Map of Slots in Maryland

Since it will be on the ballot this year, I took the time to read the proposed slots bill in Maryland. It's always work to parse those documents, but I think I've boiled down the proposed locations on this map. The trickiest one is the Baltimore area, so I might be wrong there. The definition goes:

(V)   BALTIMORE CITY, IF THE VIDEO LOTTERY FACILITY IS:
   1.   LOCATED:
   A.   IN A NONRESIDENTIAL AREA;
   B.   WITHIN ONE–HALF MILE OF INTERSTATE 95;
   C.   WITHIN ONE–HALF MILE OF MD ROUTE 295; AND
   D.   ON PROPERTY THAT IS OWNED BY BALTIMORE CITY ON 
        THE DATE ON WHICH THE APPLICATION FOR A VIDEO 
        LOTTERY OPERATION LICENSE IS SUBMITTED; AND
   2.   NOT ADJACENT TO OR WITHIN ONE–QUARTER MILE OF 
        PROPERTY THAT IS:
   A.   ZONED FOR RESIDENTIAL USE; AND
   B.   USED FOR A RESIDENTIAL DWELLING ON THE DATE 
        THE APPLICATION FOR A VIDEO LOTTERY OPERATION
        LICENSE IS SUBMITTED.

I don't think Google Maps is sophisticated enough to map the resulting region.

Two is Better Than One

Greg is writing about trilogies where the third installment was best. He picked some good ones and I don't really have any to add off the top of my head. However, I do think there is another interesting class of movie franchises: series where the second film was better than the rest. The obvious one for me is Terminator 2. Even though I liked the first one, I'd also list Aliens.

The alien franchise also displays the rare characteristic where the third film was bad so they soldiered on anyway in space marine style to create a fourth film that was at least a bit better than the third.

You'd have to be really poor

I know there are weak web hosting companies out there that would try to deny you certain inalienable Unix rights such as access to cron, but this is not the right way to deal with it.

It's clever, but it's an abuse. It can't guarantee anything that cron tries to guarantee, depends almost entirely on the chatter of bots, and well, it hurts. Please don't ever write this code. :-/

Security mod 17

WMATA is making riding on Metrorail one step closer to being as annoying as flying. Some time in the near future they will be introducing random bag searches. The Post covered it yesterday. One nice feature of this new security is that they have published the search algorithm. The officers will choose a random number, N, and search every Nth person. No terrorist is capable of computing remainder arithmetic so we will be safe from attack. But if you were so smart, you could save yourself the "8 to 10 seconds" by making sure you aren't the Nth person.

Security theatre seems like a waste of money at the Metro. Do people even feel safer as a result of this?

Mindrift (IPA: /maɪn'drɪft/)

I own a Garmin Forerunner 305 and I use it for both biking and running. Being able to save the data and see trends in my exercising is a neat feature, so that's why I started getting involved with the pytrainer project. Unfortunately I've been busy with a few other things, but soon I'm going to get back into hacking it.

Something that happens to me while running or biking is that my mind tends to drift. I doubt that I'm unique in this regard, but what I really like about those mindrifts is that I can sometimes see things from a strange angle or maybe find insight into a problem that I'm working on. This time I came up with another social web idea.

The train of thought went something like this. First I was wondering what the math is behind calculating distance between two lattitude and longitude points. Since Earth is not really a sphere, distance isn't just an arc along the surface. Assuming we all hover at some altitude and aren't affected by traveling over hills and valleys (another interesting facet when considering distance accuracy) the arc that you do travel on can be much more elliptical, or much less elliptical, depending on direction and lattitude.

But this drift led to a more interesting question. How hard is it to calculate the sameness of two routes, or just two collections of points? If you run the same route every day, each route is unlikely to be exactly the same collection of points, but they are going to be very close each time, perhaps within 50-100 ft. So if you have two lists of points, you could make some determination as to how far each is from each other and then score the groups. I think for the sake of computational complexity, it's worth it to cut down the work to comparing the nearest and the furthest, say, with some kind of weighting that pushes far routes away from each other, and brings nearer ones closer.

Why is this interesting? I tend to run or bike by myself. It's not because I'm being antisocial; it's because I just don't really know of anyone who also runs in my neighborhood (running outside is out of style, you obviously need a treadmill) and I tend to have weird schedules. But if it was easy to load the data points from my Garmin into a database, and ask the database who runs near my routes, I would definitely try to get in contact with those people and see if we couldn't start up some kind of routine. You could even ask for people who run near you and run at similar times of day.

As long as you can stop any evil stalkers from poaching the routes of potential victims, I think this would be a great site to have and would help build on exisiting bicycle and running communities.

Return this post to me via USPS

E-mail disclaimers are an annoying waste of bandwidth. Except for attorney-client or NDA communications, the disclaimers add nothing to an e-mail. Some businesses feel they are required and so they mandate that all e-mail sent through their system should be tagged with these blurbs. I usually just laugh when I read them, but I recently got this one (posted to a public mailing list, mind you) and couldn't just ignore it:

This message is intended for the use of the individual to whom it is addressed and may contain information which is privileged, confidential and extempt from disclosure under applicable law. If the reader of this messsage is not the intended recipient or the agent respossible for the delivering the message to the intended recipient you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution, or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you are received this communication in error, please notify us immediately by telephone and return the original message to our address above via the U.S. Postal Service.
Thank you

Once you get past how poorly the boilerplate translates into the actual situation (an e-mail sent to a mailing list with several hundred people on it) and the clear misspellings and grammar errors, you find the hilariously impossible final statement. "If you are (sic) received this communication in error," you are directed to return the message to them via USPS! Should it be printed first, or should I put it on a floppy? 5.25" should do just fine. Certified mail or simply First Class? To which address exactly should I send this message? (There is no address in the e-mail, nor phone number.)

We need to lead a coalition to stop lawyers from ruining e-mail.

Shopping

I stayed up late the last couple of nights and finished off a feature on my deals site that I can no longer live without. I created deal agents (as I was writing code into the night, I seemed to waffle between "saved searches" and "alerts" so here is yet another term for the same thing). If you have an account on the site, you can now save a search as an alert which will e-mail you the results of your search whenever it matches some new deals. It's really useful for those items that have ridiculously low supply but which trickle out to stores from time to time (Nintendo, I'm looking at you). When I am in the market for such an item, I usually read about it being "in stock" on my deals site way too late. Sometimes these things go in less than 10 minutes. Never again though, because now I get an alert in my inbox as soon as everyone else knows about it.

Now I just need it to shop for me.

Which reminds me of an idea that I was pondering some time back. I was listening to NPR a couple of years ago and heard this story about people employing other people as professional purchasers. I can't find any references to the story now but the basic premise was that there are some people who really want something (usually an antique or fairly unique item) and they basically make a shopping list for these pro buyers. When the pros find an item, they buy it and sell it to their employer with some percentage markup. These were typically dollar-intensive items and therefore worth it for the pro buyers to seek out.

What I got to thinking about was: would people want this for cheaper items? And, is there any money in providing the meeting place for this kind of transaction? It's sort of like eBay, but the "sellers" don't actually own the item, yet. I invisioned two main types of transactions. First, as a buyer, you would list the things that you are looking for and what you would pay for one. This is analogous to the shopping list. Second, as a seller, you would find items that people want, go get them, and sell them to the buyers. Sellers might also want to list items that they know they can find, and what price they would sell them for. Buyers would then contract the seller to go pick one up and sell it to them. The site that brings this all together has a chance to earn money on each transaction, just like eBay.

Wii, Fios, Dumb

The Nintendo Wii makes it very easy to setup an Internet connection using your existing wireless router. The dumb-user mode worked great for me the first time I tried it. However, I've switched over to Fios, and have thus switched over to their wireless router. It also tried to provide a dumb-user mode that makes everything easy. Two dumb machines on one network is too many apparently. The Wii tries it's hardest but just cannot get a connection that satisfies it. It then spits out a really dumb error message ("52030"). Thanks for emulating one of the things that drives me nuts about Oracle.

The solution wasn't bad. You have to manually set the IP address et al. on the Wii in order to get it to work with the Actiontec MI424-WR router that Fios gives you.

Push tab A into slit B.

Check out my first instructable, a howto guide for opening the Western Digital Dual-Option USB Enclosure.

Ten to the One Hundredth

Phil Shapiro has issued a dire warning that Google's Project 10 to the 100th will fail. He may be right that the project is doomed, but not for the grave reason of brevity. World changing ideas don't require more than 300 words. This isn't a call for papers on how to build a Large Hadron Collider -- this is a call for clever ideas that make people's lives better. The best startups and the best ideas are the ones that need no explanation; in hindsight they are obvious.

Of course, a philanthropic project such as this can't really fail per se. Someone will get the 10 million to work on their idea. But you can measure the quality of the success by the return on investment for that 10 million. What we're likely to see is a somewhat interesting but hardly world changing (or perhaps even novel) idea that gets the money and a lot of fanfare but doesn't end up producing much. That will be the measure of the success of this project. And really, are there people sitting on these incredible ideas, just waiting for a Google X-Prize? I guess that's what they aim to answer.

So calm down Phil, it's not that bad. Google's project is just a way to draw attention to their charity programs, and in that it will succeed. If there is one thing Google knows, it's advertising. And don't knock brevity! Hopefully they do get some good submissions, but as the Demotivator says: "None of us is as dumb as all of us."