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July 31, 2003
Airline Searching
Looking online today, I found a rather interesting article (and here) discussing the benefits of the airline profiling mechanism used in CAPPS (Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening) versus sheer mathematical statistics. The article cites a paper by two MIT graduate students (Samidh Chakrabarti, 23, and Aaron Strauss, 22) who claim that using random searches would prove to be statistically more accurate, and proceed to prove this through a series of mathematical equations.
My favorite part of the article comes from the review by Doug Laird, one of the architects of the CAPPS system. His statements to defend the system are classic denial, falling back towards "the information is classified." While the MIT students may have made assumptions, it sounds like their mathematics are not. The real problem is that we, the public, are unable to check, and as such Mr. Laird's statements are unsubstantiated.
Read the article, it's worth your time.
Posted by Dan at 10:35 PM | Comments (0)
Temporary Housing Found
With the immanent need to relocate the machine that houses my servers, there's been a stop gap solution put into place for now. The move happened yesterday, as such I may be slightly unstable for a day or two DNS wise, while everything evens out.
In other news today, I picked up a 256 MB USB drive, and have promptly begun to format it with EXT3 file system. The catch of course on this has been all this has occurred under OS X. Yep, I'm back to work hacking on file systems again. Oddly enough, I've come to really enjoy the USB drives, despite my initial dislike towards them. Lots of really dumb but fun uses for them.
[EDIT: Sorry about that, it seems Kung Log or MT somehow borked that last post.]
Posted by Dan at 03:53 PM | Comments (0)
July 29, 2003
Lack of Updates
No I haven't forgotten about my tutorial for the new ODBC PHP stuff, and no it's not that I've fallen off the face of the earth. Been rather busy actually just getting life in order, and trying to find a new host for my server. Once this is all done, and the move will be happening in 24-48 hours, I'll be back to posting on a more regular basis. Stay tuned for a few more days, some of the things to be posted:
odbc_connect()
odbc_set_env()/odbc_get_env()
odbc_set_connect()/odbc_get_connect()
Elevator Madness part 3
Posted by Dan at 03:45 PM | Comments (0)
July 25, 2003
Colocation and hosting
Anyone happen to know a relatively low cost colocation provider to suggest? I need a single static IP, and about 40kbps of bandwidth (can be made less). The challenge becomes the case, the machine is in an ATX tower only, not a U mountable system.
Posted by Dan at 04:07 PM | Comments (4)
July 18, 2003
Phrase of the Day
"Jumpin Jesus on a pogo stick!"
I've now heard someone use this phrase in an actual conversation, and that pushes the humor value that much further up.
Posted by Dan at 02:02 PM | Comments (0)
July 16, 2003
Mozilla
Mozilla has redesigned their main page. I actually like the new redesign, but find it slightly humorous. Underneath the splash page, everything still looks like the old site. A metaphor for the new Mozilla Foundation and it's completeness? I certainly hope not.
With the whole Mozilla Foundation change, I've learned just how little people really don't believe in Mozilla. Having worked on embedding it for interactive television for awhile (in the pre-1.0 headache days), Mozilla gained a special place in my heart. Not just for being a nifty browser, but also for being one of the biggest headaches to work upon, a constantly moving target, and most importantly with some talented people who REALLY know their C++. I still follow a lot of the work, despite the fact that I don't commit code back. I especially like Camino and the work that Mike Pinkerton and company are doing on that.
Oddly enough, it seems that I will be rekindling my torrid love affair with Mozilla development in the near future. My current job has me working towards adding some functionality in the EROS operating system. One of the eventual goals is to prove that a web browser can and will work in a system developed through strong security and capability authorization. It's so far proving to be a daunting task, especially when the tools needed to use (i.e. OpenCM) aren't fully operational all the time.
Back to the original point, JD and I had a brief conversation over the effects of AOL dropping Netscape, and the creation of the Mozilla Foundation. The viewpoint from someone who doesn't follow the development is really interesting, in that the public perception seems to be that AOL is funding Netscape which is funding Mozilla. While not entirely false, it's not completely true either. Much of the Mozilla development team has slowly moved from paid employees over to volunteers like any other open source project. I guess this is going to be the first big hurdle for the MozFo to overcome, the perceived death blow to the Mozilla browser.
The second big hurdle is, of course, gaining a substantial foothold in the browser market. The fact that IE 6 is the last free IE, won't hurt this cause. The $200-$300 upgrade price for a browser will be a good bit of a slow down on all things IE releated, but doesn't really address the next problem. Do consumers really care what browser they use? Initial guess, nope they don't. The challenge here is to now make websites standards compliant that will break in IE, but not Mozilla (or potentially Opera/KHTML). A few early adopters might follow this, but getting big companies to buy this idea and cross the chasm will be near impossible. Biggest advantage right now, IE won't be update for another 1+ year(s). Lets hope the MozFo doesn't drop the ball on this oppertunity.
Posted by Dan at 08:49 AM | Comments (0)
July 15, 2003
Links
To those of you who may have linked to this website in the past, it's probably broken. I spent sometime today (while installing Panther) to correct the URI's for the archives. In the past they weren't exactly to spec, and while they worked, it resulted in many 404 errors for browsers that did not automatically HTMLize a space character. James Cox sent me a URL about another site that accomplished exactly what I was trying for, only the were successful with the archive URLs and I wasn't. Turns out the big difference is to use the dirify option and not the urlencode option for Moveable Type. What an odd notion.
Posted by Dan at 04:51 PM | Comments (1)
Panther ODBC Administrator
I received my developer preview cds in the mail yesterday for Panther, and began the process of backing up, installing, and instantly cursing myself for doing so. While Panther is probably a step in the right direction for a lot of things, I wouldn't suggest using it for daily desktop functionality yet. More importantly Apple didn't fix one glaringly obvious sore point: ODBC Administrator.
Despite the fact that OpenLink Software has an extremely well designed, written, and executed application to do this very service (for free too!) Apple continues to deliver this abomination of software suggesting that it is somehow usable! I really find it unbelievable that a company so focused on form / function / aesthetics has allowed a piece of custom software that is just non-intuitive to be released and continued to be released.
Best bet now is to write to Apple and request that this be fixed. Even if you aren't using ODBC for anything, it would be wise for Apple to at least make itself consistent! So write your Apple reps requesting this be corrected!
On the other hand I found this paragraph really interesting on Apple's web page:
Panther will include a final X11 window server for Unix-based apps, improved NFS/UFS, FreeBSD 5 innovations as well as support for popular Linux APIs, IPv6 and other important acronyms.
The emphasis is my own, but the you get the gist (look under the Unix-lover Heaven section).
Posted by Dan at 04:36 PM | Comments (1)
PHP ODBV Environments
In the past, one of the big issues with using an ODBC system via PHP has been the ability to control the environment. Many features and functionality disappear when a developer no longer can set a permanent cursor type, scroll length, or insert random other option here. Strangely enough, PHP has been able to work fairly successfully without such functionality for a substantial time, but it's becoming apparent that this functionality will need to be added (witness the use of the Microsoft cursor). As such, I would like to introduce to you the new (but not yet improved) function:
odbc_env()
odbc_env() will take a series of parameters in an array and attempt to set them based upon a key/value system in the array. It will not report any errors back though at this time, and just run through the entire list. Yuck! WTF? How can you do that you say? Well, I haven't figured out a better solution. In cases where the second of 30 or so options fail, do I not make the environment? What if the option exists on only some platforms and not others?
The return value of this function is a handle to the ODBC environment, which you can use to do a variety of functions now. For example:
odbc_set_env_attr()
odbc_get_env_attr()
odbc_data_source()
odbc_connect()
The biggest part of this function is that you actually do not need to even know this functionality exists. If you've been using ODBC fairly happily all along without any problems, you can safely ignore this functionality and not notice any service degradation.
Posted by Dan at 07:01 AM | Comments (0)
July 14, 2003
TIA Gone?
Wired News has an article today that says the {Total|Terrorism} Information Awareness is now dead thanks to legislation. This has just made my day that much better.
[Edit: s/Act/Awareness oops!]
Posted by Dan at 10:59 AM | Comments (0)
July 11, 2003
PHPs New ODBC
In the past I've threatened to re-write large portions of the ext/odbc system for PHP. A little while back, I decided to finally shut up and begin the re-write. A few things have changed since that initial email, and, hopefully, over the next few days I'll be able to highlight some of the changes and discuss how they will effect the everyday PHP/ODBC user.
Today's topic of interest: Database support
At this time I intend to fully drop support for native driver interfaces. Why? A couple of reasons come to mind.
First, the biggest of which, is that I have no way to test on database X. I don't see any real reason why any of the changes being made won't be supported by an ODBC v 3 compliant interface, but I will not make that assertation blindly.
Second, the purported speed increase in many of the more mainstream commercial databases is not entirely correct. In fact many would call this a flat out database myth. Ken North performed a rather detailed examination of speed differences between Oracle 8/9 native interfaces and ODBC interfacing (via Data Direct). Oddly enough this information is in direct conflict with the testing results Georg Richter and I have collected through MyODBC on a MySQL database which showed ODBC to be significantly slower (code maturity?).
In any case, the final result (as I read it) from this research is that while there are sections each is marginally better at, the overall effect is that neither is significantly better performance wise. As such this leaves me, the developer, with the convience factor, or better known as the least amount of work I need to do to make things happy. All signs point towards a Driver Manager only world, much along the lines of the Perl DB interface.
Third, it seems to me rather odd to support a native interface for a technology that is designed to work as a non-native interface. While not a technical reason at all, in an odd way it makes sense to me.
As I see right now there are three major ODBC Driver Managers to support; Microsoft, OpenLink Software's iODBC, and unixODBC. If you have another you think should be supported, please let me know via comments, email, or a TrackBack.
Posted by Dan at 09:47 AM | Comments (0)
July 09, 2003
More on the Phone
It seems Alex Salkever of Business Week magazine is starting to catch onto the fact that Baby Bells are rapidly dying. He recently wrote an article singing the praises of the new iChatAV system, mostly with regards to the high quality audio that can be achieved through the system on even narrowband connections.
Oddly enough he seems to believe that this technology will replace a telephone system, a point to which I disagree completely. Currently the architecture for Instant Messaging is not suitable for a large scale directory service. More importantly, there is no way to update others of a potentially new screen name you've attained, nor any way to verify the authenticity of whom you are calling. Until these points are solved I don't see IM becoming a serious threat to Baby Bells. Vonage on the other hand does seem like it will be a massive threat. I can only see the iChatAV system providing an inroad for people to discover services like Vonage.
Posted by Dan at 08:03 AM | Comments (0)
July 08, 2003
RFIDs
Don't have much time to write all my thoughts down on this, but wanted to mark it so I could come back later. Timex has apparently introduced a new watch that incorporates the SpeedPass technology. Essentially it's an RFID on your wrist that can be used to track movement of a person. Like I said, not much time now for thoughts, but I'll be sure to post more later on this.Posted by Dan at 05:27 AM | Comments (0)
July 02, 2003
Future Reference
When making an entry to test that a Title has been made URI compliant, ensure that the test case actually isn't compliant. Doh!
Posted by Dan at 02:50 PM | Comments (0)
URIness
It seems that my original attempt at making useful URLs was only half-complete on this site. James pointed out today that my links (on the Recent Entry side of things) were not URI compliant. Odd. Upon inspection he was right, and I began to work towards correcting this. Now for wackiness that is Moveable Type.
I found the entry under "Weblog Config"->Archiving to alter. I set the MTEntryTitle flag to have the encode_url value to 1. This should work on any new input (this post being a test of that theory), but it didn't correct the recent postings problem. With this in mind, I began to search for a way to alter this.
Under the Templates->Main page, I discovered the Recent Entry portion. Setting the encode_url value to one here caused adverse effects. Mainly, the entire URL was repeated twice in the space, while properly escaping the Title portion. This really isn't useful as no file on my backend has a title that consists of "http://" as of yet.
Any readers good with MT hacking have a suggestion?
Posted by Dan at 02:49 PM | Comments (0)
July 01, 2003
A Tearful Departure
It seems that Casady & Green, makers of fine software for the Macintosh, are closing their doors. This is a sad moment for Macintosh users everywhere, as C&G developed some fine software that has made life immensely easier. I still own and use many of their items and have done so for years. Thanks C&G, you will be missed.Posted by Dan at 08:01 PM | Comments (0)
Elevator Madness Part 2
UNITED STATES (Reuters) - A team of programmers has reprogrammed the in-building elevators, only to have had the original settings returned a day later. Elevator users were both shocked and disappointed all within a 24 hour time period.
On Sunday evening a team of dedicated employees discovered the secret to corporate wide happiness, and began the implementation phase of a project better known as "Useful Elevator." Within hours of occupying the first floor, the team eventually arrived at the ground floor, beginning work towards restoring what could be considered a sane elevator scheduling algorithm. The insurrection lasted only a few minutes once the appropriate control panel was discovered, and went unnoticed by the on duty night security.
The following Monday employees were greeted with an elevator that arrived promptly when pressing a service request button, and heading in the requested direction. Typical water cooler commentary on the elevator service described it as "snappy", "responsive", and "useful for a first time".
Senior Facilities Management released a press statement declaring the recent behavior in elevator service as "unexpected", and "highly unlikely to continue". "Due to the nature of the service we have yet to be able to identify what exactly has failed in the elevator," explain Charles Johnson. "We are afraid that this new behavior might lead elevator riders to believe that an elevator can operate on a per request system, rather than a sweeping global servicing mechanism as has been used in the past. For this reason, we plan to reset the elevator service after the close of business Monday evening in hopes of restoring the previous, well understood, behavior."
Employees arriving to work early Tuesday morning were greeted with the old familiar long wait times. "It was great while it lasted", said James Huberik. "I rode the elevator all day Monday in disbelief that it worked when I needed it!"
Posted by Dan at 03:27 PM | Comments (0)