Too much information?

I've realized that I'm never going to know very much of what's on the Internet.

I remember back when poking through public FTP sites, I found pretty much the same dull stuff-- transcripts of Monty Python scenes (Holy Grail, mostly), tofu recipes, and the Nieman-Marcus Cookie recipe which was humorously acknowledged here. (Other than the espresso powder, I don't recall what's different from the one on the back of the chocolate chip bag.)

Now-- I have no idea. I don't even have a handle on what's on Wikipedia anymore. The flip side of micro communities catering to every possible interest is that these communities are smaller and harder to find.

I'm starting to appreciate reading the Sunday newspaper again, just to have a sense of community. In spite of what must be billions of pages on the Internet now, it's almost uniformly dull.

Powerpoint Sucks Just A Little Less Today...

In my earlier rant about PowerPoint last winter, I was making a bunch of slides for my weekly lectures for two different classes, and the many annoyances in composing in PowerPoint.

Somehow I've managed to find a bunch of links about just that topic that I missed last winter. I spent a lot of time struggling between Word and PowerPoint, only to completely give up on first composing lectures in Word to turn into PowerPoint, in favor of just composing slides in PowerPoint directly. And PowerPoint was never meant to be a content manager by any stretch of the imagination-- it's the wrong tool for the job.

Turns out, you can in fact convert from Word to PPT, and from PPT to Word. You "send to" the desired format, rather than "save as". Formatting is a bit off, but that's where the other help articles come in. (Would have been nice to figure that out a few months ago.)

An opportunity for personal growth. That's what it is...

Sunday night, July 22nd

It's Sunday night, and I'm trying to get my thoughts together before hacking again at another paper, and trying to get ready for the week. In the next week:

• I start a research project using GPS to track bus riders in NYC
• I'm going to try to get an automated login to MediaWiki from some other course for another ongoing education-related project.
• I have to do more work on a simplistic model to predict things like the numbers of evacuees that might show up in Albany County if New York City, Jersey City, Newark, or Boston ever get whacked and hundreds of thousands of people are displaced. (Or in any of the other 2,700 other counties within 150 miles of other major cities.)
  
• I have to wrap up the mind-numbing paper on why knowledge is "sticky" to share, and can be either explained or "felt", but never both at the same time, by either groups or individuals.
  
• I freak out about the rest of the work I have to finish in the next month...
• I think about the Open Source research project I have to finish.
• I think about the survey of transportation systems at college towns I have to finish.
  
• I still go to my summer day job every morning.
  
• Matt gets married.

At least going to a friend's wedding should be pretty cool. Haven't done that in a little while...

Note: I originally titled this "June 22nd.." but corrected it to July. Wow. I lost a whole month... where did the summer go?

It's a good thing...

I overslept this morning, ran downstairs, only to find... that my cat had puked up hairballs over the sofa and carpet. But, luckily our house was furnished by IKEA (of Elizabeth, NJ), assembled by a few million turns of those handy Allen wrenches they give out (now in a bag somewhere in the basement). Meaning that the affected sofa covers could be removed easily, tossed into the wash, and voila! put back on the sofa, as good as new. And I wouldn't be too late for work.

Of course, when I went into the basement, I found a miniature pond surrounding the hot water heater. Well, a respectable puddle at any rate. I saw that some water was dripping from a valve above the water heater, so I turned it to shut the water off.

That's when the valve came off in my hands and the drip of water turned into a spray. So, naturally, I crammed the broken valve back in place and grabbed a bucket, at which point the stream turned back into a steady drip.

So I called the plumber's number that was stuck onto the water heater. It had been last serviced in 1996. I recalled that the water heater was 8 or so years old. But then I realized I was told that about three years ago. Which would make it 11 now. The plumber came, brought in his gear, and switched out the valve, welding it in place.

It didn't work.

Neither did the next valve. He casually mentioned that he hated his job, in so many words. I could believe it, since it consisted of walking into such messes, from people like me who woke to a miniature pond in their basements and quite a repair bill when it was all over with.

Finally, the third, heavier-looking valve worked. Then the bad news: the water heater was also leaking. That was the sound I was hearing that sounded like water running. There's just no fixing those things, so I had it replaced.

Funny how not having water in your house limits your options. So I ironed a bunch of shirts while Scott watched Sesame Street, quite thankful that neither one of us had to use the bathroom. By 11:30, it was all done. Scott thanked the workmen, telling them that they did a good job. They seemed to appreciate that.

I think if I had never had hot water before, I'd have been a little more excited to have just unexpectedly paid for a shiny new hot water heater in the basement. But, from my perspective, I went from having hot water, to no water and a giant mess, to hot water and a giant mess minus a few C notes. And it's summer, and I don't really need that much hot water. Not terribly exciting after all...

And I thought a little later that maybe it was a good thing the cat vomited all over the living room, or else the basement would have been flooded. Yea... great, in fact.

Mobile Crawling with VindiGo

I've been stuck on the idea about mobile computing, location-awareness, and GPS for quite some time now. I don't have a good solution yet. But, you have to start somewhere.

I was pretty frustrated with VindiGo when I tried to use it a few years ago. I dunno, maybe it's better on new handhelds with faster processors, and more memory, but it was more problematical on the devices it was originally designed for. The premise is this: you're out on foot with your Palm PDA, and you need to find the nearest restaurant / ATM / public bathroom / UPS mailbox / whatever. So you pull out your PDA, launch the VindiGo app, tell it where you are (kind of annoying search through picklists of streets), and Bam! it draws a map with you in the middle and little blips telling you where Stuff You Want is located.

But it only covers Manhattan and a couple dozen other places nationwide. You have to figure out what lines correspond to streets and what they're called, since a 160 x 160 pixel PDA screen doesn't give you a lot of room for map labels. And, you can't really add anything or mark anything, or customize it in any way. Not to mention that only nerds carry their PDA with them on vacation.

So I tried it out on a trip to the Baltimore Inner Harbor, sometime in Spring 2003, with my wife, 2 1/2 year old daughter and 1/2 year old son in tow. It was a little awkward. It directed us to a couple of restaurants that looked a little scary. (Note: sponsored links.) Overall, it was just a lot easier to get maps and plan out the trip ahead of time rather than just try to have the PDA do it for us on the spot.

But if you've recently moved / changed jobs to Manhattan or another covered area where you'd walk a lot, and you carry a PDA with you, it might work, since VindiGo does pick up basic services. I haven't tried it out lately because, surprisingly enough, they don't cover Albany, NY.

What I'd really like to see is a user-contributed version, where others can make suggestions or at least vote on good excursions. You can get good-enough map data for free from the Census. Making that a background for users to load data sets against (like geocoding addresses) would work well enough.

The next step is to find something that locates zones you might drive to, then walk around in. You might even want to tag activities and locations based on what you want to do, rather than hunt through menus and lists. Even better if it can suggest interesting things to do rather than just retrieving the address of a restaurant or cafe from a list, and "interesting" varies considerably between college students and their stroller-pushing instructors, just to name a couple of target audiences.

What's in a hybrid?

Somehow I'm stuck on the idea of hybrids today.

For cars, it means theoretically higher fuel economies, since you use fuel only when needed to charge your car batteries, rather than idling when you're not moving. Your batteries in turn power the electric motors that drive your car, and only run down when moving. Except that charging batteries isn't so efficient, and running a gas engine to generate electricity has its share of losses too. But, if you're driving in a city, you're not idling your engine unproductively--hybrids can make a better case for urban/suburban (semi-urban?) driving.

For IT, we're always building hybrid systems. The goal is always to mix the best of the best, and try to ultimately build the most efficient system. Whether it's the increasingly "fat client" browser we have with AJAX, or plain old n-tier systems, we're building patchwork systems that optimize one thing at a cost of higher complexity, higher cost, and reduced maintainability.

If a hybrid car gets into an accident, the first responders have to be aware that they're now dealing with a high voltage system-- electrocution is another, unfamiliar issue to deal with, since these cars are still relatively uncommon. If your car breaks down, your repair options are limited too.

In any IT hybrid system, failure becomes more problematic as well. We're not so familiar with what piece is integrated with what, since these homebrew systems are less likely to follow familiar design patterns, and may not incorporate the same integrity / security features that off-the-shelf designs have. Not to mention, the pieces may not fit together the way we're used to, or work the way they're expected to.

Still, hybrid cars aren't a bad idea, so long as they're designed well. But I'll wait until the hybrid cars are a little better tested, and we're more used to them. In the meantime, I'm still stuck building hybrid systems, though I try to limit the complexity of the interactions. (I'm still not building AJAX stuff yet.)

Ratatouille

Took the kids to the movies on Sunday afternoon.

I don't know why, but Ratatouille is suddenly my favorite movie, animated rat and all. My eyes even watered a bit near the end. Sure, it had every chance to be pure cliche, and it missed nearly every time. Its central point, about art and the artist from even the most humble origins, is hardly the over-sugared, superficial storyline used to string together animation sequences designed to sell Happy Meal toys. It seems just as squarely aimed at iPod-wearing parents as their kids in the theater.

As an adult, it seems strange to say that a cartoon about a rat seemed immediately believeable. But it took no more than a couple of minutes to be completely drawn into both the story and the details, and the masterful camerawork and direction no longer felt like a cartoon. Time seemed to stop as we were transported from a humble rural (and apparently rat-infested) country kitchen into the top restaurant in Paris.

The few obvious plot devices were forgivable, and a small price to pay to be lead so expertly through the many gutters and alleyways between sewer and 5-star kitchen. The world they've created seemed as complete as anything I've seen recently. And aside from a few kitchen lessons, we've learned that not only can French women run in heels (as demonstrated by Audrey Tateau in the Da Vinci Code), they are not to be messed with in the kitchen.

And with my kids, I'll be able to get double parenting points for watching the movie with them again.