than anything except "Business/Management/Marketing" and "Art/Music/Design". Next on the list is Psychology, with 46%. (I mean, I know there were lots of Psych majors at Gustavus who were there more or less by default, to the eternal frustration of ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} rmnilsson. So it shouldn't be too surprising to see that show up earlier. It's not what I would have expected, though.) But, the male/female gap is immense. Boys: 45% very good, 29% good. Girls: 10% very good, 22% good.One of the encouraging results is that they went in expecting a "racial and/or ethnic" difference but found that there was little difference between African-American, Hispanic, or "White" males. So the second part of their study will try to look more at why that interest isn't translating to enrollment in CS. The breakdown by career choice (instead of by major) amuses me. "Doctor" and "Artist/Musician/Designer" score the highest on "would be a good choice for a career." at 27% "very good" each. (CS at 23%, Entrepreneur/SB owner at 20%, Laywer at 19%.) And yet it's fairly obvious that students end up making other decisions. Is this: ignorance of what the job is actually like? Overestimating their own capabilities? Aiming at a career they would like but failing? Or not trying at all at the careers they think they would most like? The answers seem very self-deceptive at some level: more "oh, yeah, it would be good to be a doctor" rather than "being a doctor would be a good choice for me." This answer also had an enormous gender divide. 47% of African-American boys and 49% of Hispanic boys gave a "very good" rating to a career in computer science, more than the 35% of white boys who did. But only 9% of girls gave the same answer--- and again proportionally fewer white girls that non-white. Girls associate computing with "boring", "hard", and "nerd" while boys' word-associations included "design", "games", and "video". (Asians == "white" as usual I guess. Admittedly the study was looking at underrepresented groups but I wonder about Asian vs. non-Asian attitudes.) The message about CS that the study reported most appealing for girls was:
Unfortunately, it is rather bland and not very CS-specific. It is only a couple points better for girls than their top-ranked message which appealed much better overall:
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| Saturday, June 6th, 2009 | |||||
| 2:46 pm | Thanks! Somebody sent me Richard K. Guy's Fair Game. It arrived from a name I didn't recognize in New York, so I'm assuming that it was ordered off my Amazon wish list through a 3rd-party book seller. Thank you! | ||||
| Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 | |||||
| 1:40 pm | Angel Investor Tax Credit The tax bill Governor Pawlenty vetoed included a 25% tax credit for angel investors. (Up to $10 million a year.) Some lawmakers and investors warn that local start-ups will move across the border. In Wisconsin, angel investors can claim a 25 percent tax credit over two years of up to $500,000 per investment; venture capital funds can earn a 25 percent credit over one year up to $2 million per investment. Iowa has a similar tax credit, as do Indiana, North Dakota, and about 15 other states. The more I think about this, the less sense it makes. This seems like the worst sort of incentives-through-taxation: one that rewards means rather than ends. Proponents claim that this incentive is "proven" but I'd like to see some actual research whether the tax credit is a deciding factor. The tax credit subsidizes risk no matter how disconnected that risk is from actually accomplishing the desired ends. If Angel A invests in a stupid business model with no chance of success, the state is right there investing 25% too with no return. If Company B outsources its development to India, Angel C still gets his tax credit despite creating only a couple headquarters jobs in the state. (Wisconsin has a requirement that 51% of the employees work in the state, but I'm sure there are ways around this.) I'm also uncomfortable with the theory that the best use of Minnesotans' capital is to fund Minnesota businesses. The state is saying that they'll give you an incentive to misdirect your capital--- you think that a business out in California is a better investment, but Minnesota will put up some immediate cash if you direct your money locally instead. I can't deny that there may well be a "cross the border for easier access to capital" dynamic, once one state has bought into this idea. But it just seems so... parochial. Minnesotans are better off with a successful startup outside Minnesota than an unsuccessful one inside Minnesota. Suppose the state funded a $10 million venture capital fund each year. Wouldn't this be decried as the worst form of socialism--- forcing taxpayers to invest in private companies? Yet that's essentially the goal here, except with less taxpayer control over where their money goes and only indirect sharing in the successes. If we must have tax incentives, why not tie them to results rather investment? Give venture capitalists and angels a credit to offset their capital gains, for Minnesota-based businesses. Tie the tax credit to the company's actual Minnesota hiring. (This would still leave a bad taste in my mouth, but at least it'd have some tie to the purported goal.) | ||||
| Monday, June 1st, 2009 | |||||
| 1:02 am | Another Birthday Book, Lack of Errata Bugs Me I'm reading Julian Havil's "Impossible: Suprising Solutions to Counterintuitive Conundrums" which is pretty fun. I already owned his previous "Nonplussed?". However, I encountered a pretty significant, if small, error in his definition of Goodstein Sequences. The text says "Gr(n) = { Br(n)-1 for r > 2 }" which doesn't give the desired result. In his terminology, it should be "Gr(n) = Br( Gr-1(n) ) - 1 for r > 2". The sequence feeds each base-bumped (and decremented) number into the next iteration, rather than base-bumping the original number. The latter obviously grows without bound. I was surprised that not only is there no errata page in his publisher (although I guess this is a "recreational" math text), but neither does Dr. Havil have any contact information on the web. Nor can I find any errata page for the previous volume. | ||||
| Sunday, May 31st, 2009 | |||||
| 11:46 am | Culture, High and Otherwise Marissa and I went to our last concert of the Orchestra season. The first piece was Pan And Syrinx by Carl Nielsen. Nielsen's summary of the tale: The goat-footed sylvan deity Pan happens to spy the nymph Syrinx among the satyrs and dryads in the hilly Arcadian forest; he persecutes her with his dances and bleating homage. She, terrified by this fierce wooer, flees to the edge of a forest lake. From here there is no escape left for her, and the gods, taking pity on her, transform her into a reed. Program note:
Ouch! Beware Danish passive-aggressiveness. Neither the Tchaikovsky piano concerto (No. 2) nor the Aho symphony (No. 10) were entirely satisfying. While the piano concerto had a lot to recommend it, Marissa and I didn't like the soloist as much as everybody else in the hall did, and his encore really emphasized the aspects of his performance I liked least. I thought he was putting very modern emphasis and phrasing (almost jazzy) on a piece that really was firmly 19th century. The Aho was fun but more of the humor was obscure (we looked for the promised "satire" in the last movement but didn't find it). It had some nice saxophone bits, and the percussionists got to use the "thunder sheet"! But it felt on the broader scale like Aho couldn't make up his mind between a tone poem and a symphonic structure, for all that he followed the broad outlines of the latter. I received Earth X for my birthday. It's a distopian future in the Marvel Comics universe, in which everybody on Earth has developed superpowers and the Earth is nearing destruction. Unfortunately, it is an extremely talky comic--- too much is narrated rather than shown. Even when non-narrative characters get a chance to speak it is often an extended monologue. While it has great bits, this was overall something of a disappointment. I also finished Jim Butcher's latest Harry Dresden novel Turn Coat, which was good fun as usual. But I felt that it really copped out on more than the usual number of plot-related issues. Still to read: Combinatorial Auctions and Cherryh's latest Atevi novel. I want to go see Up but it's likely that will be while I'm out in California next. | ||||
| Thursday, May 28th, 2009 | |||||
| 8:11 pm | Mulch! Well, all the plants are settled, finally. I put two of the tomatoes in the same pot on the theory that they both looked half-dead so my expected number of live tomato plants was less than one. However, both have perked right back up and are growing lots of new leaves. Home Depot didn't have any cocoa shell mulch so the front tree, vegetables, and marigolds are mulched with cedar chips instead. I have been thinking of mulching the herbs and snapdragons on the front walk this year too. But my 4 bags of mulch were just barely sufficient for the part I did tonight. I ended up with a couple feet of empty space due to only buying 16 snapdragons instead of 20. So I need to figure out something additional to go in that spot. | ||||
| Sunday, May 24th, 2009 | |||||
| 3:35 pm | Gardening Season! Stella sent me a tomatillo, four heirloom tomatoes, three cucumber plants, and two peppers. Unfortunately I let them get overheated and dry in the three-season porch. One of the cucumber plants wilted, and two of the tomatoes started looking bad. (The peppers were perfectly happy!) So, I finally started planting today. I added another cucumber plant (because I got stupid and thought Stella had given me beans) and a cherry tomato. I'm also planting the usual collection of herbs: dill, basil, rosemary, lavender, one or two others I can't recall at the moment. I had no need to buy cilantro this year as it reseeded itself quite nicely. For flowers I just have snapdragons and marigolds, as well as some phlox to fill in where the bunnies have eaten. I'm a little worried about any plant that has a suggested spacing in feet. We'll just have to cope with the cucumber vine taking over, I guess. The plan is to buy a bush bean to fill in the front planter, and put marigolds all around to distract the bunnies. Then I will work down in the walkway with herbs, peppers, and the snapdragons. | ||||
| Friday, May 22nd, 2009 | |||||
| 10:18 pm | Saving Newspapers, Really I still subscribe to a dead-tree edition. Here's what the Star Trib could do to better: what would be worth more to me. (And if they can't turn my value into profit, to heck with them.) (1) More comics. Bigger! Even though almost all are available on the Internet, there are plenty I read in dead-tree form. Newspapers used to believe comics sold newspapers, now they treat them like a necessary evil. (2) Local news. I read national news sites but not usually local ones. The Star Trib seems to think this means more sensationalism. (3) Stop reprinting old news from the web. Instead, do a better job on basic journalism. Don't compete with the web on junk stories. And dammit, I don't care about reposting blog entries on local politics! If I cared, I'd just read the stupid blog! WHAT THE HECK ARE YOU THINKING?!?!? (4) Unbundle my newspaper. Don't print sections I don't read. If you can't handle the logistics of delivering the right combination to my door, contract with somebody who can. I'm sure UPS can do it. (This may not work in my current household, since I read the Business section and T reads Sports, but there are still sections that go straight to recycling.) (5) While you're here, pick up the old newspaper and recycle it. (6) Provide online services I actually care about. Job fairs? You can't compete there. Your election site is pretty good, though. What else could you do that's local, interactive, and actually useful to me? Can't you add your local annotations on top of Google Maps, and turn the tables on the content-reuse front instead of just whining about it? (7) Figure out what I actually spend money on. Run those advertisements instead of full-page medical scams. (Wait, what do I spend money on?) (8) Put articles together on one page. Seriously. I hate flipping through the paper. Almost all web news has "view on one page". | ||||
