Category: Uncategorized

Much has been written and re-enacted of the trials NASA experienced putting people in space–but the focus is usually on the astronauts, the faces we put on space travel. Some attention has been paid to the propulsion pioneers and the rocket engineers that made it possible, but rarely do you hear about the software jocks that wrote the code to run the rockets.

I had searched for a while for a text that gave the software perspective on the space missions and had given up. Today I came across just such a text almost by accident: Computers Take Flight: A History of NASA’s Pioneering Digital Fly-By-Wire Project. I haven’t read it all yet but after reading chapter 3, “The Reliability Challenge and Software Development,” I’m hooked:

“Software quickly became the main driver of cost and schedule. The techniques of making reliable hardware were know to engineers before the program began. However, ensuring software reliability was still an immature process.“

Not much has changed in 40+ years.

Bandai recently announced the Tuttuki Bako, a game device where you stick your finger in it to play games.

This concept supplied nearly an endless source of comedy for a coworker and I this morning. Here’s a few of the software titles we thought of they should make for the system:

Tap Tap Revolution
Ultimate Dominoes
Nose Pick Hero
Paper Football 2009
Pro Booger Flick 2009
Scratch Master 2000
Finger Puppet Machinima CS3
Super Finger Gundam: Operation Index
Cooking Mama: Warm Tortilla
Trauma Center: Apply Pressure
Finger DJ

Keep your eyes peeled for Construction Zone, an engineering / problem solving game currently under development for iPhone by a friend of mine, Doug Beck.

If you can’t wait for the iPhone version (or don’t have an iPhone) you can download a tech-demo for PC. Check it out!

Last year I posted an article titled “Use Google to factcheck Zeitgeist,” where I used search results to investigate the accuracy of statements in the movie Zeitgeist. My investigation was only partly serious–mostly tongue-in-cheek–but that didn’t stop somebody from taking it too seriously in the comments section:

“looking up general words on google disproves nothing, i myself am unsure of how much zeitgeist may lie or bend the truth, but don’t think for a second doin twenty minutes worth of research negates all arguments made within the movie.“

Hey.. This is the Internet(s)! Anyone can do twenty minutes of research, blog it, and claim it supports their argument. Step off!

But it got be thinking: What other specific searches can we perform and distort to make broad generalizations? For example, what of the candidates in this 2008 election? Can we determine who is a liar, a cheat, or a fraud using Google? Let’s see..

mccain liar: 4,890,000 results
obama liar: 5,250,000 results

mccain honest: 10,700,000 results
obama honest: 13,900,000 results

Clearly we’ve learned that both candidates are liars, but they’re also honest, and they’re more honest than they are liars. Obama is more of a liar than McCain, but he’s also more honest… FASCINATING!

Who has more skeletons in their closet?

mccain troubled past: 332,000 results
obama troubled past: 8,040,000 results

Uh-oh! Who would be better for foreign policy?

mccain diplomacy: 2,580,000 results
obama diplomacy: 2,710,000 results

Pretty close there. But what really matters is who is better on “the issues”:

mccain issues: 56,400,000 results
obama issues: 77,700,000 results

Big lead there for Obama. And finally, who has the better Internet marketing gurus:

mccain: 150,000,000 results
obama: 210,000,000 results

This made my day! My retro-themed iPhone game Vector Blaster was honored as being one of the “Top 100 Apps and Games of 2008” according to the 2009 iPod + iPhone buyers’ guide published by iLounge.com.

The list has 48 games on it, so I guess you could say it’s one of the Top 48 Games of 2008. 🙂

BailoutSleuth.com is blogging the bailout. I’m sure this is a noble and necessary endeavor, but let me pick one statement from their website, take it out of context and then go on a tangent:

BailoutSleuth believes that transparency is vital to the success of the taxpayer-funded bailout program.

I totally disagree. What fueled the CDS market? What fueled the mortgage-backed securities market? Why did the corporate paper market work? OPAQUENESS! The market is driven 90% by perception: hunches, rumors, intuition. Without calculated risk the markets wouldn’t work. The fact that so many people got rich over the last decade with these instruments is because no one had any idea what was really going on! In the end it was a miserable failure, but it sure was great while it was good, right?

If we want to get out of this mess quickly, I think a certain amount of mystery and opacity is crucial. As I’ve argued before, all that really needs to happen to get the economy to recover is investors need to be led to believe that it will in fact recover, and we’ll get the snowball rolling again.

Ha! Terrible analogy. But probably appropriate.

New MacBook’s announced today.. I’m extremely skeptical of the glass touchpad. I love the iPhone, but I can’t stand using it for a long period of time. Sliding my finger around on a greasy glass surface starts to get tiring after a while. My fingers get tired and my wrists get sore if I use the iPhone for more than 15-20 minutes at a time… Without a rough surface beneath my finger I’m concerned the glass touchpad on the MacBook will be a similar experience.

They’ve also gone to all-glass displays… no matte finish anymore. As a programmer, I *loath* glass screens. Sure they look great for video games, Photoshop and video editing, but text editing is hard on your eyes for any reasonable duration of time. I can’t tolerate them.

I’m waiting for Apple to re-release the old PowerBook G4 12″ with an Intel Duo and 9600M video.. I wonder if someone can gut mine and do the upgrade for me.. 🙂

UPDATE: I finally got a chance to go hands-on with the new MacBook Pro. The touchpad, to my pleasant surprise, doesn’t suck. I could definitely get used to it.

The display however… glossy finish… I couldn’t get used to that. :-/

“Disastrous consequences”
“Martial law in America”

This is what we were told would happen if the government did not step in to bail out the lending markets. But all we’ve seen so far is a crisis of confidence, and a few banks that over leveraged themselves have either gone bankrupt or have been swallowed up by bigger banks. Am I naive to think that these aren’t necessarily bad things to have happened? Where’s the disaster? (I think Fanny/Freddie was a special case due to the legal framework they were built under; the government did the right thing by nationalizing them).

Yea, I’ve lost a lot of money these last couple of weeks. My retirement accounts have plummeted.. but they’ll come back. And hopefully on the up swing I’ll make it back plus some. Optimism? 🙂

I don’t consider myself to be a “free market fundamentalist”–I do believe that certain types of regulation are essential to keeping a free market a fair market. But everyone now seems to be calling for more regulation. Isn’t the market performing on itself right now the ultimate self regulation? Organizations that made bad investments are being punished by their shareholders pulling out their shares. Unfortunately, organizations that didn’t make bad investments need to operate in the same market as organizations that did, so they’re being dragged down with them… But that’s not necessarily a bad thing, it means for investors there are some real deals to be had right now on the stock market!

At this point my belief is the only thing the government needs to do is encourage more transparency in the markets. Companies that created these complicated mortgage-backed securities, leveraged instruments, etc., need to expose to their investors what they’re doing. You could argue that they didn’t even know what they were doing, but after this crisis people are gonna be on the look-out for these types of convoluted instruments and will be a lot more skeptical of them.

There have been comments coming from across the globe by various world leaders admonishing the US for “creating” the current financial crisis. Excuse me? A huge portion of this country’s stocks are owned by foreign organizations! If you don’t like our markets you don’t have to invest in them! I actually think the rest of the world’s markets crashing has more to do with the US trade deficit with these nations than it does with anything we did within the US. A lot of nations put their exports all in one basket..

I tuned in to the Vice Presidential debate tonight but had to watch it with the sound muted–sometimes the sound from the TV upsets my 2 month old son. Watching a political event with closed-captioning and the sound off is an entirely different experience than with the sound on..

Immediately I was struck by how strange Sarah Palin’s speech read over closed-captioning. It was filled with sentence fragments, run-on sentences, and awkward topic changes. It was very challenging to try and figure out what point she was trying to make. It read like she was jacked up on caffeine and/or extremely nervous.

After about 15 minutes I started to wonder if the person typing in the closed-captioning was biased–were they making Palin read worse than she sounded? Were they intentionally dropping words or periods to make it read like she was a babbling idiot? Are the deaf hearing our candidates through a biased closed-caption writer??? I had to un-mute the debate for a moment and hear for myself.

To my profound astonishment, I discovered that Sarah Palin sounded worse un-muted than she did over the closed-captioning. The person doing the closed-captioning was actually doing her a tremendous favor: In many cases they were actually completing her sentences or omitting repeated statements she made in her dialog. Although while reading the closed-captioning it was a challenge to decipher the point she was trying to make, you could find some context in her words, whereas in her verbal speech I felt like I was being talked-over by a sports announcer desperate to avoid dead air.

Un-muted the sentence fragments and rambling-on kind-of works for her, in sort-of a “I’m George W. Bush and I have invented-ed new words” kind-of way. (I just made up a new tense of “invent” right there). You interpret the rambling as coming from someone who’s “Down to Earth” and has a “Nice Personality.” For some people I’m sure they identify with it, because that’s how most of us sound when put into a stressful situation.

But over closed-captioning, she sounds like a babbling idiot.

It appears the Broadband Data Improvement Act which just passed the House is a bit of a misnomer. You would think from the title that the purpose of the legislation is to improve broadband, but after reading the version that passed the House it looks like Congress and I have different definitions of “improvement”.

I thought “improving broadband” meant “making it better,” but it appears their definition of improvement means:

1) Gathering better metrics on where to improve broadband (i.e., rural areas currently w/out high-speed Internet access)

2) Offering up funds to help states put broadband in more places

3) Increasing public awareness of child safety issues online and

4) Adjusting online child pornography laws

None of which really has anything to do with making broadband itself better. #1 and #2 will help make broadband exist in certain places, not improve it. #3 and #4 really have nothing to do with broadband and are just Internet regulation stuffs.

When I think of legislation for “improving broadband” here’s what I would like to see:

a) Regulations that put broadband reliability on par with regular land-line phone service. This should include penalties for downtime similar to what we have for phone service, along with installation time requirements like what we have for phones. Currently this is handled ad hoc on a case-by-base basis. If your broadband provider goes down for 5 days (which has happened to me) it’s up to you, the customer, to get on the horn and complain and complain and complain until they refund your money. If it were the phone company they would be required by law to automatically credit you 5 free days of service.

b) Regulations that force providers to compensate customers when advertised bandwidth isn’t realized by customer. Currently this is also handled ad hoc on a case-by-case basis. We need laws on the books that say “if the advertised speed is 3Mbit but you actually get 1.5Mbit then you should only pay for 1.5Mbit.” In many cases its handled by the provider saying to the customer, “tough noogies.”

c) Grant programs for improving broadband where it already exists by making it faster and cheaper! In Japan and Europe you can get 10-100x the bandwidth of what we can get in the US, and in many cases for a lower cost. If legislators want to realize the second dot-com boom, we need to pump up the bandwidth so that a whole new category of bandwidth-intensive internet services can be made practical.