The Squirrels Are Watching

Bought Laptop

Dell M1330

Core 2 Duo 9300 (2.5Ghz, 800Mhz FSB, 6M L2 Cache)
4GB DDR2 RAM
128MB NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS
64GB SSD
Wireless N
TV Tuner
9-cell battery
Product (RED) — Because I’m a sucker for Africa. And oddly enough, after discounts, it was $100 less than the default black.

Main reason for purchase — Only sub-15 inch laptop on market right now with full-powered processor and SSD option. I’m hoping the SSD will cut noise and heat down a bits. Not to mention speedy start-up times. Fun! Oh, and the $698 discount. That helped too.

I was considering integrated graphics in order to extend battery life and reduce heat, but that would have delayed order by 5 days and because of Dell’s discount setup, would actually have cost $100 - $200 more .

Yes, I know the new Centrino 2 processors are coming out in a few months. I’m going to feel crappy when all the new notebooks start getting double battery life, but my current PowerBook (1.25 Ghz with 512MB RAM) is annoying the crap out of me speed and heat-wise. I’m a coder and some of the stuff I’m writing does push the CPU to the limit (sometimes by design and sometimes accidentally). And Firefox alone can bring memory usage to absurd highs. So yeah, time for a new laptop.

Sexism and Racism

Angry women refused to reward misogyny (this is, vote for Obama). A response to that, broken up into eight helpful points and some advice to Obama and Hillary:

1. Sexism doesn’t necessarily mean fewer votes

Did sexism play a role in Hillary’s downward spiral? Sure. As the linked posts above show, there are plenty of examples of that — but did that translate into fewer votes for Hillary? I’m not so sure. First, the morons behind the “Stop running for president and make me a sandwhich” aren’t necessarily Obama voters. I suspect they’re rooting for McCain or perhaps more likely likely, aren’t even voting. These are the Howard Sterns of the world — they’re shock jocks (no pun intended) craving attention, not political operatives. On the other hand, these misogynistic activities have clearly energized Hillary supporters and angered women everywhere. At least some of them are now more likely to vote for her. Indeed, part of the explanation for Hillary’s comeback in New Hampshire was that women felt she was unfairly being picked on, and women voted overwhelmingly for her.

So did sexism hurt Hillary at the ballot box? Unsure.The reasoning could go either way. This is actually the sort of thing that you might be able to get an answer with by sifting through the exit poll data, but I’d prefer it be done by someone with better stat skills and more time than me.

Read more …

Laptop Hunting

Almost time for a new laptop — my aging and not-so-reliable Powerbook from freshmen year is starting to show its age. There are plenty of dents from being dropped so many times, some serious overheating (especially where the power cord plugs in — also dented), and everything is just running really slowly (granted, something that might be solved by simply wiping the system clean but I really want a new laptop). With that in mind, some considerations:

Heat: I should be able to put my laptop on my lap without fear of sterilization.

Battery Life: I like to work in coffee shops. Coffee shops often suffer from a shortage of conveniently placed power outlets.

Size: I don’t like to work in cramped spaces, but I often have to — whether it be in the back of the airplane or squashed in between two fat people in a lecture hall. Smaller laptops are more convenient.

Weight: This was initially a higher priority for me but the more I think about it, it actually isn’t. I used to get really annoyed carrying around such a heavy laptop but upon further thought, what really bothered me was the fact that I carry a heavy laptop in a shoulder bag that causes me to tilt to one side. This is easily rectified by simply putting my laptop in a backpack. Still, all else equal, lighter is better — so I probably won’t be getting a desktop replacement anytime soon (I actually like desktops — you can open them up and tinker with them — so why replace?).

Linux support: I expect to be doing a lot of programming over the next year or so. Since most of the stuff we use comes from the open-source community, I need to spend a lot of time in a *nix environment. Windows is a non-starter obviously, but OS X is actually not that ideal either. A lot of tools we use are developed with Linux (and Ubuntu / Debian-based distros in particular) in mind. What might require a simple “sudo apt-get” to install on Linux often requires manually  downloading dependencies and recompiling  source code on OS X. Heck, our web server is Ubuntu, and it makes sense for the development environment to match the production one.

Linux can be a headache though. Trying to fix an audio driver or figuring out what battery life is so abysmal really isn’t something I want to do. Keep in mind that I’m not entirely sure I want to use Linux all the time — so maybe a bad audio driver isn’t a big deal, but since virtualized OSes probably entail reduced battery performance, I’ll have to dual-boot into Linux and having a manufacturer with some history of supporting Linux and being willing to release the appropriate drivers means far fewer headaches.

Cost: My ceiling is $3000 but I’d really like it to be closer to $2000 (or even less!)

Performance: I’m obviously going to pay attention to this, but it’s fairly low on the priority list. I’m not playing games on this and any serious computation related to work will probably be done on a separate server. So video card probably isn’t important. A low-voltage CPU is probably more useful than a slightly faster one that kills the battery. You can never have enough RAM but again, it’ll have to judged against the price increase. That said, if viewing this in terms of an investment, it makes sense to max out everything once above conditions are met. The cost-effectiveness of upgrading down the road are overstated.

Anyhow, will post later on some systems I’m considering.

100 Years Nonsense

The DNC’s released a new attack ad accusing John McCain of wanting to stay in Iraq for 100 years. It’s an effective ad but it’s missing some context.

Loyalists and Sycophants

Mark Penn was essentially fired today, and the only real question is: what took so long? For those unaware, Mark Penn was Hillary Clinton’s “chief strategist,” deeply disliked by event those within his own campaign. The conventional wisdom was that Penn was an idiot, and the only reason he was kept around by the Clinton’s was his sense of loyalty — an argument also applied to Clintonistas Patti Solis Doyle and Ira Magaziner.

Bush was accused of making the same mistake — rewarding loyalty over competence — with appointments such as “Brownie“. These mistakes are, to some degree, pretty understandable though. In a cutthroat environment like politics, where you have to suspect that everyone is, to some degree, plotting to backstab someone else, loyalty is an incredible valuable virtue. We all like to extoll the virtues of a meritocracy, but after a few months in the start up world, I can tell you that while individual ability is certainly important, the ability for a team of individuals to work together is also important — and in order for individuals to work together, they need to trust each other — trust that each person in the group is loyal either to their fellow group members or to some larger purpose for which they’re working. Given that, I wouldn’t blame Bush or Clinton for rewarding loyalty.

Read more …

High Level Government

Almost all computer programs, at some level, break down into patterns of 1s and 0s. Of course, most programmers no longer program in binary anymore. We instead rely on higher level languages, that is, computer programming languages that abstract from the basic manipulations of 1s and 0s. So instead of punching a hole in the metaphorical punch card, I might just say something like “IF X, THEN Y”.

One of the trends in programming is to move to even higher level languages — that is, to building abstractions on top of the original abstractions. You can write new computer languages using older languages, and so long as the new language meets conditions that make it Turing Complete, you can do everything with the new language that the old one did. The Ruby programming language is written in C which compiles into Assembly Language which in turn breaks down into Machine Code.

Every time you add in another language layer, performance takes a hit. Why? Well, code written in the newer layer needs to be interpreted or compiled down to code understandable to the lower layers. If you had a lot of time on your hand, you could rewrite the higher level languages to eliminate many of the layers of abstraction, but frankly, that’d be a pain in the ass.

Read more …

What’s Wrong with Windows 7

See this screenshot. “Engineered for ease of ownership”. What the hell does that mean?

Why Music Piracy Happens

I used to download music on Napster (and its less than legal progeny), but more recently, I’ve started buying music through more legitimate channels such as Amazon’s MP3 download service. Why pay though? Why not go through an illegal service knowing that the odds of being caught are practically zero? I am, after all, working for a startup for zero salary. I should be trying to save money, right?

Well, in a sense, I am. Part of it is moral scruples but most of it is simple economics. When dealing with illegal downloads, the odds of downloading a song of poor quality, a virus, or something that’s been mislabeled is fairly high. That makes finding the right song in the P2P underbelly is a time consuming process. And depending on the song, downloading through a P2P network can be several times lower than going through Amazon or iTunes. I’m not exactly a voracious consumer of music but every once in a while, I hear a catchy song on the radio and I want to listen to it again. Paying 89 or 99 cents to download a song every once in a while isn’t a huge expense, and the time saved is worth every penny.

Yet it’s because of that same argument that a substantial amount of music piracy does occur. For teenagers, music piracy makes all the economic sense in the world. First, they’re either not working or not working at a job that pays a lot of money, so their time is worth a lot less. Second, they don’t have a lot of money to begin with. You can argue that if you can afford paying $50 a month for high-speed Internet, you can afford 99 cents every once in a while, but the key is that the parents are paying, not the teenagers. This is exacerbated by the fact that in order to purchase almost anything online legitimately, you need a credit card (or equivalent). Teenagers don’t have credit cards. That means the legitimate route requires going through their parents, and for teens, that’s a huge hurdle. There are tons of online users who balk at using their own credit card number — imagine how many more would be turned away if they had to get someone else’s credit card to use a service.

Yeah, they could go buy the album itself from the record store, but for teenagers without cars, that still involves going through the parents. Even if the record store is within walking distance, heading out the front door runs the risk of resulting in an inquiry from someone. No matter how legitimate the purpose, teens prefer doing something themselves over doing something with mom and dad. Also, walking involves exercise.

All of this actually ends up suggesting an interesting way to reduce piracy. Give teenagers debit cards. That is, give them an allowance with the ability to use that allowance online. Buying things through legitimate channels then becomes more economically feasible a teen, and they’ll do it because diving through the P2P underworld isn’t exactly fun. And once they’re conditioned to doing things legitimately, they’ll be more reluctant to turn to illegal means when their cash runs low. It’s no guarantee, but it’d probably save the record companies some money if they just asked parents to give their kids debit cards.

Free Software for Startups

Microsoft, Adobe, and anyone else who insists on charging more than $50 for a program should actually offer Office, Photoshop, etc. for free to startups. Free, not as in freedom (although that would be nice too), but just free, as in me no pay money free. Actually, I’m of the mind that a lot of that stuff should be free, period, but it especially makes sense for start ups. Why?

1. They’re not going to buy your software anyway — Start-ups are frugal. Take Microsoft Word. Best-case scenario for Microsoft: Startups use the Microsoft Word XP Academic Version disc they had in college. Worst-case scenario: Google Docs.
2. Good marketing — Startup founders are those smart tech guys who tells everyone else what to use. You want them on your side.
3. Good acquisition strategy — You get to know and identify all the promising start ups before they get big. It lets you get into a position to influence the direction of their company (e.g. in a direction compatible with your company) and, if appropriate, buy them.

Seriously, Microsoft should have a StartupCon in Silicon Valley, let any halfway promising startup come in, and offer them free copies of Office, Visual Studio, and Windows Server. That’s not to say all the startups will use said software (in fact, most of them won’t I bet), but at least some of them will, if only because of those few aspiring business type guys with no programming experience foisting said software upon their developers (It normally costs money! It must be better!).

Will Search Get Political?

I was reading an article about Barack Obama and happened to take a glance over at the AdSense ads by Google. While the article was fairly pro-Obama, the first link was for “Barack Obama Exposed”, a “free special report” by the conservative HumanEvents.com. There’s nothing wrong with that (other than perhaps Google’s relevancy algorithms), but it did get me thinking about the political implications of what shows up in search, in targeted ads, and so forth.

Suppose you Google “Barack Obama Muslim”. As it stands right now, the first result if a page dispelling the urban myth that Barack is some kind of Muslim Manchurian candidate — but what if you got a right wing propaganda page alleging the exact opposite? Google would then be in a position where they were spreading a false rumor. It’s certainly not that hard to see happening — if a lot of right wing bloggers decided to push it and link to each other, their articles would probably move up near the top. And your casual searcher only clicks the top two links or so before declaring themselves Satisfied that this is the Truth.

The problem is that there’s a divergence in how Google (or at least its search algorithm) and most Internet users see it. For Google, the purpose of search is to provide information. For the casual Internet user, Google presents the truth. Information, however, is not truth. You can have false information, misleading information, and uninformative information — but the truth is, well, the Truth. The mainstream media has had to deal with this for some time (e.g. does “fair and balanced” imply stating what you believe to be true or both sides of the story, even if one side is positively ludicrous?). Wikipedia obviously faces these issues (popular consensus does not always equal truth and has, on occasion, been overridden by a smaller group of editors). It’s really only a matter of time before someone looks at the political affiliations of well-known Googlers and start drawing connections that aren’t necessarily there.