More macbook wireless

I spent over an hour on the phone today with Apple support about my macbooks’s tendency to drop wireless connections when on battery power. I didn’t really expect a resolution going in, rather I just wanted to have them increment the counter on the problem so they’ll finally fix the real issue, which still appears to be power management settings when the network is idle. I worked with level one support for a while changing this setting and that, and finally got transferred to a product specialist. He of course insisted there was no problem with the macbook’s wireless. Instead he blamed my linksys router. The one interesting thing we found out is that If I have my iMac create a computer to computer network and share its internet connection, my macbook will stay connected to that just fine.

The official apple workaround is to buy an apple airport base station, which seems like an expensive fix to me.

I’m also amazed that the techs I spoke to profess they haven’t heard of this issue, when it does seem to be happening to an awful lot of people. There’s this thread at apple in particular.

In the meantime running iStumbler in the background seems to help, so that’s what I’ll do until apple comes out of denial and fixes the problem.

While we’re on the topic – anyone who runs a macbook with only half a gig of RAM is out of his or her mind. It is a dog configured like that. Now that I have 2 gigs this machine screams. Don’t even think about having less than a gig.

My Naturalization Interview

I had my naturalization interview today. Scheduled for 1:30, but didn’t actually start until 2:40, then it only took 15-20 minutes at the most. Although I passed the tests of English and US history, a decision cannot be made yet – apparently my security check is still pending.

Some highlights:

  • The waiting room had a bulletin board that hosted the Association of Immigration Attorneys Essay Contest – from 1997
  • If you’re not into nine year old essays or terrible MSNBC anchor-bimbos you can always stare longingly at the official portrait of Michael Chertoff, head of homeland security. What is it about being a cabinet level leader that makes it so you want to have your picture hung all over the place like some kind of minor deity?
  • If anyone from homeland security or the NSA is reading this, let someone know that “naturalization” is spelled “naturlaization” in the middle of form N-652 “Naturalization Interview results”. Scratch that, I mentioned the mispelling on the phone earlier, so I’m sure the NSA already knows. Thanks AT&T;!
  • Writing the sentence “I like good food” is enough to prove that one has a command of writing the english language
  • Apparently you know enough about the principles for which the US government stands if you know the answers to the following questions: What colors are in the flag? How many stars are on the flag? How many states are there? Who was the first president? Who’s the president now?. What do we celebrate on July 4th? Pretty demanding!
  • There seems to be a delicious irony that one of the questions asked is about whether I am opposed to the violent overthrow of governments, coming from a government that started that way and keeps on doing it all over the world? Could George Washington have answered yes to that question truthfully? Let the record show I don’t believe in the violent overthrow of governments.
  • The sentence “You passed the tests of English and U.S. history and government.” seems to be pretty ambiguous to me

I hate being asked for information by anyone more than once, but that was how most of the session was spent – confirming the answers I had already given.

Now we wait.

My Itunes Library: many unplayed songs.

I’m interested by data and information visualization, but unfortunately know next to nothing about statistics or data analysis. I’m trying to learn some stats on my own, so I’ve been casting about for some “interesting” data to mine.

While using iTunes one day, I noticed that there were quite a few of the ~2900 songs in my library that had never been played even once. I was curious about the distribution of play counts, and while I was at it wondered how strong the correlation between the length of time a song had been in the library and the number of times it was played. I exported the Library and wrote some python scripts to extract data (using this helpful library to parse the plist-in-XML file that itunes exports).

It turns out I have 208 unplayed songs in my library, and additionally lots of low single digit playcount songs. Here’s an (ugly excel generated) histogram:
playcounts.png

It doesn’t really hold to the power law well because of the way it seems to level off for a while, and the dip at zero playcounts.

While I was delving around, I figured I would see if theres any correlation between the length of time a song has been in my library, and the number of times it’s been played. The dot plot turned out interesting. agevsplay.png

Looks like there’s a weak positive correlation between age and playcount, which is to be expected. What intrigued me more is the vertical lines of dots that seem to indicate music being added in significant bunches which at least on first glance seem to be bigger than one album.

One of these days I’ll have to slap together something interactive so I can see what songs those clusters actually are.

Macbook wireless: use it or lose it

I’ve had my macbook for about a week now: not long enough for it to start turning yellow yet, so my chief annoyance with it (besides it only having 512 megs of RAM because I was an idiot and ordered the wrong kind) is that its wireless drops intermittently. As in, it’ll be sitting there with all 4 bars of strength clicking through web pages and all of a sudden there’s no internet. But I started downloading the new XCode (which is almost a gig), and as I started, thought, no way is this going to finish. And while theres still time for that to become true because its not done yet, for some crazy reason this is the longest its wireless connection has ever stayed associated to my base station.

Other than that I think its great. It’ll certainly keep me warm in the winter time. If anyone does happen to stumble upon this and is thinking about getting one: do not even think about keeping the stock 512 Megs of RAM. It swaps like crazy with more than a couple of things open.

Update: The experiment is a success. Of sorts. I noticed my wireless had dropped so I checked to see if the download had completed. It had.

Kickball is good: winning is better

My kickball team pulled out its first win of the season last night, and in exciting fashion. We were down 2-0 going in the bottom of the last inning – our offense was sputtering as usual, but we were still close. Eli steps up to the plate and boots a home run. That’s one in. Then Erica gets on base, followed by me with a bunt up the middle. Chip pops up, Erica gets home and I’m on third. Chris kicks one deep bringing me home for the come from behind victory.

Now we’re 1-2 with one of the losses a forfeit. Hopefully that explosive inning is a sign of more offensive output for the rest of the season.

Wisdom of Crowds and IBM

I’m working my way through James Suroewiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds, which is excellent. I was struck by an observation about the difference between socialogical diversity and cognitive diversity in a discussion about the culture at NASA around the time of the shuttle Columbia disaster. From page 183:

What was missing most from the MMT, of course, was diversity, by which I mean not socialogical diversity but rather cognitive diversity. James Oberg, a former Mission Control operator and now NBC News correspondent, has made the counterintuitive point that the NASA teams that presided over the Apollo missions were actually more diverse than the MMT. This seems hard to believe, since every engineer at Mission Control in the late 1960s had the same crew cut and wore the same short-sleeved white shirt. But as Oberg points out, most of those men had worked outside of Nasa in many different industries before coming to the agency. NASA employees today are more likely to have come to the agency directly out of graduate school, which means they are also far less likely to have divergent options. This matters because, in small groups, diversity of opinion is the single best gurantee that the group will reap benefits from face-to-face discussion.

This paragraph immediately made me think of IBM. IBM has always been one of the leading corporations in valuing sociaological diversity, but the vast majority of its new hires are fresh collge graduates. In my (limited, since I was never a manager) experience, hiring a so called “experienced hire” was like getting blood from a stone, whereas there always seemed to me lots of money earmarked for college hires. In fact IBM seems to focus large amounts of energy on gobbling up as much of the latest graduating class as it can, particularly the top N computer science programs with internship programs like Extreme Blue.

I can’t knock the value of hiring under-represented groups like women and minorities into a company, but does that really give you a pool of diverse cognitive experiences if everyone went to the same schools? If a person is fresh out of a given school, I doubt their opinons on things will vary much because they’re male or female, black or white – given the same crowd a few more years to get some experience, see what works and doesn’t work; that’ll give you cognitive diversity.

Crossing Ladies and Cheese Curds

A couple of quick comments from the last few days…

Crossing Ladies Conversation

The times I leave the house by 8:30 in the morning, there are always a couple of crossing guards working the rotary near my house. They seem to help many more adults cross the street than school children, but that’s neither here nor there.

I was waiting for my bus this morning and since it was a little late, I got to see the crossing lady interact with quite a few people. Every conversation seemed to cover what a beautiful day it was at long last – after it rained for five days straight. I’m not sure how anyone can take part in so many practically identical conversations (as eve 6 sang “talk so small I can’t remember every single word) over and over again. Or maybe she’s providing a valuable pick me up in the morning, especially in a place where one probably otherwise wouldn’t talk until showing up at work.

Cheese Curds

I love cheese, so one of the things I was looking forward to about my weekend trip to Wisconsin with Kristi was tasting my first cheese curds. And hearing them squeak. I was disappointed on both fronts. I like my cheddar cheese as sharp as I can find it. Only cheese curds are rather mild so that was disappointing. As it was pretty cold during the weekend they never warmed up enough to squeak upon ingestion either. 🙁

Jury, Have You Reached a Verdict

I don’t know if Judges really say to the jury what they do on TV when a verdict is to be rendered, but it always irks me. Usually the judge reads a piece of paper that presumably has the verdict on it, then hands it back to the bailiff who gives it back to the head juror. The judge then says “Ladies and gentlement of the jury have you reached a verdict?” – doesn’t the judge already know the answer to that question?

Gmail notifier stops checking when you’re idle

I’m not sure why this amazed me so much this morning. I got to work, unlocked my computer and suddenly my gmail notifier tells me I have mail – only that mail was some spam I didn’t bother reading this morning on the way out the door. It didn’t just arrive, so what must have happened is that it detected one of: screensaver turning off, machine being unlocked, or keyboard/mouse activity and then resumed checking.

It seems obvious thinking about it now that its pointless to tax an infrastructure by checking for updates that the user won’t even see – I guess I just never thought about it all that hard before.

I know based on what I’ve read about the effects of interruptions on productivity that its counter productive to for me (or anyone) to run any sort of mail notifier; indeed I’ve hated the way my organization has tended to use email as a lame substitute for IM. Problem is I’ve gotten into the bad habit of compulsive mail checking anyway – which puts me in the browser and then there I am checking my feeds and digg. Trouble. So I think for me, right now it turns out to be better this way.

Boston Web Innovators Group

On Monday night I went to a meeting of the Boston Web Innovators Group. It’s basically a bunch of folks either with their own Web 2.0 startups and those that wish we worked on much cooler stuff than we actually do. I fall in the second group.

It was alright – its mostly a shmoozing/networking session. There were two main presentations: the first ProxPro is this location aware application for phones/pdas to facilatate chance meetings. Sort of like dodgeball for business. They also have this application can you can look up background information on business folks so you can find out how to best exploit your chance encounters.

The second, and by far the cooler of the two (or at least more conceivably usable for me) is Plum Its a web-based tool that lets you connect snippets from the web and save them, online, in their original form. One application demoed was group trip planning – you can save a collection of web pages (even in the middle of sessions) and share them with other people. Sort of cool. There’s aleady a firefox extension that does this, and at least one Mac app I know of, but there are certainly some benefits added on here like community, tagging and autofinding of related content in the plum system.

The complete list of demonstrators can be found here.

As a schmoozing-handicapped individual, I would have liked there to be more time spent on formal presentations (it was only ~15 or 20 minutes) rather than rushing through to the free for all afterwards. Or I could just talk to strangers. What would mom think though?

Tivo: Infallible no more

I’ve long considered my Tivo one of the few pieces of technology that just works – set up a show to record and it gets done. Maybe it records three extra episodes of a show, but it gets the one you want. Until now.

I got home Sunday night expecting to sit down and watch the second to last episode of West Wing. The only problem was that it was recording Family Guy. I scratched my head and checked the season pass listing: West Wing is top priority, so it should take precendence over everything else. The problem extended to next Sunday as well, so I had to manually record the final episode. What gives? The only remotely feasible explanation is that these episodes have their rerun flag inadvertantly set.

Its unfortunate that Tivo has fallen into the larger category of devices that I need to keep my eye on. Oh well.

At least the pope is still infallible.