Joining CustomWare

My status at CustomWare has changed from subcontractor to a permanent employee. We celebrated with a surprise ice-cream cake with "Chief Toolsmith" iced onto it. I suspect that's something that people are rarely asked to write on a cake.

Thanks for the welcome!

The Incomplete Image

I find it remarkable how the same piece of music can touch me deeply at one time and yet barely affect me at another. The recording hasn't changed, so it must be me. This ties into the idea that art is not just what is created by another, but also depends how it is received at a certain time.

That's all.

What if Christmas became a world-changing event again?

I came across the Advent Conspiracy today and I like it. And its ideas can be applied to any special day that has become poisoned by profit.

"What was once a time to celebrate the birth of a savior has somehow turned into a season of stress, traffic jams, and shopping lists.

And when it's all over, many of us are left with presents to return, looming debt that will take months to pay off, and this empty feeling of missed purpose. Is this what we really want out of Christmas?

What if Christmas became a world-changing event again?"

Word for the day: Disintermediation

From Wikipedia: the removal of intermediaries in a supply chain: "cutting out the middleman"

I've been working as a JIRA specialist for some larger consulting businesses recently and this matter has come up in discussion a few times. I'm glad to see there's a nice long word for such a nasty practice. It's a sensitive matter for everyone but I naturally err on the side of caution, even if I've had existing business with the same customer that is now using the other consulting business.

I wonder if I can get my 14-year old to use it correctly in class. I reckon it would make her English teacher's day.

Because it is awesome!

"Why did you bring it to share?"
"kus it is osum."

A standard part of US education is show-and-tell. Some classes have the children fill in a form before bringing something in, both to encourage their writing and stem the flow. My 6-year old Luke found a chunk of crystal and filled in a form. His quick and simple dude-style answer to the question "why?" was a lovely explanation of the wonders of our world.

Another job that I have more respect for, the more I know of it

Gear Designers

Some clever people at NASA put together a document describing what goes into making a gear. The tooth shape and material questions I was aware of from my undergraduate days, but their calculations about just how different lubricants work around complicated shapes, expected gear lifetimes and dynamic force calculations are impressive. And it's all pretty modern knowledge apparently, mostly since the 1920's.

After reading it I'm amazed that helicopters don't crash more often!

Appearances and Expectations

I've found that a spaghetti server is a great tool for scratching my back. We have one in the kitchen for food and different one on a shelf elsewhere. Of course, children like to copy their parents so 6 year-old Luke scratches his back just like his Dad, which I find rather endearing.

But sitting at the dinner table a few nights ago, he went very quiet, his eyes widened and asked "Dad, why is your back scratcher in the pasta?".

Just because two things look the same, they aren't necessarily the same.

Jobs that I have more respect for, the more I see of them

Statisticians

99% of everything written about statistics is wrong, including this. So when people really do understand how to set up proper clinical trials or fit their data to useful distributions, I'm impressed. What most of us learned in school and university really wasn't enough to understand the traps for the unwary and naive in this area.

Statisticians also get to use some great words like homoscedasticity and kurtosis.

~Matt

Distribution of Scrabble word scores

If you take each word in /usr/share/dict/words (OSX 10.5) that is 7 letters or fewer and can be created with the standard set of Scrabble letters, and calculate its simple value in Scrabble, then the histogram of the data looks like this.

1 | 10
2 | 52
3  | 240
4       | 753
5             | 1541
6                         | 3061
7                                       | 4744
8                                                   | 6220
9                                                             | 7462
10                                                         | 7043
11                                                    | 6439
12                                           | 5276
13                                 | 4061
14                        | 2959
15                 | 2078
16              | 1713
17        | 979
18      | 714
19    | 414
20   | 255
21  | 171
22 | 90
23 | 47
24 | 32
25 | 22
26 | 5
27 | 6
28 | 3
29 | 1

The most valuable word? "jackbox".

My wife as a sea star

Vacation Bible School ended today with the inimitable Banana Slug String Band. Katherine was their guest Sea Star. It opened up a whole new echinodermic side of her character to me. She certainly was moving around.

Michelle Shocked concert

Katherine and I went on our yearly pilgrimage to Moe's Alley to see Michelle Shocked last Saturday. Steve Wozniak was there too, quietly enjoying this tiny "Reggae Pub". As ever, Michelle was truly amazing. Her energy, her humility and that soaring voice. Mostly her older songs, but with lots of local guests and backing from a band lead by James Nash who just smoked that guitar!

As Michelle says of herself,

I've been through some dark times but I've experienced joy too. Now that joy can't be suppressed.

Ambiguity everywhere

I use emacs for writing code, which is considered a bit old-school by many Java programmers. One of them recently commented that "watching someone use emacs is like watching ballet". Was that a compliment or not? "Graceful" and "efficient" come to mind, but maybe he just doesn't like watching ballet.

One of those mornings

6am. Our eldest child woke me from my slumbers with "Daaaad, the toilet's overflowed!". Turns out it had thoroughly clogged itself late last night and then a leaky tank valve had allowed water to gradually drip into the bowl overnight. Ugg. However, the rather questionable design of many American low-flush toilets is not the point of this post. In the process of clearing the clog I realized that this was where an education comes in useful. I asked her to flush another toilet in the house which created a partial vacuum in the sewer line and helped my efforts with the plunger. It worked wonderfully! A discussion of the physics involved ensued, but the best bit was seeing my daughter continue to believe that her Dad could fix anything.

Which letters are never doubled in English words?

There is now a handy website for searching an English dictionary using regular expressions. It appears that the only letters that are never doubled are 'j', 'q', and 'x'. Mind you, you have to go to Uzbekistan to get their unit of currency which is named a "tyyn".

Perhaps I should make up a word such as "sajjaqquixx" to fix the missing ones. I'm not sure what it means yet, and neither is Google. Suggestions welcome.

Happy Christmas,

~Matt

There's no such thing as a unique name

Reading an old post by James Clark about Thai personal names, I wondered how many different names I am addressed by. Surprisingly, I came up with eight.

John Matthew Simon Doar (birth certificate)
Matthew Doar (school name, birth family usage)
Matt Doar (work name)
Matthew Baginski Doar (family name after marriage)
Matthew B. Doar (shortened family name used for publications)
Matthew Baginski (used by systems that can't handle two words in a family name)
J. Matthew Doar (occasional form letters)

and strangest of all is the U.S. Immigration Service who refer to me as "John M. Doar" and once forced me to make up a signature for it on the spot! All I really want these days is to be unique enough for Google.

She found it 13 years later

Some stuff from old web pages when "Lizi", aka Elizabeth Shardon Baginski Doar, was first born. And indeed she did find them, all by herself, just the other day. I'm not sure she exactly loved it, but it was certainly a surprise!

---

I was born October 14th 1996 and am much loved by my parents. I like not sitting still and asking "why?". Below is an excerpt from my first email.

>fuukyiki7z x z>8jlj .l[
>'00 uyjkklglylewl;ghju7j 

An interesting graph of contraction times during our daughter's birth. I think she'll love this page one day.

I found a bolt-hole

I finally rented an office near home. The main things I needed were:

* an internet connection
* reasonable airconditioning and heating
* peace and quiet

The last item is why working at home isn't always as easy as one might imagine. And it's not just the kids!

~Matt

Braille typos

I was on Caltrain recently and noticed that the Braille for many of the signs must either have typos, or uses some other version of Braille than I've heard of. How can I tell? Well, the places where the same letter occurs have different symbols in each place. The picture above is of a similar sign, and I notice that it also has errors, though different from ones on Caltrain's signs.

Is this sort of thing common with Braille transliterations? Or perhaps this is Grade 2 Braille?

Can you see what I see?

Can you see anything in the pattern of this image?

If you choose colors for a software application, then make sure you print out a screen-shot of every screen on a regular black and white printer. If you can't understand something from looking at the printout, then you've used only colors to indicate something, and this will be a problem for up to 10% of your target audience.

The image above is part of a reverse colorblindness test. The image embedded in it is supposedly only visible to color blind people. I can see a circle very clearly but it would obviously be foolish to rely on color-typical people being able to see it.

Big Red Button as a Psych Test

In a recent post Raymond Chen talks about Big Red Switches and various people weigh in with recollections about pressing such things. Well, I have in my possession a Big Red Button that I found at the excellent Triangle Machinery & Tool Co in San Jose. When I had a desk, I used to have it mounted with a thick cable running from it to under my desk. It wasn't connected to anything but it told me lots about the people around me.

Most people would ask "what's that for?" or "is it connected?", but occasionally there would be someone who would press the button and then ask the same questions. Those are the people you should never let into a server room!