CJC.org

A short history-of-business article that tries to use the past to predict the future of WiFi and VoIP: Shirky: Customer-owned Networks and ZapMail.

This was found on Slashdot. The analysis of ZapMail is probably correct: FedEx was stupid for thinking that customers wouldn’t go buy fax machines instead of relying on FedEx’s expensive fax service. This is the first time I’ve heard of ZapMail.

This analogy probably applies to VoIP: Cisco’s ATA appliance will probably be similar in effect to the fax machine, e.g., Vonage. The article is probably wrong or mistaken about “WiFi”, though. What he’s calling “WiFi” is actually a description of NAT; the 802.11x portion is neither here nor there if the main affect of “WiFi”, according to the article, is to allow consumers not to bother with getting a whole new DSL or cable modem subscription for additional computers in the household. This is what NAT is about. WiFi allows me to sit on the couch with a laptop without running a cable across the floor of the living room, which may make the router appliaces more appealing, but that’s about it.

802.11x will have a different effect with phone companies, which may ruin their deployment of 3G. This is a better argument and analogy.

Here’s a quick hack to limit the number of archive entries shown (e.g., 6 months of archives, with a link to expand out the rest):

b2archives.diff

Some minor layout changes, also, mainly to eliminate the unused trackback and pingback links.

We finally got the stereo mostly installed. “Mostly” in this case means the not-quite-clear-what-the-previous-owners-did; in other words, the uncertainties about what happened to the wiring, whether the plug or the factory radio was broken, etc., have been resolved, and the new Sony stereo works.

In the end, I had to order a few more parts, in particular a wiring harness from Crutchfield. The Sony’s plug in the back didn’t fit with the plug from the Honda, and this provided the bridge between the two. I’m sort of vaguely surprised, coming from the computer industry, that the plugs aren’t better standardized, but I guess I shouldn’t be: various cars have weird functions, such as cell phone control, and, perhaps infamously, keyless entry systems build into the radio. Some wiring will be non-standard, and you shouldn’t fool the aftermarket consumer into thinking that if one plug fits into a particular socket, it should be honkey-dorey. This just leads to more tech support calls that may not be easy to troubleshoot.

Truth be told, the wiring harness took less than half an hour to put together, and this was while being distracted by TV on Thursday. Most of the wires do match up color-wise, so it was a no-brainer once I learned to trust the colors and simply crimp. Oh, and stripping the wires was much easier once I realized the crimper from Crutchfield had stripper notches for various gauge wires. In the end, there were only a couple of loose wires from the stereo that didn’t match up with anything on the harness. These had to do with cell phone controls, and something else I don’t remember.

So, the stereo works: we can get radio without the receiver cutting off spontaneously. It plays CDs perfectly well, though I haven’t tried a CD-R of MP3s as of yet (I’d be shocked if that didn’t work). The factory stereo is actually broken, or it’s wiring plug is broken (same difference), and the previous owners didn’t screw up the wiring harness. This is good news; the alternative was to spend half a day tearing out the console and testing wires to see where I had to splice.

I have figure out how to change the time on the stereo so we actually have a clock in the car, but that’s relatively minor. What’s left to be done is actually mounting the stereo in place so it’s not wiggling around: I haven’t put it into the console properly yet. But this shouldn’t take more than fifteen minutes and a screwdriver, as it appears to be a snap in with tabs. Maybe Tuesday, as I’m going to class this evening.

A Slate article on how drug treatment programs for teens tends to result in teens becoming real addicts. The argument is that most teens are trying on different identities, and AA/AN steps that require people to says they are “powerless” over alcohol/drugs becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when a teen comes to believe he actually is “powerless” over these substances; the anti-social rebel personna someone takes on when they’re young is reinforced and becomes permanent. There’s also the observation that inexperienced teens learn how to score harder drugs from their peers-with-cooler-confessional-stories.

Namazu rocks. It’s a fast, feature-rich search engine that specializes in file-system text indexing. The main use we have for it is to search the various mailing lists the company maintains for projects and general announcements. We had used ht://Dig over the past year, but it was slow, taking some four hours to do an incremental index; it would fail occassionally for no obvious reason; finally, it would seem to choke the server, for some reason pushing load up to unresponsive levels. Index files were also huge compared to the size of the data being indexed.

Namazu is almost the polar opposite in functionality, being pretty fast — a full index creation took about 90 minutes, and one-day incrementals are on the order of five minutes — and relatively light — the indexing was done with nice 19, which is a nice level htdig probably wouldn’t have finished with.

Search results are returned almost instantly. Searches can also be regexes, and can span multiple indexing databases (this may be done in the future). Namazu also knows about MHonarc archive formats, so it correctly indexes by subject, author, etc. I remember some heartache with htdig, where we had to specify exclusion areas, so that the headers and footers wouldn’t get indexed (a source of spurious results, as the “next message” subject lines in the footers would mark an unrelated thread as a hit), so a MHonarc filter is very welcome. There are also filters for MS Word docs, Powerpoint, PDFs, and a few others. I may implement this in the future, with the various binary document types having separate index databases; the user can then pick which indexes to search against.

Cron jobs have been set up for incremental updates and garbage cleaning of index databases; these can be cleaned up somewhat, but they’ll work as is. The only thing left is perhaps some customization of the namazu.cgi (which was drop-in, unlike htdig), so that the help document can be better customized to the corpus that we have, as opposed to some generic one.

Here’s a Slate article on why I-Mode and SMS haven’t really taken off and the US: There’s No Place Like Home – Why American teens don’t want the new cell phones. By Brendan I. Koerner

Basically, when someone in Europe or Asia tells you that your cell phone sucks, the proper response is to show The Two Towers trailer on your broadband connection. Mobile data services and the cost of home Internet access are inversely related; the luxury of domestic broadband makes you want to use your cell phone as a cell phone, rather than an Internet access device. It also makes paying, say, $40/month for T-Mobile’s crappy GPRS on my Treo, an unconscionable luxury. So I can access up-to-date movie times when I’m outside. Oh, wait, I have Vindigo.

Granted, this makes mobile data services much for costly for those who need it, as the infrastructure doesn’t get built or remains expensive if it is built. On the other hand, 3G might get technologically end-runned by 802.11x access points, popping up like mushrooms. There’s also the wide-area technology based on the defunct Ricochet.

Oh, the article fails to mention one of the main attractions of SMS in, say, the Philippines: price. Voice costs are relatively large compared to SMS costs, so people have developed the uncanny ability to type out messages quickly on phone keypads. It’s not because of the extravagent data infrastructure vis-a-vis American GSM networks, it’s the extravagent price of voice services locally.

Impressionistic watercolor as a side effect of aperture priority in a cab running up Third Avenue in the rain.

Addendum: Just realized that b2 allows HTML tags in the postings, such as “table”. Should have realized this earlier.

So we were rumaging around my parents’ house on X-mas, because the snow storm had kept us in for the night. I find a few old Tolkien books in the closet that I had bought more than a decade ago: The Complete Guide to Middle Earth and The Lost Road. Oh, I thought, I should take these since I have the car, and it’d be fun to glance through them again. The Lost Road has a big yellow Barnes and Noble remainders sticker on it, since I remember buying it for a few bucks over at the gone-but-not-forgotten Sales Annex on 5th Avenue and 18th Street.

For some reason, I decided to look up the Complete Guide on Amazon, possibly since I realized that I have no need of a glossary of all the proper nouns and Elvish words from The Hobbit through The Silmarillion. Lo and behold, it was out of print, and people were asking on average $15 for it. I listed it for sale, and sold it within 30 minutes at $14, a price somewhat too low because I was timid (I should have asked for more, because if you’re paying double digits for a twenty-five year old mass market paperback full of stuff you can find on the Internet, you must really, really want the book for its own sake). Gasp! This is in contrast to the near-disaster last week, when I got $10 for one of Grace’s old, heavy text books, and found that the shipping was about $10 because the buyer wanted it expedited.

I naturally looked up The Lost Road, since I really don’t need a historical account of how Tolkien developed the story of Numenor, and if I wanted one, I can pick up a trade paperback pretty easily. It was also a first edition Houghton Mifflin printing so I was hopeful. Double gasp! A buyer was asking $300 for a “very fine” copy of it, and a seller was offering $50 for a copy, though I’m not sure what condition he was looking for. My problem is the giant yellow remainders sticker on the dust cover. I was going to ask $25 for my copy because of it; still a nice little sum for something I had never read and had been sitting in the closet for most of the past ten years.

Later that day, I chatted with Scott about this whole collectible book craziness (surely amped up by the release of The Two Towers), and mentioned the big yellow sticker on the cover. Don’t peel it off by hand, he said, use Goo Gone. So, a couple of days later, I found Goo Gone at the hardware store, and gave it a try. I peeled back the yellow sticker, and it left old-glue residue on the cover. I rubbed the residue with a cottonball soaked with Goo Gone, and the residue vanished. Amazing stuff. The dust cover is now free of the awful remainders tag. It still has scuff marks on it — the book is however pristine –so it’s not “fine”, but it looks good. I changed the asking price on Amazon to $75. I’ll see if the guy who wants it for $50 goes for it. If not, after a couple of weeks, I’ll probably bring it down to $50. It’s all windfall, after all.

Next time I’m in Bayside, I have to rummage through the closet a bit more. Pity I mostly bought cheap paperbacks at the time.

Addendum: The Lost Road sold for $75 within twenty-four hours. I should have asked for $100.

Test for the fix for the annoying jump-to-top-of-page that happens when clicking on a thumbnail image. This is based on this Google post.

This should also allow the full images to be viewed by browsers not using Javascript. Now to go back and change the old posts (basically, changing the href, adding a blank target, and putting a “return false” at the end of the onClick action, so the href doesn’t trigger; probably easiest to do this by hand, since there only about a half dozen such links).

Here are some shots around my parents’ house, both at night while it was snowing, and out the backyard the day after. The night shots were also tests of the low-light capabilities of the new camera, and turned out surprisingly good. In SCN mode, ISO was fixed at 100 and f-stop was wide open for the slow lens at around 3.8. The variable was the shutter speed (is this what’s called aperture priority?), and I somehow held the camera steady for the 2+ seconds it took to expose the CCD. Either that, or the Sony has a few tricks to compensate for jitter, which I belive it does. (As a side note, there’s a photography cult around a Soviet-era camera. With it’s low-quality-control lens and a similar as-much-exposure-time-as-you-need-in-low-light feature, the Lomograph cameras are prized for the weird effects you get, what with the blurring and color saturation. I guess I might get some of that with the SCN mode, but I think the Sony lens is better, and the CCD isn’t a rich as film. On the other hand, I’m not restricted to taking only crappy snapshots with the Sony.) Anyway, here they are:

One handy thing from all this info is that I can make a guess on shutter speed for my Nikon SLR. With, say, a 2 second exposure on the Sony, I’ll need a 1/8 second exposure on the Nikon for the equivalent image, given ISO 400 film and a couple of f-stops faster lens. This is one of the many things I have to figure out with photography: how to judge exposure times.