Micky D’s

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I stopped at McDonald’s on my way home today, since I was starving and otherwise would have gotten on 128 at around 5:30 on a Friday, which is just asking for a headache. So I took a leisurely dinner. I’m fairly certain that, as long as I was there, not a single normal thing happened. I’m copying-and-pasting an e-mail I sent to Rusty while I was there, hence a little shorthand/terseness:

Lady sitting across from me, after dialing cell phone: “Hello, this is (name). You’ve called this number twice. Who is this?” “Oh, I didn’t recognize your voice.” “Okay.” Her little kid: “Who was that?” “That was Daddy. He had someone on the other line.” *phone rings* “Yeah, well, I didn’t recognize the number or your voice.”

I’m inferring that they’re divorced/separated, but I’d like to think that if I fathered a child with someone, she might at least recognize my voice when I called.

Some guy on crutches came in and I overheard him ask her to tell the manager that the handicapped door button doesn’t work. She yelled for the manager, who came over and said, “Ya, the manager is working on it.” “She’s working on it, huh?” “Yes.” So then the guy at the French fry station went over and started pounding on the button? And this surly lady sprawled out in one of the booths, with no food, yells to him, “Doesn’t work!” I went back up to order dessert, and customers are just standing around by the register. So I asked the guy in front of me if he was waiting to order. He said yes, but made a, “No, I’m all set” motion, leaving me totally unsure? So I finally approached the register, and the cashier was just *glaring* at Surly Lady? But kind of in jest, maybe? And after like 30 seconds of me awkwardly standing there and being ignored, she took my order. I got my ice cream and went to where the straws are, where I expected the spoons to be. But there were no utensils. So I went back up to the counter, and asked. The cashier—who spoke perfect English—handed me a fork and knife. And as I write this, Surly Lady is staring at me? And then a cop with his lights on pulled into the parking lot, came in, used the restroom, and left with the blue lights still on?

I sent that, expecting an end to insanity. No such luck:

So I’m sitting here looking out the window, and some guy at the stop sign to leave the parking lot opens his door and… I think he threw up? Surly Lady’s twin sister (!) just walked in and talked to Surly Lady. She’s talking VERY loudly about how she just spent $200 at the supermarket, and she pulled out a receipt as long as she is tall to prove her point?

Tip o’ the Day

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The Web Developer toolbar, which is (1) the #1 hit on Google for “Web Developer,” and (2) now compatible with Firefox 3 beta, is totally awesome. You may recall that, in the past, if you had text after a bulleted list or similar on this page, the text would suddenly be mashed together. I never took the time to fully look into it, but it always irked me.

A quick “Outline… Outline Block Level Elements” drew colored boxes around each element of the page, which was exceptionally helpful. This shows the problem: posts start off inside a

tag, and adding a list or similar closes the

tag. This would have been an easy catch, except that the list looked fine. Upon a closer review, it’s because the lists specified the same line-spacing, thus looking right. While I most likely could have solved this by staring at the code for a long time, Web Developer made it much easier to spot: the first text is inside one box, followed by the list, but the other text is floating outside, leading to a quick, “Oh, I should look at how the

is set up” thought, which ended up being exactly the problem. (There’s a bit of excessive space now, but that’s caused by me using PHP to inject linebreaks.)

Web Developer also includes a lot of other useful tools, including the ability to edit the HTML of the page you’re viewing, view server headers, resize non-resizeable elements frames, show page comments, change GETs to POSTs and vice-versa, and much more. Whether you do design full-time, or if you just occasionally fix things, it’s worth having. And you can’t beat the fact that it’s free.

Web Compression

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I’ve alluded before to using gzip compression on webserver. HTML is very compressible, so servers moving tremendous amounts of text/HTML would see a major reduction in bandwidth. (Images and such would not see much of a benefit, as they’re already compressed.)

As an example, I downloaded the main page of Wikipedia, retrieving only the HTML and none of the supporting elements (graphics, stylesheets, external JavaScript). It’s 53,190 bytes. (This, frankly, isn’t a lot.) After running it through “gzip -9” (strongest compression), it’s 13,512 bytes, just shy of a 75% reduction in size.

There are a few problems with gzip, though:

  • Not all clients support it. Although frankly, I think most do. This isn’t a huge deal, though, as the client and server “negotiate” the content encoding, so it’ll only be used if it’s supported.
  • Not all servers support it. I don’t believe IIS supports it at all, although I could be wrong. Apache/PHP will merrily do it, but it has to be enabled, which means that lazy server admins won’t turn it on.
  • Although it really shouldn’t work that way, it looks to me as if it will ‘buffer’ the whole page then compress it, then send it. (gzip does support ‘streaming’ compression, just working in blocks.) Thus if you have a page that’s slow to load (e.g., it runs complex database queries that can’t be cached), it will appear even worse: users will get a blank page and then it will suddenly appear in front of them.
  • There’s overhead involved, so it looks like some admins keep it off due to server load. (Aside: it looks like Wikipedia compresses everything, even dynamically-generated content.)

But I’ve come across something interesting… A Hardware gzip Compression Card, apparently capable of handling 3 Gbits/second. I can’t find it for sale anywhere, nor a price mentioned, but I think it would be interesting to set up a sort of squid proxy that would sit between clients and the back-end servers, seamlessly compressing outgoing content to save bandwidth.

Job Benefits, Creepy

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One company’s job listing advertises the type of benefits its employees get… You know, health insurance, dental insurance, accidental death insurance…

Wait, what?

I suppose it’s actually a good thing, but I’m kind of left wondering what my odds of dying on the job there are?

Job Qualification

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A job posting just listed something like, “Experience using TCP/IP” as a requirement.

I’ve been using it since the fifth grade or so, when we networked two PCs together. I now use it on a daily basis. I’ve used it very extensively, including billions of ACKs, millions of SYNs and FINs, and even some RSTs and PSHs.

But I’m not just being a goofball. The job doesn’t seem to entail any low-level knowledge of TCP/IP. I think they’re just looking for someone who knows what it is. (I also have extensive experience using ICs, device drivers, and OS kernels.)

I don’t really want to work at this place.

News

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Is it just me, or has the “news” ceased to be…. new? I don’t really watch news on TV much, simply because I can justify sitting in front of the computer as being semi-productive, but if I sit down in front of the TV, I’m guaranteed to be 0% productive. Plus, I prefer the news online where I can get it from multiple sources, sometimes even primary sources.

But here’s the news I’m seeing:

  • Austria’s Fritzl, the guy who locked his daughter up in the basement for decades and fathered six of her children, is apparently mentally ill. This was immediately apparent to me, and the news article ceased to be “news” a few days ago.
  • The pregnant bank teller that was shot and had her baby die? Tragic, but it happened last week. You can’t run “follow-up stories.” It’s over.
  • Obama and Hillary are facing off in elections.
  • Some colleges allow male and female students to room together if they choose to. This has been a headline in GMail for about three days for me, and it wasn’t interesting the first time.
  • Zimbabwe’s elections are screwed up.
  • The Texas polygamist ranch. It’s a big issue, maybe, and has all sorts of implications. But I don’t care anymore!

Did nothing happen in the past few days?

So I Can Close the Tab

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I came across Ken Rockwell’s site the other day, and, as I perused a lot, I came across his interesting mention of the Casio EX-F1. I’ve “graduated” from integrated point-and-shoots to digital SLRs, although this camera costs more than my digital SLR and three lenses put together.

Photographically, it’s mediocre. 6 megapixels. Except you don’t buy this thing for its resolution. You crave it because:

  • 60 frames per second at 6 megapixels. (Note that most movies are shot at 24 fps.)
  • “[S]tereo HDTV movies,” although I confess that I’m not quite sure what that means.
  • Continuous shooting mode, where it’s just constantly shooting at 60fps, and, when you hit the shutter, saves the ones around that time. Thus, you can actually get shots from before you click the shutter.
  • A maximum shutter speed of 1/40,000 second. That is not a typo.
  • 60 frames per second is ridiculous. But if you can take a cut in resolution, you can go further, all the way to 1,200 frames per second at a pitiful 336×96.

Actually, 336×96 isn’t just tiny, it’s a really weird size. I’ve resized (and cropped) a random photo of mine down to 336×96:

title=”336×96 Pixels”>336×96 Pixels

In conclusion… 6 megapixel camera, with a long zoom lens equivalent to 36-432mm. And it’s an HDTV video camera. And it’s got the crazy bonus of letting you use shutter speeds of 1/40,000 of a second, and capture low-res video at 1,200 frames/second. I wouldn’t carry it as my main camera (though it would probably be entirely usable for that), but I’d love one of these in my bag for video and such.

I also wonder about the “trickle-down” effect. Although really, more like the “trickle-out effect.” Nikon’s D3 will give pretty clean shots at ISO 6400, something no other camera even tries to offer. It goes up to ISO 25,600. Canon and Nikon are very close when it comes to the frames-per-second rate of their high-end digital SLRs; 7-9 frames/second. (Hint: get rid of the shutter, which is useless on a digital camera where you can just “read” the sensor for a given period of time.) Companies keep focusing on packing more and more megapixels into smaller and smaller sensors. As I’ve said before, I have a 20×30″ print from my 6-megapixel camera. (Cropped a bit, too, actually.) I only “upgraded” to my 10-megapixel XTi because the old one broke and you can’t buy a 6-megapixel SLR anymore. Maybe, just maybe, we’ve seen an end to the megapixel arms race. We exceeded the resolution you could squeeze out of film a long time ago, and now we’re giving medium format a run for its money. When I go to buy a new SLR in maybe five years, I don’t want it to be more than 10 megapixels. But I hope that it goes a lot further than 6 megapixels. And if a “prosumer” point-and-shoot camera does 60 frames per second at full resolution, all of a sudden 3 frames per second on an SLR looks pathetic. Similarly, I’m unaware of any still camera (aside from maybe weird scientific-engineered stuff) that will take a 1/40,000-second exposure, or any flash that’s capable of running at 7 frames per second.

(That said, I’m having a hard time figuring out when you’d need a 1/40,000-second exposure. I only hit my camera’s 1/2,000-second limit when I’m too lazy to stop the lens down…)

Eyedness

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I mentioned in my previous post in passing about determining which was my “dominant eye,” something I’ve merrily gone 22 years without knowing I had.

Wikipedia refers to the subject as ocular dominance. Essentially, the brain “prefers” one eye over the other. Of course, this is something that ordinarily goes unnoticed, but it becomes quite important in some things, including, apparently, firing a weapon. There are two easy tests to determine your “eyedness,” as Wikipedia strangely lists as an accepted name:

  • Focus on a distant (6-10 feet is plenty) object. Hold both arms out in front of you, overlapping, and form a golf-ball-sized circle between your thumbs, viewing the image through it. And then, do one of the following:
    • Slowly pull your hands towards your face, keeping the image centered in the hole. Eventually, your hands end up in front of one eye. That’s your dominant eye.
    • Rather than pulling your hands back towards you and looking ridiculous, close one at a time. With one eye, you won’t be able to see the object: your hand covers it. (If you can see it through both, the hole through which you’re viewing it is way too big.) The eye you can see the object through is your dominant eye.
  • Or, with both eyes open and without paying too much attention, point at a distant object. (Don’t look at your finger or you’ll screw things up and have to start over.) Hold your arm steady and close one eye at a time. One finger will be pointing (more or less) right at the thing. The other is pretty far off. The one that’s accurate is your dominant eye.

Of course, I’m left wondering a few things:

  • Can you accurately use your non-dominant eye? With one eye closed, if you can align the sights of a gun with your target, isn’t it still going to be accurate? I’m trying to ‘test’ this, but doing it with a flashlight isn’t accurate enough, and I don’t have a laser pointer. Further, I feel like a total goofball sitting here squinting with one eye and shining a flashlight at the electrical socket on the other side of the room. To align the flashlight and flashlight, I do shift the flashlight a little, but in both cases, it’s being pointed in the same place; it’s just a question of the angle.
  • Can you change your dominant eye through practice or the like?
  • What are the implications in daily life of having your dominant eye be your weaker eye? Uncorrected, I’m something like 20/300 in that eye. Would my perception of scenes be better if my dominant eye was the one with better vision?
  • The Wikipedia page makes a cursory mention of the two eyes and how they’re processed by the two brain hemispheres. Does this related to being right-brained or left-brained? Is this like the spinning girl and seeing whether she spins right or left?

Gun n00b

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Although the citizen’s police academy here formally wrapped up a couple weeks ago, they’d set up an appointment at the local police department’s gun range for us. After about 2 hours of reviewing the functioning of a gun, gun safety, and such, they brought us into the range.

Their standard department weapon is the Glock 23, a .40-caliber handgun. A few comments:

  • They’re very strict about gun safety. (As they should be.) As they talked to us in their classroom, he began with a safety note: all the officers in their room had locked their guns up. The “guns” he used in class were non-functioning demonstration units. He had real ammunition, but, because they would later bring a .40-caliber pistol into the room, had only a single, orange, rubber bullet in the .40-caliber size. The “Range Master” came in later with his unloaded weapon, being very careful to demonstrate that it was unloaded. As he demonstrated proper technique holding the weapon, he was insanely cafeful to never point the weapon, which he had all just witnessed was unloaded, at anyone. When we finally got into the range, they stood right beside us in the booth.
  • He had us determine our “dominant eye.” I’m right-handed. My right eye has decent vision (maybe 20/40 uncorrected, but 20/15 with contacts), but my left eye is comically bad, 20/300 uncorrected. As he joked, I’m “one of those weirdos” whose dominant eye is different from their handedness (that’s an actual word?!). The way he had us determine it was interesting: hold your arms out and make a hole about the size of a golf ball, and focus on some distant object. And then slowly pull your arms back to you, maintaining the gap you’re looking through. Eventually, your hands end up in front of one of your eyes. That’s your dominant eye. An added wrinkle to the fact that I can’t see out that eye all that well is that, being right-handed, the instinct is to hold the gun towards the right side of your body, and you end up pulling your head over to your right. Of course this must look ridiculous, and the proper thing to do is bring the gun more to your left, keeping your head steady. But as he pointed out, it’s not intuitive.
  • He said it’s “optically impossible” to keep the rear sight, front sight, and the target all in focus. Thus, even if it weren’t for my poor vision in my left eye, I’d still have ended up doing what I was doing: focusing on the target as I bring the gun up, and then focusing on the gun’s sights, firing at a blob in the distance.
  • Recoil! It’s pretty common knowledge that the gun will recoil and ‘kick back.’ But until you’ve tried it, it doesn’t do it in the way you imagine. He joked about the stereotypical fear of the gun flying back and hitting you in the face. In actuality, the gun goes more upward; in my case, a little to the left. He mentioned that, with most people who’ve never shot before, their first round will hit dead-center, but then we start trying to “compensate” for the recoil which screws us up. And that’s exactly what I did. I took time to aim each of my five shots perfectly, so my shots are pretty much in a perfect vertical line. Just seeing someone shooting, it’s tempting to think, “What idiots! If you hold the gun a little more steady, you can hold it steady when you fire.” You can’t. You hold the gun nice and firm, and, as soon as you pull the trigger, you’re holding the gun in a totally different place. You see people firing one-handed in movies; I think the gun would fly off your hand if you tried that. In addition to being impossible to prevent the gun from recoiling, he pointed out that it’s actually bad to try to control it: you end up pushing the gun down right before you fire, which throws your accuracy off.
  • I think shell casings are something that’s viewed like recoil: people know that shell cases get ejected out the side, but don’t give them too much thought. I was firing to the right of someone else. My biggest fear wasn’t that I was holding a loaded firearm with no experience, that I was going to shoot myself in the foot, or that I was going to get my finger sliced as the gun’s slide moved. No, my biggest fear was that one of the red-hot shell casings from the guy next to me was going to hit me. They didn’t, but it’s apparently a fairly common occurrence, hence why they’re big on wearing eye protection. One of the officers we were with was telling us that last time he went to the range, he was wearing a shirt tucked-in but with a loose collar, and ended up getting a shell casing down his shirt, which was apparently not an enjoyable experience. Further, my mental image was that the shell casing would just kind of flop out the side onto the floor. They actually go flying out the side, probably at least six feet.

Anyway, it was kind of fun, but now I see why they spend so much time training: there are so many little things that you need to practice before you’re able to pick a gun up and fire it (with any hopes of hitting your target) in under, say, ten seconds. Which, if you actually need to fire a gun, would probably be the situation.

As an aside, the target was a vaguely human-shaped “blob,” with a very faint “Q” in the middle of it. (They didn’t explain why it had a Q on it.) Part of me wonders if anyone has ever made a T-shirt that just has a very faint “Q” in the center. You’d just have to be careful where you wore it…