Domain of the Bored

When I do audio editing in Amadeus Pro, I find its Sonogram command useful. That command gives me a three-dimensional graph of frequency distribution through time:

The default setting shows the z axis with a color gradient of white through orange through blue to cyan, which I found hard to read. What you see above is my variation on the built-in “Greyscales” preset: Just like a printout, white is dead, black is maxed.

The difference with my preset is that the original is linear, whereas mine is a curve. Here's the preset editor, showing my preset:

Sampling the swatches in that screenshot will tell you that the five equally-spaced gradient stops are:

1. White
2. 50% gray
3. 25% gray (at the halfway point)
4. 12.5% gray
5. Black

I've found that these settings make the spectrogram clearly readable without my having to fiddle with the “range” and “gain” sliders.

The Kodak Zi6 pocket video camera has a switch on its upper-right corner that selects its focal length. It appears to have two settings: Distance, indicated by mountains, and macro, indicated by a flower.

That appearance is wrong. The switch is not binary; it actually selects within a range.

This is useful for things that are close to the camera, but not macro close. For an example, I took pictures of my keyboard. Fully macro was unusably blurry; fully distance looked like this:

whereas moving the switch a little bit up from distance mode got me this:

Neither photo has been adjusted at all. Both photos were taken freehand, but I can vouch for their sharpness-accuracy: What you see in the first photo is focal blur, not motion blur.

So, if you have a Kodak Zi6 (or, perhaps, one of their other cameras, especially in the same family) and you want to take a photo or video of something close but not macro close, adjust that focus switch a little bit.

Every once in awhile, Jeopardy! does a special series of episodes called Celebrity Jeopardy!, where the contestants are celebrities playing for charity. Most of them are laughably bad, and I mean that literally: I (and the studio audience, and the contestants themselves) actually laugh at their poor responses. The celebrities are mainly there to provide entertainment, and to bring attention to their charities and their own projects and to Jeopardy! itself; playing a few rounds of Jeopardy! is a formality.

The problem is simple: Regular Jeopardy! games are populated by contestants who pass one or more screening tests that verify that they meet some minimum standard of knowledge, comprehension of English, and ability to operate the buzzer. Celebrity Jeopardy!, on the other hand, is populated by celebrities. They have no qualifications other than being famous and being willing to be on the show to benefit a charity.

This year, they're doing a variation of Celebrity Jeopardy! called the “Jeopardy! Million-Dollar Celebrity Invitational”, where they have one Celebrity Jeopardy! episode every month for nine months, followed by a three-day semifinal and two-day final in the tenth month. The other episodes in each month are at least mostly regular episodes, perhaps with a Tournament of Champions, Kids' Tournament, or College Championship at some point.

Tonight was the first episode in this celebrity tournament. The contestants were Andy Richter (for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital), Dana Delany (for the Scleroderma Research Foundation), and Wolf Blitzer (for the American Cancer Society). Richter's performance tonight inspired this post.

Andy Richter decimated his opponents. Dana Delany did pretty averagely, entering Final Jeopardy! with $2800; Wolf Blitzer ended up well negative (they gave him $1000 with which to play in Final anyway, since this was a charity event). Richter got most of the answers, and he almost always gave right questions. He even ran a category.

This tournament, every celebrity's charity is guaranteed a minimum $25,000 donation, and each winning celebrity's charity is guaranteed a minimum $50,000.

Andy Richter won $68,000.

It makes me think that most celebrity contestants just show up, figuring that it's $25k their charity wouldn't have otherwise, and all they have to do is stand there for an hour or so and throw out an occasional right answer—something regular contestants can't do, because they have to earn their spot behind a podium. And it makes me think that Andy Richter didn't do this: He took this tournament seriously, and put in the exact same study and buzzer training that any regular contestant would have done.

I could be wrong. Maybe the other two contestants just got screwed on the buzzer (although that wouldn't explain Wolf Blitzer's score). But if I'm right, Richter's charity should be really happy with the work he put into it.

I have one idea for how Sony (the company that runs Jeopardy! in the US nowadays) could improve things. Tell every celebrity who agrees to play that they will have to take the same screening test as a regular contestant would have to. If they fail, no problem: They still get to play. But if they pass, Sony doubles its minimum donation guarantees for their charity. That may be enough of an incentive for celebrities to take it as seriously as Richter seems to have done, and bring a real game to the Jeopardy! set like he did.

You might object that I shouldn't complain about these celebrities who are playing for charity; after all, isn't it great that the charities get all these thousands of dollars for free? True, but the celebrities can win even more money for them, and I think Richter demonstrated that it's much more entertaining when they do.

On a related note: I wish Jeopardy! episodes were available online.

UPDATE 2009-09-19: YouTube to the rescue: Part 1, part 2. Thanks to Ian Baird for linking to one of them.

Here's something I found interesting.

If you're on Twitter, you might have noticed a trending tag today, #TMItweets. People have been deliberately posting tweets with Too Much Information, tagged with #TMItweets.

The interesting part is who started it.

If you go all the way back on the Twitter search for the tag, you'll find that the earliest tweet in the search engine's short memory is this one from Alex Fayle, 20 days ago. I don't think he's who started the current trend.

The next few tweets are. They are, in order:

1. Tai (her tweet)
2. Dora Bianchi (her tweet)
3. Hannelore Ellicott-Chatham (her tweet)
4. Raven Pritchard (her tweet)
5. Pintsize* (his tweet)
6. Penelope Gaines (her first tweet with the tag; her second)
7. Faye Whitaker (her tweet)

If you read Questionable Content, you recognize those names. These are the official QC character accounts, they each have thousands of followers, and they're all written by Jeph Jacques.

So, basically, this trend started among a closed circle of fictional characters, and migrated into the real world from there within minutes**. I can't think of a medium where this could have happened before (without including it in the primary medium—in this case, in the comic strip).

Like I said, I found it interesting.

* Not linking directly to Pintsize's account page because the links he posts are almost all NSFW. Consider yourself warned. ↶

** Pintsize posted his #TMItweets entry at 5:05:46 UTC, and the first subsequent non-QC entry came at 5:07:53 UTC. I used the Twitter API show-status method through curl to obtain these timestamps. ↶

2⁶⁴ doesn't sound much bigger than 2³², does it?

2⁶⁴ is 2³² × 2³², but this relation is hard to put into perspective. Even saying that 2⁶⁴ is more than four billion times as big as 2³² doesn't adequately convey how much larger it really is.

Let me do that for you now.

I wrote a program that counts from 0 to 2³². It takes about 11 seconds to run:

% ./count-up
2009-04-29 09:52:55.387 count-up[57932:10b] Time to count up to 4294967295: 11.313282

Now, as I said, 2⁶⁴ is 2³² × 2³², so the time to count to 2⁶⁴ is likewise the time to count to 2³² (11.313282 seconds) multiplied by 2³². That works out to:

• About 48,590,176,200 seconds
• About 13,497,271 hours
• About 562,386 days
• About 1540 years

Simply by doubling the exponent, we increase the time it would take my late-2006 four-core Mac Pro to count up to the number from 11 seconds to a millenium and a half.

The Apple ProFile hard drive held 5 or 10 megabytes in 11.15×43.89×22.38cm = 10952.17893 cubic centimeters.

A microSD card is 1.5×1.1×0.1cm = 0.165 cubic centimeters and can hold up to 16 gigabytes.

If you stacked up enough microSD cards to fill (as closely as possible*) the volume of a ProFile, you would have 29×20×111=64380 cards totaling 1.03008 petabytes (1030.08 terabytes)—206,016,000 times the capacity of the hard drive you'd displaced (assuming the 5 MB version).

Also, the ProFile cost $3499 in 1981 (about $8194 in 2008 dollars), whereas a 16 GB microSD card costs about $70 as of March 2009. If you somehow bought enough 5 MB ProFiles to make up the difference in capacity (3200 of them), at the original MSRP, you would spend $11,196,800 (about $26,222,014 in 2008 dollars).

(I used Robert Sahr's inflation conversion-factor tables to convert to 1981 dollars to 2008 dollars.)

* It's possible that you could fill out the space a bit more by standing some cards on edge, but I don't feel like doing that much multiplication. ↶

This bug is TN2083 doesn't document all known Session types. It was filed on 2008-01-19 at 16:44 PST.

(more...)

You may have seen Frank Caliendo's recent Dish Network commercials, in which he does pitch-perfect impressions of several celebrities. Two of the three I've seen are George W. Bush and John Madden.

But, and this is my question, who is this supposed to be?

UPDATE 2008-02-17: I just watched it again, and I think Ian is right—it's Al Pacino. Thanks!

If you have multiple Macs, I recommend that you install teleport.

teleport is a software KVM: Simply move your mouse cursor through the edge of your computer's screen into the other computer's screen, just as if it were another monitor connected to your Mac. From then on, your mouse and keyboard control the other Mac, until you move the mouse cursor back through the edge, back to the Mac whence it came.

Here's the tip: When you first set up teleport, it's tempting to turn on the “Switch with a delay” option, on the theory that it will help prevent you from switching accidentally. It doesn't. Turn that off. It's a good theory, but all it does in practice is make it harder to correct an accidental switch, not to mention harder to switch on purpose.

Leave that option off, and it will be as easy to undo an accidental switch as it is to commit one.

As usual, I've created a new public key for 2008. The old one has expired. The new key's key ID is A54AE2A6, and its fingerprint is:

3976 D719 9791 B921 FCD3  CCA7 99CE E202 A54A E2A6

Also as usual, you can obtain my key from pgp.mit.edu (or, probably, most reputable keyservers) or my public-key file.

What is this, scamming for victims with ADD?

Those of you who listen to MacBreak Weekly are familiar with the imaginary unit of currency, the Alex.

For those of you who don't listen to MBW: Alex Lindsay, one of the co-hosts, typically goes in for very expensive software—upward of a kilobuck. So his co-hosts defined one Alex as equal to $700 USD (roughly the price of Photoshop at the time). With this, the hosts express the prices of the software that they spotlight each week in fractions of an Alex: a $10 program, for example, would be stated as costing “¹⁄₇₀th of an Alex”. Something that is free costs “zero Alexes”.

To that end, here's a table of prices expressed in both USD and Alexes. If you ever have an urge to tell a friend how much some piece of software costs, simply look up the price on this table and give it to your friend as a fraction of one Alex. Alternatively, use this converter service, which I created with ThisService.

If you want a more complete table, here's one from $1 to $14,000.

Here's the background music for episode 1, map 1 of Doom:

(Alternatively, you may prefer this version by Paul Burdette.)

And here's the first twenty seconds (I'll spare you the rest of it) of “Snake Devil” by Scary Kids Scaring Kids:

I found the similarity interesting.

So I was flipping through the 2007-10-15 Target ad and I noticed this Halloween costume:

“I look forward to killing you soon!”
“For the last time, go to your room!”

What kind of ninja costume is that?!

First off, the chestplate. This makes a certain amount of sense for, say, a Superman costume, but why would a ninja have one? More to the point, why does this chestplate look slightly H.R. Giger-esque, rather than having a six-pack?

And why is it red?

Then we come to the mask. The top half is riding way too high: you can see his hair. Ninjas are supposed to be unidentifiable; as such, the mask should completely cover the hair, so that the ninja's hair color cannot be determined.

Then there's the footwear—or lack thereof. Socks? Really?

Get some shoes! (Obviously, I mean soft shoes—not like hiking boots or something.)

Finally… the sword.

I realize it's just a fake plastic sword that can't really bisect anybody, but even so, YOU'RE HOLDING IT THE WRONG WAY, KID! The would-be-sharp-if-it-were-real side of the blade should face AWAY from your thumb, NOT TOWARDS IT!

You can tell how easily I notice details like these, that I noticed them on just a casual perusal of the Target ad.

Dear Candidate,

We have a job offer available for you. I am Darnell [deleted], Recruiting agent [deleted] Consultant Group Of Co., an establishment that deals in the import and export of Cocoa butter cream, Rubber, Cotton, textiles and fabric materials based in the UK.

We are looking for a trustworthy representative in the United State that will aid as a link between us and our customers in US for getting and remitting our payments. I would like to know if you are interested, respond only if you will like to work from home (part-time) and get paid weekly without leaving or affecting your present job.

(PAY IS GOOD)
if you are interested, forward the following info. to my email address which is :

[deleted]

Full Names.
Mailing Address.(PO BOX NOT ALLOWED)
City.
Zip-Code.
State.
Tel:
Gender.
Present Occupation.
Age.
Email.
Mode Of Identification.
Country:

I would be expecting your email ASAP if you are interested and want to know more about this job.

Regards,
Darnell [deleted]
For: [deleted] Consultant Group Of Co.

Points to consider:

• The message did originate from LinkedIn's servers. (LinkedIn, for those of you who don't know, is basically a social network intended to be used for corporate networking—i.e., getting hired or finding somebody to hire.)
• I don't have an account on LinkedIn.
• So he must know my email address, in which case, why not email me directly?
• This person seems to know that I work with Cocoa.
• But didn't notice that I'm a Cocoa programmer.
• Much of the language reads like a Nigerian 419 letter (e.g., “We are looking for a trustworthy representative in the United State that will aid as a link between us and our customers in US for getting and remitting our payments.”).
• OTOH, nothing about deposed rulers or millions of dollars.

I still can't tell whether this is spam. :\

Quoth MacJournals:

Thaler says, "But really, seriously, dude. The kid is cool. Don't be like that. Don't be a ZFS hater." No one who reads our analysis in MWJ 2007.06.11 could possibly accuse us of hating ZFS.

Yes, but nobody read that analysis, because it is behind a pay wall; you can get a free trial subscription to read it, but nobody wants to do that either.

Of course, by “nobody”, I don't mean literally zero people. Obviously, there are a few people with subscriptions, because otherwise MacJournals is not profitable. But it is irrational to assume that the entire internet should have read the article because you generously provide a free trial; most people, upon seeing your subscription wall, will say “fuck that” (or a cleaner equivalent) and move onto some other activity.

That's assuming they even see a link to the walled-off article. I never did. The small (one-page) public article they had was the only one I saw.

Parallel coverage of this hoax on the two sites.

The titles:

• Reddit: Goatse image flashed on CNN live
• Digg: LIVE NATIONWIDE CNN, YouTube debate "GOATSE'D" on LIVE TV! *PICTURES*

The comments (summarized):

• Reddit: It's fake. You can tell because the frame shown in the “screenshot” doesn't appear anywhere in the actual YouTube question.
• Digg: This was really really funny and the candidates deserved it, but it embarrassed the internet on national TV, and CNN will never do a debate like this again because of it. BTW, it's fake.

The scores:

• Reddit: +179-132=47 (and dropping)
• Digg: 2510 (and climbing)

UPDATE 2007-07-25:: See Simone's rebuttal in the comments.