prod & ponder

It’s a common problem: you want to quickly refer to and jointly edit a text document while on a conference call. Answer: EtherPad.

As if to say, “hey, buddy, you really have way too much work to do to justify playing video games” my Xbox 360 coughed up the dreaded 3 rings of death today. Since I purchased the machine the day the 360s were released (shocking, right?), once news of the early consoles’ design flaws spread, I’ve known it was dead-machine-walking. Still, it had made it this long; maybe my box of gaming joy would be different. But, no. Poof.

Microsoft is sending a box to ship it out for repair, and the fix is free, which is nice and all, but if you ask me the customer rep was a bit too self-congratulatory about the company not charging customers to fix Microsoft’s egregious and well-documented screw up.

When I logged into the blog to check for comments that needed moderating, I found that over the weekend there were 601 spam postings. Thankfully, my blog’s spam filter caught the bulk of them. But still… 601? In two days? Yeeesh.

It’s nice to be able to run Windows-only applications without having to spend much time suffering the operating system. Since making the switch from SPSS to JMP for statistics work, there really is only one Windows-based application that I have to spend much time in: QSR’s NVivo, which is a tool for analyzing qualitative data. Fortunately, VMWare’s Fusion lets me run Windows apps seamlessly with my usual Mac tools.

To illustrate, here’s NVivo running atop Safari:

15 minutes. That’s how long it took me to break the WEP encryption of my home wireless network. That’s not good.

I vaguely knew that WEP encryption could be cracked and was less-than-ideal, but it wasn’t something I was particularly concerned about. Possible and likely are two very different things, and I figured that breaking a 128-bit WEP key was too much of a pain for anyone to realistically tackle. As it turns out, it’s actually quick and fairly easy. Yeesh. Time to switch the house over to WPA encryption.

IBM’s ManyEyes application recently added the ability to display state-level data for the US and several other countries. It also can generate multiple maps, drawn side-by-side for comparison, from a dataset.

To illustrate, and mull over, here’s a state-by-state breakdown of Iraq war casualties, first by total casualties and then by percentage of state populations.

Although I’ve been a supporter of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, I was frustrated and annoyed when I read this account of how Nicholas Negroponte is negotiating with potential markets for the laptop:

At a meeting this month in Cambridge, Mass., with representatives of Macedonia’s government, Mr. Negroponte balked at authorizing a pilot project there after learning that officials wanted to consider testing the Classmate. He told them he didn’t want to participate in a “bake off.”

Negroponte made comments in a similar vein at an Inter-American Development Bank meeting.

“The [developing nations] need to do things which isn’t futzing around and moving deck chairs. And they can spend the next five years planning. But that’s not what they should do. They have to take action. They have to take big action. To do a pilot project is ridiculous!”

The international development community has been fighting an uphill but worthwhile battle to instill a culture of assessment and evidence-based public policy in developing nations. It was refreshing to hear Macedonia, which by the way has done an exemplary job of building its internet access and infrastructure, request pilot test comparisons of different computer options was refreshing and encouraging. To hear Negroponte refuse and dismiss the request was disheartening, at best.

The researcher in me is an enormous fan of evidence-based decision making and an appreciation that statistical analysis of large pools of data can be mighty useful. With that in mind, let me recommend FareCast as useful tool for making better travel decisions.

You’re going on a trip, and you want to quickly find the least expensive fares that fit your travel itinerary and preferences. We’ve got sites like Expedia and Travelocity that do that. But that’s not your only concern. Should you buy your ticket now, or wait and see if the price goes down?

FareCast not only searches out the best fares, it uses historical flight cost data to predict whether or not the price will go up or down in the next seven days. What really impresses me about the site is that it also computes and reports a confidence level for each prediction. Enjoy.