Monthly Archives: June 2008

Flip-Flopper

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While looking at job postings on Craiglist, I somehow ended up at Craig Newmark’s personal blog. (He founded Craigslist.) He linked to this YouTube video.

For some reason I’m reminded of Hillary’s tall tale of ducking sniper fire. I respect McCain as a decorated soldier and a Senator who understands bipartanship, but after eight years of the Commander in Chief misleading* us about Iraq, I’d really prefer to not elect a president who will do more of the same.

  • Whether it was intentional lies or him being fed false information I’m not sure, but either way, we were misled.

Broken Windows

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Last night we were unloading a shopping cart. When done, the place to put it away was pretty far away. But there were about ten other shopping carts littering the parking lot nearby, so I said, “Meh, what’s one more?”

As we got in the car, I proclaimed, “Broken Windows in action!” I think people were confused and assumed I was referring to a literal window which was broken. Instead, I was referring to the Broken Windows Theory, which is an interesting read. The basic premise is that researchers watched an abandoned warehouse. For weeks, no one vandalized the building. One day, one of the researchers (deliberately) broke one of the windows. In short order, vandals knocked out the rest of the windows. The theory is used a lot in policing, but I think it has applications in many other places. Such as parking lots: if you’re diligent in bringing in carts, I’d argue that you’d avoid people doing whta I did. (I also felt the same way at the bowling alley: if we frequently picked up candy wrappers and popcorn from the floor, the place seemed pretty clean. If we slacked, it felt like the place was being trashed by everyone in short order.)

The theory does have its detractors, but it also has strange people who see applications of their theory in parking lots. Enjoy the photo of chives, which have nothing to do with anything, but I just took it and I like it.

title=”Chives by n1zyy, on Flickr”>Chives

Takin’ Care of Children

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From the first two pages of today’s Nashua [NH] Telegraph:

  • A firefighter in Concord was commended after saving the lives of two children in a trailer home. He explained that he drove by and saw smoke pouring out of an attached shed, with the father of the children attempting to extinguish it with a garden hose. The firefighter ran into the burning house and got the kids–who were in their cribs–out.
  • A 20-year-old man was arrested in Derry for allegedly sexually assaulting a 4-year-old. Strangely, he was arrested in the library. He was reading, of all things, a book called Encyclopedia of Rape. Just… wow, dude, you have problems.
  • A man in Brentwood was arrested for beating his 6-month-old son, apparently breaking “more than two dozen bones” on the boy. At his sentencing, his wife spoke saying that he had never hurt the boy.
  • On the front page, a babysitter was arrested with 26 counts each of kidnapping and child endangerment, and felony theft. Before you think she had a warehouse of babies she’d kidnapped, she was actually outsourcing her babysitting. She’d agree to babysit the kid, and then find other babysitters on Craigslist to provide the care. Unfortunately for her, “personal contracts” cannot be assigned/transferred, and I’m pretty sure that child care, unlike lawn mowing, counts as a personal contract. However, I’d contest that kidnapping is a reach, and felony theft is utterly wrong: the services were received, just provided by someone else. It might be a tort, but I’m not sure that subcontracting can be considered theft, even if subcontracting wasn’t permissible. Child endangerment, though, is probably a pretty fitting charge. The parents have a brief statement encouraging other parents to do random, unannounced visits of their child to make sure that they’re actually there. I suppose, in this case, it’d have been appropriate, but it seems somewhat preposterous that one would have to do that, especially since most people hire babysitters because they’re unable to be there.

Also, is there any crime that isn’t committed on Craigslist? Browse around enough and you’ll find flagrant prostitution and drug sales. (You’ll also periodically see people arrested for this stuff in the newspaper… I’d love to work in a police department’s “Craiglist Division,” which might just be a full-time job.) Apparently you now have babysitting-outsourcers.

MySQL on CentOS

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In case anyone else is struggling like I am… After you install MySQL on CentOS, it doesn’t seem to want to start… You run mysqld and it barfs up an error.

It turns out that it’s because you need to run service mysqld start instead.

(And if you’re looking for how to install GD2 for PHP, and frustrated because a search of “gd2” in yum turns up nothing… That’s because it’s called php-gd, not php-gd2.)

Obama Wins!

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Ed.: Because the blogs have been slow, and because this is a hot topic, I’ve fudged the date on this to appear to have been published two days later, so it will stay on the main page a bit longer.

Obama LogoIt looks like Obama is the Democratic nominee, while Hillary Clinton, the woman who has twice alluded to Obama being assassinated (okay, the first time was a speaker at her event, not her), has conceded that she’d be open to running as his VP.

I’d be happier with an Obama-Richardson ticket, but people are calling Obama-Clinton the fastest way to try to heal the wounds this election cycle saw. In her defense, if she doesn’t get him assassinated, she’d make an excellent VP.

Needless to say, I’ll be watching the news tonight for what may be two very historic speeches: Obama’s victory speech and Hillary’s concession speech. (It seems like it was just weeks ago that Obama gave his “” that was anything but a concession speech, in New Hampshire, which led to .)

The AP story is hot off the press, and many MSM outlets aren’t carrying it yet. Whether that’s because the polls don’t close for two hours, because it’s not factual, or just because MSM isn’t as obsessed with checking Google News as I am remains to be seen.

Update: It seems that Hillary hasn’t conceded quite yet. Honestly, I’m not sure how the AP is so sure that Obama’s won yet.

Update 2: USA Today has a good piece suggesting that, while Obama might do it tonight, it’s still about 30 delegates premature. And they also have this good article on exactly how the AP story was put together.

Update 3: You can follow the whole Google News thread.

Spam

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While I’ve somehow completely eradicated comment spam for the time being here, I’m getting a decent amount on an old page elsewhere on the server that allowed comments. It fell into disuse long ago, so I’ve done some behind-the-scene tweaks to make it more of a honeypot for spammers. They don’t seem to care that no one visits the page anymore. I did a purge of a lot of the spam, before, halfway-through, deciding to keep it as a honeypot. Some of them are replying to threads that don’t even exist anymore. I’d never coded in anything to check whether the parent thread existed, so it’s “accepting” their comments, but they’re not even showing up on the page. And still they come!

Recent words of inspiration from one spammer, right before a set of links to porn:

Your site has very much liked me. I shall necessarily tell about him to the friends.

I beg to differ. My site does not very much like you. While it may smile while accepting your comments, it’s not smiling because it likes you. It’s smiling because it’s assembling a list of spamming IPs, and you’ve just landed on it. Please do, however, tell your friends to spam the page, too.

P.S. – I have deliberately refrained from linking to the page being abused, as I want to minimize its popularity, both to avoid giving the spammers exposure and to minimize the risk of someone leaving actual comments.

IPTV

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Very often, I’ve wondered why TV isn’t carried over IP yet. For something broadcast over the public airwaves, it seems strange that no one makes it available over the Internet. I don’t mean being able to play little snippets and stories. I mean that I’d like to be able to do the same thing I can do with some radio stations: stream exactly what they’re broadcasting.

I don’t have a TV in my room. And frankly, I’d buy a 30″ LCD computer monitor before I spent the same amount on a 30″ LCD TV. But I do have several computer monitors. (In theory, my laptop and two 17″ LCDs, plus two 19″ CRTs, though none of them are hooked up right now.)

I think someone sufficiently enterprising could set something up, though. Think of a MythBox, which has a TV capture card. (Yes, they support HDTV.) It’s oriented towards recording, but really, there’s no reason you couldn’t simultaneously stream it over the LAN. It would require a decent amount of horsepower, but quad-core processors are getting cheap. One of those could easily serve a household. You’d just need enough TV cards to allocate one per simultaneous channel being watched (or recorded).

And then you just build a little webserver into the thing, and let me pull up streaming video from any channel I get over cable.

Heck, it’d make a nice appliance…

Missing the Point

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This comic was pretty funny, and the age/2 + 7 formula got tossed around a lot by my roommates.

Of course, it gives us the minimum age one can date without being creepy. At 22, it’s [(22/2) + 7], or 18. (I, however, maintain that this discrepancy would, in fact, be creepy.)

But what about the upper age limit? The formula itself is silent on this, but we can easily do some substitution to make it work. If the minimum acceptable age (“M”) is your own age (“A”) divided by two, plus 7, we get:

M = A/2 + 7

We typically solve for M, knowing A. However, the oldest person I could date would have my A as their M, e.g.:

22 = A/2 + 7

With this realization, it’s a simple Algebra 1 question. Subtract 7 from both sides and then multiply by two.

Thus, the maximum age one can date is 2(a-7), where a is your age. For me, it’d be 2(22-7), or 30.

What interests me, though, is that this means I’m allowed to go back four years, but forward eight, within the margin of creepiness.

I built a spreadsheet for people aged 1 to 100 showing this and various other statistics. It’s online here as an HTML document. A few interesting trends emerge that aren’t intuitively obvious working with just the formulas:

  • The formula doesn’t make any sense below age 14.
  • Age 14 is a sort of ‘identity,’ when you’re first able to start non-creepily dating people, apparently, without breaking any laws of mathematics. At age 14, you can’t date anyone older, nor younger, than 14.
  • From there on out, every year you age adds 0.5 to the minimum age you can date, while adding 2 to the maximum age. Thus at 22, I can date 18-30. When I turn 23, my new range will be 18.5 to 32. (At age 100, you can date anyone between 57 and 186. Because dating anyone over 186 would definitely be creepy.)
  • As you can see, the two don’t grow at the same speed; the upper age grows four times as fast as the lower age. An interesting side-effect of this is that this means that, as time goes on, your age becomes radically different than the median age. By the time you reach 100, you’re 21.5 years younger than the median age of people you can date.