Tell me more…

The basic idea: A method of presenting information such that you get as much detail as you need based on how long you read/view the info.

Example one: The Red Sox beat the Orioles last night… the key piece of info is who won.  So one of the smallest versions of this story could be “Red Sox Win.”  Most people will want more – like the score, maybe they didn’t know who they were playing or where… so another version is the obvious “Boston Beats Baltimore 3-1 at Fenway.”

For purely academic discussion: If the news query was “How did the Red Sox do last night?”  The answer could be boiled down to a single bit.  1= They Won, 0 = They Lost. If all I had time for was a single bit – this would be a great piece of information.

Continuing the academic discussion: What if I had time for 2 bits?  Maybe there’s nothing useful in a 2nd bit… or maybe it could be defined as “At home?”  So last nights story in two bits is 11, which translates to “They Won, and they played at home.”

The score and opponent are usually viewed as important pieces, so we have to define how many bits for this info, and we eventually get to a “11111101″ = which breaks down to “They won, at home, 3 to 1 against the 4th team in a list of MLB eastern league teams.  An algorithm could be designed to fit useful info into as few bits as possible.

Back to the big idea – currently we have a very established system of “Head Line” and “Story.”  I’m sure there’s a commonly accepted maximum length for the Head Line – maybe 100 characters, and the Story tends to range from a front page “couple paragraphs” to magazine styled “as much as can be read in a typical bathroom session.”

My idea is to enable an author to write a story such that it can be consumed in almost any size.  The Sports story is easy to define – but where this really hits the fan is international political stories where the audience has a questionable amount of previous knowledge.  Someone very up on their geopolitical events could get a short version, but someone without this background could consume more bits to deepen their understanding.

Weather is another topic that could probably be broken down to the single bit response to “Will it be nice out tomorrow?” to the more complex, “What temperature will it be during school hours?”

iPhone OS3 Upgrade breaks eReader Bookshelf

After upgrading to v3.0 of the iPhone operating system the eReader Pro application can no longer switch what book your reading.  A big problem.  The reader still worked, but if you finished a book (as I did last night) and tried to open another one you’re kinda just lost… it didn’t crash, it just didn’t go to the bookshelf.

To the developer’s credit their company, Fictionwise responded to an email I sent complaining with this:

We apologize for the trouble. A fix is currently in progress. We do not have a definite time for when it will be made available at this time. But it should be soon.

The most surprising thing about the response is that I got it about 5min after sending the complaint. Expected response from this kind of thing is days, not minutes.

I found reports of this problem in a couple places, but only buried in the iTune store application reviews did I find the work around: Delete eReader Pro and re-Install it.  This gives you a chance to open a new book – but has the side effect of deleting all the books you’ve downloaded as well as resetting your application preferences.

Had I got this from fictionwise I would have been much happier.  Ideally I would have liked to find a great big, top of the page kinda support link on their help pages detailing the problem and the work around.

White House "Open for Questions"

Earlier this week the White House unveiled an online system to submit questions to the President and vote on other people submitted questions.  My first reaction was very positive.  I liked the fact that I discovered this as a post in the stream on my FaceBook page.  I was eager to see what kind of technology they would be using for the system.  I have been impressed with the WhiteHouse.Gov web site team’s work ever since they switched it on at exactly 12:00pm on January 20th.

I navigated to the site and was pleased to see it was very responsive and handling what had to be an incredible number of users.  I would like to see their roll out plan and how they ensured it’s scalability.  I signed up for an account and submitted my question in about 5 min.  My question was, verbatim:

How will you prevent gaming of this system? I imagine there are special interests with the technology to get their agenda onto this system – submitting hundreds of votes for the questions they want to appear important etc

In a matter of hours my question received 10 negative votes and 7 positive votes. It didn’t come close to the 5k+ votes that the most popular questions received.

As it turns out, the people at NORML did exactly what I thought would be done.  They rallied their large following online to game the system, and all of the most popular questions in several categories were questions about the legalization of marijuana. 

So I’m a bit disappointed by the White House technology team – they should have seen something like this coming.  I don’t know if there’s an iron clad method to prevent this.  I don’t think it’s even so much a technology problem.  I am also not faulting NORML in this – as they did exactly what they were supposed to do.

The only idea I have that might help is less anonymity  in the system.  In this particular instance it might have prevented people from publicly stating their position on the marijuana issue – but more importantly, if you can tie the voting system to real people you can prevent the “multiple votes” problem, which I suspect was the case here.

There is some technology that might help as well, like the fully open online voting system called Helios.  It’s a system that uses pretty standard computer security techniques to enable people to submit votes secretly but still verify that their vote was used in the final tally.  I don’t propose that such a system be used to the point where every person who votes does the math to verify their vote was counted – but the existence of such a technique in the system would ensure that someone could audit the election, and anyone questioning the validity could do so. 

Helios doesn’t solve the “one vote per person” problem, but I believe it could be used in conjunction with some other system to do so.  What that other system will look like I have some ideas about – but it opens up privacy and indenty theft issues that mass media has convinced people are more important than things like participation in government.

Voice Synthesizer

Played with a bunch of these when I was a kid – figuring out ways to make them swear mostly – but this one is the best I’ve heard.

I used it to updated my voice mail greeting.

I have to assume the developers tested it a bit with this one.

Cannot find dnssd.dll

Trying to get an airport express back up and running after mucking around with the house wifi network (got a new router etc.)

I installed the apputil program from Apple that let’s a windows machine manage the airport express devices – and it installed fine, but when I launched it I get an error message reading “cannot start – cannot find dnssd.dll”

Called apple support – and the promptly discovered I was not longer eligible for phone support – so I played the transfer game and got some software support guy named Paul who was very nice, but said they’d had a big meeting just that day about not giving out free support (he phrased it much better) – we joked about Mr. Jobs, to which he replied, “Yes, he is in Sick Bay.”  And I hung up with my problem unsolved, but not unhappy.

Much more web surfing later (I did some googling before resorting to the dreaded real support people) I discover that dnssd.dll is something that gets installed with iTunes.  So I installed iTunes on the Wife’s computer without asking her… and… (it’s installing now, I’ll update this if there’s an update)

Success!  If you are installing the airport express util app and get the dnssd.dll error – you need to install iTunes.  I suppose the apple devs didn’t imagine someone would want to manage an airport device without iTunes installed.  Go figure.

Kids MP3 player list

01 Don’t Know Why.mp3
01 Upside Down.mp3
02 Bohemian Rhapsody.m4p
03 Barbie Girl.mp3
03 Grade 9.mp3
03 Satellite.mp3
04 Linus And Lucy.mp3
05 Christmas Time Is Here.mp3
05 Stash.mp3
06 If I Had Eyes.mp3
07 Ants Marching.mp3
07 Jingle Bells.mp3
07 Skating.mp3
08 If I Had $1000000.mp3
09 Silver Bells.mp3
14 Spider Pig.m4p
They Might Be Giants) – Particle Man.mp3

Voted: 3min 22 seconds

I started my iPhone stop watch when I got in line behind 5 other people, and stopped it when I stepped out of the voting area.  Pretty slick show they’re running.  This was at 10:10am.  I tried to hit after the morning rush and before lunch break rush.

My blog rated "Junior High School" reading level

Airport Express

Bought an airport express a few weeks ago to get iTunes music into the media room.  I was hoping it would be a “plug it in and it’ll work,” but it wasn’t.  I had the flashing amber light.  I tried a number of things, searching for answers online etc, but to no avail.  Yesterday I called apple support, got right through, and got my question answered.  I was trying to set it up from a hard wired computer – so it wasn’t seeing it.  I plugged the airport directly into the computer and was able to set it up.  Now I’ve got the entire grateful dead library available on the main speaker system.  Kudos to apple support – really top notch get the problem solved right away kinda response.  I guess a dig to the online support, as I couldn’t find the answer there.

Home Climate Server

We’re moving in a couple of weeks to a house with oil heat – which has me worried about heating costs.  I’d like to be able to manage the heating of the house via a climate server that has internet access.

The mimimul functionality this server will need is temperature readings from various parts of the house and control over the furnace valves that control where the heated water goes that heats these areas.

The next level of complexity comes with a weather monitoring station with data available to the server (like this one) that can provide exterior temperature information.  I would like to use this to predict how much it will cost to keep the house at a specific temperature on a specific day.

The server will surely be online – with access to forecast model predictions of expected temperatures.  I would like to use this in the modeling of the household environment and predicting heating costs.

Another layer of complexity comes in with the central air conditioning system – which has two compressors outside the house.  Balancing these two units such that the optimal cooling is achieved would be something I would like to monitor and control on the server.

Eventually I like the whole thing to be driven not by a clock (morning vs. night), or even a weekly schedule (weekend vs. weekday) – but to be tied directly to the family calendar, such that heating and cooling needs are specifically spelled out – and a house based use case like:

• M@ is working at home today
• SuzShe is working the morning and coming home with the Boy at 2pm
• The Girl gets off the bus at 3pm
• Red Sox game is at 7:05pm

Would be stacked up against a hypothetical weather forecast

• 55deg at 8am
• 75deg at 12pm
• 65deg at 5pm
• Mostly cloudy in the morning
• Overcast in the afternoon

Would be balanced with the

• current temperature
• the relative “cost” of heating/cooling various rooms in the house

And could potentially not just control the heating and cooling systems with control outputs like

• 6am-9am upstairs at living temperature
• 7am-6pm office at living temperature
• 2pm-6pm kitchen at living temperature
• 3pm-6pm playroom at living temperature
• 7pm-10pm media room at living temperature
• 7pm beer storage at beer serving temperature
• 7:30pm upstairs at sleeping temperature
• 8pm red wine storage at bordeaux serving temperature

And the data would be presented in such a way we could see things like

• M@ should work in the basement until noon, saving $8 in climate control
• The children should do their homework in the media room, saving $3 in climate control
• Dinner should be cooked on the grill and eaten outside on the West edge of the deck, saving $1 in climate control and with a 82% chance of seeing a good sunset

And the really advanced piece of programming would spit out things like:

• Today’s climate control cost is estimated at $14.
• Working from the office is estimated to cost an additional $4.
• The pool party you declined to goto at Vader’s house would have saved you $8.20 in climate control

I’d also like the system to warehouse data, so I can perform query’s that might tell me that running an electric space heater in my new office will be more efficent than burning oil.  I will definatly be interesteed in how much a pellete burning stove could save on our heating – but only after knowing how our daily heating needs fluctuate.  What I’d really like to produce is data supporting a geo-thermal heating system.

Pie-in-the-sky uses include having our family menu detail if we are sitting in the dining room, the kitchen island or (gasp) eating in front of the TV and controlling the interior climate appropriatly.

And now I must pack the garage.