The Onion...calls it?

Sometimes life imitates art, sometimes art imitates life:

Exhibit A: "Drugs Win Drug War" [The Onion]
Exhibit B: "Global war on drugs has 'failed' say former leaders" [BBC]

Head in the Clouds... (or not)

This was intentional, right?  This doesn't happen by accident, and yet...

Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:

(note definition 3 from Merriam-Webster)

It doesn't really give the impression that their Cloud Computing has much substance (whether it does or not is an entirely different question, this is just another post about strange branding).

Favorite Chrome extensions

For Chrome/Chromium users, here are my favorite extensions.  What are yours?

Privacy/security related

• AdBlock -- probably the most important one here.  I can't stand browsing without it.
• Disconnect -- blocks tracking web page elements from major providers (Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc.)
• Explode -- expands most URLs created by URL rewriters (e.g. TinyURL)
• KB SSL Enforcer -- This one actually causes a bit of trouble, so you may not actually want to use it. It tries to ensure that you're talking to websites over encrypted channels by detecting whether there's an SSL version of each site.  Even though it has systems to override its decisions, it still ends up screwing up a fair amount of the time (especially with online banking) since many sites don't actually mirror their SSL sites correctly.
• Keep My Opt-Outs -- opts out of personalized Google ads

Web site integration

• BugMeNot Lite -- makes a little widget pop up in the Omnibox when BugMeNot is available
• Delicious Bookmarks -- bookmarks pages quickly in Delicious.  There are many Delicious extension, but I like this one since it shows you tag suggestions.
• Google Docs Viewer (by Google) -- fast access to all your documents, easy to open them in new windows
• Google Voice (by Google) -- shows number of items in your Google Voice inbox, makes all phone numbers click-to-call
• Minimalist for Google Calendar and Minimalist for Gmail -- these two let you disable many individual elements on Google Calendar and Gmail.  On my laptop where there's limited screen real estate, this helps quite a bit.

Browser functionality

• Google Quick Scroll -- when you search for something and follow a link on the search results, this presents the option of jumping to the location of the snippet on the page
• History of these2 -- lets you search history more easily by time and site
• RSS Subscription Extension (by Google) -- adds RSS widgets to the Omnibox

Public service announcement: Space is big.

Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.

    -- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Just peanuts, visualized:

via APOD

Reduce, reuse, research...then recyle

Just a quick plug for an awesome recycling search engine: Earth911

You say what you want to recycle and a zipcode and it tells you places that will recycle it. Very well-done website. At least where I am, there are many local places that will recycle all sorts of non-trival objects (rechargeable batteries, Plastic #5, CFLs, etc.).

Unsubscribing from Your Essential Shopper

Take it back, take it back, take that thing right outta here.
Right away, far away, take that thing right outta here.
-- Take It Back (Cream)

I've been trying to permanently remove all junk mail coming to my apartment (as well as previous residences). CatalogChoice, as I've previously posted, has been great for this. However, I still get weekly junk mail from "yes! Your Essential Shopper," part of the Bay Area News Group. I couldn't find anything in my web searches for 'unsubscribe "your essential shopper"' so I'm writing this post.

Inside the all-ad newspaper, I managed to find a phone number (1-800-598-4637) and called it asking to unsubscribe [1]. They were helpful and took me off the list. Now (presumably) they will stop sending me this direct-to-recycling-bin publication every Sunday.

[1] It's possible that the number might be different for you if you're in a different area. In this case, the best I can say is that the newspaper should include a phone number at the bottom of the second page.

Three things for improving Facebook privacy

We're not gonna take it
Never did and never will
We're not gonna take it
Gonna break it, gonna shake it,
Let's forget it better still

-- We're Not Gonna Take It (The Who)

1. ReclaimPrivacy: everyone should be using this and scan periodically. This is an extremely easy way of detecting which privacy leaks you haven't plugged.
2. Remove Facebook Like buttons: a Greasemonkey script to rid you of these from non-Facebook pages. These buttons are nasty and let Facebook track you as you surf around the web.
3. Facebook Link Rewriter: another Greasemonkey script to stop Facebook from tracking which links you click on.

Sure would be great if I could stop doing these types of posts, eh?

Steal this idea: Off-hold notification

Woke up this morning I was all alone

Saw your picture by the telephone

I was missing you oh so bad

Wish I had you here to hold

All I've got is this touch-tone phone

So I guess I'll give you a call

-- Telephone Song (Stevie Ray Vaughan)

Here's another app idea for smart phone software developers. When I'm put on hold and I don't have a headset, I'd like to put the phone down until I am taken off of hold. I'd like it so that when the phone "hears" a loud signal over the line (it may need to do some noise cancellation in case there is noise on my end) the phone will vibrate or (optionally) switch to speakerphone.

This would mostly be for talking to people but a harder problem is handling customer service centers. (Ideally, customer service telephone systems would take your phone number and have an agent give you a call when they're free rather than wasting time on phone calls, but few companies do this currently) In these cases, it might be able to use a voice/music detector and check for repeated messages. Many of things you hear while you're on hold alternate between music and voice, so this might end up notifying you too much. With luck, it could be trained that some pieces were recordings (by memorizing sound "fingerprints" or something like that like) for use in later phone calls.

Quick hacks: webnumbr for fast scraping (of a single number)

Like the previous quick hack, I had little to do with this -- just demonstrating a tool. In this case, the goal was to graph the national average for certificate of deposit interest rates over time (you can find this information at Bankrate.com). At SHDH37, Drew told me about webnumbr which does exactly this (and was possibly developed at a previous SHDH) -- you pick a webpage and then select a single element from that page. webnumbr will scrape the webpage at an interval of your choosing and graph the data. I'm not wild about their graphing (prefer something interactive like this or Google Charts) but it looks like you can get the raw data in various formats (CSV, etc.) which would let you use other graphing methods, overlay charts, etc.

If you're interested, here are graphs for the average 1-year and 2-year CD rates.

Quick hacks: Yahoo Pipes for RSS feed filtering

In my Copious Free Time(tm), I've been working on some very quick projects. I'm writing them up since, while many of them are quite simple, they highlight some interesting tools.

I used to read the "Marmaduke Explained" blog at this website. It has since moved here but the RSS feed includes other entries as well. Using Yahoo Pipes, I was quickly able to create a new RSS feed which only includes entries that include Marmaduke in the title. See the pipe I made here (output available as RSS, JSON, email, etc.). Yahoo Pipes is, like the name implies, a series of tubes -- nodes in the graph feed perform operations and feed into other nodes. So, my point is that Yahoo Pipes is a cool piece of software and probably underutilized -- the basic filtering that I do is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg for what it can do (for example, there are "translate" and "location extractor" nodes). If they added basic scraping abilities, I'd likely use it even more (but see upcoming posts for different ways to do scraping...).

Facebook's War on Privacy

Naegle: I guarantee I can find some new revenue streams. Step one: Let's sell some ad space. Reverend, how would you feel about wearing this robe? [holds up a robe with "Fatso's Hash House" embroidered on it]

Lovejoy: Mmm...conflicted?

Burns: Too bad! You've already signed the deal.

Naegle: Actually, he hasn't.

Burns: Oh. Well, we highly value your input. [menacing] Until you sign the deal...

-- Simpsons, She of Little Faith

I am deeply concerned with Facebook's new privacy policy. As I understand it, the most damaging change is that a good portion of every Facebook profiles will now be public -- name, photo, location, groups, friends, etc. I can't fathom how this ever seemed like it would be a good idea. The possibilities for exploitation are astronomical. Anyway, I'll stop ranting now and point you to other people who have written much more eloquent pieces on this and suggest some actions you can take.

More information

• Detailed description of what the new privacy policy means
  ACLU's dotRights.org campaign
• EFF's analysis of the changes
  I hope that they will have an action page soon, but I don't see anything yet.
• The case for online privacy
  Bruce Schneier's response to Google's CEO (who unfortunately has a similar attitude towards privacy)

What you can do

• Share these links on Facebook, Twitter, and email! That's the easiest way to spread this information to people who need it.
• Sign ACLU's petition to Facebook.
• Visit the dotRight's Take Action page.
• A properly organized (inter)national protest might bring this the media coverage it deserves... (need help from EFF and ACLU for this)

(P.S. Yes, there are some positive aspects of the changes. However, these come at too great a cost and they're completely independent of the negative portions.)

Update (12.11.2009): Some more links as this unfolds:

• Why Privacy Matters (Guillaume Marceau)
• Facebook tosses graph privacy into the bin (Joseph Bonneau)
• An ironic, unanticipated outcome

Why I dislike text messages

This article succinctly explains the main reason I dislike text messages: (emphasis not in original)

"...Wireless data service is AT&T's only bright spot, up a whopping 26% per customer. How so? As any parent of teenagers knows, text messages are 20 cents each, or $5,000 per megabyte. After the first month and a $320 bill, we all pony up $10 a month for unlimited texting plans. ..."

I have been waiting for someone to shake things up and get cell phones using instant messaging and/or email rather than text messaging which, in my mind, consists entirely of disadvantages (expensive coupled with payment on receipt, limited message length, impossible to know if messages are even received, ...). With luck, this will help as well.

Weird Craiglist scam

Pleased to meet you
Hope you guess my name
But what's puzzling you
Is the nature of my game

-- Sympathy for the Devil (Rolling Stones)

Dear Internet,

I am attempting to sell a desk on craigslist and received an unusual response, quoted here in its entirety:

Date: Thu, 20 Aug 2009 07:53:48 -0500
Subject: Re: L-shaped desk, almost new - $150 (East Side)
From: trendy carley <trendycarley0@gmail.com>

Hello ,
I appreciate your response to my inquiry. I'm interested in buying it
from you. I would've come and inspect it myself but I am on a business
trip overseas and wont be back for a while.
Please do withdraw ,with immediate effect the advert from Web as I dont
mind adding $50 for you to do that so I can be rest assured that it is
held for me. I should believe it is in good condition as stated. I will
be making the payment via a Certified Check which my secretary will
mail across to you. I'll be picking it from you with the aid of my
mover. My Mover will be coming to pick it from you once the Certified
Check has been cashed.
If condition of sales works for you I then ask that you get back to me
with the following details so that payment can be posted ASAP:
Required Information

1.Name to be issued to...
2.Contact Address(City,State,Zip code,Country):
3.Contact telephone number:(home,cell or work)
4.Clear pictures showing details

Do get back to me as soon as possible with this details for payment  to
be made out to you immediately you get it on time. Also I will want you
to remove the advert as soon as possible and I dont mind paying $50 for
you to have that done ASAP as I said earlier, so no one else is lined up
for it. Thanks Hoping to hear from you soon.

Best Regards

Just what is the nature of this guy's game (not to mention his (her?) rather unlikely name)? Completely bizarre that one would pay someone to remove an ad and weirder still that one would expect them to do it before receipt of payment. Additionally, the desk is only being sold for $150 so $50 is a considerable markup (plus he'll certainly be paying a bundle for the mover). Then there's the spot where he seemingly leaves out my name from the template ("Hello, ") and the redundancy of asking for a ZIP code and country (at least, I've always heard other countries refer to them as postal codes).

I'm really curious where he's going with this. Some ideas: (please post ideas in the comments)

1. He's just gathering names, addresses, and/or telephone numbers.
2. No check will ever come but maybe a mover might.
3. Check will come and bounce. Mover will come and bounce with the desk.
4. There's some second part of this scheme that is too tough to predict at this point.

One other tidbit is that the original email from him (which came from trendycarley02@gmail.com instead and asked me rather simply "Is it in good condition..?i am interested.") was immediately tossed into the spam folder by Gmail.

I've been thinking about comedic responses. So far, the best one I've come up with is posting his response on the Internet.

Steal this idea: Google, optimize those links!

You know, those links at the top of Gmail and related services. Mine say:

Gmail Calendar Documents Photos Reader Sites Web more ▼

Yours do too? How strange. I would think these links should be personalized if not customizable. Google knows which ones I click on since I'm logged in all the time. Why not get rid of the ones I never click on (Sites, Photos, and Web -- if I need to do a web search, I'll use the address bar in my web browser) and show the ones that I always have to find in the ▼ like Scholar. Some people would probably object to a fluid UI (i.e. if Google adjusted these automatically) and I think the preferred methods these days are to have computers suggest changes but not perform them without user intervention. Maybe there's some plugin/extension/religion that lets you change these? (not that this is really a high priority...)

Steal this idea: Phone scammer/spammer warnings

Hear my phone ringin',
sound like a long distance call
-- Muddy Waters, "Long Distance Call"

Why telemarketing is an opt-out rather than opt-in process is beyond me. Nevertheless, if you do get a call from a number you don't recognize, you may want to run it by whocalled.us. I recently got a call from a telemarketer (see my report here*) and had an idea for a program to run on the phones of the future. When I say phones of the future, I mean roughly tomorrow since this idea is so simple it should be very easily doable on an iPhone, Android phone, or something else easily programmable. At least, I would hope this is easy to write (I haven't ever used these phones' APIs).

The idea is this: When I get a call from an unknown number, my phone should look it up on whocalled.us. Possibly there would be a reputation system and it could automatically report good calls to the site (though there are some potential privacy issues here which would need to be addressed) and give you the option to mark a previous call as a scam. Integration with donotcall.gov would be nice too.

* Incidentally, this phone number appears to be running multiple scams. The number is used to connect people with various scams so that the companies actually doing the scams are harder to trace. That's why the representative on the other line said that I had called her.

Technical: Getting Skype working with Bluetooth on Ubuntu with AMD64

If you want to use Skype with Bluetooth headsets on recent versions of Ubuntu Jaunty with an AMD64 architecture, this article might be of interest. If those words didn't make any sense, this article is definitely skippable.

When using Skype with a Bluetooth headset, I was getting error messages of the following form:

ALSA lib ../../../src/pcm/pcm.c:2165:(snd_pcm_open_conf) Cannot open shared library /usr/lib32/alsa-lib/libasound_module_pcm_bluetooth.so

Since Skype only exists in 32-bit mode currently, you can only run it in AMD64 using the linux32 command. However, this requires 32-bit versions of all the libraries that Skype would need, including bluez-alsa if you want to use a Bluetooth headset. Ubuntu currently attempts to handle this with their ia32-libs package but the current version of this package is missing its bluez-alsa libraries (as indicated in the error message). This is the bug that has been reported here.

I have a horrible hack to fix this problem, mostly because I can't find where ia32-libs development takes place nor the Ubuntu development process. I downloaded the 32-bit version of bluez-alsa and used alien -t to convert it into a tar.gz file. I then extracted its contents and made an extremely simple Makefile with this content:

install:
cp ./usr/lib/alsa-lib/libasound_module_ctl_bluetooth.so /usr/lib32/alsa-lib/
cp ./usr/lib/alsa-lib/libasound_module_pcm_bluetooth.so /usr/lib32/alsa-lib/

Next, I created a Debian package with checkinstall which you can find here. To my knowledge, these files are missing in Ubuntu Karmic too, so this might help those users as well.

Takeaway message: If you want to try my hack, download my new package (which I admitedly haven't been able to test on any other machines, so any feedback is welcome) and use your favorite package installer (the graphical one is probably the easiest) to install it.

Steal this idea: Mobile public transportation planner

If I had an iPhone or Android-based phone instead my current piece of cellphone-shaped garbage, I would want this application: While walking someone, the user tells the application their intended destination ("I'm walking home now") and the application uses GPS information and a data connection to lookup public transportation alternatives to walking. It then suggests small detours or pauses in your journey (e.g. "Wait here, you're at a bus stop. When the #42 comes in ~2 minutes, get on.") which get you closer to your destination. As far as I know, this shouldn't be that hard to write and I'm surprised I haven't heard of it so far (of course, not owning a shiny phone, I don't follow all the apps written for them). It could also get more sophisticated by learning your pace or common routes and locations. In any event, this would be a useful tool and I think I'd take the bus more often if I had it.

Thesis proposal nightmare #1

Invoking Dream either by reading or talking about him (as I was doing recently) tends to cause screwy dreams. This pattern continues...

It is April 4th -- 10 days before my real thesis proposal. I've done one practice talk which indicated that more practice talks were in order, yet somehow I'm giving the proposal anyway. Weirder still, I'm giving the proposal in my parent's family room on an old television instead of with a projector. Only four people have shown up -- two faculty and two students. Nobody in my area. It is only when my advisor Eugene shows up that I realize that not only is the rest of my committee not present at the proposal (one of the attending faculty members assures me is not a problem). I then realize that I've somehow scheduled my thesis proposal during a major conference which my thesis committee members (including Eugene) are attending.

Wake up.

Error: Too many errors

Count the errors. There are at least three:
Error 1: Saying there was an error, then saying there wasn't.
Error 2: Saying there was an error, then saying there wasn't when there really was -- it really didn't rip the DVD.
Error 3: Title says "Error while burning" but it was ripping, not burning.

Is this a bad joke? While trying to rip a DVD, I got this message from Brasero. This is dailywtf material but I haven't been able to find any previous postings on it. While ripping the DVD, the output file grew, but apparently, Brasero deleted it at the end. Also, there are no messages from the kernel about a DVD read error, so we appear to be hallucinating problems.

Steal this idea: Musical intersections

Listening to you,
I get the music.
Gazing at you,
I get the heat.
Following you,
I climb the mountains.
I get excitement at your feet.
-- The Who, "We're Not Gonna Take It"

There are a couple times when two or more people want to listen to some form of streaming music (road/train trip, shared office space, etc.). Streaming radio sites like Pandora should have the option of combining multiple peoples' musical taste and come up with music that both people would like. Being able to generate a road trip playlist for portable music players would be nice too, though there are the obvious copyright issues.

I imagine coming up with good shared playlists is trickier than just taking the intersection of the songs/musical features. Ultimately, it would depend on the model of listeners tastes. Of course, in many cases, these intersections can be small (my freshman year college roommate and I both liked Stevie Wonder but had little else in common musically).