I read a bunch of zombie themed novels. Some have lots of zombies, others not so many. Some are real books, some are what I was hoping were the upper echelons of more or less self published work.

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I signed up for Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service a little while ago. As a worker. My theory was, I’m sitting around watching Glee, but there’s all this plot and drama stuff I don’t care about happening between the Journey song performances. I could read or code or something, but then I get sucked into that and miss the song. A micro tasklet I could complete in a few seconds sounded like just the thing, and making five cents a minute was five cents more than I normally make watching TV.

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As part of working on mailtanium, I wrote a basic webapp in Sinatra to check mail on my phone. Sinatra does all sorts of magic for you, as ruby frameworks are prone to do. It’s built on top of Rack, which also does magic things.

I wasn’t fully aware of this until I recently checked my logs and noticed a bunch of entries like this.
W, [2013-03-06T06:01:57.276947 #2149] WARN -- : attack prevented by Rack::Protection::HttpOrigin
Wowza, I’m under attack! No wait, on further inspection, I see one of those every time I send a POST request from my phone. Firefox on my laptop doesn’t seem to trigger it.

What’s happening? I’m not sure. From what I can make of the source for the module, the request should be blocked, but it’s not. Everything still works. The emails I tried to send were, in fact, sent. Maybe Rack’s default config is to only log a warning and not do anything drastic. But why then say the attack was prevented, instead of not prevented?

I think what I need is less magical protection and more protection from magic.

Following in the line of I don’t want to download your app or the relevant xkcd, I don’t want to login to use your app either. Today, Autodesk released a new version of Socialcam which included HDR video. Love it or hate it, I usually apply some serious HDR effects with Camera+ to my photos so you can tell what you’re looking at. Maybe it doesn’t look all crazy colored like that in real life, but at least you can identify the details. Naturally, I figure this would be cool for video. I at least want to try it out. Download the free app, run it, see a login screen with no way past it. I can’t even take a sample video to see what the effect looks like without signing up. Deleted.

From time to time, the not entirely insane tale of FogBugz and Wasabi resurfaces, sparking off another round of misinformed speculation. Perhaps sparked by a Coding Horror classic from yesterdecade. Now unlike at least 95% of the people commenting, I worked at Fog Creek, on FogBugz, in Wasabi, which I believe makes me twenty times more authoritative than average. There’s not much point in correcting people who are determined to be willfully misinformed, but maybe I can set the record straight for the more neutral minded. Besides, it’s an interesting story (at times).

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Several articles in this month’s The Atlantic concern themselves with data gathering, both computerized and humanized.

A More Perfect Poll tells me that online polls are more accurate than the telephone pollsters I hang up on. I find this somewhat hard to believe, but I’ve always been astounded that telephone polls work, so why not?

The Robot Will See You Now is anchored by the story of IBM’s Watson making medical diagnoses and the tricky business of distilling the internet into truth.

Anthropology Inc. is a pretty in depth piece about ReD, a marketing consultancy that focuses on the social side of things. Less spreadsheets and graphs. Buried somewhere in here is the idea that what you’re selling and what the customer is buying aren’t the same thing. The article touches on this a couple times, but it’s more about the methodology than the results.

Also, of interest is Elegy for the Minibar. Cutting through the romantic puffery, a pretty cool history of the hotel room minibar. Doesn’t say much about why they’re disappearing. Fraud and theft detection are mentioned, but is it really any wonder hotels have decided they’re more trouble than they’re worth? Little vodkas go disappearing, so they add crazy electronic sensors to detect the slightest disturbance and bill you, such that you’re likely to be charged just by opening the door and jostling the contents. Then you call the credit card and chargeback the room charges. There’s still an opportunity here, I think. Like mini in room vending machines. Harder to steal from and less likely to have legit billing disputes.

Bonus fun article about flaming cocktails: Getting Toasted.

Moore’s Law is dead, long live Moore’s Law. Over at AnandTech, I came across of a graph of iPhone performance over time and decided to look up the dates of each phone’s release. Updated graph.

iPhone: June 2007
iPhone 3G: July 2008
iPhone 3GS: June 2009
iPhone 4 (A4): June 2010
iPhone 4GS (A5): October 2011
iPhone 5 (A6): September 2012
iPhone 5s (A7): September 2013

Apple is coming out with a new model that about doubles performance in less than 18 months. Closer to 12 months usually. (I left out the iPad models, for instance, the A4 really came out in the beginning of 2010. Also, the 3G didn’t improve performance, but the 3GS appears to have made up for that.) How long will this continue?

Clearly with the 5s, Apple has continued pushing things for one more year. And 64-bit.

On the desktop side, I haven’t felt the impact of improving processors that much. Individual features like AES-NI are great, but otherwise my six year old T60 still feels pretty snappy. In comparison, I kept my iPhone 4 around just in case, but it feels really sluggish compared to the 5. I noticed it felt faster after upgrading, but it was harder to appreciate at the time. I’d rather be stuck downgrading to a six year old laptop than a two year old phone.

Will there someday be the ARM version of a Pentium 4? A processor that’s too hot and too power hungry to beat it’s predecessors? The iPhone performance gains have come, in part, from ramping up frequency from 400 to 1200 MHz. Will we see 3.6 GHz phones in a few years or is there a wall just over the horizon?

An x86 processor in a game console? Where have I seen that before? I sometimes feel we’re running in circles, but this is good. Developers won’t have to struggle to optimize their games to run on an arcane asymmetric system.

Not to mention the very reasonable amount of memory, 8GB. I don’t have much reservation predicting 8GB will still be “enough for anyone” by the time this thing ships. Sure, it’s not extravagant, but 4GB PCs are common today. Nothing like the PS3’s 256MB that was already miserly the day it was announced.

I don’t have any other dead horses around to beat today. Also, I just read a review of a different tablet that reminded me of something. Lots of electrons spilled so far, but most of what I read focused on comparisons with either the iPad or larger Surface Pro devices. Also, once the 23GB free number got out, it was like it was carved in stone, even before anybody actually touched said device. Then it comes out that maybe it’s more like 30GB free, but retractions are hard work, so you still see people complain about the old number. Anyway, how does the 64GB Surface Pro compare to other Windows 8 (not RT) tablets with 64GB of storage?

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Attended RedSnake Philly mini conference on Friday. All the talks were ten minutes, which is shorter than I expected (maybe I should have looked closer at the schedule), but meant that things really kept moving. It was a good pace, but some of the talks could have used more time. Maybe 15 minutes is about right. Anyway, it was a nice contrast from the hour long talks I’m used to.

As far as content, ironically the C++ and lisp talks had the most technical content. The ruby python talks were split between introducing a framework one might find useful and describing a solution at such a high level it was basically language agnostic. If the event’s purpose was to gather a bunch of people in a room and introduce a few speakers to them, then I’d say it succeeded wildly. Three of the event’s scheduled six hours were dedicated to social time. That’s not a complaint, but it’s a little shy of their goal of being “hardcore”.

On an irrelevant note, a lot more women were present, proportionately, than at any other software conference I’ve attended. Maybe because women like ruby and python more? Maybe because the event was both free and pitched as more of a social thing? Didn’t feel like being the guy to go around and ask, but if somebody wanted to promote women in tech, more events like this would be a good start.