Socks and Sandals

Me: Did Mommy take your temperature?

Daughter: Yeah.

Me: What was the temperature?

Daughter: Um… uh… some numbers and a dot.

I was poking around the source of OpenOffice 2.x the other day and I came across its equation regression package. Inside, there is a set of functions to support regressing to a power law function. I found the recalculateRegression() function very interesting. I broke down the math involved in this function’s operation to the following:

...where m_ is the slope, _b is the intercept and R is the coefficient of correlation.

I checked Microsoft Excel and it gets the exact same answers that this formula does when it fits a power law, indicating that it, too, may be using this technique.

My question is, does anybody know where this formula came from? It looks as if they are doing a least-squares fit on a logarithmic scale, but is that right? I also haven’t seen that mentioned anywhere else in my travels. E.g. R has a package called igraph with a power.law.fit() function that uses a different technique (and strangely only yields one return value). Anybody know anything about this formula?

This interview with Peter Norvig reveals the real reason that Google built and deployed 1-800-GOOG-411. Hint: its all about increasing relevance (and thus monetization through ads) of that $1.65 billion purchase they made a little while ago.

I just saw this in this month’s Linux Journal. It’s because of that kind of mysoginistic attitude that there are very few women in our industry. Fucking morons. How did this get past editorial? Guess who I won’t be buying Linux servers from?

Of course, I had to check, but forgot to post it until the Ars review hit and started talking about the dictionary: the iPhone’s dictionary can correct the word ‘fucking’ right out of the box. I, of course, checked this within the first hour of activated use ;-) So, its got that going for it, which is nice.

...is automatic syntax checking. It really sucks to run a Python script for 15 – 30 minutes only to find that you forgot to import a package you need.

Perl and Ruby have the -c option built into the interpreter to check syntax, but both do this as a matter of course before execution in order to catch issues of this nature. Python only has PyChecker which is pretty good, but not as well integrated as Perl or Ruby’s syntax checking.

Just something for other Perl/Ruby-to-Python switchers to keep an eye on, that’s all.

Bruce: People do judge a book by its cover. That’s why they put covers on them.

Mom: Do you have to go pottie?

Daughter: Yeah.

Mom: Do you have to go poopie?

Daughter: No, not poop. Poop is stupid.

I finally got my iPhone activated. I have to say that both of the AT&T customer service representatives that I talked to were absolutely first class. The one woman, Lindsay Brewer, tried to activate my phone 5 times and was on the phone with me for over an hour, well past 2AM her time. That was literally the best support call I’ve ever been on and she couldn’t even get the phone activated in the end ;-) Mad superchamp points all around to the AT&T CSR staff; they appear to be holding up extremely well with must be a powerful onslaught of pissed-off people.

And we’re back: man, this thing is totally fucking awesome. I can’t stop playing with it. I haven’t had this much fun with a piece of hardware since… uh… since… um, oops, different story. Nevermind. Anyway, as usual, I have a ridiculous proclamation to purport:

Toby’s iPhone Proclamation #1:

Every other phone on the market is now officially a piece of shit.

Why?

Because the iPhone isn’t a phone: its a Mac that happens to make phone calls.

That’s the real beauty of it, I think. The mobile landscape today is highly disparate and varied today, much more so than the desktop environment. This leads to wildly different user experiences across phones and even applications for the same phone. By enforcing Mac-like standards on the phone’s apps and functionality, they’ve drastically reduced the impedance mismatch between the desktop and phone experiences.

Oh, yeah, and they rocked out on a bunch of other things, too:

• Fixing issues and adding features via iTunes-based software update is pure genius; people are already totally acclimated to that mode via the iPod
• Apps based on open Web standards and Safari will be a ginormous win for the platform over time; potentially any app on the Web is just an URL away on the iPhone (although Orbitz’s calendar Javascript widget is annoyingly dysfunctional on the iPhone). Plus, crazy bad apps have very little chance of crashing the phone this way
• Getting YouTube to spit H.264 video so that the hardware decoder can take care of it. Flash would have required main CPU time, thus reducing battery life: this way, people get YouTube videos and longer battery life! (unlike the new Flash Lite phones from VZ)
• OMFG: tabbed browsing on a phone!!!! Dood, that might be worth the loot right there, for realz
• Only one hardware button: beautiful and no need to figure out what to do with all those other buttons when you reconfigure the UI with a software update

I think the Verizon executives will rue the day they kicked Jobs out of their offices. It was an incredibly stupid move not to ride this wave. Others think that perhaps that mistake will come to be known as the “not-buying-DOS-outright” mistake the ultimately leads to their irrelevance in the marketplace.

I never had a smartphone before and never had a data plan, either. I’ll probably keep the latter for a good while, but “smartphones” are now a total joke. Oh, and to all the naysayers talking about “iPhone won’t work with corporate email systems”: I was up and running with email from our Exchange servers in under a minute from the iPhone. Eat that.