thekingant

This is long and self-centered. You probably don't want to read it.

1. I value my time. Like, a lot. I'm pretty busy. From August through December last year I worked on average about 60 hours a week at Meebo, and somewhere between 5 and 10 hours a week on Pidgin (a lot of time was spent migrating to our new servers and reconfiguring services). I spent about 5 hours a week rock climbing and maybe 40 minutes running. I spent the rest of my free time relaxing with Emily, and I really value that time.
2. I care about people, my country, and this planet.

These two themes affect my feelings on a lot of other things:

• I despise spam. You have no idea. In my life I've spent hundreds of hours deleting spam email and configuring spam detection and filtering on mail servers and mail clients (thankfully gmail takes this burden away from me).

  Think of everyone else in the world who deals with spam on a daily basis. People clicking "delete" on spam in their inbox. Companies who sell spam filtering software and hardware. Companies who buy spam filtering software and hardware. IT staff who install and configure spam filtering software and hardware. Surely a significantly greater amount of money is spent trying to block spam than is earned by the people who send spam. People who send spam are parasites of society. They cause countless man hours to be wasted for their own gain. Think of what could be accomplished if all this time and energy was spent doing something worthwhile.

• I don't like wasting other people's time. I try to be on time. I try not to ask other people to do things that I could easily do myself. I try to be as fast as possible whenever I'm in line at a retail store, bank, restaurant, etc.
• I don't like it when other people waste my time. Being late for meetings, being slow, being lazy, etc. Obviously some things are out of your control, and you really can't hold those against people.

On Emily and my flight back from Raleigh to San Francisco on New Years Day we missed our connection in Atlanta because our flight was late leaving Raleigh. We were forced to spend the night in Atlanta, which ended up making us about 15 hours late getting home. There were 7 people total who missed the flight by only a few minutes.

But the annoying thing is that we could have been on the plane. We ran from our arrival gate to our departure gate. Three of us were there 5 minutes before the schedule take off time of the plane, and the other 4 weren't much later. We saw the plane sit at the gate for maybe 10 minutes before it pushed back. Our luggage made it onto that plane, but because the gate attendants had already closed the door and were no where in sight, we couldn't board.

That's 7 people who were delayed 15 hours. No only that, the flight we were on the next morning was now oversold. Which means 7 other people were delayed. The airline paid for our dinner, a hotel, and breakfast the next morning. All in all that's thousands of dollars wasted because the Delta employees working in the terminals in the Atlanta airport didn't wait for the passengers who they should have known were coming. Ridiculous.

To say I was livid is an understatement. We waited in line for maybe 20 minutes to talk to the customer service lady to get our flight rescheduled and to get meal and hotel vouchers. There were 3 Delta employees in the area, but only 1 seemed to actually be doing anything. In fact, while we were talking with the employee who was actually useful, one of the other employees came over and complained about how long the line was. WTF?

I know the entire airline industry is doing pretty poorly, and part of me feels bad, but another part of me is like, "oh, no wonder." Your uselessness is costing the airline industry money. And that trickles down to everyone. You may not have noticed but the US economy isn't in real great shape. Maybe you should actually do some work?

I haven't written about this before, have I?

I think the world is better off with free software. I don't have anything against closed source or non-free software, I just think typical development processes for free software produce better products in the long run. They produce something that meets the needs of users better, with less fluff.

And I guess I feel like I can have a positive impact on open source software. Working on Pidgin is like my way of giving back to the authors of all the other free software that I use.

And I take a lot of pride in the code that I write. It is a reflection of who I am. If I write something that's buggy then it makes me look bad. So you don't need to try to talk me into fixing something that I wrote, because I care regardless. I care a lot more than you do, believe me. And it pains me when I don't have time to fix my bugs.

I'm not sure there is a mobile phone provider in the US that I would be happy with.

• AT&T - I was always happy with their service. But I feel like it's too expensive. I also feel like it's a mistake for them to waste money to only double the speed of their 3G network. I think AT&T and their customers would be better off if they didn't upgrade their 3G network, reduced prices, and accelerated the launch of their 4G/LTE network.
• T-Mobile - Their coverage is noticeably worse than AT&T where I live, and pretty much the entire way down Highway 1 to LA. In our old apartment on the corner of Evelyn and Mary in Sunnyvale I didn't even have voice coverage. And 3G coverage is spotty everywhere. I do feel like their prices are reasonable when compared to AT&T. They might want to give up on 3G and instead launch LTE before AT&T and Verizon.
• Verizon and Sprint - I don't have personal experience with either, but CDMA? Come on. GSM seems more prominent in countries I care about. And while I don't travel much and probably wouldn't even use my phone overseas if I did, I think there is a lot of value to interoperability. I'd consider Verizon and Sprint only after they've switched to LTE.

And woo boy, I hate that unlimited data plans don't unilaterally include unlimited text messaging. This is one of those things where carriers charge consumers because they can, not because the pricing model is fair. And while that's a reasonable business decision (although aggressive), I find it really disrespectful to the consumer. Services should cost an amount proportional to the overhead it causes on the carrier. Twenty cents to send 100 bytes is insulting.

The unjust cost of SMS is my primary motivation to make a kick ass IM client for Android. It's why I'm willing to work so hard on it. And why I won't stop until I'm satisfied with the product.

Just watched Hackers for the first time ever. Pretty entertaining. Decent soundtrack (or two or three?) Orbital, Underworld, a Massive Attack song with Tracey Thorn (although I don't see it on any of those albums). A few mentions of the words "elite" and "leet" and someone uses the phrase "blowin' up" with regards to his pager beeping--pretty early references in my mind (1995).

Pro Tip: If you want your movie to look silly in a few years, try adding a camera flyby that depicts the inside of a computer, and use as much neon as possible.

Dear California Government and US Federal Government,

Quit fucking borrowing money. It's how you got into this mess. It might make things better in the next two years, but it's reckless to assume you'll magically be able to afford to pay back all your loans in the future. It's also irresponsible to force your debt onto future generations. Suck it up and create a balanced budget. Cut spending, raise taxes, whatever.

I'm a 27 year old kid who tinkers with computers. You are responsible politicians and this is your job. Please stop screwing up.

Yours,
Mark

Last.fm's audio scrobbler has an option that "scrobbles" a track after to listening to anywhere between 50% to 100% of the song. So the song is considered listened to if you only listen to 4:30 of a 5 minute song. I LOVE THIS OPTION. I wish every music player did this. It doesn't even need to be an option--just hardcode it to MAX(30 seconds, 0.8 * tracklength)

From Firefox I learned that applications should always save their state. When you close and restart an application is should restore its state to what it was previously. Open windows, open documents, which text was highlighted, how far down you've scrolled, the undo and redo buffers, etc.

Let's use a text editor as an example. Say you have a grocery list saved on your computer. You open the grocery list and add three lines to it, but before you can save it a rabbit gnaws through your computer's power cable and it turns off! You replace the power cable, boot your computer and start the text editor. It should:

1. Open your grocery list automatically
2. Restore the three lines you added before you lost power
3. Realize that the three lines have not been saved to the file yet
4. Let you "undo" repeatedly until the grocery list is back to what it was originally

I've been busy! With work, of course, but other stuff too.

During the first week of May I bicycled from Mountain View, CA to Los Angeles, CA with two fellow Meebo employees. IT WAS TOTALLY AWESOME. We mostly went down Highway 1, which is ungodly scenic.

It took us 7 days of riding. Between 50 and 105 miles per day. 470 miles total (67 miles per day on average). We stayed in cheap motels each night: in Santa Cruz, Monterey, San Simeon, Grover Beach, Santa Barbara, Port Hueneme (near Oxnard!), and Manhattan Beach (just south of El Segundo!). Maybe 5-6 hours of riding per day? Each day went basically like this:

• Wake up between 6:30 and 9
• Eat a light breakfast (continental breakfast at the hotel, if they had it)
• Bike for a bit, maybe stop and each lunch somewhere, or maybe make sandwiches, or maybe just eat Clif bars and what not
• Arrive at our destination city
• Find a hotel and shower
• Eat until our bellies ca'ant take ehny mohrr food captain!

I had a fun time taking pictures with my cell phone and uploading them along the way. They're all on Flickr:
.

Shaun also took some pictures and uploaded them to Flickr:

Fun Fact 1: The recent Death Cab for Cutie song "Bixby Canyon Bridge" is a reference to the Bixby Creek Arch Bridge near Big Sur. We rode our bikes over it, in style.

Fun Fact 2: Santa Barbara is a really nice city with really hoppin' nightlife downtown.

Pro Tip: Matt bought this map from the Adventure Cycling Association before we left. We knew the basic idea of how to get there ("go south"), but the map gave us specific turn-by-turn directions. It was accurate, well made, and best of all took us off of busier roads onto some really great smaller roads that we probably would have bypassed otherwise.

I went on a bike ride with some Meebo people today, and it was good. Spotted:

• 4 deer
• 1 coyote
• 1 Audi R8
• 2 Lotus Elises

Google created a web site that displays the status of their various services. Freaking awesome.

17 Mistakes To Avoid With Electric Fencing

My wife Emily created a shop at etsy.com with a bunch of awesome photographs she's taken.

Apparently Rupert Murdoch, owner of the New York Post, apologized for a political cartoon that some people felt was racist. You can read about it and see the cartoon here. Maybe I'm missing something... but how is this racist? I'm assuming the chimp is supposed to be Obama. George Bush has been compared to a chimp countless times, why is it suddenly racist if Obama is depicted as a chimp? Maybe it's because the chimp is being shot by police? I really don't know.

More importantly, how does this cartoon even make sense? I gather they're insinuating that the author of the stimulus bill was no smarter than a chimp. But what does this have to do with the chimp that attacked that lady in Connecticuit? It's like they're trying to tie two unrelated current events together.

Really Rupert Murdoch should be apologizing for political cartoons, which are neither funny nor meaningful. It reminds me of that episode of Seinfeld where Elaine gets someone at The New Yorker to admit that their cartoon doesn't make any sense.

You know how some people put their utensils in their dishwasher with the dirty end up and the handle end down? And some people put them with the dirty end down and the handle up? After many nights performing experiments and comparing the results to a control group and plotting the results in a box and whiskers graph and solving differential equations we've finally devised The Perfect System

The Perfect System

We put things with sharp ends with the dirty end down (forks and knives), and things with smooth ends with the dirty end up (spoons). Advantages:

1. Space efficient - If all utensils are oriented the same way then they get all bunched together and you can't fit as many into the little utensil holster and they don't get as clean because it's harder for water to spray into such a densely packed area.
2. Easier to empty - It's super easy to pick out the different types of utensils when they're facing different directions. The spoons are the only ones with the mouth end facing up. And usually knife handles and fork handles look pretty different.

Google recently made a few changes to the buttons in Gmail. Here's a before and after comparison:

But they got two things wrong:

1. The mouse cursor doesn't change when hovering over the new buttons. With the old buttons the cursor changed to a little clicky hand thing, and you knew the thing was a button and you could click on it. The new buttons don't seem clickable.
2. The new buttons look the same as the new drop-down menus (other than the little black triangle on the right side). Buttons and menus should look different.

These are the warnings that Firefox 3.0.5 is capable of showing:


I once heard someone lament that as soon as a user does a web search and the browser asks "you're submitting information that's not encrypted, do you want us to warn you about this in the future?" the user invariably says, "no, I don't care."

And that's unfortunately because it means that if the user happens upon a web site that doesn't force them to use https, then that user might accidentally submit their username and password over an insecure connection and the web browser isn't able to warn them about it.

My question is, why couldn't browsers add this additional check: "Show a warning dialog when I submit passwords that are not encrypted?" It's as simple as checking if the HTML form performing the HTTP POST contains an <input type="password"/> input box. In fact, you could just modify the current check for submitting unencrypted information to only warn if there is a password field, because that check is pretty useless as-is.

Can anyone think of any reason NOT to do this? I'll file a feature request in Firefox Bugzilla if people think it's a good idea.

Edit:
Done: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=476797

When I was climbing in NC, before I moved to CA, the group of us semi-jokingly referred to ourselves as "Team Locomotive." Before a few of us moved out of the area, Penney made each of us an awesome team t-shirt. It was a solid red t-shirt with a black train engine cut out of iron-on fabric. The design was pretty cute and it got a lot of compliments.

Unfortunately the iron-on train engine on my shirt curled up around the edges and eventually peeled off. So I decided to make another one. I took a picture of Penney's train engine with a digital camera and opened it in Inkscape, an Open Source vector graphics editor. I traced over the image and created an svg. So now I had an image that looked very much like Penney's (perhaps even a little bit more playful, since the edges were smoothly rounded), and could scale to a large size.

Anyway, I uploaded the image to Zazzle, which is one of those web sites where you can have stuff printed like t-shirts and mugs. I created an account and made a shirt that looked like the one Penney had made. It turned out pretty well! One problem I've had is that the printing on the dark red shirt has faded quite a bit. I have a feeling the design would last better on a white shirt. Also, I'm not sure Zazzle still offers the same red shirt that I bought a while ago--they describe it as "Maroon," and I don't know what it looks like in real life. Ideally it would be NC State red.

Check out the gallery! Disclaimer: I get 10% of the cost of whatever you spend (I tried to turn it off but it won't let me). You can also download either the raw svg or a converted png. I guess Penney and I share the copyright on those images, so please ask for permission before distributing them or using them in anything you distribute or sell.

When is a cookie not a cookie?




Answer: When it's made with oatmeal and raisins.

I keep wondering how George W. Bush got reelected 4 years ago. Emily pointed out that his competition was only John Kerry.

And I wonder who's going to take over when Obama leaves in 8 years? Hilllary might be too old. Plus she's already run once.

Last week I complained that the fee for bringing a pet on a plane with you was unreasonably high. I think Emily pointed out that children under the age of two can fly on planes all day long with no fee whatsoever. Something else I didn't realize is that most major airlines are now charging for checking a single bag.

Please enjoy this handy table, and remember to factor in the extra fees when buying your ticket. All prices are for coach class (sometimes fees are waived for business and first class). And let me know if you notice any inaccuracies.

Airline	In-cabin pet	Child under 2 years old	First checked bag	Second checked bag
American Airlines	$100	Free if sitting on parent's lap	$15	$25
Continental	$125	Free if sitting on parent's lap	$15	$25
Delta	$150	Free if sitting on parent's lap	$15	$25
JetBlue	$100	Free if sitting on parent's lap	Free	$20
Northwest	$150	Free if sitting on parent's lap	$15	$25
Southwest	$75	Free if sitting on parent's lap	Free	Free
United	$175	Free if sitting on parent's lap	$15	$25
US Airways	$100	Free if sitting on parent's lap	$15	$25
Virgin America	$50	Free if sitting on parent's lap	Free	$25

Edit: I discovered this.

Remember four months ago when I said I switched to Google Mail? The count of emails in my spam folder shows me a seven day rolling average of the amount of spam I've received for the past week.

On November 10th a large source of email spam was shut down. Reports stated that it caused a noticeable drop in the amount of spam on the Internet. I noticed that my seven day rolling average dropped from about 11,000 to about 5,000.

Check out this screen shot from a Washington Post article:

Emily and I are heading back to NC this year from December 22nd to January 1st. Since most of our friends will also be traveling, and 9 days is a long time to impose on someone anyway, we'll be bringing Toro with us on our flights between California and North Carolina. He's a 5lb 5 year old chihuahua who's super cute and rarely barks. The fee for this varies by airline, but it used to be around $50.

But now it seems airlines have increased this fee:

American Airlines	$100
Continental	$125
Delta	$150
JetBlue	$100
Northwest	$150
Southwest	Does not allow pets
United	$175
US Airways	$100
Virgin America	$50

I think these fees are ridiculous (except for Virgin, which is reasonable). I can think of only two costs incurred by the airline: 1. takes a few seconds longer to go through security and 2. if the pet pees on the plane it could be annoying to clean up, but the airline should just charge people when that happens (and $100 is a disproportionate amount to cover this cost anyway).

I think I'm going to ask airlines what their rationale is for charging that much... I suspect it's "because we can."

Edit: My updated version. Also see this.

Emily and I have been loosely following the availability of the Wii Fit. It's generally sold out in our local Best Buys, Circuit Citys and Game Stops. It's often also sold out online at those same retailers, and at Amazon. However, there are always Wii Fits available on eBay. The retail price is $90, but the eBay price tends to be around $125.

It seems like what's happening is:

1. There is more demand than supply
2. Enterprising individuals monitor retail stores closely and buy Wii Fits whenever they can
3. Enterprising individuals sell Wii Fits on eBay and make a profit
4. This is inconvenient for non-enterprising individuals
5. Enterprising individuals are making money
6. Nintendo is losing money

I'm not sure why Nintendo is so chronically unable to meet the demand for the Wii Fit (and for the Wii, remotes, nunchuks, Mario Kart, and many other games). I can understand wanting to keep up a high perceived demand. And I can understand not wanting a lot of inventory sitting on store shelves. But holy cow, they're missing out on sales. I can't imagine the high demand or low excess inventory really outweighs the lost business.

From a business standpoint they should

1. Produce more and keep the price at $90
2. Continue producing the same amount but increase the price
3. Some combination of 1 and 2