No Google Earth infrastructure layer: thoughts on the community model

A week or two ago I speculated that Google could move the infrastructure discussion along ....

Gordon's Notes: Bridges: 77,000 deficient, 750 have I-35W design

8/3/07 Update: I thought a bit more about how Google could accelerate the infrastructure review. A 'route around risky bridge' option for Google Map directions would concentrate minds wonderfully. One can readily imagine icons for bridges with the I-35W design and risk designation....

In the meantime, I was pretty sure the Google Earth community would put an infrastructure layer up that would attach federal infrastructure ratings to bridges like this one (Strib, Aug 11, 2007)...

Corroded strands of rebar jut from the sides and pillars of the cracked Hwy. 36 bridge near Stillwater, while jagged pieces of fallen concrete litter the ground below.

Every day, nearly 10,000 vehicles travel eastbound over the crumbling structure. Most of the people in the huge trucks, cars and school buses on the bridge are unaware that it has been listed federally as "basically intolerable."...

I still can't find such a layer, though problems with the OS X version of GE may be limiting my search (Is Google losing interest in GE in favor of Maps only?). Today I posted a comment on a GE blog to try to move things along. In a sad sign of the times the blog I commented to does point to a Google Maps mash-up that claims to do just what I want -- but that map is festooned with ad words, shows no data, and seems to be a splog. Yech. I'll withhold that URL, thank you.

All of which leads to two questions. Why do some community products take off and others don't? Are we seeing a community fatigue where the small minority of compulsive contributors are tapped out?

I'm fairy sure the latter is true -- it would be very odd if we didn't see a drop in participation after the usual early adopter surge -- followed by a resurgence a few years from now. The relentless onslaught of the fraudulent and parasitic "contributor" (e.g. splogs) doesn't help, but of course game theorists and evolutionary biologists know how inevitable that is. [Hint: If you're going to do a genuine community project, you probably can't do advertising at all.]

As to the former, I think that question is going to be discussed for many a year to come. It's easy to guess that the mathematical model for community project success will resemble the models used to forecast disease epidemics. I think this would be a nice little project for a class in mathematical modeling ...

Gordon's Notes: check your feed

Gordon's Notes is going to move domains sometime in the next few weeks. When it does move, the old address (jfaughnan.blogspot.com) will redirect, so if you read this via a web browser your old links will work. You can update the bookmarks any time you want after the move.

Feeds, however, can be a problem.

If your feed looks like this:

http://jfaughnan.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

You'll be fine. This type of feed will redirect and most feed readers will automatically update to the new address.

If you have an older RSS style feed, however, your feed may break when the blog moves.

So, if you have a moment, please switch to the above feed address now.

We now return you to your regular show.

So that's what happened to my Chinese audience

Cosmic Variance writes about blog censorship from China:

...Any blog on Blogspot is definitely off-limits (so I can’t visit Preposterous Universe for old time’s sake). You can type in the address or click a link, and the browser will think for a minute, and then return a “Problem loading page: The connection has timed out” error. My impression is that that’s been true for a long time, although apparently it’s been on and off for a while now. Typepad blogs are also off-limits, so no Cocktail Party Physics for me, although that might be a recent development. Livejournal seems to be unavailable, and likewise Xanga, but blogs hosted on Wordpress.com seem to be available...

I used to have some PRC readers, but they seemed to have stopped a year or two ago. It didn't really occur to me that China had blocked all of blogspot. I wonder how moving this blog to a custom domain will change that.

I image China must block the major web based feed readers as well, otherwise a block on blogspot would be easy to avoid.

iPhone: my demands

My hunch is that the iPhone is more successful than many phones, but perhaps not as successful (yet) as Motorola's (evil) RAZR. So perhaps there's a chance that Apple is feeling "receptive".

I'm sure Jobs reads my blog daily, so I'll trot out my personal lists of demands. The non-negotiable ones need to be fixed before I can justify buying the iPhone.

Non-negotiable:

1. Copy, Cut, Paste.
2. Search.
3. Tasks at least comparable to the 1994 PalmPilot tasks.
4. Synchronization with Outlook at least comparable to the modern Palm OS (in other words, flawed, but useable). A 256 character limit on contact comments is not acceptable.
   
5. Run FileMaker Remote.
6. Synchronize notes.
7. Multi select and process for email
8. Apple needs to fix the "international problem". It's ridiculously easy to run up a $1000 phone bill unintentionally when outside the US. The phone needs to provides a permission-only control over non-US EDGE access. (added 8/14/07)
9. Secure data wipe so you can sell or donate an iPhone (added 6/08, promised with iPhone 2.0)
   

Wishes, not demands:

1. A real calculator.
   
2. Flatten the recessed headphone socket. (promised with iPhone 2)
   
3. Site-selective synchronization - so can sync at both work and home, but not send home data to a work machine.
   
4. Support for a bluetooth keyboard and mouse.
5. Video out - so I can use a larger display.
6. Encrypted data stores.
7. Third party app support (signed is ok)
8. Flash support, but not from Adobe.
9. GPS
10. Custom ring and alert tones
11. Allow file storage on the iPhone.
12. Let the iPhone tether (bridge) a computer to the net. (added 9/5/07 in honor of Boingo, demoted to optional 6/08 in recognition that the phone companies hate this)

Lessons from my garage door remote

It's possible to be too geeky.

When the remote for our 1996 Sears Craftsman garage door opener failed I naturally entered the remote part number into Google. This led me to a forest of aftermarket "universal" remotes; after a few hours of research and with some trepidation I placed my order. The remote I got was three times the size of the old one, but it works quite well.

Today I decided our keypad needed to be replaced. Once again I started digging through Google and Amazon, but this time I happened to notice a "call 800-... for parts" notice on the opener.

It seemed unlikely, but a search on Craftsman parts led to the Sears Parts Store. There a search on the opener part number led through two menu options to a list of compatible accessories. The sites not perfect, as the part numbers have only a vague one line description. I ended up going to sears.com, searching on the part numbers, and ordering two devices. Not cheap, but I'm reasonably sure they'll work.

As an experiment I tried constraining my search by "sears.com" and googling on the part number. This time the search worked.

There are two lessons I draw from this:

1. There's still a "deep web" of database tables Google can't track -- that's why starting with the parts site worked.
2. Sears.com is ranked relatively poorly by Google, so it didn't show up in my searches. I have to remember to scope by site more frequently.
3. I might have done best of all to phone the Craftsman parts number on the side of the opener, but, really, that's unthinkable.
   

Update 8/19/07: I have a few clues as to why Sears may rank pretty low in Google searches:

1. Despite my usual practice of turning off all opt-in spam invitations, Sears still sent spam to my email address (of course I only gave them my spam account, but still!)
2. Their stated returns policy requires a shipping statement as well as a receipt?

This weekend, a virtual world teeters on the edge

The virtual world of finance, that is. The world where imaginary trillions flit about like moths in a storm ...

Grasping Reality with Both Hands: Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal

...today the monetary base in the North Atlantic economies is 7% higher than it was yesterday--an annualized growth rate of 2100% per year"...

This is when we find out how good our emergent financial systems really are. The S&P has wiped out the gains of the past four months, but that's really not so bad. If we're above the 12 month low next weekend we'll be doing fine.

Dockables: donation ware, clever!

I think TUAW pointed me to Dockables. These are donation ware applescripts with a full installer and excellent icons. I have "sleep", "screen saver", "screen capture", and "log off" in my Dock now. Since I don't use my Dock for much these are great to have, and of course LaunchBar (love it) can activate any of them easily.

I've always had trouble remembering the key combination for screen captures, and I don't like the TIFF format Grab uses (though I'm sure there's a way to change Grab to use PNG, I don't like those tweaks if I can avoid them). Now I use dockables, open the PNG in Preview, select, copy and then either pastse into a document or "create new from clipboard", then save with a useful name or paste. Ok, so it's not ultra efficient, but it works rather quickly.

These are also handy for the docks of my family members, who really don't know any key shortcuts or hot corner mouse actions.

NTY Business: replaying press releases?

"Jeff Leeds" wrote this for the NYT:

Universal Music Will Sell Songs Without Copy Protection - New York Times:

... the music will not be offered D.R.M.-free through Apple’s iTunes, the leading music service. The use of copy protection software has become a major bone of contention in the digital music business, where iTunes accounts for the vast majority of download sales. The record labels generally have required that retailers place electronic locks to limit copying of music files. But Apple’s proprietary D.R.M. does not work with most rivals’ devices or software — meaning that music sold by competing services cannot play on Apple’s popular iPod. Some record executives say they believe that the stalemate has capped the growth of digital music sales, which the industry is relying on more heavily as sales of plastic CDs slide...

Apple sells music with DRM and without DRM. Universal's refusal to sell through iTunes has no logical connection to Apple's DRM, though it may make business sense as a way to weaken Apple's dominant retail position and keep competitive channels open. A reasonably informed human being would have noticed that that Universal's press release made no sense, so "Jeff Leeds" must be an algorithm for repackaging press releases. (Either that or a very dim editor chopped some key sentences out of the article.)

Pollution has vitamins

Scott Adams sums up the GOP candidates in 3 panels

... terrorists will use your skulls for salad bowls ...
... take money from the people who don't vote for me and give it to the people who do ...
... pollution has vitamins ...

Ok, so the 2nd is somewhat bipartisan, though when I vote Dem I'm voting for less money for me (at least directly and in the near term).

I don't recall Scott Adams getting political before. Perhaps the GOP presidential slate is inducing an unprecedented sense of national terror among the few Americans still conscious. There may not be anything worse than Cheney, but the leading troika are arguably worse than than Bush, who's already among the worst Presidents in American history. Really, Romney, Giuliani et al are exhibit A for terminating the GOP and starting over.

Dying heroically - known for his coffee mugs

Dead heroes rarely receive the attention of heroes who live to tell their tales. This is the first I've read of a hero of a local disaster who died trying to save others.

State to get funds; death toll reaches 8

... The medical examiner also reported Friday that Peter Hausmann, 47, a father of four from Rosemount who survived the bridge collapse and escaped from his van only to perish while apparently trying to help others, died of drowning...

One might wish Peter, father of four, had been less heroic, but he was. MPR has a small article about him. I'd have titled this post "A geek dies heroically" but I can't know if Peter would have approved:

Peter Hausmann, 47, was a computer security specialist worked at Assurity River Group in St. Paul. The company's president says Hausmann was a quiet leader and a man of faith.

There's one in every office. The guy who's the diligent worker, nose to the grindstone. The one who mentors colleagues and whom everyone trusts. And the guy who's the first to make the coffee every morning...

..."One of the things that was very high on the priority list was to get the coffee machine in and running as fast as possible," says Olejnik. "Pete was very happy when we got that installed. He was the number one person who was going to be using it."

Olejnik says Hausmann often logged long hours at the company's small office of eight employees, sticking around until 6 or 7 p.m. Hausmann was, Olejnik says, a quiet leader, a devoted Catholic, and a man capable of explaining the most confounding aspects of information security....

...Hausmann resided in Rosemount, hailing originally from South Dakota. He spent time in Kenya, where, Olejnik says, he worked as a math and science teacher. Kenya is also where Hausmann met his wife, Helen.

The family has declined requests for interviews. They told a newspaper last week that the night of the bridge collapse, Hausmann was heading to St. Louis Park to pick up a friend for dinner when the bridge gave way.

He reportedly phoned his wife during rush hour traffic on the bridge and was not heard from again. His car has since been pulled from the Mississippi River...

...When that difficult time comes, says, they'll give the Hausmann family any of Peter's personal effects, including the cluster of coffee mugs sitting empty at his desk.

I wonder how well his co-workers knew him, and whether they'd have marked him for the heroic mold. Peter, I salute you. If I find a fund to help Peter's children's education (four) I'll post on it.

Update 8/12/07: See the comment below from a niece of Peter's.

Update 8/14/07: Family fund (taken from comments). I've sent my contribution on its way.

... My cousins ages are 16, 14, 10, and 7 and I can assure you that they have very promising futures. Their father has left them with an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. Thank you once again for your interest in my family. I told my mother, Pete's sister, about Pete being called "a geek who died heroically" and for the first time in almost two weeks I saw her laugh. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Anyone that would like to donate to the the memorial fund can send the donation to:

Peter Hausmann Memorial Fund
c/o Anchor Bank
66 Thomas Ave E
West St. Paul, MN 55118

Dear Salon and Dear Volkswagen: this will cost you

This is how my Salon Premium article looks today when viewed with Firefox:



An extremely obnoxious VW ad is covering a chunk of the article. VW, I am very annoyed. You are on my poop list.

Salon, one more time and I drop the Premium subscription.

I am not amused.

Should we preferentially tax premium gasoline? How evil would that be?

What fraction of premium gasoline sales are an evil exploitation of the weak minded?

Here's why the question matters. Most rationalists believe we need a carbon tax to keep our planet's climate within a familiar range, and we know we have a $1.5 trillion dollar infrastructure bill coming due just as we boomers prepare to suck the young dry. So most rationalists would say a carbon tax now, starting with a gasoline tax increase, makes scientific, political and economic sense. On the other hand, many rationalists, due to ethical impulse, a desire to survive, or an aesthetic aversion to starving masses, prefer to avoid exploiting the weak and gullible. If we add up a carbon/gasoline tax, infrastructure repair, and the duty/wisdom of the strong aiding the weak, should we preferentially tax premium gasoline?

The answer depends in part on what percentage of premium gasoline sales are a scam perpetuated on the weak minded:

Fact or Fiction?: Premium Gasoline Delivers Premium Benefits to Your Car: Scientific American

....Most modern cars, however, are designed to employ a specific compression ratio, a measure of how much room is available to the fuel when the piston is at the bottom and the top of the cylinder. This compression ratio—somewhere in the neighborhood of eight to one—tolerates lower octane fuels (such as regular gasoline, good old 87 octane) without knocking. "The compression ratio is fixed by the designer of the engine," Green says. "The regular fuel will burn properly and the premium fuel will burn properly and therefore there is no reason you should pay the extra money." High-performance engines, such as those in some sports cars or older, heavier automobiles, often boast much higher compression ratios. These cars—for example, Shepherd's Subaru WRX—require premium gasoline and will definitely knock without it. "I have to put the 92 octane in," he says. "It has a turbocharger."...

...for standard cars on the road today, purchasing premium gasoline is simply paying a premium for a fuel that delivers no added benefits. "If you think you need it," Green says, "you're being very eccentric.

So collector cars and sports cars (and lawn mowers? motor cycles?) need premium gasoline. These are not requirements for modern economic survival -- they are luxury items. That would favor a preferential gasoline tax on premium gas. On the other hand, we know a significant fraction of premium gas sales are an exploitation of the naive, the gullible, and the weak. That seems to argue against a preferential tax -- but in fact I think it supports a preferential tax. I bet that within days of announcing such a tax, the vast majority of consumers who don't need premium gas will learn that they've been conned, and they'll stop using it. So a preferential tax won't raise all that much money (we have to tax all gasoline), but it will serve a social good anyway. It's worth doing.

Incidentally, there's another question I haven't asked. Would we be wiser to equip our cars with floatation devices and spend our carbon tax money on avoiding war with China, solar energy research, "rationalizing" the tax code, meteor impact prevention, biowar prophylaxis or any of a hundred other worthy causes? Ahh, well, I'll save that one for another day.

Rome burns. Bush fiddles.

We have a 1.5 trillion dollar infrastructure bill to pay.

MPR: Bush cool to federal gas tax increase

Just one week after the deadly I-35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis, President Bush reacted coolly to a plan to raise the federal gas tax.

President Bush said Congress should reprioritize the way it spends highway money instead of raising taxes to pay for future bridge repair.

"Before we raise taxes, which could affect economic growth, I would strongly urge the Congress to examine how they set priorities," said Bush. "If bridges are a priority, let's make sure that we set that priority before we raise taxes."

Bush made the comments one day after Rep. Jim Oberstar, DFL-Minn., announced a plan to increase the federal gas tax from 18 to 23 cents a gallon.

Oberstar, who chairs the House Transportation Committee, says the money would go into a new trust fund for repairing and replacing bridges. He said the plan would raise about $25 billion over three years....

Cut out GOP senator Stevens bridge to nowhere and a few similar boondoggles, and you get maybe $3 billion. We don't need $3 billion. Bush is an idiot.

On the other hand, assume we need to raise $2 trillion over 25 years (cost plus interest), so we need an extra $80 billion a year for the next 25 years. That's more like a 15 cents a gallon price rise in the gas tax. So three times what Oberstar is saying now, but, still, he's at least on the right track.

[rewritten, because I was too sleepy to remember we don't need to raise all the money all at once.]


I think we're going to lose at least a dozen major bridges before we get real.

Ignatieff: I'm so glad I didn't bother ...

Michael Ignatieff, a pseudo-Canadian who emerged from Harvard to bring salvation to the barbarian backwaters of my birthplace, wrote an OpEd article for the NYT a week ago. I tried to read it, but I fell asleep half-way through. It was ponderous, pompous, vacuous, internally inconsistent insofar as it had any meaning, and, by the way, it made no sense. I vaguely wondered about commenting on it, but I don't have the skill to make that kind of commentary funny and I couldn't think of anything useful to say. (Other than, Oh Canada, you don't deserve this.).

Happily, others have done the job. Crooked Timber's "Ignatieff" has some good links and droll commentary, but the first comment links to ...

David Rees: Cormac Ignatieff's "The Road" - Politics on The Huffington Post

Hello everyone! Personal message to all the New Yorkers out there: Did you read Michael Ignatieff's essay in the the NY Times Magazine? If so, contact me ASAP to let me know you're OK. I put your flyer up at Grand Central Station, but have heard no response.

Myself, I'm just making my way out of the debilitating Level-Five Mind Fog that came from reading the thing. Even my "Second Life avatar" has a headache! (Hey young people, did I get that right? Hope so! See you in "Warcraft Worlds!")

The essay is called "Getting Iraq Wrong." And baby, if Michael Ignatieff got Iraq wrong, I don't want him to be right! Because this essay can MAKE LEMONADE IN YOUR MIND...

And so it goes.

Again, we ask, "where is the medium lobster", and what happened to him in July 2006?

The Apple iMovie story: An interesting lesson in modern software evolution

Apple's iMovie was a very good product for editing home videos. Apple decided, however, that they needed to provide a simpler product for managing small video fragments (phone, camera) including editing and organization (iPhoto also organizes video fragments, but even my fellow geeks don't know that.)

Apple decided to kill their original iLife product (iMovie 2006) and replace it with a new 1.0 product called, not coincidentally, iMovie 2008. iMovie 2006 and iMovie 2008 are very different products with some overlapping and some distinct features -- but 2008 is definitely not a superset of 2006. In some ways iMovie 2008 is a significant step backwards from iMovie 2006. If you don't like it, one imagines Jobs saying, you can buy Final Cut Pro and new Mac to run it.

This is arguably a rather arrogant move, but we Apple customers are accustomed to this sort of thing. Those of us who knowingly sold our souls to Mephistophejobs knew there'd be days like this. The iPhone doesn't have, cut and paste, tasks or search capabilities (ok, there's a long list of missing basic PIM functionality), Aperture can't modify image dates and the database is unbelievably slow, iPhoto can't import/merge iPhoto Libraries, etc, etc. Apple's software gets dumber and dumber, but that's what non-geeks want. Geeks just have to suck it in -- for us the pinnacle of software development on any platform was probably the mid-90s.

That's what I thought, until I read this: Buy iLife '08 and get iMovie '06 for free.  This is so unlike Apple I'm a bit stunned. It's almost as though Satan were say "John, I'm really sorry about that eternal hellfire bit, I'll drop the temperature". They're effectively apologizing for the kill/switch move, and providing the old functionality for those who want it. They barely waited for the screaming to start.

So what happened? Is Jobs grip weakening? Is some non-satanic force emerging within Apple?

Wow. Next thing you know they'll build an iPhone I can buy, or maybe even, dare I dream, fix Aperture?