January 2010 Archives

I seem to recall some of my mates on the right saying that government run healthcare would lead to dying while waiting for an appointment, like the Brits do. As one of the Brits, who never had private insurance in the United Kingdom growing up, I beg to differ. My entire family wouldn't trade your HMO-based, fucked up, system where people die out of an inability to afford the care they need for the free-at-the-point-of-service, no bureaucracy National Health Service, which, had Margaret Thatcher not cut its funding, would be the best health system in the world.

Enough ranting about healthcare, but just one question for you ignoramuses -- if there is no waiting in your private sector über alles system, why would the 7^th largest economy on Earth have to pass laws limiting wait times?

If you would recall, I've committed myself to email mining to determine what time is busiest for email. Well, now you can help out! Just download the latest version and its dependencies, (Commons HTTPClient 3.x, javamail, and their assorted dependencies -- yes, I know it's a large number) and run the program as java -cp commons-codec-1.2.jar:commons-logging-1.1.1.jar:mail.jar:commons-httpclient-3.1.jar:. -Dusername=my.username -Dpassword=my.password -Dmail.protocol=imaps -Dmail.host=my.imap.hostname.which.defaults.to.gmail EmailStats. As with the last time, the dependencies are all open source and my source code is pasted after the flip...

Lifehacker has an entry highlighting improving memory using memorize now. My own best-practise for remembering something is qui scribit, bis legit. In other words, writing things down, or outsourcing your memory.

Socialist Unity shows a profile of the two parties in the Ulster conflict. Some facts: the DUP, disgusting as some of their views are on the Ireland situation, has broadly left-wing views, ditto with Sinn Fein and may not stand for a Tory government. The question still remains, though, whether they would be willing to join their mates in the republic of Ireland under a centre-right (but not as far as a neo-Thatcherite) Fianna Fail government?

I noticed, while watching this weeks 24 episodes, that the volume on the recording seems to be lower than that of the adverts. Volume normalisation seems to be a solved problem. So, why can't my DVR actually, err, you know, skip the commercials?

You may have noticed a new link on the right side of the page labelled How about some analytics? I wrote something to generate the page and have pasted the code after the flip.

I fixed the out of memory errors and embedded the class into javamail. As with last time, the source code for my class is posted after the flip. Javamail is open source. Because it's been bundled together, you can run it using $JAVA_HOME/bin/java -Dusername=username -Dpassword=password -Xmx512m -Xms512m -jar mail.jar, again it does take a long time but it's memory use is considerably lower than the last iteration.

The output on my email address is below. Running it, I uncovered an off-by-one error in the final loop and have corrected it in the source code after the flip. The code on the server will soon be updated:

1       2715 messages.
2       2647 messages.
3       2848 messages.
4       2985 messages.
5       3465 messages.
6       4310 messages.
7       5051 messages.
8       5370 messages.
9       5576 messages.
10      6022 messages.
11      5908 messages.
12      5219 messages.
13      5143 messages.
14      5011 messages.
15      4522 messages.
16      3833 messages.
17      3328 messages.
18      2933 messages.
19      2529 messages.
20      2582 messages.
21      2698 messages.
22      2931 messages.
23      2906 messages.
        90532 messages processed

Runtime: 22630750 miliseconds 

Interesting, most of my email in the past few years has come around 10am Pacific Time (or 1pm Eastern, 6pm GMT, 10am HKST). I'll do further studies on this as time goes on.

Lifehacker teaches how to acclimate yourself to new localities with a list of tools. For adjusting socially, I find joining a local Toastmasters chapter and getting involved in local politics has helped me acclimate immensely.

Nate Silver says we shouldn't trust the poll from Massachusetts done by Pajamas media. Perhaps some background on the outfit is in order? This is the same outfit that sent Joe the plumber to Israel, from which vantage point he was rubbished by the greatest presenter this side of Beirut, George Galloway. Joe the Plumber also asked a silly question at an Obama event in Ohio and misrepresented his name, his profession and what he does for a living. Then, he became a war correspondent and the outfit that paid him is the same as the one backing this poll. Colour me unphased.

... is Alan Grayson. Watch the video and try to guess why.

This afternoon, I wrote a program to analyse my email. I was curious as to the hidden patterns in the times I receive email. You'll need javamail and JRE 1.5 to participate in the fun. Do note, it tends to take a while to run, so start it and leave it running till completion. The results are below and the source code is after the flip. Enjoy and do let me know if your results differ:

0       12
1       3
2       2
6       5
7       13
8       22
9       20
10      24
11      26
12      23
13      28
14      18
15      19
16      12
17      18
18      15
19      9
20      8
21      10
22      11
23      18

The column at left is the hour (0-23) and the right is the number of emails. On the larger dataset, the code ran out of heap space, which will be investigated further.

I'd never heard of Vudu until I bought the BD-390 and have Netflix. Hacking Netflix claims that Walmart is interested in buying it to compete with Netflix. The only competition Vudu gives Netflix is in the area of instant streaming and this is the latter's weakest area. So, colour me unbuzzed. Examining the stocks, it would seem traders aren't too worried about it either.

Google Reader has this nasty-quirk of using "A" as "Mark all Items Read", which I tend to inadvertantly hit. I'd like to make this a no-op using Greasemonkey. But I have no clue how to do this. Anyone have code samples disabling a keyboard shortcut? If you do, please post them in the comments. Many thanks!

We who read Lifehacker know that the best password manager is keepass. If you have more than one device and can install jython, your solution for read-only access to your passwords is to be found here and the source code is below.

Tom Schaller claims the DNC wants to do away with the so-called long primary by eliminating superdelegates, who he claims, kept Mrs. (now Secretary of State) Clinton in the race and kept Mr. (now President) Obama from declaring an early victory. All the analysis I've heard said that the extended primary helped the Democrats and hurt the Republicans. Then again, most of the committee membership are conservative Democrats, who are akin to the Thatcherite wing of the Labour party at home, so I'd imagine this lot doesn't like Obama very much anyway.

One of the most popular social networks today is Facebook, which has an authentication service for end-user applications. A certain Jian Shuo Wang says that he removed Facebook connect from his blog, because it added no value (well, not much value for the reader community of this blog), and it make the system too complicated. I don't fear complexity, one bit. I also believe in giving readers a choice. I don't think I have readers using Yahoo Japan, but that is still an authentication choice.

Penelope Trunk gives anger management tips today. Perhaps I need them (Midori thinks I do, while acknowledging that she herself needs help in this regard)? Anyway, the tips follow:

1. Face the problem and make it a priority.
2. Focus on your trigger points.
3. Use deep breathing to regulate stress.
4. Have a regular sleep schedule.
5. Accept that every day includes unpredictability.
6. Understand what causes you frustration.
7. Use (something called) solutions-based language in tense conversations.
8. Slow down a tough situation, as snap decisions are usually bad ones. This goes back to the type 1 vs. type 2 thinking we covered in MBD.

Dumb Little Man, who seems to be anything but dumb, judging by how useful the entries are, has 9 secret ways to persuade people, summarising below:

1. Framing
2. Mirroring
3. Scarcity
4. Reciprocation
5. Timing
6. Congruence

It would appear that Notepad++ won Lifehacker's best text editors. Now that I have Windows XP, between cursing the software and praising the hardware, I'm trying to tweak it as best I can. Including replacing the notepad, whose instructions seem incorrect. Anyone have updated instructions? Many thanks!

I title my Zooomr photos after song lyrics (3~4 words/photo title) in my iTunes library. If Zooomr's API included a method to set photo titles, the titling of my photos would be automatable. That would be truly useful.

Scoble claims that automotive radar is the most important technological innovation, yet isn't too well known and goes on to speculate why we technologists find items like Android or the latest iPod cool. The reason automotive radar is not seen as terribly sexy is that car companies are in the business of selling cars (or loans to buy cars), not automotive radar systems, while Apple is in the business of selling iphones. You see it in their ads. The typical car advert has prices for purchase and lease, yet no mention of the radar system. The Lexus we have in Dubai has a pretty cool rear-view system that goes crazy when you get too close to the car behind you when parking. Yet, you never see Toyota demonstrate this in their adverts. Perhaps, it is precisely because these radars and cameras prove their usefulness in distressful situations. I don't see adverts for cars getting close to accidents from the car companies. I do see them from the insurance companies, who are, similarly, not in the business of selling cool car technology, rather they are in the business of separating my money from my bank account. I am open to hearing how to solve this, though.

I just heard on CNN that the al-Qaeda narrative is that the US is anti-Islam and just thought I'd post a response to posit that the United States is not anti-Muslim, rather over the history of the United States, there has always been a minority of some sort that has been discriminated against.

I signed up for ribbit on the premise that I wanted to be able to read my voicemail without paying extra to Vonage. Now I can't receive calls on the line as they're automatically forwarded to voice mail in one ring. Grrr... Anyone know how to fix this so that ribbit is triggered after 4 rings on Vonage and my mobile?

I finally figured out how the background colour is set in Movable Type. In your themes CSS (I'll use my current theme as an example), which would be at $MT_STATIC_PATH/themes/$SELECTED_THEME/screen.css, there is a line looking like " background: #628642 url(body.gif) repeat-y top center;". The emphasized numbers represent the RGB hex code. Just pick the one you want and set it there. There's no rebuild required as you're changing the theme, and not the template itself.

I just became aware that the HTML CENTER tag is deprecated. However, there is still a need to align non-block elements, specifically, images. The new way of doing so is below:
margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;
Put the line above as the style attribute and you'll achieve the same effect.

Matt Cutts is doing the digital cleanse, a phrase coined by, and attributed to, John Mayer. I'm going to coin the phrase digital cleanup as in cleaning up the noise in a dataset. Specifically, the market data I'm currently collecting at work. Filtering noise is most efficiently done at the data collection level, since I'm using Yahoo for stock information, which I then collect in a MySQL datastore. For the expected and unexpected market holidays, it's a waste of space to collect redundant, useless data. However, when the stock market is closed, trading volume is 0. Now there are already holidays on Saturday and Sunday. It's the various bank holidays and unexpected holidays that pose a bigger problem. I'm only adding data if the volume is greater than 0. Another assumption that I'm making is that users of the service won't be investing in low-volume stocks. I am leaving myself open for being corrected, though.