girtby.net

Over to the right — unless you are using one o’ them fancypants RSS aggree-gators — are the monthly archives for girtby.net, with a count of the number of articles posted for each month. Last month there was just the one and this month isn’t looking too promising either. That’s as good a measure as any that I’ve been, well, preoccupied.

It’s a pretty safe bet that if you see a semi-regular blogger (still not quite ready to label myself like that, but anyway) suddenly go quiet, then they have either had a baby or a new job. And so it is with great pleasure that I can announce that I am the proud parent of … a 5- and a 7-year-old, and also I have a new job!

I like it so far, there’s a lot of c++ coding about which I intend to blog copiously until every last remnant of a regular audience has fled for their lives. Whilst simultaneously, and endlessly, reciting the latest internet meme to jump the shark (eg “FAIL!”). Oh yes.

But not to worry because I promise not to drive you all away just yet - not until I have at returned from a 2 week northern hemisphere (just) vacation. Tomorrow, the family and I are on the next plane out of Sydney, and after seven flying hours we’ll be landing in Phuket. More interestingly we’re also venturing inland to a rather remote part of the country, staying in a villa about which you can read on their excellent website. In short, I’m very much looking forward to it.

Naturally I have some reading matter and some new toys to sustain me for the flight, and I will make a vague, non-committal promise to blog about one of these on my return.

Keep the internet warm for me while I’m gone, won’t you?

To justify my occasional lapses into Apple fanboy-ism, I offer the following for your consideration.

Exhibit A: Apple, 24 years ago

Exhibit B: Microsoft, today

Yeah, I know, who cares about packaging? But howcome so few companies get it right?

And in the long run, I think it *is* important. The message you send with the packaging of your product is one of the care you have put in to producing it. And of the importance of the customer’s time in getting up and running quickly.

Message received, Apple.

Broadcast radio is changing. It’s going digital, and with this change broadcasters are likely to start embedding watermarks in the audio stream (if they haven’t already). Podcasters, and other internet music publishers are likely to do the same. Watermarks are inaudible markers that uniquely identify the broadcaster, and are also the key enabling technology of a great new business venture that I’ve just thought of, and will now share with you, in the hope that someone, if not me, implements it.

The elevator pitch: music insurance. Insurance against hearing music that you hate.

Here’s how it works.

Let’s say you wake up one day with a revelation. “I would,” you think to yourself, “pay good money to never have to hear Meat Loaf’s Paradise By The Dashboard Light ever again. I would pay until the end of time, should it hurry up and arrive.” Or words to that effect.

Pick whatever example you want here: maybe the Crazy Frog song might be your choice instead? Or Whitney Houston’s I Will Always Love You? I-I-I-I-I-I-eee-I-I-eee-I-I don’t wont to go on, I’m sure everyone has at least one song that is disliked to the point of justifying financial outlay. (For me it would be the majority of the AOR canon, which could get expensive, but I’m getting ahead of myself.)

So you take out insurance against accidentally hearing this song, whatever it might be. Like most insurance policies you pay a premium, and when you hear one of the covered songs, you make a claim and receive some financial compensation to ease the pain. All you have to do is prove that the music was broadcasted publicly and you couldn’t escape it. This guards against fraudulent claims, and is where technology comes in.

We need to make two simplifying assumptions. Firstly we require the music to be broadcast by a radio station or similar public broadcaster, who are motivated to watermark their broadcasts in the interest of asserting their license to do so. This precludes the private playing of insured music; in other words, you’re not allowed to play Celine Dion CDs to yourself and claim on them.

Secondly we require the insured to be in a public place, or specifically nominated private places, for the claim to be valid. This might be at work, at a pub, restaurant, or wherever you have no control over what radio station is played. This precludes you claiming against family members who play music too loud, but I’m sorry no insurer is going to go anywhere near that sort of dispute.

When you sign up for the policy you will download a small application to install on your mobile phone. When you hear an offensive song, you whip out your phone and start the application. This records a sample of the music, the date and time, and the place (either manually entered or from the GPS receiver). This information is transmitted (via internet, SMS, or whatever) to the insurer’s servers. These servers will automatically extract the music sample, match it against the sender’s insured songs, verify its authenticity using the watermark and location data. The watermark is verified against a known list of broadcasters, and the location data against a set of covered locations. If after this, the claim is determined to be valid, the insured amount would be paid.

Of course there is still a potential for fraudulent claims, but — without meaning to oversimplify the actuarial art — this can be countered by conventional risk management techniques. Claiming against Achy Breaky Heart when you’re *at* a Billy Ray Cyrus concert is obviously fraudulent, for example. And as with all insurance policies, the premiums and claim amounts can be adjusted in relation to specific risk factors, including the potential for fraud in a given situation. I am not an actuary, but feel free to chime in if you are (or can impersonate one on the internet).

Now I know it’s a great idea, but if you make millions from selling musical insurance policies, I don’t even want a cut. I just want you to cover me. Come on in and cover me.

Got a common document repository? Have it organised into a hierarchy? Here is my official list of words that you should never use for nodes in that hierarchy.

Data, General, Misc, $COMPANYNAME, Stuff, Docs, Team, $X-Drive

If you find yourself using any of these vague and overly-generic terms, you really should re-think your taxonomy.

(This post requested by Scott, who I’m sure would never be responsible for using any of these…)

A wise man once told me that he deliberately avoided cultivating expensive tastes, because they are ultimately unsatisfying unless you are uncommonly wealthy. I think this is probably good advice in general, and particularly good advice for cars, wine, cameras, and home A/V equipment. But for headphones, not so much. Sure, you get the urge to upgrade, but you won’t end up mortgaging your house to do so. Although you can of course go overboard if you want to, the point of diminishing returns can be reached relatively cheaply.

Dan likes to make the analogy with motorcycles. They perform better than cars, but at a fraction of the price. This is true also of headphones versus a full-blown home Hi-Fi system. However, unlike motorcycles, headphones are more practical than their full-priced competitors. You can even carry them around!

The only thing you really lose with the headphone experience is that whole-body listening sensation. You don’t get to feel that thump in your chest on really deep bass hits. Instead it’s all in your head. Which is by no means unpleasant, just slightly different to a live performance or even a good Hi-Fi system.

In case it’s not painfully obvious, this post is about headphones. It contains some recommendations and advice about specific types and models, but mainly the message I want to get across is that headphones are an inexpensive and invaluable conduit to musical satisfaction. For a few hundred measly bucks you can experience something close to musical perfection. Without even bothering the neighbours. (Although you can do that too, just by singing along…)

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A recurring source of amusement is the number of sports whose followers all claim ownership to the term “football”. Wikipedia lumps them all together in one big, NPOV, article. As if they all had a legitimate claim to being called football. Naturally such neutrality will not stand.

I propose that one of these sports be selected and standardised by, I dunno, ISO or someone as the sport entitled to be called football. The rest of them will have to change their names.

The criteria by which sports shall be judged are: a) whether the foot contacts the ball with any kind of regularity during the normal course of the game, and b) how widespread the game is played around the world.

Let’s look at the candidates shall we?

First off there’s soccer. Played by just about every nation in the world. The foot contacts the ball often, the rest of the body rarely. It’s a pretty strong candidate, you have to admit.

There’s American football, a.k.a. Gridiron. Wikipedia tells me there is a Canadian Football as well, and as you can see from about 5 seconds at glancing at the pictures in the comparison article, you can see that Canadian football is played in three dimensions, whereas American football is only played in two. But in neither of these games do feet actually contact ball in any significant way. And only played in two countries, oh dear.

Of course, there’s Australian rules football which, as you know, I am a bit of a fan of. Played in parts of one country, but at least boot hits ball fairly often. They have a strange hand-ball rule too but that shouldn’t rule out a claim to being called “football”. Still, not a strong candidate.

What else? Rugby league. This is the other Australian football, besides Australian rules. Or the other other Australian football if you count soccer (which as you may have gleaned already, I do). Anyway it’s played in England, Australia, NZ and France by those too dumb to get into a Rugby Union team. Oops, did I say that last bit out loud? Not widespread, and very little foot-ball contact unless you count their silly play-the-ball move, which I dont.

I don’t really think anyone still calls rugby union “football” but I suppose there must be some. Ironically the ball is kicked a lot more in union than in league, so if either of these is to be called football, it should be rugby union. Not as widespread as soccer, but then again what is? 20 nations competing at the world cup though, not too bad.

Gaelic football. It is the Irish version of Australian rules football. And its claim to being called football is just as weak.

So there you have it. And the winner is …

Soccer, obviously.

The ISO should now deprecate the term “soccer” as it is obviously redundant.

I will now listen to your proposals for new names for each of the other codes.

Here is a picture of a slinky that has been turned inside out, or reversed, or … something.

You can see that the circular logo of Questacon is still present, but each of the segments has been reversed.

Frankly, I’m at a bit of a loss to explain it. Well, I can imagine stretching the diameter of the first ring so that it can slide over the outside of the body of the slinky, and then repeating the process so that the entire slinky is turned back on itself. But that would be extremely difficult, and anyway that’s not what I did!

What happened was the slinky mysteriously got itself into a tangle (a 6-year-old may or may not have been involved). I tried to untangle it, fruitlessly, and then noticed that the slinky had been turned inside out in the process. I then cut off the tangled part — which is why the picture contains only part of a logo — and took the photo.

Anyone else care to have a shot at explaining it?

Yahoo sent me an email telling me to upgrade to IE 7:

In the new Web 2.0 economy it may be customary to advertise your competitors products but it still strikes me as weird.

So why are they doing this? My first guess was that the Yahoo audience is predominantly IE and are more likely to upgrade to a new version of IE than switch to Firefox or Opera. Yahoo presumably want people to get more modern browsers and they figure this is the path of least resistance.

I wondered how IE7 could be “Optimised for Yahoo!7”? Because they’ve both got a 7 in their name, perhaps?

But then it struck me: they want people to keep the Yahoo home page. By promoting the IE download they get people to upgrade to a Yahoo-branded copy of IE; with the home page and default search engine set to Yahoo.

All this before IE is pushed out automatically by Windows Update. Clever.

My SO came home this afternoon to a crowd of police outside our house. We’d been broken into. Again.

It happened while both of us were at work. The neighbour from two doors down came home and found a Lexus blocking his garage door. We live in a row of terrace houses with a rear lane entrance into our garages.

The neighbour was honking his horn and not getting any response. He noticed that our garage roller door had been levered open with a car jack. Just then the neighbour from three doors down drove up behind. Neighbour 2 says to neighbour 3 that he thinks we’ve been broken into, and he proceeds to walk around to the front of the house to see what is going on. He rings the cops at the same time.

Meanwhile neighbour 3 sees a man come out of our garage. Neighbour 3 asks him what he’s doing. The man says that he’s helping someone fix a garage door. Neighbour 3 starts to argue with him but the man gets into the Lexus and drives off. No one gets the number plate.

Neighbour 2 waits for over an hour for the police. Then he has to leave on other business. My SO arrives home soon after, to find the police swarming all over. They wouldn’t let her in the house. She rings me.

We eventually find out what happened inside. The burglar had broken into our rear garage and taken a garden tool to lever open our rear sliding doors. He had gone upstairs to our bedroom and rifled through it all, finding nothing, but leaving a mess on the floor.

In my study he really got busy. He had rifled through all of the boxes of papers and books, spilling them all over the floor again and making and even bigger mess.

In the end he got away with nothing. Err, I mean, a huge pile of jewels. Our priceless Picasso. My collection of rare sports cars.

Here’s what he left piled up neatly in the garage:

• My computer, but thankfully not the laptop which I had with me at work;
• An old iPod, which I had just the evening before resuscitated from presumed death;
• A pile of DVDs, although Pride & Prejudice had been specifically left behind;
• A box of iPod accessories; and
• A half-full bottle of orange juice

Thirsty work, robbing people.

So I’m reading the Linux Shadow Password HOWTO document and come across the following:

If you think about it, an 8 character password encodes to 4096 * 13 character strings. So a dictionary of say 400,000 common words, names, passwords, and simple variations would easily fit on a 4GB hard drive. The attacker need only sort them, and then check for matches. Since a 4GB hard drive can be had for under $1000.00, this is well within the means of most system crackers.

Amused at the anachronism, I decided to conduct an experiment. How accurately could I date this document, given the figures quoted in this passage?

So, 4GB for $1000. When the document was written, storage was $250/GB.

Today, Newegg has 250GB drives for about $80, or about $0.30/GB. Quite a difference.

Now I happen to know that hard drive capacities have historically doubled every 12 months; much faster than Moore’s Law. Don’t ask me how I knew this. Dating the document would be a interesting test of the accuracy of that figure.

Doubling every 12 months also makes the calculations easy. Easy enough to do brute force, instead of looking up the right equation (an exercise for the reader).

So at year 0 we have $250/GB. Then in year 1 it will be $125. Then $62.5, $31.25, etc etc down to to $0.48 and $0.24 in years 10 and 11, respectively.

Which means that the document must be between 10 and 11 years old.

Pleased with my prediction, I looked at the date on the front of the document. Sure enough: 1996. Bingo!

I'm sure the distribution of ratings in my iTunes music library says something about me.

I've spent some time thinking about how to assign ratings and even writing scripts to report on my progress. And what progress have I to report?

Of 2720 rated songs in my library, exactly 15 are deemed worthy of a perfect 5 stars.

This seems way too stingy, especially when I glance at some other peoples ratings. If not stingy then at least pessimistic.

I mean, look at Amazon or any other site which employs the near-ubiquitous five-star ranking system. Better still, conduct a social research experiment where you look for patterns in the way that people assign ratings to things online. My guess is that 5 stars are pretty common.

But it's nice to know that I'm not a complete freak of nature. On a recent O'Reilly Distributing The Future podcast, a professional photographer explained how he rated his photos. The short version is that he doesn't use 5 stars at all. Nope, according to him, the magical fifth star is reserved for future expansion!

Wow. I'd never thought about that. All those people with 5 stars and nowhere to go from there. What if they need that extra push over the cliff? Where's the iTunes that goes to 6 stars? Where?

Being added to someone's blogroll is usually quite a sincere form of flattery. But I just can't help but wonder if there's been a mistake of some sort here.

Ernie Chambers has me added to his blogroll of almost exclusively right-wing whackos like Instapundit, Powerline and Tim Blair. Surely Ernie can't mean to put me in with that lot? It must be a typo.

And ooh it makes me wonder. Maybe there is a right-wing politics blog which is only a typo away from girtby. It wouldn't be the first time that questionable content had come uncomfortably close.

Here is section 3.1 of the Usual Terms and Conditions (UTC) for Consumer Mortgage Lending, from the Commonwealth Bank:

If the Security is not in existence at the date of the Contract, you agree to give us the Security.

I think this is mostly in reference to properties that are bought off the plan — when it's built it becomes property of the bank — but they sure have a funny way of putting it.

Wow. You don't get more authoritative than Google. Number one hit, no less!

Thanks to Frances for the tip.

The great thing about blogging is that even when you perform some totally pointless task or make a futile gesture, at least you get to redeem some benefit from it by sharing with others.

So, in that vein let me tell you all now that I have attempted to report an email spammer to the Australian Communications and Media Authority.

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