Play with the Electoral College

Friday, November 10, 2000

Now this is a cool Java Applet. It's the Electoral College Calculator and it allows you to play “What if” games, selecting different states to either Republican, Democratic or Independant (read: other). It also has data from the elections from 1980 through 1996.

Using it, I found that it only takes 11 states to win the election: California, New York, Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina and one of either George or Virginia. That alone will get you 270 Electoral votes. All other states combined only add up to 268.

Very fun program.

Topiary

I'm talking to Spring, and she informed me that the wierd alien thing I photographed is in fact a topiary. I checked an online dictionary and it's not quite that—it's topiary-like, but it's not a live plant.

And here I though the thing couldn't be classified.

The Dreaded Comfy Chair

I swear, I was getting ready to hang out with my friends. Okay, so I got up when I was supposed to meet them (7:00 pm) but hey, they're my friends, they'll understand.

I then made a big mistake: I sat down in The Comfy Chair!

The Comfy Chair is this cusiony-sink-down-into-it type chair that is all too easily to fall asleep in. Deep asleep in. My intention was to put on my shoes, but I think I sat back to relax for a second because the next thing I remember is my roommate Rob going “Sean! It's eleven o'clock. Sean! Get up!”

Just in time to make it to work. Sigh.

Saturday, November 10, 2001

The Quick and Dirty B-Movie Plot Generator

My friend JeffC sent me a link to They Fight Crime, a CGI script that prints out a plot.

I checked the page, and it's all in JavaScript. Pretty easy. It looks easy. So I take the text (it's there for the taking) and write my own version (in C of course) that can be easily extended (all the text are in files) and I've even included character names. Mine also has more options than just fighting crime.

I do need to fix the pronouns in a few cases but I'll save that for later.

Update on Friday, July 6^th, 2007

Oh, it only took a few years to fix the problem.

A google spiders

In checking the log files for this site I've notived that Google has finally found it and has spent the past few days spidering through it.

There are a few thousand links for it to follow (out of what? A million potential URLs on this site? I know the Electric King James has over fifteen million URLs). For instance, there are three just for the years, 12 each for each year (okay, so there's only 11 for this year, but close enough) so that's now 39 URLs. Each day (for those days that have an entry) have at least one entry and while I may have skipped a day or two here and there, let's say there's an averave of 300 per year, so that's over 900 there. And if you assume an average of two entries per day (remember, you can retrieve the entire day, or just an entry) that's another 600 per year or 1,800 so we're now up to nearly 3,000 URLs that Google has to crawl through (with lots of duplication).

`robots.txt` for bible.conman.org

#-----------------------------
# Go away---we don't want you 
# to endlessly spider this
# site.
#-----------------------------

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

There's a reason I don't allow web robots/spiders to the Electric King James—it would take way too long to index the site (if indeed, the spider in question was even aware of all the possible URLs) and my machine isn't all that powerful to begin with (it being a 33MHz 486 and all). But I feel that there is a research problem lurking here that some interprising Masters or Ph.D. candidate could tackle: how best to spider a site that allows multiple views per document.

Wednesday, November 10, 2004

The Office

It was the most depressing cubicle I've even been assigned to (sorry C, but it is depressing). The last cubicle I had wasn't nearly so depressing (actually, cubicles, as I was moved about five times in a single year).

But not that was my last job though. At my last job, I didn't even have the indignity of a cube; nope, I had to share a desk with another cow-orker (much like Sam Lowry did in Brazil)—then again, the last job was at Negiyo, which I suspect was where it was filmed).

To make matters worse, I have to deal with the phone.

This is not good.

I was banned from talking to customers at two ISPs and a webhosting company (the department I worked at in Negiyo never talked directly to customers so that was never an issue there). I wasn't banned because I was mean to customers, or excessively used the phones for personal use. No, I was banned because I was too truthful to the customer.

“I'm sorry,” I would say. “But I just don't know how to configure Novel's SMTP server to talk to our server.” Or “Windows? That's that … thing … from Washington, right?” Or even “Yup, the President of the company attempted to add an external SCSI drive to the system live.” And then my boss would scurry up yelling “Never tell the customer you don't know!” Or “Are you insane? You don't tell the customer I screwed up!”

And I would end up being banned from talking to customers.

Which really isn't a bad thing really.

But C knows all this. Yet here I am, expected to deal with the phone.

Sigh.

Friday, November 10, 2006

It's still there

It's not dead, and I haven't forgotten about it—it's just been … busy at The Office. That's all.

“You want me to close the program? Sí”

It's D&D night, and I forgot to bring my laptop (we use kLoOge during game play). So Bob (the DM) lent me his laptop computer to use.

It runs Microsoft Windows.

So okay. I can deal.

I spend about an hour pounding on the machine to get it running semi-decently when all of a sudden half the message boxes pop up in Spanish.

Then back to English.

Then Spanglish.

“Do you really want to end the application? Sí No”

Sigh.

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Perhaps an 80M script isn't that excessive …

Okay, I played around a bit with the Lua code from last night. Here, again, is the six minute run:

[spc]lucy:/tmp/lua>time lua -i show.lua
Lua 5.1.4  Copyright (C) 1994-2008 Lua.org, PUC-Rio
> dofile("default.lua")
> os.exit()

real    5m49.052s
user    5m43.279s
sys     0m0.577s
[spc]lucy:/tmp/lua>

show.lua is some code to display a given table, and it's only being used here to see if the code actually built the huge table up correctly.

Okay, six minutes. I'm not sure what prompted me to do the following, but I did it anyway:

[spc]lucy:/tmp/lua>time lua -i default.lua
Lua 5.1.4  Copyright (C) 1994-2008 Lua.org, PUC-Rio
> dofile("show.lua")
> os.exit()

real    0m12.354s
user    0m6.293s
sys     0m0.413s
[spc]lucy:/tmp/lua>

Oooohkaaaaay … what happend here? To make matters more interesting, it's repeatable. I load show.lua (at 1,101 bytes) first, and it takes six minutes. Load default.lua (the 80MB file) and it takes 12 seconds. And if I do it this way:

[spc]lucy:/tmp/lua>time lua
Lua 5.1.4  Copyright (C) 1994-2008 Lua.org, PUC-Rio
> dofile("show.lua")
> dofile("default.lua")
> os.exit()

real    0m16.130s
user    0m6.311s
sys     0m0.365s
[spc]lucy:/tmp/lua>

and it takes 16 seconds (only because it took me an additional four seconds to type the extra line of code).

Very weird.

Update Wednesday, February 3^rd, 2010

It was a bug in Lua that has since been fixed.

Tuesday, November 10, 2015

Freebooting

Facebook says it’s now streaming more video than YouTube. To be able to make that claim, all they had to do was cheat, lie, and steal.

I’m a professional YouTube creator. Some people think that this is some kind of joke but I have 30 employees. All of them work in the online video industry, about half of them work directly on producing videos for our educational YouTube channels. We’re a small, profitable business.

Facebook is an interesting, emerging platform for us. Reaching an audience is valuable, even if there’s no way to turn that value into money. So I’m excited about the potential future of Facebook as a video platform.

But there are a few things that make me wary, not of their ability to grow my business, but of whether they give a shit about creators, which is actually pretty important to me. Let’s go through them one by one.

…

According to a recent report from Ogilvy and Tubular Labs, of the 1000 most popular Facebook videos of Q1 2015, 725 were stolen re-uploads. Just these 725 “freebooted” videos were responsible for around 17 BILLION views last quarter. This is not insignificant, it’s the vast majority of Facebook’s high volume traffic. And no wonder, when embedding a YouTube video on your company’s Facebook page is a sure way to see it die a sudden death, we shouldn’t be surprised when they rip it off YouTube and upload it natively. Facebook’s algorithms encourage this theft.

What is Facebook doing about it?

They’ll take the video down a couple days after you let them know. Y’know, once it’s received 99.9% of the views it will ever receive.

Creators have been yelling (apparently into a void) about this for over a year now.

Via Jason Kottke, Theft, Lies, and Facebook Video — Medium

Now, it's not as if Facebook is downloading videos from YouTube and placing the videos on their site, it's users of Facebook that are doing the downloading and uploading to gain attention , and it's Facebook that is profiting from it by selling advertising around the uploaded video. And as Kurzgesagt and Destin Sandlin have mentioned, they put a lot of work into the videos and have partnered with YouTube for a share of the advertising, something Facebook isn't doing.

What I suspect is going to happen only after enough content producers threaten legal action is Facebook will have to set aside a portion of their revenue for content creators and when the original creator of the video makes a claim, get paid that portion of the revenue. Then it won't matter necessarily where the video is shown, just that it is shown and the creator gets a cut of the advertising revenue.

Kind of how YouTube now works.

Oh look! A potential Darwin Award Winner!

I forgot about this!

When Bunny and I went to Gretl's Bistro on Friday, we came across this horrifying scene:

[What part of “DO NOT STOP ON TRACKS” do you not understand? Maybe I shouldn't have blurred the license plate!]

While I'd like to think of this as “evolution in action,” the sad thing is that the collateral damage can be pretty devastating.

Okay, maybe the collateral damage might not be that bad in this instance, but man, this crap happens all the time down here. All the time!

Sunday, November 10, 2019

Notes on an overheard conversation while eating dinner at the International House of Pancakes

“So do you know anything about this elf thing?”

“No, I never encountered anything like that growing up.”

“Me neither.”

“Oh, so it's not just me then.”

“Let's see … oh! There's a Wikipedia article about it.”

“What does it say?”

“It's based upon a book written in 2005 …”

“So it's after both our times.”

“Yup. It says, ‘The book tells a Christmas-themed story, written in rhyme, that explains how Santa Claus knows who is naughty and nice. It describes elves visiting children from Thanksgiving to Christmas Eve, after which they return to the North Pole until the next holiday season.’”

“So the elves spy on kids.”

“Yeah, it indoctrinates them into the 24-hour surveilliance society.”

Tuesday, November 10, 2020

Let's see what Parler is giving to the FaceTwitBookTer refugees

So it seems there's this mass exodus away from FaceTwitBookTer with a large portion heading towards MeWe and Parler. I know a few people who have moved towards Parler, and I thought I would take a look at what's up over there.

Of course, if you aren't a member, you can't see much by default—sadly, that doesn't surprise me at all. All these social media type sites want users and what better way than by locking everything up into a walled garden.

So let's see what their User Agreement says:

5. You grant to Parler a license to any content posted by you to the Services, including a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute your content. You agree that Parler or its service providers or partners may display advertising in connection with your content and otherwise monetize your content without compensation to you. You warrant that you have all rights necessary to grant these rights to Parler and Parler users. You also grant a limited non exclusive, royalty-free license to any user of the Services to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display, and distribute any content posted by you to the Services solely in connection with that users use of the Services. The licenses granted by you hereunder do not include any moral rights or right of attribution.

Parler User Agreement

Scary, but probably required to let people repost posts. Of course, there is Fair Use, but Fair Use gets tricky when the entire post might be 40 words long. Pay close attention to the “service providers or partners” bit—that will become important in a bit.

Continuing on then …

10. You agree to receive communications from Parler, including communications sent by phone, email, text message, or other means of communication. If you provided a phone number to Parler, you are required to notify Parler when you cease to own or control that number to help prevent Parler from sending communications to others who may acquire that number.

Parler User Agreement

If you provide a phone number to Parler? If? There's no “if” here, it's required to sign up. That's the one thing that stopped me cold from creating an account. I get plenty of spam already to my phone, what with the two to three robo calls per day, and the dozen spam text messages over the past month (mostly trying to get me to vote for or against <insert bogey man here>) Email spam I already deal with, but crap like this to my phone? I don't need more crap like that to my phone.

So then there is this, right on the web site:

Parler believes in transparent relationships. We will always provide updates and notifications to keep you informed about changes to the platform.

Parler Values

That's nice. But it's when you dig into the User Agreement that things maybe aren't what they seem …

15. Parler may modify the Terms of this User Agreement in any way and at any time without notice to you, and you agree to be responsible for making yourself aware of any modification of the Terms and to be bound by any modification of the Terms when you continue to access or use the Services after any such modification. As a matter of courtesy, Parler endeavors to inform its users of any such changes …

Parler User Agreement

They'll try their best, but don't hold them to “always provide updates.” Even if they hold to always inform users of updates, who's to say that if they are aquired, the the aquiring company will maintain such a policy.

I'm just saying …

Also on their website, they say:

Any personal data shared with Parler is encrypted for your protection, and never sold to outside entities.

Parler Values

Which appears to be true—they won't sell your data, but they sure will give it away without much thought. They give away

location information
device information (including IP address, device type, browser type, operating system, phone carrier and installed applications)
usage information
your contacts (if you allow them to)
web cookies (along with their third-party partners)

vendors and select providers
marketing
analytics partners

It's all spelled out in their privacy policy. And it's pretty typical of all the social media sites.

Their community guidelines are fine—don't do illegal things or spam, and you'll be fine. Even their elaboration on said guidelines are fine—I don't see any real issues there.

It appears that right now, they aren't quite as bad as FaceTwit BookTer, since they aren't as big. They're still bad though, collecting and diseminating user information just like other social websites. And if it weren't for the mandatory phone number, I might have signed up just to see what the fuss is all about. I did sign up for MeWe early last year (and while MeWe asks for a phone number, it isn't mandatory). I never used MeWe that much because it was glacially slow (and still is—I just checked).

Ah well, I'm just glad to have my own little corner of the Intarwebs that I control.

Wednesday, November 10, 2021

Extreme doors of perceptions, this time Highlands, NC edition

Another day, another mini-road trip. This time, to Highlands, North Carolina. An old friend lives in the area and we decided to drive out to have dinner with them. On the way there, we ended up in a small Mexican restaurant in Rosman for lunch (one of three restaurants in town as it turns out). Not bad, but the town of Rosman (population: 576 as of 2010) makes Brevard look positively metropolitan.

Then onwards to Highlands. Along the way, we came across a salvage place (sans website, else I'd link to it) and stopped. There, I found yet another stash of doors:

[A picture of more stacked doors] It was tempting to think that opening one of these doors would lead to Black Dog Salvage Company in Roanoke, but I think the only thing that would happen is I find more doors … or perhaps let in some pan dimensional beings, and that would be a Bad Thing™.

I'm sensing a theme here.

Anyway, we finally arrived in Highlands at 4:45 pm, which was bad since the entire town rolls up the sidewalks at 5:00 pm on the dot. Fortunately, Bunny's friend was at the restaurant, where a good time and good food was had by all.

After a few hours, it was time to drive back along US-64 to Brevard, in the dark. I had fun driving along the up-and-down widing road, but for Bunny, it was a white-knuckle experience.

The Boston Diaries

Friday, November 10, 2000