Ideas, Randomness, Startup stuff

I lived in Canton, Michigan until I was seven, when my family moved to New York. Being a transplant who has never returned, my memories of Michigan feel sort of surreal--like my old neighborhood doesn't exist anymore. I found a neat way to see my old home, though. Go to Live.com, and search for an address. Along the top, click "Bird's Eye View" and then click the magnifying glass to zoom in as much as possible. You should get a crop-duster's-eye-view of the location you searched for. For example, I can see the current residents of the house I grew up in have added a pool which takes up the whole back yard.

Try your own Geo-Stalking.

Most ideas about the future seem far-fetched, unless they happen.

It turns out real Artificial Intelligence, known as strong AI, is tough. We still don't have machines that are conscious and there aren't many signs that it will happen soon. Sorry Skynet. What we do have is improving robotics technology--we are getting better at animating smaller robots and creating them inexpensively. Robots are starting to walk and I own a robot that can mop.

An autonomous self-controlled robot that can fold laundry or pick up my apartment is probably a way off. It turns out, as boring as these tasks are, they are complicated tasks intelligence-wise and that's the main reason they aren't on the near-term horizon. Physically, creating the robot shell is feasible with current technology. It's the brain that's the problem.

There's a twist. The internet has made long distances trivial. Outsourcing a software project to India is trivial. Even more importantly, remotely accessing a device, either a remote PC, or otherwise, is trivial. There are whole areas of the world where there is little opportunity--especially if you're not literate.

An enterprising company could create an inexpensive robot form factor that can be controlled remotely over the internet. Set up offices in the third world and recruit inexpensive labor to drive a fleet of house-cleaning robots over the web. Then sell house-cleaning services at incredibly low cost to First World Countries (via the robot helper) while providing a safe, clean job in the third world and presumably making a nice profit. An interesting consequence is that this creates a financial incentive to gradually build autonomy into the robot. If a single operator can control a greater number of robots by increasing their autonomy, then there will be an incremental path for developing autonomous AI. For example, if a robot can find and pick up a shirt on it's own, the operator could switch back and forth between two robots while each robot finds the next shirt.

The wireless spectrum auction for the C block (the frequency that standard tv signals used before the shift to HD) may be over. The current bid is 4.7 billion, just slightly above the FCC's 4.6 billion minimum. The FCC's rules say so long as the auction exceeds 4.6 billion, the open access provisions would remain on the auction. Google wants these guarantees in place very badly. Verizon, not so much. If the total was under 4.6 billion, the FCC planned to take a Mulligan and re-run the auction with the restrictions removed.

Although the current auction-leader is anonymous, my thought is that it's Verizon and they've won. I think Google bid exactly enough to make sure the open access rules were followed. Then Verizon bid a little more to start the real battle for the spectrum. Knowing the open access provisions were in place--google's only end-game--Google has no incentive to counter, so Verizon will win the spectrum.

Google’s pre-announcement of their intention to bid at least the minimum was brilliant–it made sure Verizon had enough cash to outbid them, so Google doesn’t get stuck actually buying the spectrum. It also forced Verizon to bid, as opposed to sit out and attempt to force the FCC to rerun the auction without the restrictions.

Don't be Evil...Genius!

This is a cool link to a Ninja geek who I am jealous of. The video for the head-tracking site is cool. It looks like it makes 3D without glasses possible.

Regarding the error uninitialized constant Gem::GemRunner, there was, apparently, a warning which I missed when I upgraded RubyGems which said:

NOTE: If you have installed RubyGems using a package manager you may want to install a new RubyGems through the same packaging system.

I asked about this at Eric Hodell's blog. The bottom line is that if you don't interpret this bland warning for the screeching banshee it should be, you'll run into the problems I had when upgrading my debian machine.

The lower-level something is, the more I subconsciously expect it should just work. For example, I think C mostly just works, and my BIOS is reliable to an even greater number of nines. I would be annoyed if I had to maintain, upgrade or pay attention to those things. In this case I didn't even "want" to upgrade RubyGems-I got stuck doing it while fixing some other chain of dependencies when upgrading to rails 2.0 and I didn't give it special care and feeding because I couldn't imagine something so basic as a ruby component upgrade on a common platform like Debian as likely to cause harm. Woops.

If you're arriving here after searching for the GemRunner error (more than 20 people so far) here's a link to my hack:
uninitialized constant Gem::GemRunner with RubyGems 1.0

RubyGems 1.0 announcement on Eric Hodell's blog

My latest project is a hosted load testing solution. It's currently a work in progress, but it will use real web browsers for the load tests, so it should be able to load test streaming media, like flash and video but without the need for custom scripting to run the test. As for how to get a large enough numbers of web browsers to make the test meaningful, I've got a few tricks up my sleeve. Should be fun.

On my Debian machine I upgraded rubygems this morning. Suddenly gem -v wouldn't work and threw uninitialized constant Gem::GemRunner. Thinking the install was half-baked, I uninstalled, reinstalled, using apt-get. Kept getting v1.0 of RubyGems and the same error. Gave up and used nano to toss the line below into /usr/bin/gem

require 'rubygems/gem_runner'

Haven't seen anyone else complaining so far, which is really the only strange part. Works for me now, though. Very annoying to have to hack a system library to get it to work, though--makes me feel dirty. I'll be looking for a better answer. :-)

I won't watch news videos, even on topics I am curious about. Video is too slow. I can read faster than a video and I don't have the patience to listen to the parts of an article I would normally skim. First there's the commercial, then there's the intro rehashing the summary I read before clicking the link. Finally the news starts, but if it starts off slow, moving the slider forward makes the video re-buffer. I'd rather just read it. Thanks!

For rails folks: In Ruby on Rails, don't name a column in any of your models "type." If you do, , it will be a source of great sadness and gnashing of teeth. For example, don't even think about creating a field named Account.type -- it will conflict with the "type" method. A safer but perhaps slightly more redundant choice would be Account.account_type. A rails warning would be handy here... I'm ashamed to admit I've done it twice, and was baffled. C:/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-1.15.5/lib/active_record/base.rb:1361:in `compute_type'

This fake clippy is great. I wish I had this at the job before last where we used to occasionally play pranks on each other. Fake Clippy

I'm creating spiders to auto-populate freenormous with offers found on the web. It has been continually gaining between 1-8 registered users every day with no advertising. My goal is to have the spiders ready by Tuesday. Users aren't doing a lot of commenting, though, which is disappointing. I just put up a new look for the site today. I'm making a buck or two a day on adsense now. So if I can create 200 sites like this, I'll be paying the bills. Kidding. Sort of. The site will more or less run itself, so I can look at some other things starting this week and just let it grow.

More great TED Talks

Jeff Bezos, founder of amazon.com on why the dot com bust is OK

Steven Levitt, author of Freakonomics, on the economics of crack cocaine(crackonomics?). Outstanding.

Ray Kurzweil on the future

Malcolm Gladwell, author of the Tipping Point. How to really determine what consumers want. (Hint: don't ask them!)

Jennifer Lin, on the piano. Just WOW. Listen to her improv at 17:40 to see what I mean. Amazing.

I posted Freenormous-free samples, free stuff, freebies to Digg last night. If you're wondering why I always throw in "free samples, free stuff, freebies" when I link to it, it's because Google weighs heavily on the keywords used in link text when it organizes search results and I'm targeting those keywords .

Click here to see the Digg post

It's at the top of the Tech-->Tech Deals-->Upcoming with 6 diggs right now. Pretty cool to have people digging my site I don't know and even cooler to have the most diggs in Upcoming. The first comment was "awesome site, has some good free stuff on it." So please, sign up for digg and digg it if you can.

Freenormous is interesting because it didn't take a lot of time to build (pligg made it easy), but lets me experiment with building traffic and marketing. So far, on Google Adsense, I've earned 3 dollars, although that counts the traffic to this blog also. Soon I'll be able to afford that latte I've always dreamed of.

I was cleaning out my desk at work today, my second to last day, and feeling guilty for throwing away various marketing tchotchkes, like the rubber bouncy ball, company logo'd calendar and cheap company logo'd clock when it occured to me: Over a long enough period, everything is trash. Sure, some of it I might pass on to other people. But if you think about 1,000 years from now, at some point, all of this junk will have ended up in a trash pile somewhere. Rather than depressing, I find this liberating.

Now I can throw away anything without feeling bad about it. The only reason to feel bad is if, perhaps, by passing it on to someone else, it would prevent some substitute from being created--like passing on our dingy blender to a neighbor.

Speaking of passing things on to neighbors, our apartment building has a magical table in the entrance. It has the ability to absorb random crud. I started putting last-stop-before-the-trash items on it; I'm amazed at what the magical table can absorb. Off the top of my head:

• a gigantic bag of plastic hangars
• 3 big bags of fake silk rose petals
• a purse with a picture of audrey hepburn
• the last harry potter book (gone in minutes)
• several boxes worth of books (90% gone)
• a wooden decoration with a knitted cat
• 3 ancient laptops with no hard-drives
• cheap, old, hard-wired phone

The magic table balks if you use it to dispose of something you originally found on the table. Also, it has a limited appetite for votive candles and it is utterly unable to digest Bridget Jones books--too bitter, maybe?

I watched the Heroes premier tonight with its "limited commercial interruptions." What they limited was not the number of commercials, but the variety. I watched the same stupid Nissan commercial 9, count them, 9 times. Each "break" they played the commercial again 3 times in a row. There is A rule of thumb in media buying that people must be exposed to your advertising three times before they notice it. I'd like to update that rule of thumb to state: people must be exposed to your advertising exactly 9 times in a row before they hate you.

On a separate note, did you notice the mark on the "Takezo Kensei" sword is the same as the death-marks on Kaito Nakamura/Angella Petrelli pictures, and also Nathan's Necklace? I think the delicious twist for Hiro is that he becomes his own Hero--I think he will take the mask and become Takezo Kensei.