No new books this week

This is the first week I haven't finished a book this year. Quite amazing! Part of the reason is that I'm reading Richard Powers's "The Time of our Singing", which is a 600+ page book. That will take me some time. I've also been reading the news in the morning and listening to more podcasts. The most interesting one that I've read was:

Daniel Tunkelang talks about Endeca, Search, and ‘Reconsidering Relevance’ from Talis's Nodalities.

It's an interesting interview that discusses things that I can relate more than the usual discussions about SaaS and linked data. As this is not my technical blog, I won't get much into why I found this interesting. Eventually I'll write some notes about it.

Things at work have been a little stressful lately. And it's not really because of work itself, but mostly because I have been a little unfocused. Maybe it's the new house, maybe it's because I'll have visitors in town this weekend, maybe it's because the cleaning people killed my lucky bamboo this week, or maybe it's just the moon, I don't know. I just hope it will go away soon.

What else can I talk about my week here? Well, last weekend I decided to finally do an actual hard cheese. I chose one of the easier ones to start with: cheddar. Last Saturday to Sunday I did the whole preparing the curds, cutting them, heating, and pressing. This week it was drying and today I applied cheese wax to seal it from mold and let it age for at least a couple of months. The trick now is that, without any experience, when will I decide to open it?

Also in two months I should open one of my bottles of plum wine to try. I tried a little when it came out of the clearing up process and it was alright... Won't win any prizes. I've been thinking of starting a new batch of something, but I'm not sure what yet. It's not that hard, it's just such delayed gratification and moderate risk that is tough to be very excited about it. And I think I do need some excitement in my life right now. Just too many things to be worried about that I feel I don't have full control over. Like my poor lucky bamboo.

Fun bus experience to start the day

I was running a little late today (too many things to do this morning and I was only able to do 1/3 of them) and got to the bus stop about a minute after my bus (74) was supposed to show up. Another person that takes the same bus as I do was at the stop too, so I thought I was safe. A minute after that the bus that comes after my bus (75, and does not take me to work) arrives. We ask the bus driver if our bus is late and he doesn't know and says that some buses are not running today (it's Martin Luther King day). So we take the 75 that should take us to a hub where many buses that go to downtown stop. I was convinced that my bus was a little early and that's why we both missed it.

So we get to the other stop and stand there and wait for the next bus to get to downtown. Two show up that take the slow route and I decide not to take them (the other confused person that took the 75 with me go onto one of those buses). Then, after about 10 minutes waiting the 74 shows up! It was late and not early and it takes a slower route to this hub. So I end up getting to work about 5 minutes later than usual.

With all this experience what I learned is something dangerous: I can be a little late, get the 75 and still be able to catch the 74 later in the bus line. The only trick about it is that usually the 74 is full at the time it gets to the hub (not today because of the holiday), so it's not something I would want to do every day, but good (or bad) to know that I have this option.

Oh, and you might be asking: if it's a holiday, what are you doing going to work? Well, in order to "help" businesses, the US government does not impose any holidays onto companies. So companies pick and choose what holidays to give to their employees. Amazon didn't choose MLK as one of these holidays. And it's not that unusual for this holiday to be one of the ones that are ignored by companies.

Two more books for the year

I'm quickly running out of books to read, I guess. Last week I decided to read something completely random, which ended up being Jim Butcher's Storm Front. Why this book? Well, I was reading on random things, which ended up taking me to an old series that died some time ago, The Dresden Files. Which reminded me that it actually came from a book series. I kind of enjoyed the TV series (although I wasn't very sad when it was gone), so I decided to read the first book of the series. It was mildly entertaining, but probably not enough for me to read more on the series.

That was last week. This week I decided to start reading Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success. I just finished it on my ride back home today. The book makes very interesting points on why people become successful. The core concept is that everything counts. You can't become successful just based on intelligence, or school, or social background, or cultural background, or luck. You become successful because of the combination of some or all those factors.

I won't get more into the book, as I won't be able to do justice to all the things that he talks about. What is a little depressing about the book is that it sort of shows that unless you focused on something from early on in your life, you'll very likely never be successful. That means that "moving downstream" is not likely going to be a success story. Oh, well...

An Excel guy playing with Apple's Numbers

I've done a lot of Excel in my life, and still do. I can't say I'm very proud of it, but I have to admit that it's one of the most powerful tools that "normal people" seem to use.

Well, so Apple decided that one of their big Macworld Expo keynote announcement was their new version of iWork, their Office competitor. So I decided to give it a try and see what I thought of it.

As expected, installation is easy and startup is straight-forward. It starts with template choices, which was a surprise for me. I know that pretty much all the office suites have templates, but I think I have repeatedly tried to use them and never found any template that was really helpful to me, so I gave up on them a long time ago. Well, Numbers still has them. And they look pretty with odd things like Home Inventory, Baby Record and even Garden Journal.

But I kept to my normal experience and chose a blank file.

The next thing I notice is that by default it is highlighting the top row and the leftmost column, as if to notice that they should be used in a special way. Excel offers that also, but it's not the default behavior.

Another thing that struck me at first was the ability to add tables to a table. Not only a simple table, but a pre-formatted table, like a checklist or one that already contains the sum calculation in the bottom. And it can go into the same sheet, embedded under the current table.

I found that concept very interesting. Many times I did want to have one sheet, but multiple different pieces of information with different formatting. Many times I wished Excel had this feature and you didn't have to keep adding new sheets or putting everything in long set of columns.

I didn't spend too much time using it, so the only other thing I have to say is that it does have a lot less options than Excel. This could be a very good thing though. People never know even 20% of what Excel can do for them. And when they do, many end up spending a lot of time trying to understand how to do it. For example, what the parameters of v-lookup mean, how to get pivot tables correct, and so on. I can't tell yet if they've removed too much stuff from it to be useless.

I'll continue giving it a try. I have another 29 days left.

And I might eventually look at the other things you get on the suite, like Keynote and Pages, and post something about them. Now it's time to follow X's suggestion and go to sleep. It's barely 12:30, so that's certainly better to check if his way of coping with it works for me too.

8 years in the US

This would have been a much better subject for my 400th post, huh? Well, unfortunately I'm not sure I have much insightful to talk about this one. Most of it has been the theme of this blog: "moving downstream". Just going with the flow, towards the path of least resistance. Yes, you might find a waterfall here and there. But the path seems never to really branch out. Only other paths join in and become one big way... downstream.

It's probably a little too late also to have deep thoughts about this. Lately I've been busy and stressed. Lots of things just don't seem right. Projects are just not complete, ideas flow around and don't get much attention, and new things keep piling up on top of the incomplete things.

For example, I've set up my office here. I have both my computers on, chair, but it's missing my printer, there are still some stacks of papers that I haven't figured out where I'm going to store them, things are inside my drawers, but still wrapped up. It's mostly functional, but just not finished. I have 5 email drafts that I can't seem to finish and send them to friend. Projects at work are almost at the same state. And my mind keeps trying to convince me to do something new. Probably is some escapist need to keep me away from my weaknesses.

At least I'm blogging and being able to finish my posts. So, changing subjects back to the original intent of the post, thanks US for the last 8 years. They were comfortable.

Spam day today, huh?

This month I decided to aggregate some statistics about spam detection on all my mailing systems (i.e. how many false positives/negatives I get on Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail). So I'm building this spreadsheet with how many spam messages I get a day on each of those services. With this amount of visibility, it's interesting to see some odd patterns. Like, for example, today I received so far roughly double the average spam I receive a day (which is around 17 messages - today I'm at 33 and the day is not over yet).

What have I found so far besides that? Well, I can't really tell. I receive way too much spam on my gmail account and very little on my other accounts. So I don't have any statistically significant numbers on the other accounts. Current numbers are:

Gmail:
True positives: 159
False positives: 1
False negatives: 0

Hotmail:
True positives: 3
False positives: 0
False negatives: 1

Yahoo:
True positives: 25
False positives: 0
False negatives: 1

If I was not statistically inclined, I would say that, as I was expecting, gmail seems to err on the side of classifying things are spam when they are not spam, which was the biggest problems on early spam detection systems (which had a much higher false positive number than the 0.6% that I'm seeing here). Hotmail and Yahoo learned with this bad experience and decided to miss more spam messages in order for people to be able to use the "empty" button to get rid of all their spam messages without having to go through each of them.

But, as I am "statistically inclined", I'm not going to conclude anything yet and just wait until I have more evidence.

Oh, yes, and this is my 400th post. Interesting number. This blog has been alive for 4 years and 3 months, approximately. My previous blog that lived for 3 years and 8 months had 1,049 posts. Just a small difference, huh?

Half an hour is a long time!

Warning: this is probably going to be a very boring post about routine change.

Since the move, almost two weeks ago, I had to change my morning schedule. My bus ride is longer, so in order to get to work at about the same time as before (between 8 and 8:30 AM) now I have to leave half hour earlier. I decided not to wake up 30 minutes earlier (which is good as lately I haven't been able to convince me to go to bed before 1:30 AM), so I end up having 30 minutes less at home in the morning (which are now spent in the bus). It's odd how hard it's been for me to adapt to it!

In the past, my morning routine used to be:

• Wake up
• Check emails
• Check favorite blogs
• Read news
• Shower
• Have breakfast
• Reply to one or two emails (only the time-sensitive ones, usually from my family)
  
• Read more news
• Leave for the bus listening to a podcast
• Listen to podcast in the bus (except for towards the end of some weeks that I ran out of podcasts to listen to and I would either listen to music or an audiobook)

Now my routine (if a week of doing something can be called a routine) has been:

• Wake up
• Check emails
• Shower
• Have breakfast
• Check favorite blogs
• Leave for the bus listening to a podcast
• Sit on the bus reading a book

It's a lot of things that were cut out of my morning. When I get back home, I do try to check news, but that makes my evening way longer and less productive (that's part of the reason why I haven't been able to force myself to go to bed before 1:30 AM - I have to feel like I did something productive at home). I tried to read the news on the bus using my Kindle yesterday and today, but it's just not the same thing. "Normal" news have been quite boring for some time. The economy, and Obama setting up his people, and now the Israel-Gaza conflict (which is depressing, not boring at all). And I miss the ability to navigate through news to get more information on things that seemed interesting to me.

Well, I probably need to revisit my plans. Maybe I'll reconsider setting my alarm to wake me up earlier. Or maybe buy a tablet PC with a 3G wireless card so that I can do my news reading with browsing on the bus (no, not an iPhone, or equivalent - the screen is too small for my taste). Or maybe I just need to get used to it and reorganize my evening around it. I've been arriving home earlier (because there are no good buses to get me home that leave work after 6:20 pm)...

Anyway, I said this was going to be a boring post. I'm not sure why I wrote it... And now that I did it, I can't convince myself not to publish it. Oh, well, maybe this will force me to post something better soon to compensate for my personal ramblings. Now onto work!

The first book of 2009

It's kind of cheating to say that I've finished my first book in 2009 today, considering that I've read most of it in 2008 (actually I read 80% of it this week - the joy of longer bus rides), but, well, I'll add to the list anyway.

So, to the book: Firstborn

It's actually the third and last book of the "A Time Odyssey" series, and I thought it was the most interesting of them. Events happen in a much more exciting pace. I bought the series when I heard that Arthur C. Clarke passed away. I was in the bus going to work and bought all the books on my Kindle. Later I found out that I had already bought the hardcover version of the books... Oh, well..

It was a good series. Not Arthur C. Clarke's or Stephen Baxter's best, but quite good anyway. I'm not sure how much I can say without spoiling it for people, but the whole idea of it is this fight with a race of highly advanced beings that seem to not really care about other life forms in the universe. There is no real interaction with this race, just a struggle for the human race to keep alive.

What is next on my list? Well, I'm still reading João Ubaldo Ribeiro's "Viva o povo brasileiro", a 600+-page tome of Brazilian literature. Tough and rewarding read. It's actually interesting to read it and realize how much different it is to read works of literature in Portuguese to English. Not that I'm calling "Firstborn" a work of great literary depth - it wasn't meant to be that way. I'm not drawing the comparison to it, but to the more general English-language literature, like Richard Powers's The Time of Our Singing.

In any way, the Brazilian/Portuguese literature that I miss is much more psychological and, in many ways, metaphorical. Time goes by slowly as the author takes time on the characters' reactions to what is going on more than the event itself. Sometimes you can't even really tell what is going on as it's so small compared to the world inside the mind of the protagonist that draws relationships to other events on their lives or world events and, more disturbingly, keeps replacing the current events to things in their past in a form of "internal metaphor" that you have to keep following in order to understand the book. As I said, tough but rewarding.

And I think that's the main things I have on my list right now. I did buy Malcom Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success, but I'm not sure I want to read it right now. We'll see what surprises I'll find once I finish unpacking and organizing my books back onto my shelves.

Happy new year

It's 2009. Kind of shocking how quickly all those years in this new decade/century/millennium are going. But, well, many things have happened on those years, so it's not that I'm just realizing that I haven't accomplished anything. But I'm not sure I can say the same thing about last year.

Anyway, let's start with the obvious: Happy New Year to all my readers. There aren't many of you out there, I know, but it's not what is important.

So, what are my plans for this blog for this new year? I'm actually not so sure yet. I still have plans of keeping a personal (this) and a technical blog separate. But maybe I'll finally work on my homepage and migrate both blogs there. It's been on my plans for the last year, but didn't get even close to doing anything about it. I think most of it is because I want too many things on that homepage. Things like:

• Research interest/links to my papers: not that hard as I have stopped writing papers some time ago
• Technical interest/links to my project designs/alpha implementations: this is a little trickier, because I'm not sure how many of my projects I actually really have a consumable design or implementation. But that's where my other blog would be linked
• Aggregation of my pictures: that right now are mostly on SmugMug
• This blog
• A twitter-like feed of interesting links: It's what I'm trying to accomplish with the FriendFeed side bar, but the current way I find hard to really navigate

It's a good amount of things and integration with things. Especially when getting to my projects up somewhere and running.

Anyway, I also know that a good part of this year is going to be devoted to the new house. The list of things that might need some work is getting long. I'm planning on not starting on anything until I have enough experience with the house and weed out things I want changed not because they are unusable, but because I'm used to something different from my previous houses/apartments. But I'm sure that there will still be a lot of things to do. And right now my goal should be finishing setting up my office, which right now is a sea of boxes with a small island of my chair and a small part of my desk, where I'm sitting and writing this post. It's actually quite impressive how many books and magazines I've collected in the last 8 years. I came to the US with pretty much no books. But now I have a Kindle and the speed of my book collection growth might slow down a little. Hopefully.

Alright, time to start the work today. Happy new year again and wishes to a wonderful year, full of accomplishments, to everybody.

Economic crisis or just newspapers doing what they like most: create fear?

I was reading this article on BBC today: Chinese warned off lavish gifts. It talks about how the Chinese government said it's forbidding Chinese officials to buy expensive gifts for Chinese new year. They claim that this is because of the difficult state of the Chinese economy due to the world crisis.

If you stop reading the article at this point, like most people do, they will end up with the idea that the Chinese government is really worried about the state of the Chinese economy and is telling people not to spend too much money. Then, if you read further you find:

[...] Each year too the Communist Party exhorts its officials to avoid conspicuous consumption. [...]

Which might be the only actual note that the Chinese government sent. The same it sends every year. But then reporters took this as being a sign of impending doom. If Chinese officials are asked not to spend all their bribery money on their "friends", it means that something really bad is going on. With all the things that the economy is doing, that has to be the cause! And people should be warned of it. No more parties, no more happy Chinese. No more happy Chinese, worst quality at the Wal-Mart stores. Lower quality on Wal-Mart, lower quality on most US households (because people won't stop buying - it's so inexpensive). Lower quality of products in US households, higher chance of accidents. More accidents, more medical bills. More medical bills, more unhappy citizens. More unhappy citizens, more stories to put in the newspaper. So it must be true! Q.E.D.

Living in the new house, and tired

So my life has been centered on the big move lately. Nights were spent putting things in boxes, except for when my father was in town. Not that I could do much more, as we had a freak snow storm in Seattle that kept us stuck at home for days. But now everything is much better.

Anyway, back to the move: it was supposed to happen on Friday, but got postponed on Friday morning by the moving people because they couldn't get their trucks out because of the snow. But we had everything ready. The bed was in pieces, all clothes were packed. So we decided to just take the air mattress and move anyway. And I was working on Friday, which worked out ok, because once we got to the house we didn't have anything else to do. So I was able to get good work done in the evening and this morning.

The house is doing well. As I start to live in it I end up finding a lot of small things that could be improved, but it's how it goes. It feels kind of odd that I now can do things with the house and when I see blogs that point to gadgets for the house, I can actually pay attention to them. Very time-consuming and potentially harmful to the wallet. But I have been good so far in trying to organize things and prioritize.

Tomorrow is finally going to be the real moving date (I hope), so it's waking up early and going to the old house, making sure everything is ready to go, being bored waiting for them to pack their truck, come to this house and direct traffic to make sure I don't have to haul furniture around the house once the movers are gone.

After that it's putting everything in the right places and start to plan the new year's party that will happen here on Wednesday. Mostly I have to have the kitchen ready enough to cook and then start to think of what I'm going to cook this year. The theme is "something new", so it has to be something I haven't tried before.

Oh, there was one problem with the house because of the snow: it had an awning in the back that didn't survive the weight of the snow and collapsed. Fortunately it didn't damage anything too much on its way down. I just will probably need a new cover of some sorts in the back to protect my grill when it arrives tomorrow.

Alright, enough about this. Time to go to sleep as I probably will have a long day ahead. Moving is very painful.

The great things of 24h chat support

So I've had my problems with Quicken for some time. Tonight I was feeling "lucky" and decided to contact their 24 hour chat support and see if I could get it to work. The short story is that it's now working again! The longer story is that it took almost 30 minutes and I was the one that actually found the solution to the problem (as a variation to a step that the support person kept asking me to repeat in different contexts). The program even crashed once while we were going through the steps. But the important thing is that it's working now and I would never have been able to get it to work if it had one of the "classic" support systems that would only be open during business hours. I'm rarely in front of my home computer during business hours!

Now it's done and I can drop again Mint.com and Microsoft Money.

Adding things

So I finally decided to try and understand Blogger's plugins and make my blog a little more of a destination for people to see what is going on with me. So I've added a feed view of FriendFeed. So now people can see every time I post on this blog by looking on the right side of the blog, instead of having to look at the main column. Brilliant, isn't it?

Actually my FriendFeed contains much more than this blog. It contains my Twitter, delicious, Google Reader (which I don't use any more), LibraryThing (which I also don't use - I use Shelfari and I've just added a widget to show what I'm reading), LinkedIn, Facebook and Netflix (which I also don't use any more). So you can see what I'm doing in many different angles, isn't it weird?

Distracted

Today was getting poor day and after that I was working from home (not to have to take a bus downtown and waste an hour commuting, as I didn't have any meetings scheduled today). But it wasn't a very productive day. The whole day I was thinking about what happened and the plans for the next few days (my father is arriving tomorrow evening and staying until Saturday morning) and next few months in the new house. So... No in-depth shoe size analysis for me. Just a lot of random thoughts and observation about the most important concept of all statistical analyzes: if you don't have a model, you can't analyze anything meaningful. I can look at things and calculate averages, do general clustering and find patterns, but without a model I can't tell if what I'm looking at is meaningful.

It all goes back to my inability to assert things to people in a way that they will accept and act on it. I trust people too much and I don't trust myself enough. So, when multiple people ask for something, even when I know it shouldn't work, I decide to go ahead with it and get to the same conclusion the practical way.

So, that's where I am. The rest of the week is going to be mostly dead with my father's visit and some meetings (Wednesday and Thursday are my days full of meetings - it's great that they are concentrated this way, unless I hope to get anything accomplished those two days in particular, and Friday is my closing date and key collection). But we keep on moving forward. I have started working on a model (which is now on a paper that was invaded by information on the contractor that is fixing the roof at the new house) and that's what I'll have to make sure to settle on before I move back to analysis. Then I'll do the thing that I got at Amazon to do: analyze the Amazon catalog for patterns. In this case, figure out how to train my model and validate that it correctly represents shoe sizing.

Can't quite explain what my thoughts are, but I'll say that it's a very interesting problem. What makes it very complex is the fact that there are multiple ways of explaining to a user the size of a shoe. There are multiple size standards (including some that are very similar, like US Men's and US Women's, which are off by 1.5 or 2, depending on who you ask), with sometimes non-fully-deterministic translations between the sizes. There are also shoe width information, with multiple standards. And these "standards" are not exact. Some brands or product lines run smaller or larger than the actual number that they say, which is technically another size feature.

So, with all those features, how can you make sense of the size? That's the question that I'm trying to answer in the next couple of weeks.

Huh, Microsoft Money, what do you mean?

I've been using Quicken for about 4 years to organize my finances. I chose Quicken because I had no choice, as I had a Mac and all online options were kind of ugly. I was happy with it until last year when it decided to be unable to sync with my WaMu checking account (note that it was able to synchronize with my WaMu savings account that uses the same user name and password). I kept using it for some time until I decided to plan better my finances in preparation to buy a house. Then I got really annoyed by it and decided to try other options.

Oh, I have to note before I continue that I have since moved my Quicken to the Windows version because it had way more features, looked nicer and was the same price.

I haven't had that much time to try around, but I've tried the famous Mint.com, which was pleasant, but certainly had less features and was slower to edit than Quicken. However, it was able to sync with my WaMu without a problem. I tried Quicken Online too, which had even less features than Mint.com and also was able to sync with WaMu.

Then, this evening, I decided to just accept it and install a trial version of Microsoft Money. The installation was very quick and setting up the accounts (except for my Charles Schwab account, which requires calling their support service, apparently) was very easy. But then, when it takes me to the account home page I see that I have one huge expense type: transfers/credit card payments! Huh? If the credit card is listed on their system, isn't counting credit card payments causing all my expenses to be counted twice (one month apart from each other)?

If you go to the reports section, it's the same thing. And you have to turn on "advanced reports" to be able to hide this class of expenses, which is very puzzling. There is probably some sort of configuration that I have to enter to make this stop showing, but it's odd that this seems to be the default behavior for this popular financial management software. I'll dig a little more into it and find out if maybe I'm missing something quite obvious. Until then... Huh?

Driving to the gym

I always thought it was funny to drive to the gym. You are "lazy" to go exercise. But now I see how it would make more sense:

Gym Car Concept Sounds Both Healthy and Extremely Dangerous

Now they just need to add a shower inside the car and it would make it perfect! :-)

Great spam

I received a great spam message today:

from: Yahoo/Msn Lottery Incoporation
reply-to: eventmanager_verificationboard@live.com
to: undisclosed-recipients
date: Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 9:19 AM
subject: Windows Live Lottery Have Chosen You Has A Winner

And it came to my gmail account, which makes the mix even more interesting. And, yes, gmail did recognize it a Spam. Gmail is generally pretty good at identifying spam. It's just too aggressive sometimes. About one "non-spam" email a week ends up in my spam folder. It's been a long time I haven't seen any spam in my inbox.

Friends, old games and gmail

This is a post done by request from my best friend, who went through a great ordeal to send me one of the games we used to play a lot a long time ago: X-COM UFO Defense. Great turn-based strategy game! So it's time to take a step back in time and remember the games that "defined my computer gamer experience". The list below is not in any particular order. And it could be much longer than this, but I decided to keep it simple, so that I might still be able to get some sleep tonight:

• X-COM series
• Maniac Mansion
• Indiana Jones The Last Crusade & Fate of Atlantis
• Monkey Island series
• Leisure Suit Larry series (well, I think I've only started playing pretty late in the series, something like 5 or 6)
• Loom
• Myst
• Test Drive series
• Planetfall (I really disliked that game because I was never able to get very far on it, but it was probably one of the first games that I've played on my 8086)
• SimCity
• SimEarth
• SimAnt
  
• Flight Simulator
• Lakers versus Celtics
• Battle Chess
• Lemmings series
• Prince of Persia (they just come out with a new of this series, amazing!)
• Sam and Max
• Space Quest (also didn't play too many of the series)
• The Adventures of Willy Beamish
• Elvira & Elvira 2
• Budokan
• Indy 500
• Vette!
• Stunts
• Syndicate
• Out of this world
• Wolfenstein 3D
• Doom
• Dune
  

Writing this list made me realize how much free time I used to have... And there are tons of games that I remember playing them, but couldn't figure out the name any more. And these are all computer games. I could try to list old game boy, NES, SNES, SEGA Master System... Oh, so much time... I'm so old!

And what about gmail? Well, it's the second day in a row that I receive a message from somebody saying that they tried to send me something on my gmail and it bounced. So the ended up sending it to my yahoo account and it all worked. Go figure how evil Google wants to be.

Ok! enough about forcing my memory and time to go to sleep. It's been a very busy week so far and it's just the beginning. I'm looking forward to the weekend when it's supposed to be below freezing and snowing. The joys of winter.

A day of crazy news

I really should be going to bed, so I'll keep it quick.

Today, I mean, yesterday, was a day with lots of odd news happening at once. None of them completely surprising, but all of them quite big in different ways. The two highlights are:

1. The house purchase is decided. It's still not complete - things close on the 19th - but I really can't back out out it without paying for the consequences (on the order of US$11K, which is not an amount of money that I should be throwing away).
2. I received a letter saying that I should be receiving my green card in about 3 weeks. Interesting that I won't be in this house in 3 weeks. I hope it gets forwarded correctly. The full process took only 1.5 years! It's amazing how time flies with those things.

So that's it. Now it's time to really go to bed. This morning I have to wake up early to see if I can decide on the color of the roof for the house. So exciting!

Why are news readers so buggy?

Well, I know that the answer is: because they try to use too much JavaScript and AJAX and all the minor differences between how to do stuff and reference objects in the browsers make them very prone to being buggy. Also, sometimes it's not only how buggy it is, but what you have to do to get around some flawed design decisions, which makes the experience even worse. But let's get to some examples, shall we?

Google Reader

I was very happy with Google Reader until one day that I think Google was having some problems with their servers and opening any links was very painful. That's when I realized that it was painful because all links are actually links to their tracking page that redirect you to the site you want to get (and, by the way, Gmail does the same thing, but let's not talk about Google's evil ways today) and their tracking service was apparently having a slow day. I don't really mind people tracking what I'm doing, because I know that in the end it actually will help other people find things. What I mind is that it was interrupting my reading experience. So I stopped using Google Reader.

But today I went back to see the changes that they made and started just clearing all the lists marking everything as read when I saw an interesting bug: when I read all posts on one feed that was inside a folder the count in the feed went to zero but the folder was still showing that I had unread posts. I wished I took a screenshot of it, but after some time there seems to be some "refresh" task that cleaned it up.

Bloglines Beta

I decided on using the Bloglines Beta because I was too used to the Google Reader model in which things are marked as read only when you scroll to them. The classic Bloglines marks everything as read automatically as you select the feeds to read.

More than just bugs, Bloglines Beta had a very simple annoyance: it wouldn't refresh the feed you are reading. You had to navigate out and back into the feed. That took a lot of time, considering that I read my feeds once a day or once every two days and I usually have on the order of 500 entries to read. When I get to part of them, there are new waiting.

A very well known bug of Bloglines though, and what made me move away from it, was the fact that it just didn't refresh some of my feeds. The blog itself had new messages, Google Reader would show them, but Bloglines wouldn't. It's something that has been observed by other people, but it was time to move on...

NewsGator

My latest trial is NewsGator. It's a pretty simple system that does not try all the fancy AJAX things that the previous two had: it does not try to see what you are reading to auto mark them as read. You have to go to the end of a page and click on "mark all posts on this page as read". It took me some time to get used to it, but in the end it made it ok to set waypoints on reading entries instead of one at a time. It was way lighter-weight, so it made me happy.

But not everything is great in this world here. NewsGator seems to have a very odd bug on the counts of unread emails on the summary on the left. Sometimes I mark things as read, but it does not get in sync with the list on the left. At least in this case there is a button "Refresh Feed List" that fixes it. The only problem with it is that it takes you to a "feed discovery" page, instead of keeping you in the context of where you were. Quite annoying.

The conclusion is that there seems to be no online RSS reader that doesn't annoy me in one way or another. I'll keep using NewsGator for a little longer, but let's see what happens.

Oh, all tests above were done on my Mac using Firefox 3. I haven't really tried other browsers.

And music

Lots of very stressful things are going on right now. But that's not what I want to write about today. I'm about to do what psychologists say you shouldn't do: write about what is good and not what is bad. Writing what is bad makes you understand it better and find ways out of it. Writing what is good just helps banalizing it and then it's not as good any more. But, well, even after all this understanding, I'll still do it. I don't want to make any of my readers decide to remove my blog from their trial list.

So I've joined a choir again. It's a Jewish choir, so no more large amounts of church songs to sing. Not that I'm against singing good choral music. What I'm against is people deliberately choosing Christian church music because that's what they are more comfortable with and never really branching out to anything else equally interesting, and less sung.

Back to the current choir: it's been an interesting ride. In many ways it reminds me of one Jewish choir I was part of in Brazil. It started out with something like 50 people. Now, a little over a month after the first rehearsal, it's already down to something like 35 people. Out of these, maybe 15 actually know how to sing, while the rest are in a varying grade of followers. I think the choir experience should be fun, so, as long as the conductor doesn't feel like we don't really need to learn things to perform, we are still good.

Our first concert is tonight, actually. At Bellevue Square Mall. Yes, a shopping mall! That is doing a special "holidays" celebration and decided to invite us even though we haven't been around for very long. It will likely still work out, but it won't be exciting enough for me to advertise it out for my friends for them to check it out. We'll be singing something like 7 pieces for about 15 minutes total. So, it's not that worth people's time yet. Parking at a mall at this time of the year is torture. Listening to a choir that hasn't been rehearsing for very long is not much of a relief.

But I'm enjoying it. It's doing something that I was not expecting: It's making me appreciate music again. I've been going through a phase where my mind can't abstract itself any more to appreciate music the same way I did before. I stopped being able to compose (although I was not never very good at it anyway - so it might have been a good thing) and even just sit in my corner in my office and listen to things like Beethoven's late string quartets. But it's all coming back to me now! I find myself spending time just playing intervals, short melodies and quick harmony exercises on my keyboard almost every day now. Odd that it's not a place to leave stuff on any more.

I guess that's it. If you didn't come here to read about me rambling about my life, I'll leave you with something funny:

Uh

Oh, life and news readers

I've been finding hard lately to find something to blog about. It's part shame, part confusion and part simply lack of time to consider anything. But I'm here and still alive. I feel like the world is a confusion right now. The stock market is maddening, and even vitamins that people thought were good for you, don't seem to be. Actually, after reading In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, you learn to question everything that science is saying about nutrition.

Also, I've been disappointed with Google Reader. I don't like the fact that Google tracks all the links I click on it and, in general, I thought the UI is a little sluggish sometimes. So I moved back to Bloglines, which I found confusing because it just marks everything as read before I scroll through all the feeds. But they have a Beta interface that looks very much like Google Reader. I've used it for some time but realized it seemed not to work for some feeds sometimes. But the most annoying thing is that it had no "refresh this feed" button, so if I was reading one feed and when I finished going through it there were more articles, I'd have to navigate out and back in to read them.

That's when I decided to move onto something new and started trying what seemed to be number 3 for news readers (actually this is probably quite skewed, but it's interesting to see Outlook showing as number 1 biggest news reader somewhere - maybe it has a bigger refresh rate?): NewsGator. It's not as AJAX-y as the previous two. It paginates the feeds, so that you have to keep pressing "Mark All Posts On This Page As Read" to move on, but it's snappy, has no link tracking and it mostly works. The only annoyances that I've found so far is that the list of feeds on the left with counts of unread items sometimes doesn't get updated and you have to click on "Refresh feed list". But at least you don't have to navigate in and out of things.

Well, I guess that's it. Time to start my day!

The pain...

After battling for another couple of hours with NTRootKit-AC and Generic FakeAlert.a and Generic FakeAlert.d, I decided to give up and reinstall Windows. I moved all my data files to my data partition (E). I wasn't able to access anything external, but I was fairly confident that it would be easy to just clean up my program partitions (C & D).

Well... Things didn't go as well as planned. When I tried to clean up the first two partitions of my disk, for some reason the format procedure thought that the first partition had the full disk size and destroyed all partitions in the process. Including the one with all my data!

So what did I lose, you might ask. Well, besides multiple save games from multiple games I've started and haven't yet finished, including Spore and Fallout 3, and everything that I've added to Quicken since about 6 months ago (when I did the last CD backup) - including all the budgeting that I have been doing in the last couple of weeks, the thing that I'm mostly sad about is that I've lost multiple of my personal projects. That was probably about 80-100 hours of designing and coding. Surely I will take less time to redo it than it took me to go through the first version, but it's just depressing. It's like I'm starting a lot of things from scratch again.

And what doesn't help is that I've already rebooted my computer since I've reinstalled Windows 10 times (and installation took many reboots too because of the mess with the partitions that I've mentioned above). And Windows Update still says that I have 23 updates to install after SP3.

Lesson learned? Maybe quit using Windows? ;-)

When things just don't work

Last night I was working until a little late trying to get some reports to work. To generate these reports, it takes about 5 hours. But the surprise I was getting was that after about 5 hours the report generation tool would crash mysteriously. Nothing logged, just simply apparently the application would stop responding correctly. Very painful. But that wasn't all...

While I was in this pain and running multiple tests on this service, I was playing around on my windows box looking at random sites to see if there was anything close to a project I want to work on. While I was going through this almost-random search, I came across some very fishy sites. But I was in the middle of lots of things going on and, by accident, I clicked on download/open (which was by reflex) an .exe file! ARGH!

Note that I do have an anti-virus running on that computer. But it didn't quite work. It detected that something was wrong, but too late. Next thing I knew, my computer auto-rebooted. Then when it came back up, the antivirus was off. Not long after that, I got popups from Windows Security saying that my computer was contaminated but they could help. They scanned my computer for me and said that I had 37 infected files and I only needed to pay something like $60 to fix it. Even if I really wanted to pay, of course I wouldn't be that idiotic to enter credit card information when there is some sort of trojan installed on my computer.

So I went to McAfee, which the antivirus I use, and turned on full firewall to isolate myself from the web. Ran a full scan. Found 17 infected files and quarantined them. But I kept getting the warning from Windows Security. So I've restarted the computer.

Everything seemed normal. No more messages, my antivirus was turned back on. I was starting to be less worried... When... Another reboot. And we are back to the previous state.

Now I'm running another virus scan, but ready to get all the user files I have on that computer and start over. I don't use it for much more than games, but game files are huge! It's late, so I guess I'll have to wait until tonight to continue fighting the good fight. Right now I've even disconnected the computer physically from the network.

Oh, joy...

Oblong Glove

I think this is what Microsoft had in mind with its "Surface" plan:

oblong industries, inc.

Pretty-looking, but you probably need a huge computer behind it to handle all the interactivity, a very expensive setup of screens and... I'm not sure to what benefit. Throw letters around the room?

Antarctica Mystery

Apparently they are still trying to figure out the mystery of the Antarctic mountains. They probably should look for answers in past literature

Yes, that's all I have to post today... I'm fighting a cold right now, as well as a lot of small details at work. Haven't had time to play Fallout 3 since last week. Quite sad.

Still here

I know I haven't been blogging much lately. I have multiple posts in draft right now and I can't seem to be able to finish them. So I'll keep this simple.

I'm back to Seattle after a short-ish trip to Brazil for my sister's wedding. The trip was generally good. The only thing I was a little sad about this trip is that the schedule was quite tight and it's not that I didn't have free time to meet with friends, it's that I didn't know when I would have free time to meet with them. The result of that is that I've ended up not doing much besides the wedding events. Oh, well. I kept my mind away from work (something that was helped by my blackberry not wanting to sync with my mail) and it's always good to get back with a fresher perspective on things.

Since I'm back I can't say I've done too much. I was exhausted on Thursday, went to work on Friday to find Amy sick at home. I've played some Fallout 3 until I realized it was going to consume my next few weeks so I've been controlling myself. And it also crashed on me twice.

Today we tried to get out of the house a little, going to Lunchbox Laboratory (a quite expensive burger place with somehow different burgers - quite good) and the Ballard Market to walk around a little under the rain (it started raining while we were walking at the market). And now I'm here finishing this post and preparing myself to get back to cleaning my room and finishing folding laundry and ironing my shirts. Lots of fun ahead!

Oh, and I am annoyed that the connector to the suction cup on my GPS broke and it will cost US$50 to get a new one. Considering that a new GPS (with the suction cup) costs $200, it's silly that this is this expensive.

When work ruins fun

No, this is not going to be a post about working too much and not having time to have fun. This is about how working on something sometimes can change your perception of things around you and highlight problems, reducing the ability for me to enjoy reality.

Here is today's example: I was looking at MyThings to understand what they were really trying to provide you as incentives to cataloging everything you own and purchase in their systems. So I decided to list the first thing that I saw in front of me: my printer, an HP Photosmart C6180 All-in-One. So I started typing "Hp Photosmart C6180" and using the great auto-complete I've received the following suggestions:

hp photosmart c6180 hewlett-packard
hp photosmart c6180 all-in-one

What is the difference? Uhm... So I picked up the first one. And that's when I had an even nicer "surprise". They give me a list of products to choose that match "hp photosmart c6180 hewlett-packard":

1) Hewlett-Packard PhotoSmart C6180 All-in-One
2) Hewlett-Packard PhotoSmart C6180 All-in-One
3) Hewlett-Packard PhotoSmart C6180 All-in-One
...

Two pages of it (about 18 options). All with the same title, the same specs, and two different images. All in the category "Other Electronics", which is a great category name. Finally, on the left there is a summary of how many per category were found and it shows:

Other Electronics (17)

And nothing else. So what is the categorization of the 18th product? No clue... they all look the same, so it's hard to figure out what doesn't show on their category count.

Most people wouldn't be bothered by those kinds of things. However, because improving an online retail catalog is my job, it killed my whole experience with the website and I decided to stop playing around with it, write this blog post and go to bed. I'm sure there are some great ideas on the website, and hopefully one day I will get back to it, but right now it's just too sad to see something like this.

Anyway, it's Wednesday now... Less than three days from now I'll be on an airplane heading home to Brazil. I don't know why, I'm actually a little nervous with this trip. Probably because I haven't planned much this time. It's going to be short with a lot of wedding-related events, so I didn't want to be just running around while I'm there. Oh, well... Let's see what happens.

Up earlier... What to do?

Yesterday during house cleaning apparently somebody readjusted my alarm clock (which is a terrible piece of engineering, by the way, but I won't get to it here) and changed the time in such way that instead of waking me up at 6:15 AM as normal, it woke me up at 5:35 AM. As I didn't know of it until I got to my computer to read the morning emails and news, now I can't really get back to bed any more.

So suddenly my day was given extra 40 minutes... What to do with them?

Well, first I tried to find more information about Siri, a start-up with a good amount of AI big names, all that worked in SRI's big CALO (Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes) project. It is arguably the largest AI project ever built with funding from DARPA.

Unfortunately there isn't much out there, just that they raised US$ 8.5 million and don't want to say what they are really about. ReadWriteWeb has some observations, but still not that helpful. I did sign up for the private Beta and will see what happens whenever they decide to launch.

Everybody should be skeptical about AI-focused applications, but they do have a strong team of people and experience. Judging from the "paper trail" that the CALO project generated, there could be something to it. I think it's a great concept to (and now I'm projecting a concept to their product, which could be completely off) instead of trying to build a search engine, to build a layer on top of the web (so that integrates search engines and specific websites) that tries to guide you to the information you are looking for, instead of forcing you to be search-savvy, i.e., find out by yourself which search keywords will actually take you closer to the information you are looking for.

Again, I'll wait and see... While I'm waiting, I can do the most time-consuming thing (and get rid of my extra 40-minutes): go through the CALO papers...

Starting again... but so many things to do

So the whole Jewish New Year event is over. It's actually my favorite Jewish Holiday actually mostly because I like reasons to stop and reflect on what happened with the past and plan the future. It's actually an interesting time to plan the future as in a week I'll be "celebrating" 4 years working at Amazon. And I like to think of things in 4 year cycles.

So, what is my plan for the next 4 years, you ask... But I won't answer it here. I'll have to say that I don't really have a real plan yet. Economic situations are being an influence on the lack of a real plan, as well as the many things I have to think right now. First, and foremost, my imminent trip to Brazil in less than a week. With all the things happening right now, I didn't have much time to think about what I need for this trip. I haven't bought any presents, only a few of the requests that I've collected... I'm pretty much utterly unprepared this time.

It's going to be a short trip. Only two weeks out, meaning only 12 days in Brazil with the couple of days lost in transit. Technically two weddings to go (same people, but first in the civil wedding and then the religious wedding), plus a big party. That leaves only about 8 days left that I can do something about. And with my lack of thought to plan anything, I think I'll end up not doing much. We'll see.

What else is going on? Many other things, but I won't bore anybody with details. Some parts of work (when I'm not out for high holidays) have been interesting. I could claim that in the last week I've made Amazon something like 60 cents! So exciting! I should ask for a pay raise! :-)

And I think that's what I have to say. Back to seeing how odd things happen when you have way too much visibility on what people are doing, even when they shouldn't be doing much. Wouldn't it be funny if Michael Arrington is right and "the video video will always be associated with the end of Web 2.0". Not that I believe it's true, but humorous nevertheless.

Saltpetre + stock market today

I was asked to take saltpetre home. That's the description for one of the offers on Amazon:

For women who do not want their partners to have outside relationships. Also for exorcisms & other purification rites.

I guess I'm not asking for details about why they want it... (btw: it's supposed to be for cooking)

Also, today looking at my daily emails from MarketWatch, this is how you want to wake up to the market:

6:36 AM: U.S. stock indexes open more than 2% lower in opening minute of trading
7:09 AM: Dow industrials break below 10,000 mark; Nasdaq composite plunges 4%
7:33 AM: Dow industrials down 400 points
7:47 AM: Dow industrials down 500 points

And I'm sure it's only going to get better throughout the day.

Funny things about Twitter

If you don't know what Twitter is you are probably living in an alternate universe. But, although it's been pretty big for some time now, it feels like people don't really know how to use it correctly. It started out very simple: I create a network of friends and people can send short messages through their cellphone or online to say what they were doing now. This way people can quickly organize themselves and know what their friends were doing.

But then it turned into a "stalker" type environment: there is this set of people that I'm interested in and I follow them to know what they are thinking. On the other side, I want to advertise myself to my "stalkers" (or fans if you want to put a positive twist to it) and keep them thinking that I'm a good person.

The problem in my opinion with this new reason for twitter is that it's not that good at that. It centralizes everything into one platform that allows you to have only 140 characters to send out your message. So it becomes a world of sending links around that is very hard to index and organize. And if you want to keep an eye to what is going on, you have to be online all the time and reading a lot of things (that are now linked around and not there for you to filter based on the text).

Then what happens when you have a tool that people can't really find a perfect use for but lots of people are using it? Well, you start experimenting! People start using it to try to promote themselves by starting to follow somebody, which will make this person look at what you have and decide if they are going to follow you or not. That's what happened today when I was followed by masstransitnow, a political temporary twitter account that is trying to pass some proposition to increase the amount of money sent to mass transit in the greater Seattle area.

There are others, like comcastcares that tries to use twitter to solve customer problems with Comcast.

Does this type of thing work? Well, it's not a great way of sending good content to people, but it's a cheap way of getting your name out there and getting a couple of hundred people to know that you exist. The numbers are completely meaningless for most of those applications (what would 200 extra votes do to a proposition being selected in a place like the whole state of Washington?), but it's easy and free. You only need 140 characters a day and people will keep you in mind.

So back to my personal experience: do I use twitter for anything useful? Actually no. I end up writing less because things that I want to write are too long to twitter about, but because I first try using twitter, I feel like in order for me to post it on this blog it needs to be more in-depth, which usually means that it just never gets written.

I'm actually amazed that I was able to finish this post... Before 2 AM!

First concert of the season

So my first Seattle Symphony concert for the 2008-2009 season has finally arrived and it was quite good. The only kind of depressing thing is that the concert hall was quite empty. Usually it's between 80-90% capacity (at least as far as I can see), and today it was at about 60%. Maybe too many people wanting to watch the VP debate. Who knows? Anyway, they missed a great concert. Three pieces:

1. Stephen Albert's "Anthems and Processionals"
2. Dmitri Shostakovich's "Cello Concerto No. 1 in E-flat major, Op. 107" with Lynn Harrell playing the cello
3. Richard Strauss's "Ein Heldenleben", with Maria Larinoff playing the violin solo (she is the first violin for the Symphony, not an invited guest)

In general it was great. Albert's piece was an American premiere of the revised version, which brings me to a puzzling concept: Stephen Albert died on a car accident in 1992. He was a composer in residence for the Seattle Symphony and the Symphony did its world premiere in 1988 (somewhere in the program it said it was in 1998, which made it more puzzling, but it was most probably a typo). Just after the premiere, he started working on the revised edition. And only this year they finally played the revised edition. At least 16 years after it was written (probably closer to 20 years). A long time to leave a piece in the drawer.

Nice piece, though. I did overhear some people saying that it was a piece for the MTV generation, because something happened on it every 20 seconds, but I wasn't able to remember it enough to confirm it. In any way, I should look into more things from this composer.

The rest was also great, but not new. The Shostakovich is a very hard piece to perform, but it was performed amazingly well. Not perfect, but, hey, I wouldn't want to be the one playing it. The Strauss had amazing energy. This is an example of a composer that is able to use a huge orchestra and build something that doesn't sound just like a mass of noise. Or one big chord. Genius!

Alright, I should stop writing emails and posting on my blog and go to bed.

Oh, I just wanted to add that my day today started very interestingly: with a bus on fire inside the bus tunnel just by work. Not terrorist attack type of fire, just the engine apparently overheated or something and had actual flames coming out of it. I wished I had the energy to take a picture with my camera so that I could have posted it here for the curious. I was already thinking about all the things I had to do at work, so I decided to just move on.

A TV addict? Me?

It's kind of odd right now that I'm actually watching something like 4 series:

1) House: yes, I know I'm kind of tired of always about the same thing over and over again, but it's entertaining sometimes.
2) Fringe: a brand new series with 4 episodes so far, maybe 5. It's kind of an X-Files with a little more emphasis on technology and less on aliens or the government trying to hide things from us. I've been quite happy with the results so far
3) Terminator: Sarah Connors Chronicle: Ok, this one I'm a little embarrassed to say that I've been watching. It's really not a good series, but I think it's a little bit of being old and remembering watching the movies.
4) True Blood: I'm not sure yet if I like this series. The acting is pretty bad, but there are some interesting oddities to it. If I fast-forward through all those sex scenes, it has been watchable. But it's in the fringe of derailing to "vampires are evil and let's kill them all" type of thing. If it does, I guess it's going to come out of my list.

I'm waiting for another couple of episodes of "Knight Rider" to really consider this series trash. There is also a new potentially ok SciFi channel series starting this Friday, Sanctuary. It looks trashy, but, well, I'll have to find some time to have a look. One good think about most of those series is that they only have new episodes every other week, so it allows me to have time to watch them spread out through a couple of weeks. The beauty of a DVR and Hulu.

Odd idea for today: IntoSpace.org

This is an odd idea:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/01/send-a-photo-of-yourself-to-space-for-the-suspiciously-low-price-of-2/

For $2 you can send a something measuring 0.4 x 0.4 inches (that is 1 cm x 1 cm, pretty small) to space. Aren't you excited about it? Hello? Anybody there?

Anyway, it's only $2, so it's not that it's a huge investment for something so meaningless. People spend more meaningless money out there, like paying to send small digital gifts to people on Facebook, or paying taxes so that companies that make bad decisions in what to invest can get out of it for free... I could make this a long list, but I won't bore you with my list. Just think about last month's expenses and all the things that you could have lived without. I'll assure it's way more than $2.

Ask a designer to do statistics...

Here is a great example of what happens when you ask a designer to draw something cool to show statistics:



(sorry for the poor image quality here: I don't have a real image cropping tool on this computer)

Note the market share for Creative Labs as written and as represented. If the error isn't also somewhere else, it's supposed to be 3%. When you have somebody manually creating and typing numbers, you get typos. I'm not saying that you shouldn't ever have a designer do graphics for you. What I'm trying to say is that for such a simple representation, probably it shows that our graphics building software options are a little on the weak side.

Source: The Trouble with Zunes from Fortune Magazine.

A morning of looking at web2.0 companies

Every time I see a random list of "best new web companies" I get amazed with the amount of diversity there is right now. They all have this web2.0 feeling to them, but try to do a lot of random things. I won't try to go through all of them in this post (because I don't have time for it), but I wanted to highlight two today:

SezWho: I've heard of this site before when it was on inception but it seems now it has some tools available. The idea here is to create communities around people's trust ratings based on people's activities across multiple websites. Sounds like a not-so-bad idea, right? But I don't think it will work as it is today. Why? because it requires the site to be "SezWho-enabled", i.e., the site owner has to do coding work to make sure their posting and comment system actually traces back to SezWho. Who will do this jump of forcing their site's experience through somebody else's system? I know I wouldn't. I could ask SezWho to listen to my site's RSS feed and then provide content aggregation and cross-rating. Making it a part of my site is not an option.

Get Satisfaction: Another site I've heard before but when I saw it was in private beta or something like that. The idea of this one is for people to post comments/questions about companies and their products and then for companies to be able to post answers to those questions. All public and searchable. Not a bad idea, I say.

This one is kind of odd to think that it's not going to work. If I post something public about how I don't like my old Canon printer, Canon might think it needs to participate on trying to defend their printer. And once people see that they really have a connection to the company, they might start to really use it.

My biggest concern here is the silo approach again. You have to post on their site. The future is aggregation, not silos. Make you sign up, register your data source (blog, twitter, etc.) and make them aggregate what you say about companies. Then you let companies comment on their system and that is automatically sent back to your site as a comment (whenever possible) with an ad to their service.

Anyway, we will continue to see a lot of changes coming in the future. I just don't know if people will ever be able to fully change.

People love statistics, even when they don't know how to interpret them

So I was reading this article from ComputerWorld that shows statistics about Chrome users to their site and comparing to the other 3 "most popular browsers": IE, Firefox & Safari.

They go through a lot of discussion of how it varied every day, and that during the weekend it went up, then down again and then it "stabilized" at around 5% market share, a bit lower than Safari. Sounds like a meaningful analysis? Well, just look at the graph and tell me! Look at the amount of variation that happens with "old" browsers, like IE and Firefox. They seem to keep competing for the first position, even when they have already been out for many months (actually years, because I think they aggregate all versions into one metric).

My point is, if that's the variation on normal operation, why does anybody care about .5% or even 5% changes day by day and try to conclude anything about them? Yes, Chrome got a pretty big market share quickly, but that's what you expect with anything that is released by such a big and well-known company. And that's the only thing I would take from it. Leave the rest of the conclusions for when you have month-over-month data and you can actually see cannibalization.

An evening of working from home + Spore

So I decided to leave work earlier today to concentrate on working on a new idea. The last times that I've tried to do that I ended up getting sidetracked and not really doing what I was planning on doing. And you might think that this time the same thing happened because of the title, huh? Oh, well, not really. I did get some work done. Not enough to prove if my idea would work, unfortunately. I was interrupted by the reality of working with HTML parsing: not all parsers can parse all pages. Oh, well...

But it's actually somehow funny to do it, because you realize how "unprofessional" some sites really are behind the scenes. I'm not going to cite names here, but here are some pieces of HTML that I found around:

<!--modified by sakthi for req no: 104293 -->

<!--Code added for Task1 .3 start-->

<!-- BEGIN HumanTag Monitor. DO NOT MOVE! MUST BE PLACED JUST BEFORE THE /BODY TAG -->

Anyway, so why did I mention Spore? Because I actually did download it and try it out. It's not a bad game. Has a huge potential for just consuming all your free time, so if you want to give it a try, keep it in mind. The graphics are pretty nice, especially underwater. When I moved to the ground form, the graphics weren't as nice, but the amount of variations you can put on your creature was quite neat.

In any way, I had fun!

Quite odd how different the evening can be when I get home before 7 pm.

Odd statistics

I was going through Estadao's neat statistics UI on Sao Paulo's governor's election poll. Not very complicated, but has some odd things (which is more likely to mean that somebody entered data incorrectly than anything else):

If you look at the general election numbers by education level and income level, you will see that there is a positive correlation on both factors with voting for Alckmin. You'd expect that, as there is a positive correlation between education level and income level.

But when you go to the 2nd round is when things get odd. There is now still a positive correlation to education, but not on income.

I'm a little away from Brazilian politics (although I'll be in Brazil this year during the 2nd round - but I won't be able to vote as of now, because my voting registration was canceled, because I haven't voted for so long), but one thing that I can relate to is the rejection rate on Paulo Maluf. I'm somehow in shock that the guy is still running for a public office. He has a huge track record of corruption, but apparently he still thinks that he was able to get more things accomplished while giving money and taking money from "his friends", so he deserves to be put in power again. The scary thing is that he is not completely wrong about it, just a little narrow-sighted.

Thinking too much?

Sometimes I have this feeling that I'm thinking about too many different things at the same time. For example, right now I have four main technical projects at work, two at home, I'm reading 4 books at the same time, 3 podcasts weekly (I've reduced that from about two months ago) plus news and stuff.

It's not the busiest time-wise that I've been in my life. I still have time to watch the Olympics, work on a jigsaw puzzle and play some Wii (mostly Soulcalibur Legends and Boom Blox). The problem is the mental cost of not being able to focus on anything specific for enough time. I have been coming home earlier than usual and more tired than usual. Quite worrisome.

And is this improving any time soon? Not really. Some of the projects at work have to finish in the next week or so, but new ones will take their place. I'll be going to Vegas for KDD this weekend, which will probably give me more ideas of other projects to do at home.

But one of the things that I feel like I'm being most wasteful about is that not only I haven't been finishing most projects, but when I do get somewhere I don't really write it down to both remind myself later and try to give something back to my readers as a token of going through things and suggestions of what they should look into. So I'll try to be a little better about that from now on. Easier to write about a book that I've finished than write emails that friends never reply, or when they do I take months to reply back.

So, what was the last book that I've read? Well, I actually finished two at the same time:

Leadership Brand: Developing Customer-Focused Leaders to Drive Performance and Build Lasting Value by Dave Ulrich and Norm Smallwood

Quite an interesting book, but unfortunately I wasn't able to absorb too much out of it, because it's more focused on building leadership on your company, creating a theme for it, and making it something visible to the outside world, and it's really not the level that I usually operate. I'm not even sure why I bought this book, but it was on my bookcase, so I decided to read it.

Sunstorm by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter

I really like Stephen Baxter. I thought this was another very well-done book. I liked it more than the first of the trilogy, Time's Eye. I actually bought the trilogy when I heard of the death of Arthur C. Clarke. I always wanted to read it and found it was a good opportunity. I was actually at the bus reading the news and went on my Kindle and bought the trilogy. Later I found out that I had already had this idea before and I had the trilogy on hardcover.

I'm not going to any details about the book, as anything might spoil part of it. As all Stephen Baxter books, I'd only suggest it to the hard sci-fi fans and not the ones that like nice stories in a futuristic environment. The technologies were interesting, but maybe a little lame. The connection of it all and the reaction of the world to tragedy was interesting.

Anyway, as I said, I won't get into any more details. I'll just mention one thing: I really like my Kindle. Great device to read books. Unfortunately not so great for other things. I tried newspapers (and still have a rolling subscription of at least one newspaper at all times), but it's just hard to skim through it and see if anything catches your attention. And that's how I usually read newspapers. But for books... Ah... One of the things that differentiates it from my bookshelf is that I can see all the books that are there waiting to be read. My bookshelf has too much noise of read books. I usually just delete the books I've read from my Kindle (I can re-download them at any time anyway), so it's easy to see what is there waiting for my attention. Also buying new books is way too easy. Very dangerous! I read some news or listen on a podcast about a book that sounds interesting and I get my Kindle, check if it's available and if it is I usually just buy it there. Very dangerous to my finances.

I think that's what I had to write today. Long post, I know... But hopefully with some interesting content.

The reality of our taste

I was reading this post on The Amateur Gourmet and it reminded me how all our experiences are tainted by subjective connections to other things in our lives.

Getting out of food, a typical example of this is on human relationships. If you had a big disagreement with somebody in the past, it's very common for you to never really trust that person's judgment. You have to force yourself to be neutral to be able to correctly compare that person's ideas with others'.

For me I found a different easy way out. I've been so grumpy lately that every idea seems bad. No effort involved in trying to level the the ideas to the "best common denominator". Why I've been grumpy? That requires probably a post that will take longer to write than the 2 minutes I have before having to leave to go to work. So maybe some other day.

VMware time bomb

This must have been a lot of fun for VMware users

Very hard to test something like this. But I won't get into more details here. Maybe this should be a topic for my other blog.

Microsoft Surface... Interestingly odd

So Microsoft seems to now be pushing its "Surface" product/concept of interaction. It has even, according to this article, installed some in Sheraton hotels in some cities in the US. Go to the article to see a video of how it is supposed to work.

So what do I think about it? I think the goal is great. But I'm not sure they have the right applications in mind yet. They love the flipping through pictures idea and the iPhone multi-touch style zoom, but pay attention to the transition: press a light corner of the table??? Also, they show in some videos on their website the ability to integrate with phones and other active elements.

And that's where I think they are getting things wrong: instead of right now working with everybody to discuss how they can integrate the technology with all devices they are going through a private testing only with selected distributors of Microsoft technology. So, where the innovation can happen will not receive any SDK until who-knows-when. And when this happens, it's hard to say what the compatibility will be with devices.

In a way, this is what Apple got wrong at first with the iPhone, but now is slowly remedying it. They launched a great new way of people interacting with their phone and at first you had to break into the device to install more useful software. Now you can buy it through Apple. Things are still limited, and will always be, because Apple wants to control the iPhone experience, but you can already see the explosive reaction of the development community. That's what people are looking for.

A window to the past

I don't know for how much longer this will be available, but it's funny:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=eagle+point+drive++Ark&ie=UTF8&layer=c&cbll=34.886369,-92.239196&panoid=SqGxboge__NMt6Fy4liZ0w&cbp=1,98.31571236932916,,0,-2.044612009305669&ll=34.89151,-92.238336&spn=0.010789,0.02223&t=h&z=16

It's a picture from the Google maps streetlevel view of a house on fire with firetrucks and everything. Quite amazing quality.

Sometimes they are hard to believe

Sometimes you are browsing through news items and you come across something that just doesn't make too much sense. Today, it was this article on the Daily Telegraph:

Sexual harassment okay as it ensures humans breed, Russian judge rules

I can see that in some cases it's hard to do something about these sexual harassment cases, mostly because the threshold of what defines a sexual harassment is always a little fuzzy and it's hard to find good evidence. I think that's the case here, but the newspapers took it in a completely different way: that it's a good thing to have. Oh, I'm not trying to say that hitting on a co-worker is a good thing. It actually creates a very bad working environment and that's usually the last thing you want if you want to ensure people are happy and productive.

What I'm trying to point out here is that the way this news was written, it looks like the judge was just oldfashioned and wrong. Although judges make mistakes, it feels like there is a part of the story that is missing here.

When you know that a program has been over-engineered

From time to time I have to be reminded what is bad software engineering. And it usually happens by accident, reading an article that was about something completely different. This morning, it was this interesting article on ComputerWorld:

Free Windows XP tuneup: Put new life into an old workhorse

Look at the trick to add "Copy to Folder..." and "Move to Folder..." to your context menu: you go to the registry and add some completely meaningless GUIDs somewhere and... magic! If somebody on the design team decided to add this capability, you either should have put it in a structured menu to add this, or just have removed it from the system altogether!

The other tips are a little bit less worrisome. Interesting article. If my main operating system wasn't a Mac OSX, I would probably use some of those hints.

Oh, and don't think that I consider the OSX great. But it's very simple. It does have some "hidden features", but they usually don't require knowing magic keys here and there. Just digging through menus you didn't know existed, or calling command line tools.

It all always reminds me of the horror that I felt when I had to code using MFC. I bought the great The MFC Answer Book and was shocked by the amount of hidden and under-documented features (well, this was back in 1999 - maybe some things were documented after that) that just did magic to your applications. Things like (this is a fictitious example): "want to create a window with three panels, where two are static and a third can be resized? Just override this "CMainFrame::OnWindowInitialization()" and return "FALSE" and it will just work. Huh?

Anyway, I'm glad that's something far in my past. And also far in Microsoft's past (it's still supported, but there are way better ways of building "rich" UIs right now in Windows using .NET)

Camping this weekend

IMG_5963, originally uploaded by Wandering Minstrel.

So I went camping with friends this weekend. We went to Dash Point State Park, which is only about 40-50 minutes south of where I live. Nice park, but small. What it means is that you can get to anything in the park within a 20-30 minute walk, but there isn't that much to see.

In any case, it's always nice to get out and enjoy time with friends away from the normal day-to-day tasks. Good conversations, fun cooking around the campfire, some smoky but cleaner air...

If you want to see more pictures, you can check the SmugMug album

Cutting 10 zeros?

This article today kind of shocked me: Zumbabwe knocks 10 zeros off currency. 10 zeros??? How can somebody have a currency in which you have to deal with such large numbers. Certainly an inflation rate somewhere in between 2.2 million and 12.5 million percent (according to this article at MSNBC) can do something like that really quickly. I kind of vaguely remember the hyperinflation period in Brazil and basically you get two things:

1) Banks become very important and need to make things move quickly. That's why the banking system in Brazil right now is so good (compared to here in the US).
2) You just don't keep money laying around. Every minute that you have cash you are losing money. So there were rushes to stores and banks during payment days. And everything would get even more complicated when there were all the plans to freeze prices and such. Life was not fun.

But this was many orders of magnitude lower than Zimbabwe. I can't think that anybody there can use money. As the bills get out of the press, they are pretty much not worth the paper that was used to make them. Yikes! It saddens me to even think of life there...

Technology demos - sometimes not very impressive

The last couple of days I've seen a few demos of potentially interesting technology that when you get to it they are just not there yet. One I mentioned on my last post, so I decided to increase the list:

The first one, as most people are already talking a lot about, is Cuil. There are lots of articles about it out there, so I won't write much besides saying that it's quite impressively fast, but relevance is worse even than MSN Search on its early days (and that's a hard thing to beat).

Then, going to a whole different type of technology, there is the Martin Jetpack. It claims to be able to run for 30 minutes and get to 8K feet, but the demo is underwhelming: a guy with a big thing on his back making a lot of noise and then two guys around him guiding him around hovering a couple of feet off the ground. A few balloons and a lawn chair seem way more efficient.

Twine and OpenLink

I've played around with Twine for some time and then for some reasons that I will eventually try to summarize, I've stopped paying much attention to it. I still receive the daily digests from the twines that I follow and do skim over them, but in general haven't found a real reason to do any switching over. I'm a little addicted to having the del.icio.us bookmarks on my Firefox and be able to quickly find what I'm looking for by using ctrl+b or APPLE+b and typing a keyword. Twine only offers something like that if I get to their website first.

But, anyway, as I said, I'll get to an analysis of Twine some other day. Right now I'm going to just make this observation hoping that I'll have somebody solve this for me. I was reading Kingsley Idehen's blog post about Twine and OpenLink and it referenced the ability to navigate Twine through the relationships that it adds to the pages.

It sounded interesting so I downloaded OpenLink for Firefox (which required me to create an account with Firefox Add-ons) and gave it a try... And then started the head-scratching. Lots of options that don't seem to do anything (like the relationships on the popup from the storage URI section) and things that don't seem to work until you click twice on them. But once you got used to clicking around, there is some information there. Not organized enough, in my opinion, but it's probably a good start. If you have some organization it will highlight better what isn't organized correctly.

But the question that remains for me is: is this what is missing? Should this be the next browser experience? I don't get it yet, but it might be more because of clunkiness of interface and some improvements in the data. It's a way of looking at information, but it's just not fluid enough. Not all interactions can have a real grouping that is not themselves. And if something is only grouped with itself, what is the use of grouping?

Anyway, it was an interesting experiment anyway. Now back to something more productive. Not mowing weeds (which was part of today's entertainment)...

Mistakes cities make

When you have too much money to spend, as do bigger cities like Seattle, you are bound to make very expensive mistakes. The latest one to make to the news here is the great "high-tech" toilets that now the city is trying to auction off through eBay, but hasn't been able to find people that are crazy enough to pay 90 thousand dollars on it. Ok, I actually should be a little bit more precise in saying that it's not the city that is using eBay, but a contractor for the city that is specialized on getting rid of surplus equipment.

They are quite expensive toilet to maintain: something like US$360 a day (according to this other article on the Seattle Times). And, well, they are a public "safe and clean" place, so they attract illicit activities, like drug dealing and use, and apparently prostitution. Think that there are only 5 installed in the whole city!

Anyway, they will be gone and the 332 people that use it every day will have to go somewhere else. Perhaps to some US$16 a day port-a-potty.

And yes, this is the level of concerns that I have lately. Actually I'll have to say that lately I've been trying to work more on interesting projects at home and I think I'm close to something quite fun that uses FreeBase. I've subscribed to their modeling mailing list and that has made me excited about paying more attention to what is going on there.

Getting people to do things for free

I read this interesting article on TechCrunch:

We Want A Dead Simple Web Tablet for $200. Help Us build it

Simple thoughts and reasons and then you look at the reaction of people claiming they want to help. The pattern I found that is very interesting is people saying that they can code anything in a set of languages that usually starts with PHP. So sad that there are so many PHP coders out there. It's a very weak language with powerful libraries, in my opinion. But I'm not here to get into PHP. Back to the analysis of the people that respond to this article.

The response has been pretty huge. Lots of people got easily excited about the project: a cheap computer that does 80% of what you usually do on the internet. It won't help on making me blog more often or actually write emails to my friends, but it certainly would be a great piece of technology. People can see it, but they can't really see the actual complexity of the problem. You find comments like:

"College student will help with writing the marketing aspect." - huh?

"Wow, this sounds like an awesome idea. I’d love to contribute in some way, I have lots of education contacts and some limited coding expertise. Maybe my biggest asset is enthusiasm and time? Contact me if I can help."

"Finally! I can help promote this in and bring it to Canada. Let me know if you’re interested - I am!"

"I would be happy to contribute my companies resources and expertise to the project." - and this guy has a web hosting company

There are too many other hilarious things to quote.

Odd watch brand

Those are things that I find out because part of my work is to look at the items that are part of the Amazon's catalog:

01 The One

Definitely a geeky watch brand, but a non-geeky website. Odd combination.

Show me your ads and...

I was looking at an address in Seattle on MapQuest today (yes, I do still use it from time to time), and I was shocked by the ads that I was offered. They all come from Google's adsense: out of 10 textual ads (yes, quite amazing how much they can cram on that page), 4 were for DUI attorneys, 2 for life insurance, 2 for job search, 1 for a DJ and the last one for a florist. Getting ads for DUI stuff when you are looking around for driving directions gives quite a negative feeling about driving. Probably not what MapQuest would have chosen if they were given a choice.

That's the inherent problem around any algorithm-based advertising (if not almost any computer-generated prediction). It's very hard to encode and take into account psychological reactions to things. It's much easier to just consider the financial correlation. If (I'm inflating the numbers here a couple of orders of magnitude) you put an ad (A) that will make 10% of the people click on it (out of confusion and disgust) and 50% never come back to the website and another ad (B) that only 8% click on it (which let's say is the average click-through rate on ads - again, this number is a couple of orders of magnitude off), it's easy to build an algorithm that will tell that A is better than B, but very hard to tell that B is better than A. It takes some time until you realize that there is a traffic reduction going on due to showing ad A.

Anyway, I'm probably going to be back to MapQuest. I keep rotating around the map provider I use not to miss new features and to make sure that I can appreciate all of them better.

The oddities of seeing past snapshots of the world

Actually the title of this post is a little misleading. I'm really talking about looking at the US stock market. I'm not a big investor at all, so I don't keep track of what is going on throughout the day. However, I'm subscribed to MarketWatch's bulletin and when I get home I read all the "spam" that I receive from them. It's quite amusing just to look at the headlines. Here is an example for today:

7/15/2008 9:52:14 AM - Dow industrials down triple digits; AIG, B. of A., J.P. Morgan biggest decliners
7/15/2008 11:14:22 AM - Crude oil slides more than $8 to trade below $140 a barrel
7/15/2008 12:33:12 PM - Nasdaq and Dow erase steep declines, turning modestly positive
7/15/2008 3:00:00 PM - Crude oil loses nearly $7 in biggest one-day drop in 17 years
7/15/2008 4:03:29 PM - Dow industrials drop nearly 100 points, with AIG, B. of A. pacing slide

What a roller coaster! And It's been like this almost every day for many weeks now. I don't know how people that actually get their sustenance out of this can keep their sanity!

Yes, I do have money in the stock market. Mostly funds, many through a retirement account. It's kind of depressing to see how their are doing right now. They are not doing terribly, but pretty much everything is in the red compared to some months ago. So I don't look. I'm not planning on needing the money any time soon.