This journal is actually updated pretty frequently, but most of it is only visible to people I know. Do I know you? Please poke me!

It was time tonight to make bone soup!*

While doing so, I checked the interwebs for bone soup recipes. It was horribly depressing. The ingredient lists all started with, "Purchase three ox bones and one ham bone from your butcher..."

No, no, no.

( Bone soup, done properly (not vegetarian)**Collapse )

If you are using Firefox:

• Adblock Plus - load no banner ads, etc. You... you just need this.
  
  
• Flashblock - load flash stuff when you want it. No ads, no secret cookies.
  
  
• Better Privacy - a little more complex. Functionally, recent versions of Firefox have allowed Flash to set its own cookies; as a result, lots and lots of sites use that functionality to avoid your cookie-privacy settings. If you don't just accept all cookies from all comers, you probably need this. (I had a few thousand such cookies. O-o) You can whitelist things you actually want Flash cookies for - if you can think of one.
  
  
• Nuke Anything - adds a right-click menu option that makes any page element go away. Surprisingly awesome, especially for printing stuff.

So yes, I (past tense) kept data on my phone, which is a T-Mobile Sidekick. As most people who aren't on Jupiter have heard, they've been having some big, bad problems, which include my data.* Here is a good article. Excellent summary originally courtesy ishaa:

1. Microsoft started a secret smartphone project called Pink
   
2. Microsoft bought Danger, said it was to acquire Sidekick goodness
   
   • But either Microsoft never intended to really assimilate Sidekick, just to smother a competitor and to give the Pink team something to worry about
     
   • Or Microsoft meant to assimilate Sidekick into Pink, but then learned that they couldn't quietly let the Sidekick die because of unbreakable support contracts with T-Mobile
3. At this point, everyone smart had already quit Danger
   
4. The Pink project failed on merit
   
5. the Sidekick servers failed, unclear why (see an argument for sabotage), but:
   
6. It is very clear that Microsoft didn't give a damn about maintaining Sidekick beyond their contractual obligations to T-Mobile... and they didn't even manage that.

Many, many props to Daniel Eran Dilger, who is doing actual reporting and journalism.

* (If you want to point out that anyone stupid enough to rely on the cloud should expect data loss: save it. I disagree and I don't want to hear it.)

You remember that thing I was on about, a while back? About how we should look at the security of household robots, because it's important? Well, we finally got that paper published, although it took some doing, and it seems to have caught public attention, however briefly. We made the front page of Slashdot, a Popular Science article, and Science Daily even quoted us. (That's a good article, IMHO.)

Curious about the content? UW CSE news gives links; I think the easiest and most informative read is our FAQ.

I am extremely pleased that people may realize this is important. Carry on, human beans.

So let's say you want to change the size of fonts Thunderbird, or help someone else do so. Furthermore – God help you – let us say you want to increase those font sizes. Because, I dunno, perhaps you live in a world where not everyone in the entire world in every age group has perfect vision. Just hypothetically. I know, freaky! But work with me.

You have to do this by poking CSS files directly, so there are a lot of ways to do it, most of which don't work. This is just what I got working on this machine. So assuming you actually want to do this thing, instead of switching mailers, ( here's how.Collapse )

( Let me save you some time and put the rant under a separate cut.Collapse )

I promise this'll just take you a sec:

"Adobe has recently announced a pair of critical vulnerabilities in all supported versions of Adobe Acrobat ... This isn't the first time and we worry that it will not be the last. It's easy to disable JavaScript, and doing so doesn't affect core functionality, so we strongly recommend that you do so. Here's how:

• Launch Acrobat (or Acrobat Reader) however you normally would (not from inside Firefox, but stand-alone).
  
• Click on Edit from the menubar.
  
• Select Preferences.
  
• Select JavaScript from the Categories list.
  
• Untick Enable Acrobat JavaScript."

Go on, humor me. It doesn't hurt anything. You really don't need your PDF documents running scripts anyway, promise!

This afternoon I gave a five minute presentation on what I'm doing for the security group, as part of a lunch where a whole bunch of people (15 or so) did the same thing. I got disproportionately stressed about it (like I do), but I guess it went all right? I got a couple of good laughs, anyway.

So what have I've been doing? Well, according to my presentation, "exploring the security implications of ubiquitous robotics."

Assume our houses and workplaces gradually fill up with robots over the next decade. What does that mean from a security perspective? Could our privacy be damaged? Could bad guys steal all our stuff or burn our houses down (more than they could before)? Could a poorly-designed robot accidentally ruin our belongings? Or is the biggest risk that we'll trip over them?

Why do I ask? Because our lives will fill up with robots, and soon. Look at the sales numbers for Roombas and Scoobas, RoboSapiens, telepresence robots... hell, just go to Toys Backwards 'R' Us and look around. We're right on the brink of having little robots everywhere, quietly integrating into society. They'll be small and cheap and special-purpose; a Roomba here, a phone there – no Rosie, no need for one. Many will be toys (which means they'll be made by people who are used to thinking about lead paint and choking hazards, not encrypted web interfaces).

On the brink. It will be a big change – a big, quiet change that we don't notice. In ten years, vacuuming your own carpet will seem quaint, and we won't notice it happening. And just for once, it would be nice to figure out how to do it safely and intelligently before it happens, instead of playing catch-up. Will that happen? I don't know. But if it doesn't, it won't be because I'm not banging the gong.

Currently my research focuses on using AI, robots, and RFID to help elders live independent lives for as long as possible. One of my colleagues (thanks tamiaka!) just sent me a link to the following gadget, marketed for older folk: it finds your keys, and sometimes reminds you to take your meds. Hell, I could use this.

However. (This is where I have a little soapbox moment.) Because I work on robots, sometimes people offer me 'insights' like the following comment from the article:

"This is pretty impressive, I agree, but I’m not sure how effective a soulless object can prove itself to be. I don’t know if the best solution for the care of old people is to be left to robots. [...] we’re talking about those who raised us and who spared no efforts in order to make us the happiest people on earth."

How true! I'll go take away your grandmother's washing machine and mixer and vacuum and dishwasher. Damned soulless objects. And the next time you try to visit her, don't use the impersonal, dehumanizing internet to make a ticket! Or an airplane? YOU HEARTLESS CAD

If you got mailed your Washington ballot (and still have it), you can either mail it (postmarked ≤ Nov 4), or drop it in a ballot drop box. It took me longer than I liked to find the →list of ballot dropbox locations← so I'm putting it here.

For physical voters, a hot tip from txgreengoddess: the results page for googling 'where to vote' (no quote marks) has a widget to enter your home address. Entering your address gives you a polling location, a map, and links to find your voter registration info/etc.

I have quite a lot of travelogue to post. Too much to actually post. Or even think about in my current sleep-deprived state. So instead, I thought this was a mildly interesting concept when it floated across the CS graduates' list:

Paul English just launched Codesnap. It's basically craigslist for software -- a site with a lightweight ui where people who need code written can rent a coder. Most of the jobs are pretty small and pay well so it's a great way to make some beer money. (modified for readability)

They're seeking beta-test programmers at the moment.

Obviously, this may be mildly interesting if you do, or need done, small bits of code. I'm more interested in it as a social concept; it seems most akin to places where people post tech-support questions for small fees, and I have no idea how well (or whether) those make any money. It's a curious idea, an eBay or craigslist for small bits of intellectual labor, akin to Amazon's mechanical turk but more specialized, or to online translation or paper-writing sites. The IP ramifications seem nontrivial, too.

Strange world.

Update: Some of the jobs are not what I would call "coding" work, to wit:

Advise on a good open source SMS gateway to send and receive messages: I will pay you just for good advice on this subject. I would like to know if it's compatible with ...

You should come study algorithms! I mean, if you're at UW. And you are in algorithms. And, uh, plan to study. Okay, maybe you specifically shouldn't.

( Oh, you know who you are.Collapse )

Update: To answer the first question received, no, you don't have to bring clues. Enthusiasm, determination, morale, and quiet desperation are all acceptable. Noisy desperation might be pushing it.

A few people have asked about the dentist who is coping with my broken tooth (*shakes fist at burger place*). If you're not in or near Seattle it's probably not of interest.

( dentistCollapse )

teyli turned me on to ChoreBuster!

So you aren't disappointed, I'll say up front, they haven't actually found a way to reduce one's chore load magically via the Internet. It's actually a chore tracking and scheduling tool. You enter people (in my case, me), chores (difficulty and desired frequency and so on), and *pop*, a balanced schedule comes out. (This could be used for almost any scheduling task, not just chores, but that's their target.) The underlying geekery is worth some analysis, too.

( Why that's useful, what they do right, what they do wrongCollapse )

Anyway, it's free to use, with a very small cost ($2+) to enable certain features. Worth playing with if you (a) care about the chores part or (b) are into HCI, AI planning, or task scheduling.

Waiting for my next prospective student interview to show up and ask me questions about UW. What a terrible day it is for that. So I'll use the pause as an excuse for the following PSA:

If you have content on LJ that you care about – several years of intermittent posts, discussions in threads with friends, and so on – it's a good idea to take backups occasionally. (This is true of any content you care about, anywhere, but especially here.)

The way that I have found to do this that suits me best is LJ Book, which creates a big ol' PDF you can keep on your own storage media, and lets you define what components you back up (music? mood? userpic?). Other options exist, about which I know nothing firsthand: one, two, three, four on casual search.

i hunted you a wumpus



but it eated me

UW's Graduate Funding Info Service has a blog. It's on Blogspot, so I made a feed:

uwgfis

Which you can befriend, if that is in any way relevant to you.

If you've known me for more than 15 minutes, you know I have a Thing about the "supplements" industry. I don't intend to subject you to that rant at this time, however. Apparently no-one has dropped a hat.

Instead I wanted to point out this web page. The interface is frustrating, but if you type something like "melatonin" into the drug or supplement search box, you get not only some useful info, but a list of uses that a substance has been put to, along with a grade:

A Strong scientific evidence for this use
B Good scientific evidence for this use
C Unclear scientific evidence for this use
D Fair scientific evidence against this use (it may not work)
F Strong scientific evidence against this use (it likely does not work)

So a C usually means there's not much research – but if there is research, you can find out. You can also look into "off-label" uses of FDA-approved drugs.

The undergraduate AI class I'm TA-ing is having a movie night. (In a week! Yipe!)

Apparently, last time we showed AI, and nobody came. I'm not that surprised; it's recent enough that I would guess everyone's seen it who wants to, and it's not a good enough movie to see twice. (Or even once. Urgh.)

So... what should we show? It has to be AI-themed. I, Robot? I enjoyed it, but I don't know if anyone else did. I think everyone's seen The Matrix too many times, probably. Should we go back to one of the classics, something these horribly young kiddos wouldn't have seen? I sort of think 2001 is just too hard to wrap your head around. TRON? The Day the Earth Stood Still? Blade Runner? Maybe the Ghost in the Shell movie isn't too inaccessible? T2? Something listed here?

Hep'! Especially those of you who are young peoples! Suggestions, thoughts? What would you go see on a Monday night?

Update: Holy crap. The Matrix came out eight and a half years ago.

A rant on web design:

A lot of designers treat their sites as, essentially, artwork—their artwork, with emphasis on the possessive. They get to choose how it's supposed to look, how you're supposed to navigate through it, and what you're supposed to use it for. They're fully entitled to change colors and fonts and font sizes. And they get annoyed when people mess with their precious art. This is the attitude that causes people to do things like try to find ways to block your browsers' preference settings on layout and font, or to use to make it look like they intended it to.

I think the following comment (found in an article about Gmail blocking browsers with Greasemonkey installed) sums up this attitude quite well:

Personally I dont think greasemonkey is right anyway [...] from googles point of view, youre basically hacking their site and making it do things it wasn't intended to do. I wouldn't want people messing with my sites either. (sic)

All right, web designers, listen closely: this attitude is wrong.

Web pages, in the main, aren't artwork. They serve a purpose other than being visually appealing/moving/whatever. They exist to provide information or a capability or a service. Expedia isn't there for me to admire; it's there for me to make plane tickets from. And my ability to adjust that experience makes the web page more able to provide functionality to me as a client, not less.

Print media are pretty much fixed. When you're doing a layout for a newspaper, it's going to go to print the way it is, and it will either work or it won't. It makes sense to think hard about the visual presentation, and do the best you can to make it appealing and accessible to the largest number of people. But if you could have a newspaper that automatically adjusted itself to use a larger font for the 10% of people with weak eyes, would you tell those people "Your preferences are wrong, I'm sure it's better with the smaller font?" Would you deliberately adjust the layout on an ad to put the text at the bottom, knowing your target audience was looking for it at the top? Well... maybe you would, I dunno. But you shouldn't. And that's exactly what you're doing when you try to set your web page in stone.

I've just quit using Expedia, which I like, for one reason only: they've changed their web layout to pin down the placement of some tabs, and now critical links end up behind those tabs when a larger font is used. Okay, the tabs now stay where the designer thought they looked best. But trying to access my most recent itinerary brought me quite literally to tears of frustration—I ended up grubbing through page source, just trying to figure out how to get to my damn flight. And that's stupid.

Yes, it can go too far. You can change a site so much that it's offering services you don't want to provide (such as using your gmail account as an external hard drive). But if a user wants to add a more intuitive way of deleting a message, let them. You should be thrilled that they like your site enough to try to individualize it. And you should look very closely at how many people agree that certain changes are worth making.

Browser preferences, bookmarklets, and tools like Greasemonkey offer the web designer an unparalleled opportunity to give their consumers exactly what they want, at no additional cost. All you have to do is not deliberately screw it up. It's not hard; it's what the web is designed for, after all.

End rant.

Update: Several neat positions open, not just QA.
Update 2: Geek jobs. Not joobs. I don't know what that meant either.

So it looks like txgreengoddess' company is hiring additional geeks. It's a (well-funded) new company, a spinoff from a think-tank in that region—that's all I know. More importantly, she highly recommends it as a workplace. Looks like an interesting variety of jobs available - go look!

Also, Seattle is my new favorite place to encourage awesome people to move to. Uh... no. Seattle is my new favorite place to which to encourage awesome people to move. Gah! That sentence is fired.

Anyone interested, or know someone who's looking? Please spread the word to awesome people.

I've worked a lot this week. Today's hassle: fighting with LDAP from 9pm to 11:30. I missed a Cork outing with txgreengoddess and ruato, because I was screaming at a yast dialog box. Tomorrow and Saturday will be the UT visit; then Sunday apparently I will work much of the day. I'm tired. I have this theory that when I get to grad school, my professional development and my work will stop being on separate, parallel tracks that take up separate, parallel blocks of time. It sounds exciting to me.

The other thing that sucked away sleep time this week was reviewing papers for AAAI. Monday and Tuesday were laaate nights. It's, oh, mebbe my fifth round of reviewing; it still terrifies me, but less each time. I reviewed eight papers, which is twice the normal load, or approximately "Enough to make my eyes cross so far they meet inside my head." mattinaustin helped quite a bit, or it would have been much worse. That was enough papers that I started pattern-matching on what the papers I accepted and rejected had in common. (Also hallucinating slightly, but that's a separate issue.)

So I turned those patterns into suggestions that I can re-read the next time I'm writing a paper. Behind a cut for your sake:

( Sleep-deprivation-induced suggestions for paper authors and reviewersCollapse )

Comments solicited. Meanwhile: bedtime.

Texas voting is tomorrow, 7am to 7pm.

Some links:

• WHERE: What precinct you're registered in, and where your polling station is. Requires cookies.
  
  
• E-VOTING: What kind of ballot you can cast depends on what county you're in. Consider using a paper ballot if you can.
  
  
• INFO: The ever-popular League of Women Voters information for your area. (Here's the PDF file for Austin.) Includes short explanations of bonds, as well as candidates for offices.
  
  
• INFO: Project Vote Smart has deeper information, like voting records. Specifically useful:
  • Info about congressional candidates
    
  • Info about gubernatorial candidates
    
  • Info about other Texas candidates
  
  
• INFO: And finally, some links to a bunch more information sites where you can find out more about candidates and issues.

Please spread the word to anyone you think may be interested, especially students:

Call for Student Abstracts: Workshop for Women in Machine Learning

Abstracts are due August 15; registration by September 15; event is October 4th. The workshop is free. Co-located with the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, in San Diego, California, October 4, 2006.

( detailsCollapse )

I gather this is a classic paper in management literature: a discussion of how rewards and punishments for a person's actions often aren't actually aligned with desired behavior. Nothing too surprising, actually, which is acknowledged in the afterword; the contribution seems to be bringing the topic up. It's an interesting and thought-provoking read, with examples. Especially useful if you are, god help you, an authority figure of any sort:

On the folly of rewarding A, while hoping for B (updated version) – Steven Kerr

So apparently, the city of Austin is using a pulverizer to turn glass recyclables into non-sharp fragments—around the size of pea gravel—which they will give you for use in landscaping. It's cheaper than pea gravel (because it's free), environmentally responsible, and very pretty.

I learned about this from nyogtha and ilana_gefen, who were kind enough to let me come admire their landscaping. It sparkles in the sun, just a little—more when it rains, they tell me. The colors are all mixed together, and it's much nicer than the usual xeriscaping gravel. I walked around on it barefoot for a while, and they're right about it having no sharp edges; it's about as comfortable as small gravel ever is.

The program is described at this city page, and the text of the relevant bit is ( behind cut.Collapse )

I'd love to see this succeed. Pass the word on! It's not just Austin, so check your local recycler or city web pages.

Ganked entire from the ever-clever ishaa, it's:
http://www.catchpenny.org/patho.html

Featuring!

6 features common to pathological theories
4 more such features
7 guidelines for dealing with anomalous phenomena
4 steps of proper scientific methodology
3 forms of outright scientific dishonesty with regard to observation
6 basic motives for scientific fraud
25 fallacies that lead us to believe weird things

Undeadline (n-ddln) n.

1. Initially appears identical to a deadline, but when you think it must have passed, staggers back up and wanders around some more, feasting on the brains of the living.

Undeadlines can return arbitrarily many times to torment the living, and can usually only be destroyed by a sufficiently powerful deliverable, although even this does not guarantee safety from sequels.

They can appear spontaneously anywhere deadlines naturally occur, but are particularly attracted to government contractors and work environments which do not have a clear-cut deliverables process in place.

I just spent 40 minutes choosing emoticons. I do not need another full-time obsession. I hope you all like my emoticons and journal style, because it ain't changing.

Next trick: work out how to make entries friends-only without having to do anything.

Hm. Live Journal. Hmmm.