Jay Leno did a bake-off between morse code and text messaging to see which one is faster. Watch it to find out if Motorola will be implementing a morse code SMS input mode on their next phone.

 › technology     2008-04-14 12:14   ...0 comments

Several years back I wrote about Captchas. By now we’re all familiar with them, they’re the little automated “please type these words” tests that websites use to stop automated systems from posing as users.

A very cool new project has popped up called Recaptcha that is getting users to digitize historical books by offering a captcha service to websites. They want digital copies of very old books, and scanning and using OCR (optical character recognition) just produces too many errors. What they do is take images of two words and present them as a captcha all over the net. You type the two words in, they get the help and you prove you’re human. It’s a great solution.

You can use this too. You can use their public “mailhide” api when you need to post your email address online. You post a link to their site and they reveal your real address only if a human correctly answers the captcha. It’s called Mailhide. Here’s my address: c…@orange-carb.org

Learn more about how Recaptcha works over here.

 › technology     2008-03-28 09:15   ...1 comment

Jen is interested in environmental footprinting as a way of analysing environmental costs and benefits of various lifestyles.

Along the same lines, BLDGBLOG has an interesting essay today on the topic of the carbon footprint of internet servers. This is something I haven’t really thought about before, but it is true that even a small server room can pump out a lot of heat. Of course all this heat, and the energy to run the massive cooling systems that have to move it outside, come from electricity which has a fairly high carbon footprint.

One server (particulars not specified) is apparently equivalent to an SUV doing 15 miles to the gallon. One data farm (particulars not specified) uses up to a small city’s worth of power, primarily for cooling. Makes you think about what benefit we are getting for the costs.

ETA: In other news, it turns out that divorce is bad too (for the environment that is).

 › environment     2007-12-03 17:45   ...2 comments

Cholesterol may be the most misunderstood substance in most people’s minds. And it’s all wrapped up with fat.

For years our mothers have been telling us to eat a diet low in fat, with lots of fibre-rich fruits, vegetables and whole grains. The problem with fat is that it has high calories (bad for most urban Canadians) and in the old days we believed that eating fat was a serious cause of heart disease.

In the old days we thought that eating fat boosted cholesterol in the blood, and cholesterol deposits in the bloodstream cause narrowing of the arteries. In the heart’s supply arteries a blockage causes a heart attack. We know that is bad. So we existed for many years with this view: eating fat causes heart attacks.

It’s understandable that people are a bit confused right now, because the view has become a bit more complicated. But it’s not so complicated that you can’t understand it. Just think about it a bit.

There are two types of cholesterol: HDL (we’ll call it good cholesterol) and LDL (we’ll call it bad cholesterol). Having lots of good cholesterol is good, because it cleans up bad cholesterol. You want more good than bad cholesterol, and preferably lots more. If your good cholesterol cleans up the bad cholesterol, then it doesn’t deposit in your arteries, and so you avoid a heart attack.

The evidence for the benefit of good cholesterol is getting stronger every day, to the point that today it was reported that keeping good cholesterol high is important even if you take drugs that artifically lower your bad cholesterol. In other words, it may have benefits beyond just cleaning up.

So where does this leave us with fats? Well, we need to realize that there are four broad classes of fat (for our purposes) and they have different effects on the good and bad cholesterol.

The worst fats are trans fats. They raise your bad cholesterol and lower the good cleaning-up kind. Most are in convenience foods. I try not to eat artificial trans fats at any time, and don’t worry about eating the trace amounts in milk and meat products.

Then comes saturated fats. They raise your bad cholesterol, but also raise the cleaning up good cholesterol. Best to limit them where possible, but I don’t declare war on them.

Unsaturated non-trans fats are the key! Eating unsaturated fats lowers your bad cholesterol and increases your good cholesterol. By doing so they reduce your risk of heart attack.

Of course, unsaturated fats are still high in calories, but as long as you don’t overeat, replacing trans fats with unsaturated fats is the way to good heart health!

 › health     2007-09-27 14:38   ...0 comments

It’s kind of surreal. Beekeepers all over the world are reporting that their bees are dying. They are calling it Colony Collapse Disorder. There is no accepted explanation for this phenomenon, but apart from a few back-page stories in the paper there has not been much discussion of this.

A bee pollinating, from pdphoto.org

An article in the Independent today has two interesting aspects to it. First it presents work related to electromagnetic disturbance of bee navigation. This is relevant to mobile phones because it’s been shown that bees won’t return to a hive if there’s a cell phone nearby. In colony collapse disorder the bees seem to die alone, far from home, so anything that has appeared recently that would confuse their navigation seems relevant.

The second interesting thing is that Bees provide huge amounts of our pollination services in commercial agriculture. According to Wikipedia “the largest managed pollination event in the world is in Californian almond orchards, where nearly half (about one million hives) of the US honey bees are trucked to the almond orchards each spring. New York’s apple crop requires about 30,000 hives; Maine’s blueberry crop uses about 50,000 hives each year.”

The Independant article reminds us that Einstein said: “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years of life left.”

 › environment     2007-04-17 10:50   ...1 comment

Emacs is a pretty good editor. Recently I’ve been hosting a traditional music show and I find myself needing to type accents for Irish and Scottish. This is of course in addition to the french accents I’ve been needing for years.

I use the Mac OS X Terminal application and the system lets me enter accents using dead keys. I hold option and press e to set up an acute accent, then press e again and get é.

This worked in the shell, but did not work in emacs. Now, emacs has lots of different ways to do its own keyboard entry, but I wanted my mac keys to work.

To complicate matters, I use emacs on at least one machine running FreeBSD 4 which does not support UTF-8 encodings (the mac default).

I have had success with the following combination:

Now I can type and paste accented text into the terminal application and thence into emacs. The accents come through OK and seem to save and email OK too!

 › technology     2007-02-12 16:08   ...1 comment

Earlier this week, Erin linked to BLDGBLOG which I have been very much enjoying since that time.

Today, a link for both Jen and Andrew. It seems that original Tudor houses are more energy efficient than modern houses built as replicas.

It’s a link for Jen because of the reference to energy efficient housing. It’s a link for Andrew because it alludes to repair rather than replacement of windows.

ObPhoto: The Elne Cloister

    2006-11-21 15:25   ...1 comment

One day long long ago you may recall sitting in a chemistry class and learning of the ideal gas law. This law states that pV = nRT. The pressure of the gas is given by p, volume by V, the amount of gas n, R is a constant and the temperature T.

Basically if you collapse out the amount and the constant you get an equation that says pV ∝ T. This means that if you increase temperature you also increase volume. If you seal the gas into a space to prevent the volume from expanding you get an increase in pressure instead. The same principle holds for liquids.

Why am I teaching a lesson on thermal expansion you may ask? Well, it is to explain the problem we’re having with our hydronic heating system.

A hydronic heating system has radiators, piping, a pump and a boiler. The boiler is like a BBQ that heats water that is circulated through the piping by the pump. The hot water flows through the radiators, and — through the holy triumvirate of conduction, radiation and convection — heats the house.

Water goes through the rads, and returns to the boiler to be reheated. When the thermostat stops calling for heat then the boiler no longer barbecues the pipes, and eventually the system water cools down and no more heat transfer takes place.

A key point about this system is that it is a closed one. Water stays in the pipes.

Now, we can tie together the first few paragraphs with the last few.

If you heat a liquid it expands. However, the hydronic heating system is full of water and the system is closed. This means that adding heat increases pressure since there is no room for expansion. Too much pressure is a bad thing. As any child who has overblown a balloon will attest to.

The system incorporates an overpressure valve that opens if the water pressure becomes too high. This valve has the positive effect of keeping the system pressure regulated and safe. However, it has the negative effect of making a mess in the basement.

In order to prevent the valve from having to open each time the boiler fires up (in order to relieve the pressure increase caused by thermal expansion) the system is equipped with an expansion tank.

Think of the expansion tank as the plumbing equivalent of a spring or a shock absorber. This tank is sealed, and essentially has a strong balloon inside it. When the water temperature (and hence pressure) increases it compresses the balloon, which then takes up less space and the tank accomodates the larger volume of water. When the water cools the balloon naturally increases in size due to the available space made by the decreasing liquid volume and the system is happy.

If, however, the balloon bursts inside the tank (or becomes deflated) then it no longer provides any cushion. In this circumstance, the tank fills with water and an increase in temperature has nothing to push against and nowhere to go. See above re: mess in basement.

This explains why I need to call a heating contractor tomorrow to blow up a balloon located in a sealed metal tank attached to my furnace.

    2006-10-30 21:40   ...0 comments

By now this will not be news to most readers, but I carry a lot of stress around with me. About a month back, Jen had a little intervention with me on the topic. She pointed out that since she has known me, my stress levels have been on the rise. It’s a bit of a two steps toward the stress one step back kind of scenario, so it hasn’t been a direct trip to stressland… still it’s been adding up.

I did a bit of research into stress manuals and came up with The Relaxation and Stress Reduction Workbook. It turns out to be a bit of a bible on the topic, and it’s been around for more than 25 years. It’s in its fifth edition, recently revised. This is a great book. One that I heartily recommend to pretty much everyone.

It all but says Don’t Panic in
large friendly letters on the cover.

Here’s how the book is laid out. The first two chapters have background information on stress that are common to everyone. The meat of the book follows, in the shape of a chapter with instructions for virtually every known stress reduction technique.

The real value of the book comes in a large chart that lets you match the effects of stress in your life (e.g. back pain, chronic worrying, irritability) to the specific chapters known to help with those effects (e.g. breathing, meditation, refuting irrational ideas, worry control).

The book gives you enough background on each technique to let you understand how and why it will work, and whether it’s for you. It suggests picking 3 or so chapters and trying them out. As with all these kinds of books there is a point where the rubber meets the road and you actually have to work on your issues; the great thing with this book is that by directing you to things that will work you ideally get good results without flailing around too much.

In any case, I’m still at the early stage of this process, but I am hopeful. Several chapters in this book describe me to a tee. I’ll keep you posted.

If you think it sounds like you should read this book, you should. I am seriously thinking about giving these out to people as gifts. No offense, but I know a lot of people like me who could use it.

 › health     2006-07-13 21:17   ...0 comments

Does anyone else out there have trouble estimating walking distances?

For those who know the area: take the walk from my house to Rasputin’s as an example. How long do you think it would take to walk from my house to Rasputin’s?

No, I mean actually. Form an opinion. Then click below.

Read the Complete Entry

    2006-01-29 22:29   ...3 comments

I’ve recently upgraded my speakers and things are sounding fantastic around here at the moment. (Although I am a bit disappointed to discover that I was sold “last year’s model” that in truth was discontinued in 1999, gonna talk to them about that.)

Yesterday my friend Bob came over with a stack of his CDs to check them out for himself. It’s likely to have been an expensive visit for him because he agreed with me about how enjoyable the speakers are.

We listened to probably 30 discs, with a wide range of production values. A handful of those discs were obviously poorly produced and their flaws were laid bare. What was interesting was that those crummy discs were pretty evenly distributed across the time period we listened to… from the old days to today.

Anyway, bad CDs isn’t the point of this blog entry. The point of this blog entry is to discuss the obsession that people seem to have with digital things. My new speakers, for example, have the words digital monitor on the box. These are speakers, folks, they accept an analog signal and produce analog soundwaves. What’s digital about them? Nothing. Why do they say digital on the box? Marketers have decided that its a desirable term.

Anyone who thinks that CD audio is equivalent to an analog recording has never listened to a variety of CD players side-by-side on the same equipment. CD players are an instrument (in the musical sense), and vary in their ability to perform (in the musical sense) the string of numbers on the disc. CDs have many advantages over traditional analog recordings in terms of longevity, and it is true that digital signals are largely due immune to noise (although this is not true in digital devices with poor power supplies, which is most of them). I am not a vinyl purist, I think the tradeoffs made by CDs are good. But I am not onboard with the digitization of broadcasting (e.g. digital radio) which requires ridiculous destruction (compression) of the audio data.

Today I’m listening to CKCU and the audio sounds just as good as if I were listening to those CDs right here in the house or in the studio. Yet, CKCU is broadcasting that signal over the air from 20 km away, and it can easily be received by everyone in a 100 km radius.

Radio signals broadcast in FM are analog signals, and can (in theory) reproduce signals exactly at huge distances. All the subtleties of the buzzing of the pipes, the breath sounds of the singer, the fret noises of the guitar are coming through in fantastic detail. Once decoded into analog by the CD player at the station, this 50 year old technology is beaming a perfect copy of that signal into my house and onto my speakers.

Many people these days are easily satisfied. They purchase 128 kilobit/s recordings from online stores and listen to crummy feeds from around the world. These feeds surely offer an inexpensive and plentiful source of music. From a cultural point of view they are great. But they don’t stand up to good old FM radio for reaching power and good listening.

 › technology     2006-01-29 14:05   ...0 comments

PhoneHerald Broadcast Dialer 1.0 ships today. It has been a very very long week, but I can now announce this publically.

PhoneHerald is designed to place calls automatically for things like appointment reminders, overdue notices, and attendance notifications. It calls folks up, delivers a personalized message and then can accept a response (or even transfer the person to an operator). It’s cool. And it’s a great complement to our existing PhoneValet product that answers calls. (Perhaps we should get the one product talking to the other or something.) This product is a bit more business-focussed than PhoneValet so that’s complementary too.

This has been our smoothest product release ever <touches wood> but even a smooth product release takes a lot out of you. I’m looking forward to some slowing down a bit now.

 › technology     2006-01-09 03:46   ...0 comments

I am listening to Christmas songs in an attempt to start programming Christmas morning’s special edition of Music from the Glen. Maddy Prior’s CD A tapestry of carols has a track called Personent Hodie, a thirteenth century Christmas hymn. I misread this initially as “Persistent Hoodie” which I thought was a strange name for a track.

While doing random searches on the word ‘Hodie’, which I like, I found this interesting story about a Multics latin error message. I love that. The message translates to ‘today unto the Root a brother is born’ and refers to a problem where the root of the filesystem tree has a sibling node (which is impossible, and therefore is a pointer bug).

I think I am going to start writing latin error messages into my code. There is an online translator here.

 › technology     2005-12-20 23:16   ...3 comments

I have been sick for like 10 days now. This is the one period of the year when I really can’t afford to be sick. Pub carols was last sunday and tonight, and I need a clear and strong voice to lead those… I didn’t have it either evening. Yesterday there was a lovely brunch with my cousins, the Finest Kind christmas concert at the black sheep, and dinner with folks after. Then I stayed up until 1:30 getting my radio show ready. Then I woke up early (why, body, why?). Today I did the radio show, two hours of SOCAN paperwork, then pub carols. I am shot. I have been pushing myself hard for even a healthy Colin, so I’ve been masking the cold with a pharmacopœia (yay, ligatures)… now I need to really give myself a rest, let myself be sick, so I can get better. Earlier this week I thought I had licked the cold, but then I had to push start my car in the freezing on Wed night and the cold came back with a vengeance. I took two days off work this week, and I don’t think that after this weekend I’ll be going in tomorrow, either. Whoa. Wah. Poor me. This concludes this whinging missive about my health.

 › health     2005-12-18 19:47   ...3 comments

You’ve heard about cat-5 wiring… how about just leaving the wiring part off.

Here’s a suggestion for using cats to carry wifi signals. (Also some funny comments here in the metaquotes community regarding powering the cats.)

 › technology     2005-11-18 18:34   ...0 comments

Well, I’ve come down with a fall cold this week.

It all started Monday night when I had a huge sneezing fit while watching a movie with Jen. Luckily we were at home so I only had her to shower with my microbes.

Anyway, it’s the stuffy nose head cold type of jobbie. I actually thought it was allergies at the start, but 2 Benedryls did not stop the stuffy action… it went all night long. So I have concluded that it is a cold¹.

I decided on Tuesday that I wanted decongestant. You may think that after hundreds of years we, the human race, could have located more than one substance to use as a systemic decongestant. But no, it is not true, we have not. The only thing we have discovered are ephedrins. These compounds basically stimulate the adrenal system to give you an adrenaline high. This high causes your blood vessels to shrink up, and that helps your congestion for some reason.

Adrenaline, what a great thing to give to someone who is prone to anxiety attacks these days and who can’t sleep because of a stuffy nose. Hmph.

So I went to the pharmacy on my way to work and talked to the pharmacist about this problem. She recommended Sinusalia. This is a homeopathic drug whose active ingredients (albeit in infinitesimal quantities) are: Belladonna (a notorious neurotoxin), Bloodroot (causes heart failure) and Wormbush (also causes heart failure). So I bought and ate a few doses.

As you might imagine for a sinus draining pill which is a blend of three powerful poisons diluted over and over and over again until the quantities are too small to be poisonous — and whose potency is accounted for by “potentiation through succusion” (shaking the diluted poison in a tube) — it drained nothing except for my pocketbook.

I went back to the pharmacy after work and talked to a different and better pharmacist who suggested the topical option of using Otrivin. I have never used Otrivin in the past because I have heard that your nasal system can become dependent on it. That means that your problems come back way worse when you stop. The pharmacist explained that you should taper your usage off to avoid this problem. Also, he said three days is enough to build a dependence but my favorite drug information site says 2 weeks is the accepted time. I bought the Otrivin.

All success was not assured, however, as the bottle I bought was the you-squeeze-it-through-the-hole-in-the-top-of-the-bottle-to-make-a-mist type. I got it home. I positioned my face according to the directions on the bottle. I squeezed the bottle, expecting a soothing moisturizing spray of decongestant goodness…

I don’t know if my bottle is defective or what, but when I tried to use it it squirted a strong stream of Otrivin right up my nose (probably 10 times the normal dose), and down the back of my throat. Damn, Otrivin tastes bad. And you know what? It stimulates the adrenal gland when absorbed through the stomach. So I got a nice little buzz off of that — and avoiding that is why I bought the damnèd Otrivin in the first place. Argh.

The Otrivin, however, did work wonders on the congestion front. Today I’m going to go to the pharmacy and buy the kind of Otrivin that delivers a metred dose. That will remove the guesswork and keep me on track.

I hate sinus colds.

¹Correct punctuation and grammar are optional when you have a cold.

 › health     2005-10-12 13:00   ...5 comments

Well folks, here’s a meta-blog entry for you. And it’s related to Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science to boot!

I’ve been having problems with spammers. They come and leave comments like ‘Very nice blog. Why not check out my great Viagra site at www.badsiteyoudonotwanttovisit.com.’

I had a great scheme that diverted spammers to expensive downloads of Microsoft operating systems, but it depended on knowing their addresses. Now spammers come from so many addresses that I can’t keep up with making the list.

My new solution is to use a captcha. Like everything else in this crazy business, captcha is an acronym for ‘Completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart’. A mouthful for sure. A captcha basically asks you to answer a skill testing question.

Sites like Yahoo! and Google use them to stop robotic computer programs for signing up for free email accounts. Big sites have complicated captchas that are hard for computers to break. My little blog has an easy captcha: read the mathematical question and type the answer. I suspect that even the most math-phobic human could answer my captcha.

So, folks, I’m sorry to inconvenience you, but please type one character into a field to prove you’re human when you leave me a comment.

Oh, and here’s some more captcha tests to play with if you’re so inclined. I like Bongo and Pix.

 › technology     2005-09-25 23:48   ...7 comments

As if there weren’t enough reasons to quit smoking, studies have shown that smoking causes blindness.

Now a british eye disease association reports on a poll that says that about 70% of smokers would quit or cut back (41% quit, 28% cut back) if they knew it would blind them.

“Yet, the survey shows that fear of blindness is a powerful incentive to stop smoking or smoke less. Out of the respondents who had stated that they were current smokers 69 per cent would either stop smoking permanently (41 per cent) or smoke less (28 per cent). In the group of people aged 25-39 as many as 81 per cent would take this action with 46 per cent stating that they would stop smoking permanently and 35 per cent saying they would smoke less. These figures, as well as experiences in Australia and New Zealand, lend considerable support to the assertion that a focus on the link between smoking and blindness would considerably increase the effectiveness of anti-smoking campaigns.”

Time to get the word out.

 › health     2005-09-07 14:09   ...0 comments

Steganography means ‘hidden writing’. It has a long and proud tradition, with ideas dating back to the 1400s and 1500.

Steganography is the art of hiding a message so that it can easily be read, but only if you know where and how to look. It doesn’t necessarily have to be an encrypted message (although sometimes it is) it just has to do with hiding it.

One example of Steganography is that of an ancient Greek slave who had a message about invasion plans tattooed on his shaven scalp. When the messenger arrived at his destination the message was hidden under his hair, but when the scalp was re-shaved the message became visible. Steganography: hidden writing.

You may be surprised to know that Steganography is a feature in many colour printers and photocopiers. It turns out that the US Secret Service has deals with printer manufacturers to print tiny dot patterns which identify the printer used to make the print.

That’s right. If you make a colour printout, the serial number of the printer used is encoded right into your lovely colour output. That means that the US government can just read the serial number right off the page, and obtain your name and address from the store that sold you the printer.

Think twice before making a colour pamphlet advertising your next political demonstration! Big brother is watching!

Props to Chris for forwarding me the URL

 › technology     2005-08-10 12:10   ...1 comment