A recent NPR story on TV Energy Usage (not that I *cough* would ever listen to NPR when there is a good rock station in range, of course not) was going on at length about the number of watts used, and how it converted to kilowatt hours, and how bad it was that a plasma TV used the same as a few non-high-energy bulbs, and how they wanted yellow stickers on the TVs to say how efficient they are.

All of which I think is entirely meaningless.  Think about it: We only care about a car’s MPGs because we see just how much a gallon eats at our wallet every few miles as we drive. ($3.85?  CRAP!)  I’ve got no emotional connection with the kilowatt hour - it could be $20, it could be a fraction of a penny, I’ve got no idea unless I look it up.

The only thing that made any impact was the comment of “With this TV, you’d have released another half-ton of C02 into the air over a year.”  Even that doesn’t resonate much - a ton is a lot to think about, and gas is really light, so a ton of CO2 is… er… a lot?

Cmon, hit me!  I saved $200 dollars a year!  I released enough CO2 to kill a thousand penguins!  Buy the non-energy-star TV and you hate baby otters!  Something, anything.  Because putting yellow stickers on TVs is just going to create more yellow stickers unless anyone cares.

Wow that was hard.  We got a pair of Kodak EasyShare digital frames for the parents and the parents-in-law.  I mean, it has “Easy” and “Share” in the name, how bad can it be?

Bad.  Really Bad.  How does the rest of the world deal?

I wanted the photos to be the right size to maximize space on the frame, and so the frame wouldn’t have to do any live rescaling.  But of course, Picasa doesn’t export with a width/height, just a max dimension.  No good.  So I download the GIMP plugin that is supposed to export to any size.   Broken on the latest version of GIMP for Windows.  Getting nowhere.  Finally I try ImageMagick - success!  (’mogrify -interlace none -resize “800×480>” *.jpg’ … isn’t it obvious?)

Now to drag and drop the files onto the frame’s internal memory.  Except, it errors out after about half load with a nice “can’t create file or folder”.  Um, why not?  So I try to copy to a 2GB Secure Digital Memory Card - same file creation error.  WTF?  SYBA.com writes back with “Thanks for your inquiry. This model is not compatible with SD 2GB card. You can get this model CL-U2CR-RGD28, which is compatible.”   Why the hell not?  So we have two SD card readers that we got for free - one has the same error (did industry have some sort of shift for these things?) and the other works great!  Can copy all the files over no problem.

So how about the software that comes with the frame, shouldn’t that simplify the process?  It tries to eat my computer, absorbing my entire photo library, installing multiple services and memory resident programs.  I never did find out if it would resize the photos, because I could never get it to actually see the frame when it was plugged in!  Perhaps they have some unresolved issues in the latest firmware (which of course I installed without trying the original firmware, that could be where I went wrong…) but you wouldn’t know that from their support.

• My first pass got the canned: “However, progressive JPEGs are not as widely supported.  Progressive JPEGs are also not understood by our frames”
• My second attempt got “Yes, the FAT or FAT32 compression also helps in transferring pictures from the memory card to the frame.” - um… I thought fat32 is a disk format, not a compression method?  Still can’t put the photos on the frame.  wtf.

Ok, rant off.  That sucked.

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‘usefulness of meeting’= ‘the inverse of # of emails sent during the meeting’

Of course, this is assuming people aren’t totally tuning out.  In which case, I’d propose that

‘Number of resolved bullet points emailed out after the meeting’ * 1/(’number of people attending meeting’ * ‘percentage of people that declined the meeting’ * ‘http requests by attendees during the meeting’ * ‘emails sent by attendees during the meeting’) = ‘usefulness of meeting’

The only positively weighted metric is the ‘resolved’ list.  And yes, I wrote this post when in a meeting.

I’m always on the lookout for the P2P singularity event. 

• Napster - So sued.
• Gnutella - exploded when scaling.  Nice network topology research!
• Freenet - not quite there, too slow, no good search.  Nice anonymity!
• BitTorrent - still dependent on trackers, and getting lawyered-up more and more lately.  Oh, and network throttling.

 So it is nice to see things like Cubit, giving me some hope for a decentralized tracker replacement. I still think that an early-warning of the singularity is software being delivered anonymously through the network it creates. 

I can’t tell you know long I’ve been looking for a free alternative to VersionTracker… why is it so damn hard to keep up with all the various apps your average geek has installed?  Hell, even cygwin has a default “check for outdated stuff” core that forms the base of the windows install.   I finally found one today: FileHippo’s Update Checker.    Fast.  Easy to run.  Doesn’t try to force paid upgrades to the latest version of Adobe Elements (I’m quite happy with my legal 2.0 version, thank you very much).  Clearly breaks out beta from regular releases.  Links directly to a file.   It rocks.

Except it doesn’t cover DLLs…

No saying “You always”

Saying “you always” instantly leads to arguing about semantics, “I don’t always…” “yes you do…” etc etc.  “You often…” is totally fair game.  “I can’t stand it when you…” is just fine.  “You never” is cheating because it can be rephrased as “You always (never)…”

You get one free whine

“I’m hungry… I have a headache… I’m bored…” - you can whine about anything, once.  After that one free time, you’re only allowed to continue whining if you’ve tried to do something about it (ate a snack, taken an Advil, suggested an activity).  Once you’ve tried to change things, go ahead, whine ’till the cows come home.  Otherwise, suck it up.

Navitch

Having a navitch (not gender specifc!) is the best way to avoid arguments while driving.  There are two roles: the driver and the navigator.  The driver is responsible for not hitting other objects, maintaining forward motion (including lane changes), and reading out street signs when prompted.  The navitch is responsible for higher-level functioning, including all turns.  Given this division of labor, the driver can say things like “I think we should have turned back there” but then (and this is the hard part) lets the navitch make the call.  Why “navitch” and not “navigator?”  Because the navitch is responsible for the outcome, be it good (on time, relaxed, scenic) or not-so-good.

I decided to open source the phpoetry framework.  Do you got a need to connect some AJAX-y goodness to a PHP back-end in a hurry?  phpoetry makes it possible- perfect for prototyping and pico projects.  It uses the YUI library for cross-browser AJAX communication, JSON for efficient data encapsulation, and PHP5 reflection for a hassle-free bridge between the PHP and JavaScript layer.

Ever tried to actually use SOAP?  Ever tried to make your own WSDL? It sucks - way too much overhead for a simple ajax app.   Use phpoetry instead!  (Oh ya, the entire package is one class, around 200 lines.)  If you do use it, drop me a line!

While I don’t hold the Google top spot for “Benjamin Hill” (just you wait Mako Hill, you and I have unfinished business, whoever you are!) I’ve been pretty happy being myself in the digital world.  Until this week, when Benjamin M. Hill (goatee) fouled up my (no-goatee) background check.  It seems he has been less law-abiding than I have lately, and even worse, gets caught.  And then screws up my background check.  To be continued…

Any online community’s total value = the cost of injecting spam into the system * amount of spam in the system * η (a constant I just made up)

Put another way: A new and potentially more accurate way to estimate a startup’s market worth as it vies for VC money is through the sum of spim, blam, spaSMS, spamdexing, bots, farmers, phishers and offshore traders.

The modestly named “Hill’s Law” came to mind during talks with internet companies of various sizes about their relative problems with spam, and observing how the problem’s magnitude (IMHO) tracked with the community’s market value. An example is Yahoo’s recent addition of a CAPTCHA verification for their online chatting service, a common reaction to reduce spam in the transaction-cost-free communication environment of “web 2.0″ communities. Combine this with the going rate for CAPTCHA cracking style low latency OCR work (human powered? Who cares!) through something similar to Amazon Mechanical Turk, and you’ve got a precise market metric for exactly how much it is worth to spammers to infiltrate a chat room and push unwanted ads to the room and a known number of viewers, a number I’m sure they’d be none to happy about revealing. I think this is a better metric than the CPM or CPA cost of advertising, because the spam has to go through the same hoops that each user does when communicating.

For any given form of electronic (or low transaction cost) communication that provides the backbone of a Web 2.0 community:

• … is there a range of CAPTCHA difficulty/human-only barrier placed on the communication choke points where (economically speaking) it isn’t worth it for any spammers to outsource or manually crack through, but is “worth it” for the general users of the service to put up with?
• … to what extent does placing these added restrictions on the end users’ experience squeeze down on the users’ tolerance for the prevalent advertising based business model?
• … and finally, can this squeeze be offset by tricks like re-captcha, actually putting those brain cycles to work and recouping value from the spammers?

I vote ‘no chance in hell but enough to manage the issue’, ‘enough that Yahoo should be sweating’, and ‘absolutely’, respectively. But for the next year, the market will be swinging back and fourth (take a look at the user’s complaints on the rooms before the CAPTCHAs went in), and a great time for a few people to make loads of cash both exploiting and patching those inefficiencies.

Or “How my thinking has changed about coding prototypes.” Bear with me, funny idea leads to new-web-prototyping conclusions.

The Reality: People still have garage sales, not everything goes on Craigslist (shocking, I know). Some very good stuff is being sold in those garage sales, for very little $. Problem is, most of it is crap, and you and I don’t know enough to separate the undervalued gold from the junk.

If Web 2.0 ruled the earth: A real-time auction that happens every weekend, where there are two teams. Team 1 (the ground troops) have fun going to garage sales, used furniture stores, etc, and take cameraphone pictures of stuff for sale, and upload the photo along with a price tag to the server, all while still at the garage sale. Team 2 (the buyers/knowledgeable ones) get to hang out at home and get a real-time feed of photos of potentially valuable stuff stream across their screen. Anything can be bid on - and a bid session for an item only lasts about a max of 10 minutes. If the bidding goes above (base price of item + service fee for the ground trooper) then it reached the “minimum bid price” and the ground troop buys the item, and bidding is extended another half hour. Ground troop gets a percentage of the final bid amount beyond their service fee, and is guarantied payment of at least the the purchase price - bidders are on the hook for payment, same as ebay. Ground Troops are discouraged from just taking pictures of everything (spamming) by rating them on their picture/bid ratios. Buyers can have “favorite” ground troops that they think are good at finding good deals and can mark them as “friends” which will give the buyer advanced notice when the troop is going to go on a garage sale run. Likewise, ground troops can self-tag with their special areas of interest. And garage sale owners end up selling more items. Everyone wins!

The interesting part is, where as a year ago I would be thinking

“And to do this, I’d need photo uploading, and auctioning, and reputation mechanisms, and all these other parts to program, whoa this would be a lot of work to build…”

nowadays I think

“and I could use the flickr mobile app for uploading and just have people tag items with a specific tag and the Ebay API for actually selling something once an item reaches an auction level and Amazon S3 for data backup and PayPal for payment, perhaps this wouldn’t be a lot of work to build…”