/dev/null/kevin

Before I Go...

kevin — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 17:38:01 -0700

Just a little reminder of my proudest blogging moment here at Sun.

That's all folks! Follow me at http://devnullkevin.blogspot.com

Today

kevin — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 09:44:55 -0700

Today is my 19 year anniversary at Sun.

It's also my last day.

Thanks to all my friends.

If you like this blog, it will continue at http://devnullkevin.blogspot.com/

Bye!

What Sports Are Like When You Don't Care

kevin — Wed, 9 Jul 2008 19:11:32 -0700

Here is how different sports appears to people who don't care about that sport:

Soccer (Fútbol)

kick, kick, kick, out of bounds, kick, kick, kick, whistle, kick, announcer gets excited!, nothing happens, kick, kick...

GOOOOOAAAALLLLLLL!!!!

kick, kick, kick....

American Football (pro)

Kickoff, commercial, 3 seconds of play, wait, talking, 3 more seconds of play, more talking, commercial, another commercial, game recap...

TOUCHDOWN!!!

40,000 replays of touchdown, commercial, kick off, commercial, play, play, play, punt, commercial, halftime, naked boob!, quick cut to commercial...

Baseball

Pitcher stares, shakes his head, more staring, more spitting, steps off mound, spits, grabs crotch, commercial.

Commercial for jock itch powder. Viewer fights urge to spit and grab own crotch.

Basketball

First 47 game minutes: Walking, passing, scoring, whistles, scoring...

Gatorade commercial. Nike commercial. Michael Jordan's underwear commercial.

Last game "minute": Timeout, whistle, free throw, foul, timeout, free throw, foul, timeout, free throw, timeout, commercial... (88 real minutes pass)

Hockey

Guys skate left.

Guys skate right.

Puck no where to be found.

squint, clean glasses, nope - still no puck.

Conclude that the puck must be invisible!

NASCAR

♫ The cars on the track go 'round and 'round, 'round and 'round, 'round and 'round... ♫

♫ The commercials on TV say beer and trucks, beer and trucks, beer and trucks... ♫

♫ The people in the stands have bright red necks, bright red necks, bright red necks... ♫

Horse Racing

Hype, interviews, hype., ladies in big hats, hype, interviews, profiles, filler... (3 hours)

Race! (2 whole minutes)

Interviews, filler, replays, filler, filler, filler... (2 hours)

Golf

Soft, whispering voices lulling you to sleep.

Ah... sleep...

Zzzzzzz...

Olympics

Hype, interviews, hype, Americans, Americans, Americans, hype, interviews, American national anthem, medal count.

Americans.

Cricket

Is that a batter or a goalie?

Bowler? What? Is he trying to pick up a spare now?

Wild pitch!

Days?! This game lasts days?! I am out of here!

Why You Should Care About Twitter Spam

kevin — Mon, 7 Jul 2008 17:39:22 -0700

If you don't care about Twitter then stop reading.

A while back I posted that Twitter needs to delete the follow-spammers. There were three kinds of responses:

Agree!

Disagree!

Then follow me on Twitter out of spite.

"Why should I care? It doesn't bother or affect me."

BTW, one of the comments from that post left a great link to Stop Twitter Spam! Check it out for lots of details.

For the "It doesn't affect me, why should I care?" crowd, here is your answer: It does affect you.

Let me first acknowledge that, yes, this is all Twitter's problem, and they need to fix it. But it is also our problem and we should assist where we can. Twitter, after all, is a social service so we must behave like social creatures. A community is always stronger as a whole.

If you saw an arsonist lighting a fire would you try and stop them and/or put out the fire? Or would you just say that this is the fire department's problem and ignore it? Would you at least report the fire? Would it make a difference if the fire was near your house or favorite winery?

If Twitter matters to you -- has value to you -- then you should care that your service could go away if Twitter can't fix the problems. Are you just willing to jump to the next service, like plurk, FriendFeed or identi.ca? If you are then you are forgetting that the value of Twitter is not the technology, but the social network itself that you've created. Just because you are willing to switch to a different network doesn't mean that your other friends all will. You won't be able to rebuild what you had. It will be different, even if the underlying technology is better. Remember that Twitter itself had no value until it reached a critical mass. Twitter also has many useful tools built on top of its API. Those tools also go away.

Thus, if you think that the follow-spammers don't affect you then you are wrong. Even if they don't send you messages they are breaking the service that you use. They are also making it more difficult for the Twitter staff to fix the problem if they are dealing with outages all of the time.

Finally, there is a new wrinkle to this story. Since the whole point of follow-spammers is to ultimately get followed themselves (so you see their spam), the spammers have added retweeting to their arsenal of tricks. What they are doing is taking normal tweets from the public timeline, or from people they are follow-spamming, and retweeting the text, plus their spam link. This gives them the illusion of being a legitimate user and of having "meaningful" content, and that increases their hit chances. How does this affect you? They could be retweeting your posts.

Do you want the picture you sent of your child linked to porno-spammers site? If anyone does a google (or summize) search they would be linked together, forever, along with you since you never blocked them as a spammer.

So, bottom line: everything affects you in a social network, so you should care.

Condiment Crappy Graph

kevin — Mon, 7 Jul 2008 15:46:55 -0700

I redid this old post as a Crappy Graph:

Chuism: Political Options

kevin — Wed, 2 Jul 2008 10:36:42 -0700

Chuism: Wisdom passed down from my father.

Chuism #3: Political Options

This one is short, but sweet. I'm just going to quote him verbatim.

"Democrats want to make the poor richer. Republicans want to make the rich richer. Both of them want to do it by making me poorer, and I'm supposed to pick which is best?"

aka, the lament of the ever-shrinking middle class. Two-class system, here we come, America!

80s Street Cred: I Haz It.

kevin — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 13:23:58 -0700

This cnet review of Lasonic i931 ipod "dock" is hilarious. You can see the little ipod nano in the tape cassette bay.

Update: Link fixed! Here is a second link in case that one goes bad. No commercial, either.

San Bruno Mountain Fire Pictures

kevin — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 09:47:47 -0700

Here are pictures my step dad took of the San Bruno Mountain fire, located just south of San Francisco. He is a guide for the area so it's very sad to see it go. Still, as an environmentalist, he knows that fire is part of a rebirth process so he's looking forward to the renewal and regrowth process once things are under control.

Google Docs FAIL!

kevin — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 09:26:17 -0700

While uploading a spreadsheet to Google Docs I got this error:

We were unable to upload this document because of this error:

conversion request did not return an error or a new document

This error message comes from the converter we're using, and hopefully tells you what you need to know to fix the problem.

That's one of the worst error messages I've ever seen. I'm surprised they didn't draw it on a blue background. The fact that they suggest that it could actually be helpful is just insulting.

In spite of that error message, I was able to track down the legal thing I was doing and remove it.

On to actually using the spreadsheet. I updated a few numbers and then tried to resort some rows.

FAIL.

I cannot sort by number. I can only sort A-Z or Z-A. Are you kidding me? Do they really expect that people won't use numbers in a spread sheet?

I also cannot sort just a range of rows, unless I only want them sorted by column A. The only was to sort by any other column is to sort the entire sheet. Yes, I can freeze some of the top rows, but if there are any rows I don't want sorted, I am SOL.

It just might be possible to do these things, but I can't figure it out. Maybe it's just a UI fail, but I don't think so.

One more thing I never thought I'd have to reboot...

kevin — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 21:04:05 -0700

One more thing I never thought I'd have to reboot: my keyboard.

Check out the Optimus Maximus keyboard. Each key has a 48x48 OLED display that is fully programmable.

The best part: only US$ 1,800.00. Bargin!

The Spoilening

kevin — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 09:07:02 -0700

To all movie reviewers: you are not as clever as you think.

Yes, I hate spoilers [1 2], so I had to rant on yet another case of blatant spoilers contained in movie reviews from professionals who are supposed to know better. If you haven't seen The Happening (and I hear, you shouldn't, because it's really bad) then I'll bet that you, like me now, already know the movie's plot twist.

Watching Ebert and Roeper: At the Movies, they made a little "clever" joke that gave it all away. Roger Ebert himself (who isn't on the TV show anymore) gave it away in his printed review, as did the New York Times. These are four top movie reviewers with huge audiences, not some punk blogger, so why are they just giving away this plot twist? I'm no fan of M. Night Shyamalan, but even a bad movie doesn't deserve to be spoiled.

I had to laugh at this statement from the NY Times reviewer:

"I won’t say too much about the gimmick that Mr. Shyamalan has come up with this time around..."

Dude, too late! Seriously, the last half of that sentence is a spoiler, as was the frigging title of your review.

I'm not putting any links here so if you track down their reviews then you're inflicting the spoiler damage on yourself. Plus, they don't need the huge bump in traffic from being dev-null-kevin'ed.

Update: If you don't mind this particular movie being spoiled for you, then I recommend this "spoilerrific" review of The Happening. via Molly Wood.

Chuism: The Law of Pre-Fallen Objects

kevin — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 10:33:33 -0700

Chuism: Wisdom passed down from my father.

Chuism #2: The Law of Pre-Fallen Objects

This law is subtitled, "You can't fall off the floor." I added that last part, making this a multi-generational Chuism. In short, it means something can't fall if it's already "fallen." i.e. Just assume something is going to fall and put it, gently, on the ground before gravity does it for you (and less gently).

This law originated with packing stuff into the car. When moving or shopping my mom would load things into the car and put them in precarious places. My dad would take one look at everything and reposition it all so that the bouncy car ride home wouldn't destroy half of what we'd bought.

The law really applies to putting things on the seats of your car. It just takes one emergency stop to send it all crashing to the floor. Items especially susceptible to this were:

Flowers in vases or other wedding center pieces

Fish in bowls (yes, this happened)

That tuna casserole for a potluck

Me and my sister (pre-seatbelt era)

These days you could probably add laptops to the list.

I learned the "you can't fall off the floor" part again from my college drinking days. Better to pass out on the floor than a bunk bed. Just saying.

When I'm King... Part 2

kevin — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 09:45:02 -0700

... all car alarms will be illegal, especially this one:

Personally, I hate this particular one so much that if I ever do see someone stealing a car with this alarm I'm going to help them. Hey Buddy, need a hand there? Got money for gas? Buckle up! Remember, safety first. Bye!

The Pickle Makes it Southern

kevin — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 17:34:37 -0700

A recent tweet about pickles reminded me about a recent trip to Arby's. They were advertising a "Southern Chicken Sandwich." My wife got one and she ended up with a tiny sandwich consisting of the following:

tiny bun

tiny fried chicken patty

mayo

pickles

Arby's Southern Chicken Sandwich

We weren't sure where the "Southern" part came from. Maybe we are just ignorant Yankees, so was it the pickle?

Soon afterwards I saw an adversisement for McDonald's Southern Chicken Sandwich. It, too, consisted of just chicken and pickle. I was sensing a pattern.

McDonalds's Southern Chicken Sandwich

So, I put down my copy of William Shatner's book, Get a Life, and went to google "southern chicken pickle" to see if, indeed, the pickle is the key to making a Southern Chicken Sandwich. What I found where two blog postings [1, 2] mentioning that McDonalds was ripping off Chick-Fil-A's southern chicken sandwich. Ah ha! (Arby's didn't make their RADAR).

Chick-Fil-A's Southern Chicken Sandwich

Again with the pickle.

I don't get to the south much, nor even to the few Chick-Fil-As in California. The first time I saw their name I pronounced it "chick-FILL-ah." Can someone tell a dumb Yankee why the pickle makes it Southern?

Update: Pulled from the comments, it's a NY Times story on the chicken-pickle sandwich wars.

Introducing Chuisms: The Last Tuna Can

kevin — Mon, 9 Jun 2008 13:46:59 -0700

My dad, as dads are want to do, has passed down years of fatherly advice. Some of it actually makes sense - more as I get older. So, for the benefit of mankind, I will be repeating some of his better gems. I even added a new blog catagory! For the record, he is a distinguished hardware engineer at Agilent (by way of H-P), although I still had to show him how to use the remotes for his new plasma TV setup.

Chuism #1: The Last Tuna Can

This metaphor stems from living in the woods with raccoons who would knock over our garbage cans looking for food. There would be a huge pile of garbage that needed to be placed back in the cans. We would clean over half of the mess, but it would still look like a huge pile of garbage. In fact, it would look like we had made no progress at all. It wasn't until the last tuna can was placed back in the trash that the area looked clean again.

I've taken this as a metaphor for measuring progress of any task, from programming from weight loss. It's easy to spend lots of effort but see little tangible results, and that can be demotivating. The Last Tuna Can rule is just a way of reminding myself to not get discouraged and to keep pressing on. The results will come if you don't give up. The code will work once you pushed through the debugging, and the GUI will look nice once it's been properly skinned. The home remodel project will be less chaotic once you've cleaned up the mess, and the weight will start to drop once you've conditioned your body to do so.

It's also a reminder that there are other ways of measuring progress. For example, we would look inside the garbage can to see our progress, and that provided some confirmation that we really were making progress. It is important to find something to help make sure that you are not wasting your effort. Perseverance is good, but you also don't want to be a damned fool about it either. You can only say "stay the course" for so long without any kind of results (yes, that's a jab at certain political figures).

Also, get garbage cans with lockable lids.

Bait and Switch News Headlines

kevin — Fri, 6 Jun 2008 12:49:14 -0700

Catchy headlines are the surest way a newspaper can get people to read a story. I use the exact method on this blog. There should, however, still be some meat to the story/post, else you become The Boy who Blogged "Wolf."

Take this headline, for example:

Feinstein Gives Details On Secret Clinton-Obama Meeting

Wow! Secret details! I must read this story.

Here are the details:

"I received them. Put them in the living room, two comfortable chairs facing one another and left," Feinstein said. She said there was no staff and no security in the room. Just water for candidates. One person from each campaign sat in a nearby study.

Earth-shattering.

But the true irony is this line:

The California senator refused to give any other details about the conversation.

So in reality, Senator Diane Feinstein didn't give any details.

But that makes for a much less alluring headline.

Clinton and Obama Meet, Reporter Gets Nothing and Likes It!

Crowd-Surfing Drum Solo

kevin — Tue, 3 Jun 2008 12:11:17 -0700

I caught some heat for making fun of Led Zeppelin's recent tour. Thus, it's only fair that I point out when older rockers do something noteworthy.

Checkout Shooting Star's singer crowd-surfing so he can play a timpani solo. Take that, kids! It's about 3:15 into the song.

Twitter Needs to Delete the Spammers

kevin — Thu, 29 May 2008 16:20:51 -0700

Twitter's performance problems are well known. Twitter, and everyone else, are trying to fix the problem. Here is my quick and dirty fix:

Kill the Spammers.

This is not a long term solution, but it may buy twitter some time to really fix the problem.

Twitter spammers don't actually spam, the don't send messages to you. What they do it follow you, and everyone else. Their hope is that you'll investigate their profile and then click on the web link (mine comes here to this blog). It may also boost their search engine ranking, I don't know.

However, this also puts an extra burden on twitter. Twitter's scale problems stem from the fact that the workload increases geometrically as every message people send is forwarded to each follower. The more followers people have, the slower twitter is. The follow-spammers just increase that load. Some of these spammers follow 25,000 people. That's 25,000 extra message each time any of those 25,000 tweet. There are hundreds of follow-spammers, so that's hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of extra tweets.

Again, removing the spammers won't solve any of Twitter's problems, but it might give them some breathing room to work. I think it would be easy to auto-detect most of these spammers. If you follow more than 10,000 people and have less than 1000 followers yourself, you are probably a spammer.

I have blocked some of my more obvious spammers, but I'm not 100% sure this helps. It depends on how Twitter implemented the blocking feature. Hopefully they aren't checking for blocks all of the time and that the block just removed the spammer from my follow list.

I checked the Twitter forums to see if this (seemingly obvious) suggestion has been made, but I didn't have too much time to look. I did find other people who have spammer problems, but I didn't find a discussion about Twitter removing them, or what kind of impact it would have (maybe it's just worth the trouble to them). So, lazyweb, if you know, give me a pointer.

Update 1: I posted my own suggestion to the forum, we'll see what the response it.

Update 2: Twitter has admitted that uses with lots of followers/followees severely tax the system. Then Rober Scoble (with his 20K+ of both) gets "blamed" for the problem. So, I think it's only a matter of time before the spammers get the spot light. To be clear, I don't blame Scoble. He is a legitimate user. Non-human spam listeneres and spam bots can be eliminated to (temporarily) free up resources so Scoble is free to tell us he is safe after earthquakes. It's all still on Twitter's shoulders to fix the scaling problems.

Concall Confusion

kevin — Wed, 28 May 2008 14:49:59 -0700

Imagine being on a conference call with the following international coworkers:

John (male, English pronunciation)
Jon (male, English pronunciation)
Jon (male, Scandinavian pronunciation)
Jan (male, Scandinavian pronunciation)
Jan (female, Scandinavian pronunciation)
Juan (male, Spanish pronunciation)
Jean (male, French pronunciation)
Jean (female, English pronunciation)
Yan (male, Chinese pronunciation)
Yuen (male, Chinese pronunciation)

Good luck! Enunciate well.

TV Filler == TiVo FF Workout

kevin — Thu, 22 May 2008 13:49:12 -0700

It's finale season for reality shows, so that means tons of filler, and time to give your TiVo's fast forward a workout. Who knew it took two hours to read one name off of a card?

Watching these shows really make me love my TiVo even more. The joy of fast forwarding through commercials is nothing compared to the joy of fast forwarding over the Jonas Bothers or some enless montage o' crap.

Sadly, filler is not limited to reality shows. Sports is now loaded with filler. If the game "starts" at 7pm, that means I tune in at 7:45, skip the 15 minutes of pregame hype, and then gradually catch up as I skip the commercials, halftime (more hype) and other fluff. If it's a hockey game, then I get to skip both intermissions!

The events with the most filler, however, are the big horse races. They are nothing but hours of pure filler, followed by two minutes of actually racing, followed by another hour of follow-up filler and pictures of rich ladies in big hats.

Twitter

kevin — Wed, 21 May 2008 16:01:58 -0700

A graphical representation of twitter.

When I'm King...

kevin — Tue, 20 May 2008 13:44:00 -0700

... I will make it illegal for radios to play some sounds you might hear while driving:

Sirens

Cell phone ringing

Car horns

Screeching Tires

People yelling, "Get off the sidewalk, you moron!"

Handicapped Access?

kevin — Mon, 19 May 2008 10:11:25 -0700

Someone please explain this to me.

These wheelchair steps (?) are in the toddler play area at Legoland in San Diego. They continue up about 5 more steps. The first step is high enough for a wheelchair-bound person to lift themselves from their chair to the step, but then what? There must be a real reason for this, but I can't figure it out. I doubt that this is just a mistake.

Update [May 20, 2008]: OK, no responses yet. Maybe someone at Legoland is just really stupid.

CSI: Jump The Shark

kevin — Fri, 16 May 2008 07:11:08 -0700

The CSI armada of shows is sailing in shark-infested waters and each of the shows is jumping them.

CSI: Miami jumped years ago. I stopped watching when I couldn't take the show, or David Caruso, seriously anymore. The only time I see the show is on The Soup, when they make fun of David Caruso.

The original CSI is usually pretty good, but it had a potential shark moment with the episode written by the guys who write Two and a Half Men. That idea doesn't even sound good on paper, so I can only assume it was some bizarre concession made to end the writers' strike.

And while CSI: NY as never been awesome, I watch it when I can. That may change if the New Yorkers don't stop being so Web 2.0 savvy, or at least thinking that they're savvy. It's bad enough when they try to solve crimes in Second Life, but the most recent episode actually featured the following line when tracking down a kidnapped blogger, who continued blog while captured:

I'll create a GUI interface using Visual Basic. See if I can track an IP address.
-- Spoken by Agent Dumbass

Are you freaking kidding me? That is just so wrong on so many levels. I had flashbacks to the magical "Unix GUI" in Jurassic Park. She might as well have said, "I'm going to draw a pretty picture with Crayola Brand crayons."

I could not watch any more after that. I should just delete that episode from my TiVo before those bits corrupt any of my other shows with their lameness.

Update: Look for CSI: Target soon.

Lego Monkey Butt

kevin — Wed, 14 May 2008 09:55:06 -0700

We went to Legoland in San Diego recently and saw sculpture sticking out of a tent.

My first thought was, "Wow, a Lego monkey butt!"

My second thought was, "someone had to make that."

I wonder if they put that accomplishment on their resume:

Legoland - Lead Monkey Butt Builder

His mom must be so proud.

New and Improved CAPTCHA

kevin — Wed, 7 May 2008 13:49:00 -0700

There was a recent story about Google's CAPTCHA being broken. CAPTCHAs are the little tests that websites use to prove the user is a human and not an automated system (spammer). This very blog uses the simple, and easily broken, "add these numbers" test to leave a comment.

Here are my (not serious) suggestions for improved CAPTCHAs:

Use Pop Culture References:

Which character ruined Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace?

A. B. C. D. All of the Above

Answer: D

What internet meme died on April 1, 2008?

Dramatic Hampster

Rick Rolling

LOL Cats

Scientology

Answer: B

Use Song Lyrics:

How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?
The answer is: --> blowin' in the wind

Who ya gonna call?
--> Ghostbusters!
Who's the black private dick that's a sex machine to all the chicks?
--> Shaft!
You're damn right

Who is the man that would risk his neck for his brother man?
--> Shaft!
Can ya dig it?

Who's the cat that won't cop out when there's danger all about?
--> Shaft!
Right on!

You see this cat Shaft is a bad mother--
--> Shut your mouth
But I'm talkin' about Shaft
--> Then we can dig it

Use Trivia:

How Many Licks Does It Take To Get To The Tootsie Roll Center Of A Tootsie Pop?

--> 3

What... is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?
--> African or European?

Use Jeopardy Questions:

Catagory: POTPOURRI

The most undeserving popular blog at blogs.sun.com.

--> /dev/null/kevin

Please phrase your response in the form of a question

--> What the hell is /dev/null/kevin?

Comment approved.

LOLCatrpilr

kevin — Fri, 2 May 2008 07:18:10 -0700

Vogon Poetry or Hockey Excuse?

kevin — Thu, 1 May 2008 13:14:04 -0700

I'm questionable. Got a huge freaking spider bite on my big toe, and I can barely get a shoe on and hobble around at work.
--Chris W.

Thanks to Chris K. for the laugh.

The Deadliest Snack

kevin — Thu, 1 May 2008 12:18:14 -0700

Code Orange! Code Orange! Hazmat teams to Playground One!

When you have a kid in school you learn all about other kids with food allergies. The most common allergies seem to be wheat, dairy and peanuts. Schools are careful that no one is served food they shouldn't eat but some schools actually ban all kids from bring food with peanuts in it.

I have to wonder what the extra zealous schools would think of the following snack: Keebler Cheese and Peanut Butter Crackers. Motto: It's the trifecta of allergens!

And, yes, I'm pretty sure that this isn't so healthy for kids without allergies to be eating, either.

Earth Day Contribution

kevin — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 12:57:05 -0700

For Earth Day, I am retiring my old (and dangerous) Sun Blade 2000. I'm replacing it with a new Ultra 24. Granted, it's not up the drool-worth specs of Rama's system, but it will do for now. I expect my office to be much cooler now (and quieter).

This will also allow me to use the latest xVM Server hypervisor technology, which is good because I'm on the xVM Ops Center team and I need to get some of this stuff to work.