For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately “roughed up” the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko’s to upload clips from computers that couldn’t be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt “very strongly” that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube.

Viacom’s efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself.

This is so absurd you’d be hard to come up with a better “who’s on first” plan yourself.

Thermostat.rb 1.1.1 was released yesterday.  It provides a concise interface to the Proliphix web services API.  An example of the usage is something like:

I’ve got support under the covers for everything in the Proliphix API. I’ve only mapped about 1/2 of it to the user visible interface, starting with all the functions I’ve tended to need or use.  I was a good little agile developer and built unit tests for everything here.  Using the new module, I added the thermostat to my homegraph code, with some pretty reasonable results:

All this is released under the MIT license.

Newgem is like h2xs in the Perl world, something to stub out a new module with all the right files and structures.  But, as the Ruby folks tend to do, it ups the ante in the process.  In addition to the basic build, packaging, testing, and coverage results you’d expect, you also get a targets for: creating you rubyforge website, publishing your gems to rubyforge and gemcutter, posting release announcements on rubyforge, and even posting blog posts about your release (though I haven’t configured that one yet).

The release cycle is now:

The Rakefile created is loading these features from base modules, so it’s only ~ 30 lines, a heck of a lot easier to maintain than the 300 line Rakefiles I had which provided about 1/2 these features inline.

If you are doing Ruby development, you should really check out newgem.

Let’s do the math.

My back-of-the-envelope calculations (explained in a footnote below) suggest that if you drive one of the Toyotas recalled for acceleration problems and don’t bother to comply with the recall, your chances of being involved in a fatal accident over the next two years because of the unfixed problem are a bit worse than one in a million — 2.8 in a million, to be more exact. Meanwhile, your chances of being killed in a car accident during the next two years just by virtue of being an American are one in 5,244.

So driving one of these suspect Toyotas raises your chances of dying in a car crash over the next two years from .01907 percent (that’s 19 one-thousandths of 1 percent, when rounded off) to .01935 percent (also 19 one-thousandths of one percent).

The rest of the op ed fills out some more of the details, and talks about the dangers of fearing something that is such low risk.  It echos back to Tom Engelhardt’s thoughts from last week.

Today, after a year of work, we launched the new farmproject.org:

Go check it out.  Now that we’re on a drupal platform, we’ll be rolling in smaller features over time.  I’ve got a few ideas queued up that I’ll try to get out there for the first member pickup at the end of May.

In findings sure to gladden the heart of anyone who’s ever wondered whether tiny acts of kindness have larger consequences, researchers have shown that generosity is contagious.

Goodness spurs goodness, they found: A single act can influence dozens more.

This is the same team that’s been studying how many things, loneliness, obesity, happiness, spread through social networks.  Wired has a good write up on the research.

The guys at The Onion nail it again.

Now, I had been taught in school that scurvy had been conquered in 1747, when the Scottish physician James Lind
proved in one of the first controlled medical experiments that citrus
fruits were an effective cure for the disease. From that point on, we
were told, the Royal Navy had required a daily dose of lime juice to be
mixed in with sailors’ grog, and scurvy ceased to be a problem on long
ocean voyages.

But here was a Royal Navy surgeon in 1911 apparently ignorant of
what caused the disease, or how to cure it. Somehow a highly-trained
group of scientists at the start of the 20th century knew less about
scurvy than the average sea captain in Napoleonic times. Scott left a
base abundantly stocked with fresh meat, fruits, apples, and lime
juice, and headed out on the ice for five months with no protection
against scurvy, all the while confident he was not at risk. What
happened?

It’s really fascinating, definitely worth your time.

The full documentation for the project is on rubyforge.  Gems, tar, and zip format have all been published, and it should be propagating out to the main gem servers tonight.  It’s not exceptionally complicated, however it is convenient, and it’s even got 236 unit tests to ensure it’s doing things right.  The code is released under the MIT license, so you are pretty much able to do anything you want with it.

7 years… it’s kind of hard to imagine.  I was also really touched, multiple times last night, by the waves of appreciation I got from folks in the room.

Last night was a perfect night, even though it started as anything but.  At 4:30, Thor’s hard drive decided it was no longer a drive, and without a backup of the presentation, we were scrambling in the office to try to recover the drive, and come up with a backup plan, which meant finding another good base presentation online he could work from.  I still hadn’t gotten an ack back from the library, so had to call to ensure someone would actually open the door, and we didn’t get locked out of our space.  Pat called during setup, and reported that they were having a mail server meltdown at work, so he would try to get there by the end with the cake, but there were no promises.  This was exceptionally more chaos than we typically have to deal with for a meeting, but it definitely meant the night was starting off off balance, and we were just working to try to get it back on track.

As the meeting was about to start, Bruce Locke interrupted and got up and said a few words about how much he and others appreciated the efforts I’ve put into the group.  He then presented me with a set of gift certificates to our local beer mecca, that a number of members had gotten together and pitched in on.  I was really really touched by that.  While this is a labor of love, it’s very energizing to have such a tangible gesture of how much it means to others.

The talk was great.  Thor worked well off the borrowed slides, and we had a lot of great questions from the audience.  Sahana is a great project, and really demonstrates how much of an impact we can have on people’s lives as members of the open source community.  Sahana is actively being used right now in Haiti and Chile to handle the aftermath of their recent earthquakes.  We had at least one new face in the room, who had first attended our meeting last month virtually (over the live stream), and had come out for the face to face meeting.  As that was exactly what I was trying to get out of the streaming, I’m really glad it seems to be working.

I was given another comment of appreciation from the floor when I let folks know about the upcoming meetings we had locked and loaded for the year.  It is hard to get that far out ahead on the schedule, and it was great that everyone seemed to really be excited about our upcoming meetings.

The cake… was not a lie.

Pat showed up about 7:40 with the cake, just a few minutes after the lecture had ended.  We had people hanging out and chatting until 8, then 15 folks came out of the palace afterwards.  We had great conversation that went until 11.

As I was driving home, I thought to myself how perfect that all had really been.  Good people, a great talk, and lots of good conversation.  Really… just perfect.

Under the circumstances, you would never know that Americans living in the United States were in vanishingly little danger from terrorism, but in significant danger driving to the mall; or that alcohol, tobacco, E. coli bacteria,
fire, domestic abuse, murder, and the weather present the sort of
potentially fatal problems that might be worth worrying about, or even
changing your behavior over, or perhaps investing some money in. 
Terrorism, not so much.

My love of curling was rekindled, and I got to watch a lot of it during these games.  While it was a bummer that the Americans didn’t do very well, the medal rounds were just incredible. The spontaneous outbreak of “Oh Canada” before the 8th rock of the final end in the men’s gold medal match was amazing.  I didn’t watch much hockey, except for the gold medal match, which was definitely the best game I’ve ever seen.

To me, the most surprising thing of the Olympics was how much x-country skiing was aired, and how much I enjoyed watching it.  The men’s 30 km pursuit was an incredible race.  When I saw they were showing it live, I never thought they’d stick around for the whole thing, but they did.  With the snow arriving this past week, it helped inspire us to get out to Fahnestock for some skiing of our own.

No Olympics will ever be the same to me as the Sydney games, which I got to experience both in person, and with Australian TV coverage that was live 8am – 11pm every day.  However, I really think that with NBC’s use of their cable networks so extensively, we got much closer to that this time around.  I’m hoping that isn’t a one off, and that we see that again in the future.

Once upon a time I bought some 1-wire thermo sensors that I was going to wire that into my computer for data collection.  After the house was hit by lightning, I got far more gun shy about running conductive cables from the outside to a computer.

It occurred to me recently that there was good odds that someone must have figured out to sniff that wireless communication.  These aren’t complicated devices, and Oregon Scientific seems to be letting different generations of sensors work with different generations of head units, implying that they have some pseudo standard protocol.  It would also solve my spark gap problem, as I could gather this data without any wires connected to the sensors.

After some googling I discovered that yes, these devices are operating in the 433 Mhz band, and yes, thanks to the folks at rfxcom, there is a unit out there which will receive this and spit it out in a reasonable usb interface.

Under Linux, this information can be very easily decoded with the heyu program.  This is really more of a command line system for home automation, but it also includes the rfxcom protocol and the decoders for just about everything Oregon Scientific makes.

After plugging in the rfxcom device, it took me about all of 30 minutes to get heyu compiled and configured for my devices.  The first time you run the heyu monitor you’ll actually get big hex strings which are the raw data.  Once you tell heyu what kinds of sensors they are, you’ll get it decoded in much more friendly units.  Here are the relevant lines in the heyu config file:

TTY	dummy
TTY_AUX  /dev/ttyUSB0  RFXCOM
ALIAS Sensor1 A1 ORE_TH1 0xB1
ALIAS Outside A2 ORE_TH1 0x83
ALIAS Sensor3 A3 ORE_TH1 0xCE
ORE_TSCALE Fahrenheit

After configured and running, I now have sensor data being collected continuously:

gallifrey:~> heyu monitor
02/25 21:49:54  Monitor started
02/25 21:50:11  rcva func      oreTemp : hu A3  Ch 3 Temp 58.6F (Sensor3)
02/25 21:50:11  rcva func        oreRH : hu A3  Ch 3 RH 42% (Sensor3)
02/25 21:50:20  rcva func      oreTemp : hu A1  Ch 1 Temp 43.7F LoBat (Sensor1)
02/25 21:50:20  rcva func        oreRH : hu A1  Ch 1 RH 54% LoBat (Sensor1)
02/25 21:50:22  rcva func      oreTemp : hu A2  Ch 2 Temp 34.3F (Outside)
02/25 21:50:22  rcva func        oreRH : hu A2  Ch 2 RH 87% (Outside)

The next steps here are going to be gathering this into something that I can use for graphing.  I’ve now got all the sensors I was looking for to be able to build my better thermostat brain.  Next steps will be tying this all together and starting my graphing.

I came up with the following snippet of jquery to highlight bad links and images client side so that editors would realize they needed to do something about them:

So every time we find a link or image that starts with an absolute url to one of the addresses the site has had inside the content block, we highlight it. This has been incredibly effective so far in catching some things I didn’t even realize was an issue.  This with the combo of drupal’s broken link detector internally is helping us ensure the content is consistent prior to launch.

As you can see, you will get to throw stones, which is just awesome.  This picture is of Pyg, one of the members of our Poughkeepsie contingent that came out out for the open house in 2006, we ended up taking a 2 week course, which was brilliant.  They seem to be running things a bit earlier this time around, I suspect in hopes of getting more play in for people before they close down the clubhouse for the year.

If you have any interest in Curling, you should check it out.

Listening to the sine-wave speech sound again produces a very
different percept of a fully intelligible spoken sentence. This
dramatic change in perception is an example of “perceptual insight” or
pop-out. We have argued that this form of pop-out is an example of a
top-down perceptual process produced by higher-level knowledge and
expectations concerning sounds that can potentially be heard as speech:

There are audio samples at their website which demonstrate this.  It’s really neat to hack your perception.

To those familiar with the science and the IPCC’s work, the current
media discussion is in large part simply absurd and surreal.
Journalists who have never even peeked into the IPCC report are now
outraged that one wrong number appears on page 493 of Volume 2. We’ve
met TV teams coming to film a report on the IPCC reports’ errors, who
were astonished when they held one of the heavy volumes in hand, having
never even seen it. They told us frankly that they had no way to make
their own judgment; they could only report what they were being told
about it. And there are well-organized lobby forces
with proper PR skills that make sure these journalists are being told
the “right” story. That explains why some media stories about what is
supposedly said in the IPCC reports can easily be falsified simply by
opening the report and reading. Unfortunately, as a broad-based
volunteer effort with only minimal organizational structure the IPCC is
not in a good position to rapidly counter misinformation.