t3knomanser's Fustian Deposits

I want to make a trailer for a Jesus Resurrection movie. Jesus rises as an evil zombie, and his former apostles must put a stop to the undead horror before all of Israel falls prey to the growing undead horror.

Mostly, I want a scene with Peter slapping one of the other disciples, "Matthew, we have to! That's not Jesus anymore!"

This very clever would-be politician needs your money. His opponent, Arlen the Hutt is a bloviating dickbag of anti-science anti-choice pro-censorship douchery.

He must be stopped, and Sean Tevis is working on turning the system in his favor. Statistically, money is what it takes to win. But Sean doesn't have that much, and he can't rely on the people he knows to be able to donate enough. So he's appealing to the Internet- if 3,000 people donate $8.34, he'll hit his financial goals. Doesn't mean he'll win, but think about this: the most donors anyone has ever had in Kansas is 644. The press he'd get for 3,000 donors alone would devastate his regressive and bloviating dickbag opponent.

GRIMLOCK SAY DONATE!

Pittsburgh is throwing a "Robot 250" bash city wide. Basically, combining Pittsburgh's 250th anniversary with robots. I'm not sure you can go wrong there. At any rate, this is the "robot" just outside of where I work- these wires are somehow wired up to track the movement of people in PPG Place and create generative music based on that. I'm guessing that they're using a capacitance effect to do so, which makes me think of canissum's motion lighting project from years ago.

At any rate, in this shot, they look like lasers being fired by a robot off camera, so I'm gonna run with that. LASERS!

Yesterday, I mentioned my move over to identi.ca, but I gave the site short shrift. The service, and more to the point, the underlying engine, Laconica represents a sea change in social networks.

I'm going to skip to the end, and then go back to what's going on under the hood. Here's the end: Laconica represents a completely distributed social network. Anyone can set up a Laconica server. They can then communicate with users on any other Laconica server. Gone is the, "I can't leave, all my friends are here!" friction. Laconica lets you leave and take your friends with you.

OpenID

How does it do this? Well, there's a couple of very cool technologies running under the hood. First, there's OpenID. Back in the day, you might remember Microsoft Passport. The idea was that you could have one user name and password (owned by Microsoft) and use it to log into any site (that paid its tribute to Microsoft). Shockingly, that never caught on.

OpenID serves the same goal, but with the opposite philosophy. Anybody can set up an OpenID server and give out accounts. LiveJournal is the most obvious example for those reading here. LiveJournal gives out accounts, and those accounts exist inside its OpenID server. Okay, so, you're logged into LiveJournal, and you swing over to Identi.ca.

You click the OpenID link, and put in your LiveJournal address and Identi.ca sends you over to LiveJournal. It's asking LiveJournal, "Hey, you know this guy? You wanna vouch for him?"

LiveJournal sees that you're logged in, but it doesn't vouch for you just yet. It gives you a page that says, "Hey, this Identi.ca guy has been asking about you. What should I say?"

Assuming you hit the "Yeah, this is cool. Tell him you know me," button, you get sent back to Identi.ca with a little note from LiveJournal, telling Identi.ca that this is all cool, and you can talk.

The beauty here is that anybody who wants to can setup an OpenID server. OpenID provides limited identity. It can't prove that I'm Remy Porter, but it can prove that the LiveJournal OpenID server knows me and calls me t3knomanser. This server here will say it knows you and make up a new name for you every time. Completely anonymous.

OAuth

OAuth is another idea like OpenID. I've got an Identi.ca account, and I want to subscribe to you over on SomeOtherSite.com. OAuth is a protocol for me to give SomeOtherSite.com limited permission to access my Identi.ca data. The OAuth site describes it as a "valet key"- I can give SomeOtherSite a key to my "car" that only works for driving a mile or two, and won't open the trunk. I don't have to trust SomeOtherSite very much to give it that data.

Shared Data

So, with OpenID and OAuth, we've got a "trust network". LiveJournal vouches for me at Identi.ca. I can swing past other people's Laconica servers and share information about my identity over at Identi.ca without giving them the keys to the kingdom. The only site in the chain with any important personal information is LiveJournal. Identi.ca trusts LiveJournal when it vouches for me, and SomeOtherSite.com trusts Identi.ca when it passes along OAuth information.

Compare that with new social site Ping.fm. Ping gives you a one-stop-shop for updating everything from Twitter to LiveJournal to MySpace via email and IM. But in order to do that, you have to give Ping.fm the username and password for each of your sites. Ouch- Ping.fm now knows everything about you, and if their data is compromised- well, you're screwed. This is the exact opposite of the OpenID/OAuth architecture. You have to trust Ping.fm a hell of a lot, and you also have to trust all of your other sites to, and put the same personal information in again and again.

So, tell me why this matters

Okay, so what's the big deal. "Trust" and "OAuth" and servers and crap. I don't care. How does this affect the price of tea in China?

The big deal is this: right now, every social network is what we call a "silo". They've got their own box of data about you, and there's no way to get at that data from the outside. Or, if there is a way, it's a site specific tool: the way you get your Twitter data from outside is different from how you download all of your LJ posts.

There are a lot of disadvantages of silos. First, as I already mentioned, when you ditch a social network, you ditch all the friends you've made on that network. You've gotta get them to come with you somehow. With OpenID and OAuth (and services like Laconica), we can reduce that burden. We have protocols that let you keep track of your friends no matter where they are.

Second, LiveJournal owns your posts. If the owners evaporate tomorrow, so does all of your content. Oops. OpenID and OAuth don't, themselves, do anything to stop that. But the fact that you can use those tools to make something like Laconica- well, that means you can be your own LiveJournal, without giving up the social network you've created.

Coming attractions

Okay, this is all pretty nascent. I'm not the sort of person that says, "Hey, run your own server, it's easy!" It's not easy, and it's not worth it for most people. We generally don't worry about LJ evaporating. But the good news is that these tools are going to pressure the silos to open up: LJ's going to need to open up your account data so that you can easily archive and backup your posts to stay competitive. LJ will need to provide a better way to track your friends on other social sites than just RSS to stay competitive. More and more sites are going to grow that are focused on helping you share your information and stay connected to people.

And that's why Identi.ca and Laconica represent a sea-change. It's not the first service to work with a distributed architecture, but it's the first one to put it into the right package at the right time. With the growing Twitter discontent, they're well positioned to create a robust, decentralized network that creates the massively-multisite social network. My powers of prognostication don't let me say that Identi.ca and Laconica are going to be the killer apps that do this, but if they're not, whatever does take their place will use the framework they laid out.

Troy police, under a search warrant, broke into a home to search for drugs and weapons. They shot the locks off the door, chucked in a flashbang, and went to town.

There's only one problem: their informant gave them bad info. Based on nothing more than that tip, they got a search warrant and trashed someone's home. According to the police, "All the checks and double-checks were done," but one would think that if they were really following up on that tip with investigative techniques to build a case to justify their no-knock raid, someone would have noticed that their suspect was entirely innocent.

It's okay though, the Troy PD is real remorseful, and will do whatever it takes to set things right.

Anya: "Will you be going back to clean-up the damage to the house?"

Sgt. Dean: "We just have to enter lawfully with our search warrant, that is our only obligation."

Anya: "And you can leave it in any state that you left it?"

Sgt. Dean: "Yes. We had probable cause that led us to believe there was drug activity."

No-knock raids are bad. They endanger civilians. They endanger the police. They're an action movie solution to the problem. So when Bruce Willis and Mel Gibson team up with Samuel L. Jackson and Danny Glover to take down drug dealers, you can use them. Until then, they seem to be an unreasonable danger.

I've made a few changes to my Internet presence. Obviously, I'm still keeping my LiveJournal up, and it will be my primary presence. I'm ditching twitter, except as a reblogging system. It's been so unreliable lately that it's not worth anything to me. Posts will still end up there, because I have my replacement reblogging to Twitter.

So I've moved over to identi.ca. This site is sweet. It's the same basic idea as Twitter- a 140 character microblog. But, unlike Twitter's walled garden, identi.ca is entirely open. Open source, open platform. You can run the software (laconi.ca) on any server you like- and still share data with any laconi.ca server. That means you can setup your own laconi.ca, but still exchange noticies with me over on the main identi.ca server. It also uses OpenID- that means your LiveJournal account is able to access that site without creating a new account.

Not as open, but also cool: FriendFeed. FriendFeed takes all the various sites you use and aggregates them into one place. Everything of interest that I post online will drop to FriendFeed eventually, which means that's your one-stop-shop for all things Remy, for all those that are interested in such things. It tracks comments, and so is kinda the ultimate solution to replacing LiveJournal with whatever. I know people were interested in that, so it's good to know that it's available.

So, last week, I paid off the remaining balance on my school loans. Or so I thought. I made the 4-day payoff, but didn't think about the holiday. They don't process payments on holidays, but they certainly accrue interest. So by the time they handled my payment (late yesterday or early today) thirty-eight cents of interest had accrued beyond what I paid them.

So I have $0.38 sitting in my account balance. "Okay," I say to myself, "annoying, but easy enough to fix." I go to the payment page, enter a payment for $0.38 and hit "submit".

Oops, you're not allowed to make payments smaller than a dollar.

"Fine," I say, "they can have the extra $0.62, and I'll just pay a dollar." Again, I go to the payment page, enter a payment for $1.00 and hit "submit".

Oops, you're not allowed to make a payment larger than your 4-day payoff (the 4-day payoff on $0.38 just so happens to be $0.38). So, I can't pay my remaining balance because it's too small, and I can't pay more than I owe.

I've sent them an email, and maybe I'll harass them by phone. This is kinda ridiculous, though. I mean, seriously.

My school loans are paid off. I now have zero debt.

I'm a bad American, apparently.

Why have I never heard of this show before? Thank you Internets. Thank you.

Today was the big day. The new Dunkin' Donuts opened. I come from Albany, NY- where there's a Dunkies on every corner. In Pittsburgh? Good luck finding one. Until today. A new Dunkin' Donuts opened in Market Square, which is a block from work. I walk past it every day.

The grand opening was pretty grand. People were lined up around the block. In order to stay stocked in donuts, they had a truck baking fresh ones outside. The whole square smelled of fresh-made donuts. The store was selling them still warm. It brought back memories of the good old days, when donuts were made in-store. Warm childhood memories.

Speaking of memories: they resurrected the chocolate coconut doughnut. They also had a one-day-only special: an Oreo doughnut. Chocolate doughnut cut in half and filled with icing, topped in icing and sprinkles. I haven't had one yet, but they look delicious.

Today would be Alan Turing's 96th birthday. Show your respect to the father of modern computer science and savior of England by wrapping a paper tape about your waist for the day!

Bonus points if your tape is infinitely long!

In 2005, Pittsburgh was unprepared for a zombie outbreak. I'll have to see if the local politicos have done anything to update our emergency response plan.

• 23:02 I was dreading the "return of Rose" arc in Doctor Who. The first episode in the arc showed a surprising lack of fanwank. #

Twitter is useful. Visit me there.

It's been awhile since I've posted a Remy-trademarked recipe, so I think we're about due. This one might sound a little odd, but bear with me. Based on my experiments, when served to a date, spouse, or other willing victim, this will increase your chances of getting laid significantly. The ingredients might be a bit tricky to come by, but this is entirely worth the effort, I swear.

Remy's Teriyaki Duck-Bacon Udon - Serves two
( The details )

Seriously, I can't tell you how awesome this recipe is. No matter how hard it is to track down some of the ingredients, it is worth it. Even if you need to hack your way through the jungles of Cambodia and kill an army of Viet-Cong with your bare hands for the last package of duck bacon on Earth, it would be worth it.

I had an idea a moment ago. Bacon sushi! Replace the seaweed with cooked bacon. Fish and rice wrapped in bacon.

You're welcome, world. It may not be the cure for cancer, but this is a ten foot stack of awesome in a six foot high room.

Yet another study shows some evidence of a biological basis for homosexuality. On one hand, this is obvious. Human beings are constrained by their biology, and so everything done by a human is based in our biology.

On the other hand, this is being treated as a political coup. I'm not really sure why. I've always been opposed to what I call "The Biological Excuse", e.g., "You must accept my sexual preference because I have no control over it," is a very weak grounds for social change. I much prefer, "You must accept my sexual preference because it's none of your goddamn business."

Never mind the unintended consequences of such a claim. By focusing so strongly on the biological basis, you're turning it from a choice into a condition. If a lack or surplus of androgen during development can cause homosexuality, doesn't that give us a chance to eradicate it in the next generation? I'm not advocating such a thing, mind. But some people would.

One must face facts. That means the biological basis for all human behavior must be accepted. That means accepting, no matter how unpalatable it may seem, the fact that every action we perform arises from nothing more than some very chaotic chemistry. We can't ignore the real world.

I'm not claiming these results are false or should be ignored, but I think there is a large community that has viewed the biological basis of sexual orientation as some sort of holy grail of justifications. That has always been a mistake, because it doesn't address the social implications. The biological basis is irrelevant to social change, but if our knowledge of the biological sources advances more quickly than our social wisdom- then we have a problem.

The new version of Firefox is providing an object lesson on user momentum.

Momentum is mass * velocity. Velocity, as you might recall from high school physics, is a "vector" quantity. That means it has a magnitude and a direction (if you're driving the speed limit, your speed is 55 miles per hour; your velocity is 55 miles per hour due north).

User momentum is user-base size (mass) * workflow (velocity). Firefox, as an application, has a fairly large user base. This user base is biased towards more technical minded types, people who know their way around a computer (let's face it- your average luser is going to just use IE). A technical user is the kind that tends to develop a consistent workflow.

The "AwesomeBar" haters are those kinds of users. They've developed a specific way of working (direction) and gone far down that path (magnitude). They're a subset of the overall Firefox user-base, but big enough, with enough magnitude on their workflow that they've got a lot of momentum.

Newton's First Law tells us that "an object in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted upon by an outside force"; e.g. momentum can only be changed by force. How does one apply force in this case? Well, Mozilla hit the nail on the head: they took away the old address bar behavior entirely. There's no legacy setting, no way to disable the behavior (without disabling all address bar behavior). That's force.

And Newton's Third Law tells us that "for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction". The reaction, in this case, is backlash. "This sucks, I'm going back to FF2." "Mozilla's driving users like me away." Hundreds of angry postings in hundreds of blogs rattle their "I'm dropping Firefox" sabers.

Now, imagine if you will, a train moving down the tracks. You stand on the tracks and attempt to apply force and stop the train. Obviously, you're going to lose: the change in force you have to apply must exceed the momentum of the train (mass * velocity). You can't stop a train. But you can stop a rolling bowling ball. Or a thrown football.

The important question here is: does Mozilla have enough force to counteract the user momentum? Is Mozilla stopping a train, a bowling ball, or a frisbee? In this case, I think it's a frisbee. I think the largest mass of the users (myself included) look at this AwesomeBar and think about how we can work it into our workflow. Either the direction of our workflow isn't too far from what the AwesomeBar tries to do, or the magnitude of our workflow isn't so great. We're willing to change. A subset of the total user base has a great deal of momentum, and there are only two options to deal with them: you apply force to bring them in line (remove legacy compatibility) or you cut them loose so they don't drag your project behind them.

At any rate, after work today, I'm probably going to put together "Remy's Laws of User Motion" to better explain how user behavior can be managed using physics as a metaphor.

The new TV series, "The Middleman" is sixteen gallons of awesome in a six gallon jug. Let me put it this way: this show is so awesome it will be canceled in six episodes or less.

It airs tonight, the pilot is available on iTunes and the XBox download service. While there are lots of comparisons one could make about the show, the closest thing in living memory is "Pete and Pete" mixed with "The X-Files". Nerd friendly humor ensues, including obscure comic book nerdery.

I'll be honest, it has a hard time deciding where it wants to keep the Cheese Factor, and bounces from "Batman" level camp (the Adam West version) to "Pete and Pete" with occasional forays into "Spaced" territory. It never loses its self awareness though, and for a show like this, that's the most important thing. The acting is stiff and wooden, as it should be, and the bit parts are tiny bits and are as cardboard cut out as can be. This episode features cartoonish mobsters. Future episodes promise Luchadores as villains.

My conclusion? On a scale of one to ten, this ranks it an an awesome.

Okay, now I feel guilty about that awful infomercial. Here, let me make it up to you:

This morning, I realized I hadn't posted any horrible videos that are short samples of pure torture in awhile. Time to rectify that:

(in other news "idiots" has ascended of one of my top 5 tags used on posts)

I designed an application recently. It's a really simple application, as such things go: Read a record from a database, send the record to the mainframe, and flip a flag on the record to mark it done. Tack on a little logging and error handling, and you've got a very basic project. So basic, in fact, that my boss decides that it's a waste of my time. I'll put the design together and we'll ship it to an offshore contractor.

Now, I've seen the way offshore fucks up projects. So I sit down, and try and figure out how best to prevent this sort of blow up. My solution? I write the program myself, mostly. I supplied design diagrams, documentation, and about 40% of the code, already implemented so that it matches the design. There are a bunch of blanks in the code marked with "TODO: Open the connection to the database and fetch the next record. Map the column values according to the tech spec, a la: 'rec.sMfgCode = dbrecord("sMfgCode")'^*".

Now, it's entirely possible that the developer might screw up filling in those blanks. Mind you, this stuff is (theoretically) basic knowledge for a contractor, but hey- it could happen? But I was surprised by the scope of the offshore fuckup. The developer completely ignored the sample code I gave him. I did most of his job for him and he just pissed it down his leg and reimplemented the application. He ignored my design diagram, didn't create the classes I told him to, and generally fucked the entire thing up.

Also: no comments, bad coding practices, ignorance of key syntax elements, and a horrible horrible habit of doing lots of switching logic instead of using OOD and the config file to control app behavior.

I hate offshore.

^*No, I didn't name the database columns. They really used Hungarian Notation. I hate Hungarian Notation

Dear Steven Moffat,
This season of Doctor Who has, thus far, ranged from mediocre to awful with a dash of occasional moments of enjoyment. As always, the two parter you wrote that concluded this week was incredible. You use the same tropes and routines every time, yet you manage to always put them together into an arrangement that is stunning.

Keep up the good work.

//Seriously, this week's Doctor Who? Awesome. Awesome.

19 years ago, Ayatollah Khomeini died. Iran threw a big bash to commemorate this, with all the pomp and circumstance you would expect when honoring a theocratic dicktard.

At funerals in Iran, there is a tradition. To show respect for the dead, you toss money at their coffin during the funeral procession. For important people, you toss money at their gravesite too. This is collected and given to the poor. When Khomeini died, this tradition was observed, but with one small addition: the bills were wrapped in shit. Yes: they threw shit at the corpse of Khomeini. This gives you an idea of how popular he really was.

My grandmother-in-law, who lived in Iran was recently buried. My mother-in-law traveled back to her homeland to visit the grave-site (in the same cemetery as Khomeini's tomb). This happened to be around the same time as the anniversary of Khomeini's death. The big bash wouldn't have looked so great if people were standing around hurling shit at the tomb, so the government of Iran did the only rational thing it could do: it imported celebrants.

They trolled through third world Islamic countries and offered people a free plane ride and hotel rooms in Tehran so that they could attend this bash. Most of the people in the audience didn't speak a lick of Farsi. They looked, dressed, acted nothing like locals, but hey- they don't throw shit at the guy you're trying to make look good, so that counts for something.

That's the news my mother-in-law brought back from Iran. She also brought back a joke:

Ahmadenijad heard about a local blood drive, and decided that it might be a good photo-op to make his failing administration look good. When he arrived, he was lined up with the people who hadn't ever given blood before so that he could be blood typed. The nurse sat him down, ran the test, and looked very confused. He called over his supervisor and showed her the test. "His blood is no type," the nurse explained. "He is not A or B, AB, or O. All I can see is that he is negative."

The supervisor ran the test again, and confirmed the results. The supervisor, the nurse, and the president all sat there, very confused. And then the supervisor noticed a strange odor coming from the test tube that held Ahmadenijad's blood. A foul stench- but one that she recognized. "I'm sorry, Mr. President," she explained. "But we do not need your kind of blood."

"Why? What blood type am I?"

"Shit negative," she replied.

I imagine it's funnier to a native speaker.

I kinda skipped the actual day, but Minna and I moved to Pittsburgh about a year ago- off by about two weeks. I started at my new job a year ago yesterday.

It's been a good year. I really like Pittsburgh. It's... it's a very different sort of town than the big cities I'm used to (Boston, NYC). Pittsburgh is the city of abandoned wealth. During its heyday, you had the steel foundries and the Heinz factories. There were huge amounts of money it the city, and this lead to major capital investments. Gorgeous buildings. Opera, symphonies, museums, conservatories. Carnegie Hall. A gilded era of wealth and prosperity.

And then the jobs moved overseas. The local economy crashed, and a lot of companies pulled up stakes and moved. But the buildings stayed. The initial investments that got the culture of Pittsburgh started were already made. Even if the big companies left, there was enough money to keep things running- the big costs were in building the museums and establishing their collections. Getting the concert halls and theaters built. Even when the big money left, these things were able to hold on.

And now, the jobs are moving back. Pittsburgh's got a great job market. IT, medicine, banking and yes, even a little bit of manufacturing. Major companies are starting a new round of skyscrapers in downtown. Money's moving back in, and the economy is picking up.

It's actually a really exciting time to be in Pittsburgh. It's a gorgeous, friendly town. All the amenities of major cities without the downsides.

Of course, the city isn't the only reason it's been a good year. I've got a good job- not a great one, but it keeps the bills paid and doesn't annoy me overmuch. Even more important to making it a good year of course is Minna. We've made a really nice home for ourselves, with our kittens, and it's been a good year for us. We're putting together a solid future, and everything's looking up for us.

Works for me.

• 20:26 And with the board showing 2-0 wings, it doesn't look so good for the Pens. #

Twitter is useful. Visit me there.

• 07:54 My few-levels-up-boss is ripping one of her peers apart on a conference call. Hilarity doth ensue. #

Twitter is useful. Visit me there.

We all hate 9/11 "Truthers". Their conspiracy theory illogic and furious ranting is insulting, annoying, and generally devoid of anything resembling value. But this post isn't really about them.

It's about the US torture ships that we're just starting to find out about. Floating prisons involved in extraordinary rendition. The information this far is tentative, unconfirmed, but there's the glimmer of what may be a real conspiracy.

And this is what I hate about Troofers. They foam and froth and waste so much effort on idiocy, when there are very real conspiracies that are worthy of investigation. If their fervor could be tied to intellectual rigor, investigative journalism, and, y'know, reality, we might be able to, as a nation, really learn to control and monitor our public servants.