Paralipsis

reCAPTCHA is awesome and I’m shocked I haven’t heard about it before. This is an absolutely brilliant example of distributing a little bit of work to many people in a socially productive way. Whomever is behind this is a genius and deserves a firm handshake.

In a nutshell, reCAPTCHA provides a free (!) captcha service to third party websites where the captcha pictures are scanned text from books. This turns every captcha lookup into a human driven OCR process. Absolutely awesome.

Wow, as Tom McMahon put it, “my heart attack just had another heart attack“.

Joe Davis has an excellent exercise in exploration and expansion of concepts. You must check out Telescopic Text.

You have to love this sort of thing. http://macenstein.com/default/archives/1562

Over in the valley there’s a 24-hour pawn shop that makes me a bit nervous. On the one hand I like the notion that if you really, really, really need money you can get it any time at a little bullet-proof window near katella, however on the other hand I can’t imagine a lot of what goes through there is owned by those who sell it.

I recently had the opportunity to experience the ultimate in vendor stupidity. I placed an order for a new phone and then called to cancel the order 5 hours later. The cancellation call was around 11am the same day I placed the order with the vendor. Instead of simply canceling my order, the vendor informed me there would be a $25 “cancellation charge”.

Now, in certain circumstances I can understand a cancellation charge. Specifically when there is some actual non-recoverable cost incurred by the vendor. Special order items, custom products, anything not already in stock, etc. But when an item that they had in-stock was ordered then canceled, and all they did was pick the order, charging me money to not send it to me simply ensures I will never place an order with that company again.

Someone I knew once said that a customer who doesn’t bring you repeat business is not a customer, but a victim. I feel abused by this company and the only thing that makes me feel better about it is that a more reputable company had the same product for less than the crappy company even with the $25 cancellation charge.

I suppose it’s entirely indicative of the software industry, but I was still saddened when I noticed that the embedded ‘title’ field of the PDF version of the IEEE Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge, is “Microsoft Word - Title_page 2004.rtf”.

The meta-data shows that the file was created using version FIVE of adobe’s own acrobat creation tools, so why doesn’t the title meta-data say “Guide to the SWEBOK” or some such? And the author field should be the IEEE Computer Society, not RobertD.

When someone in the IEEE Computer Society, writing a document on how to write software can’t even get their tools to work the way the designer wanted them to work, it’s a damning testament to the quality of software engineering. I’m sure RobertD isn’t an idiot, his software should have helped him make this document, not made the IEEE look like a bunch of morons.

I’m not even going to begin to comment on the fact that the official swebok pdf download page seemingly ‘requires’ an email address, while the html version is served up anonymously, but you could always just download the pdf directly from the IEEE CSDP education portal.

I’ve been a member of the IEEE Computer Society and the IEEE for years, and a software developer for even longer. Sadly, this is totally indicative of the mishmash of disciplines that make up software engineering. Computer scientists are keen to point out how every discipline can make use of our science, but frankly software needs other disciplines as well. Marketing, management, communications, you get the idea.

The folks over at Bad Astronomy really put it best, “Never, ever forget: we did this. This is what we can do.”

Think on this, and think on it carefully: you are seeing a manmade object falling gracefully and with intent to the surface of an alien world, as seen by another manmade object already circling that world, both of them acting robotically, and both of them hundreds of million of kilometers away.

You can view full images and get a nice collection of links over at Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD).

It turns out there are others who are fans of the sadly out-of-print Avalon Hill title Advanced Civilization. A group calling themselves Civilization: The Expansion Project have been working on updated rules and an expanded map board to support 16 player play! Awesome.

If only it were possible to get new prints of the cards and maps so we could play this old game. There is a beta module for VASSAL available, however. VASSAL allows you to play board games online. Mostly geared toward wargames, it’s a fairly generic engine that lets you produce your own modules. It seems handy, but I’m yet to find someone to try it with.

The Great Southern California ShakeOut
November 12–16, 2008

The Great Southern California ShakeOut is a week of special events featuring the largest earthquake drill in U.S. history, organized to inspire Southern Californians to get ready for big earthquakes, and to prevent disasters from becoming catastrophes.