hinkty.com

Father's Day

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 09:14:10 -0700

Happy Father's Day to all you Dads.

My kids served me breakfast in bed. This afternoon we've got back to back dance recitals, one for my middle daughter and then one for my older daughter. Four hours of little kids doing jazz and tap routines.

I'm wearing a Tinkerbell mouse-ear hat that my youngest insisted I wear. She's wearing a princess mouse-ear hat you see.

It all pretty much sums up Father's Day doesn't it?

Caltrain's Bike Master Plan

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 20:44:20 -0700

I took a quick look at Caltrain's Bike Master Plan. The "plan" is a multi-page pdf file I'll summarize for you:

No more space can and will be devoted to bikes even though demand currently exceeds supply.
We'll be nicer to cyclists.
We have to do something, lets put in more bike racks.

Okay, yes, I'm being bit snippy. There are some interesting tidbits hinting that perhaps they understand the underlying issues. Unfortunately they don't come out and state them. For example, under "Are We Doing Enough" they list:

Real-time Information
Demand Management
Bike-sharing Program
Folding Bike Subsidy

On any given day cyclists start lining up informally at stations. They don't know if there will be one or two bike cars on the coming train. They also don't know how full the bike cars already are. When the train arrives, they all have to file into any available spaces and that takes time. Caltrain lists 250 hours worth of delays attributed to bikes getting on and off the train.

The first two items are critical. They absolutely need to make real-time information about how many bike cars are on a train, and how full the car is available over the web. And at least have some mechanism in place for reserving a spot.

My suggestion for addressing the main issue of increasing bike carrying capacity which Caltrain ignores would be to eliminate designated bike cars, and simply go to a "cargo" area near the center of every car where the first two rows of seats are currently. This area would be designated for bikes, luggage, strollers etc. By having bikes load and unload all along the train, you reduce delays. It also makes the cars more uniform, so that emergency maintenance doesn't create a critical shortage of any particular type of car.

Getting even more inventive, there's a lot more available room on the train in the center "vestibule" if passengers load and unload on one side only. Once the station improvements are complete at Burlingame and California Ave, trains will no longer let passengers off into the center/opposite side of the car from the other stations. That's a lot of unused space in every entrance vestibule of every car. For safety reasons, obviously, you can't have bikes piled haphazardly and you need to have emergency egress. But I wonder if a portable rack couldn't be built to fit half of the unused side. When the train reaches the end, the racks could be slid to the opposite side of the car for the return trip.

If the portable vestibule rack could hold 2 bikes, and we could hold, say 4 bikes in what's the first two rows of seats. That's 10 bikes in every car except the handicap car and the bathroom car. But it significantly upgrades the carrying capacity of the train, decreases load/unload times and doesn't materially impact the carrying capacity of passengers.

Another alternative might be to install fold down seats so that the mix of passenger and bike carrying space could be more flexible. This is a solvable problem. I just wish Caltrain hadn't already made up their mind on this issue.

Lets Ban Bikes

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 08:24:20 -0700

The other day I rode on over to OSH to pick up some parts to fix a leaky toilet. No one batted an eyelash at my cycling getup as I walked through the plumbing section. I was starting to think, damn, with high gas prices, this is the new normal. Could it be, could cycling be poised to go mainstream?

No, of course not: NYC Mayor: I'd Ban Bikes on Subways

Hearing that you're not welcome on the subway because you're carrying a bicycle is disappointing to say the least, especially since biking goes hand-in-hand with public transit. That's why cyclists in the Big Apple were outraged when Mayor Michael Bloomberg said that, if it were up to him, he'd ban bikes from trains.

Out here in California, Caltrain's bike cars are rapidly filling up. My wife recently got bumped, and it was the first time it happened to her on her run up to school at UCSF. Apparently this happens often on some of the more popular trains and they haven't figured something out yet. Leaving customers at the station is okay? Is it appropriate for a cyclist who has been waiting for the train longer than someone without a bike to be bumped and other not? I guess I should be happy they allow bikes at all.

Startups Are for the Young?

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 20:19:54 -0700

I think Aaron Swartz does a pretty good job highlighting the challenges for a lot of people, particularly those who have children who would like to found a start up. How to Promote Startups:

Anyone with children is also straight out. Startup founders tend to be quite young, in no small part because no one can afford to support a family on a startup founder's salary. But if we had universal child care, that would be much less of an issue. Parents would be free to pursue their dreams, knowing that their children were taken care of. And universal higher education could let parents spend their savings on getting a business started, instead of their children's tuition. Plus, it'd give many more kids the training and confidence they needed to start a company.

I'd add, starting a company requires a certain amount of focus that can be very hard on families. Especially families with young children.

And the challenges apply to more than just start ups, it speaks to the tech industry in general. Engineers are paid to execute on what they know. But there's a premium paid for skills in the latest technologies. The two are somewhat mutually exclusive. The skills you know well with very few exceptions literally become less valuable with each passing year. A practicing software engineer could use 4 or 5 months "off" building up their skills every few years.

I took nine months off about three years ago and retooled. I was so burnt out from a start up that I needed a couple months just to let the coding itch come back. And it did. Thankfully we had health insurance through my wife's job, and we had made conscious choices with our lifestyle so that we didn't need to both be working in order to support it.

Nintendo DS

Sat, 07 Jun 2008 11:31:42 -0700

We were thinking about getting the kids a Nintendo DS, mostly because Brain Age looked awfully cool. Ultimately we decided against it. But I'll go further, I've come to the conclusion that the Nintendo DS is just plain evil.

What I noticed about the DS, once I started paying attention, really wasn't pretty. At what would otherwise be very social situations, there seemed to be a couple kids not participating. Why? They were glued to their DS. At birthday parties. At dinner parties. It didn't seem to matter.

I know you could argue that if the parents wouldn't allow the DS to become an excuse for non-social behavior then it wouldn't be a problem. But with the DS non-social seems to be the path of least entropy. I would need to exert energy to make it not be a problem. And frankly I already have to exert enough energy to rein in Webkinz. Do I need another thing?

Maybe if I was regularly taking the kids on a couple hour drive, where they're stuck in the back seat and the alternative to playing on a DS is for them to torture each other and my wife and I just to amuse themselves. Okay, then, maybe I'll rethink DS. But until then, forget it.

Which is Worse?

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 22:49:43 -0700

Some things are just too irresistible. You can't help linking to them, like this one. If you've ever wondered which is worse, eating an all beef diet and riding a bike, or eating more reasonably and driving a car, look no further! I can't say I've ever wondered that, but if I did, apparently grist.org has an answer:

... on a 100 percent ground beef diet (bleagh), a person driving a car emits 730 kilograms of carbon equivalent per 1,000 miles, while a cyclist will emit 410 kg over the same distance. More reasonably, if the person is fueled by the typical American diet, those emissions shift to 670 and 87, respectively. Certainly these are ballpark calculations, but they support the inclination of logic as regards these matters.

There you go, pig out, but ride the bike. I wonder what their "typical" American diet was to drop the, um, carbon equivalents from 410 kg to 87 kg over 1000 miles. And here I thought the typical American diet was mostly ground beef!

The Social Mine

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 11:37:53 -0700

Social Networks like Facebook have not yet generated a significant amount of revenue, not compared to search. And everything gets compared to search these days. The many-billion dollar question seems to be, can they? And if they could, how?

With those questions in mind, some interesting research on how the neighbors and family members of lottery winners spending changed appeared in the The Economist which references The Social Effects of Unexpected Income, which in turn references the original research The Own and Social Effects of an Unexpected Income Shock: Evidence from the Dutch Postcode Lottery. Could this "keeping up with the Joneses" effect be the major revenue source for Social Networks? The most interesting quote was this,

"Still, we do find that households’ consumption of visible, durable goods (and only such goods) are affected by genuinely exogenous shocks to their neighbors’ incomes. We find these effects intriguing and deserving of further study..."

Note the emphasis on visible durable goods. In particular they were able to isolate car purchases and exterior home renovations. So clearly, the effect is real and I think we've all experienced it to some degree in one form or the other. Just this weekend for example, my kids, after playing on a neighbor's Wii, started asking for a Wii of their own. It happens.

You could argue that Facebook in particular has already tried to exploit this weakness of ours with their beacon network by making the purchase of a product or service "visible" to a user's "neighbors". The privacy implications of beacons aside, it would be interesting to compare the impact of say, the purchase of a car on physical neighbors vs. the reporting of the purchase of a car on a social network.

In a similar vein, according to TechCrunch Like.com is matching ads to items which appear in profile pictures on Facebook. And again it would be interesting to compare the physical vs. virtual impact. As an aside, I've been reloading my profile again and again to see if an ad for Red Sox caps appears, but so far no luck.

So the first attempt, beacons, has been a failure because of the privacy issues. Promoting what would normally be non-visible purchases as visible without expressed consent created a backlash, and for good reason. Matching products in public profile pictures is too new, and I know of no reliable data on the results of a campaign but at least it won't run afoul of privacy concerns. It'll be interesting to see what gets tried next.

Update 2008-06-25: Venture Beat Are social ads getting too much? Try "FriendRank" looks at SocialMedia's "FriendRank" offering, an attempt to monetize social network sites. Apparently it relies on interacting with an ad, ranking it, or suggesting it to others. The example they give is a movie trailer. Unfortunately I'm having a hard time seeing this work on anything but a movie trailer and perhaps a few Superbowl class ads. But it wasn't clear what exactly they were up to, I'm sure there's more to it.

Gmaps Pedometer

Wed, 28 May 2008 20:59:13 -0700

My boss pointed me at Gmaps Pedometer today. Nice implementation. It lets you draw a ride route on top of Google Maps. Here's my current favorite 1 hour ride, I set the start/end to the San Antonio Caltrain station near my home.

The route takes you right past the strangest neighborhood of McMansions built around an old quarry up on Stonebrook. I swear I never see anyone outside aside from cyclists, or as SWoo corrected me, cyclists and landscapers.

Update 2008-06-26: Google maps supports this functionality natively. It's under the "My Maps" tab, Create new map. Here's my map of a route between the Palo Alto and San Antonio Caltrain stations.

Introducing Blogthing

Tue, 27 May 2008 11:37:36 -0700

You may have noticed that things look a little different 'round these here parts. What happened was I finally broke down, bit the bullet, and rolled my own blogging software. I've been calling it blogthing for lack of a better name. What blogthing is, is a couple hundred lines of ruby code that picks up my posts as plain text files, applies one of a few templates and generates plain old, gloriously spartan static html and an rss feed. Basic, basic. The software isn't ready for general release, I'll toss it out there at some point.

RSS: For those folks reading via rss, the old feed now redirects to the new one. Hopefully you won't notice a change other than perhaps a bunch of read articles appearing unread all of a sudden. Sorry about that. For the record, the new rss feed is available at: feed://www.hinkty.com/blogthing/index.xml . Please do update.

Archive: My monthly archives show that month's articles as a short summary in chronological order (not newest first). I borrowed this from my original hand-rolled blog and I've missed it ever since. I want to add some additional features to the monthly pages, like listing books read, movies watched, that kind of thing. I'll get there.

I'm also in the process of backfilling old articles off of Wordpress, and into my new blog format. Over time, I'll move everything out. As I backfill, the old post will redirect to the new version.

Why? I was pretty happy with Wordpress, but the security issues pushed me over the edge. I didn't want to be upgrading Wordpress every month. Nothing is as secure as plain old static html. Nothing is as fast either. Things may be a little rough around the edges for a bit, but hang in there with me.

Missing Stuff: The biggest missing feature in the new system is comments. I apologize to all those people who wrote comments, I'll get a new comment system up and running eventually. In the meantime please do email me any comments you may have.

Credits: I drew design inspiration from Steven Frank's site as well as John Gruber's Daring Fireball. Thanks guys.

Morse Code Flashing Keyboard Light

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 08:21:00 -0700

In one of the many climactic scenes of Neil Stephenson's Cryptonomicron, the protagonist manages to decrypt the coordinates of a WWII era stash of gold. The twist was that he did it on a laptop whose screen was being monitored. It's a long story and I won't do it justice. But how does he overcome this and get the decrypted coordinates without tipping his hand and giving the location away? He has his keyboard light flash the results to him in morse code of course! And this being a novel's novel, all protagonists know morse code. And I suppose, how to make the keyboard light flash.

Ah, but now we can too! Thanks to Amit Singh's post about his latest hack, Manipulating keyboard LEDs hrough software. I thought hot damn, I've got make a command-line tool that flashes the keyboard lights in morse code based on whatever gets sent to it via stdin. The fact that I don't know morse code is completely immaterial. Don't confuse me with details, I must do this!

Except, even though Amit Singh's a genius, and I'm sure he knows morse code, his keyboard_leds code didn't work for me. I get a bad or missing LED cookie error. I can't believe it. Such a let down!

3 short, 3 long, 3 short

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 08:07:00 -0700

A title caught my eye this morning in my RSS feeds: MacBook Air: How to address a computer that starts up with 9 beeps. Address a computer? That warranted a click.

Some MacBook Air computers may not start up into Mac OS but instead start up to 9 beeps - 3 short, 3 long, 3 short. ...

Wonderful!

Update: If anyone has seen this behavior on their MacBook Air, please let me know. Thanks.

The Age of the Traffic Sign

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 06:49:00 -0700

I had one of those wonderful ah-ha moments yesterday while riding my bike. I was looking at the myriad of traffic signs arrayed around me, hundreds of them, mile after mile. And it struck me that they're all going away. Okay, not all, and not abruptly. They will still be here for some time, but I think we've reached the apex, the absolute height of traffic signage and it's all downhill from here.

There's a perfect storm of technology building and it's all arrayed against the venerable traffic sign. First up, GPS mapping devices that are already in use. They walk you through your trip turn for turn. As these become more prevalent, and more detailed, the need for signs goes down. Certainly those signs that that say, 150 miles to San Francisco, they're the first to go. Who needs a sign telling you how far something is when your GPS is counting down the miles for you? But it won't be long before more and more signs fall to GPS devices. Signs that give you visual clues as to which lane you should be in to make an exit? Your days are numbered.

Then there's wireless technology. I've been wondering for some time when we'll see our first wireless traffic light. Oh sure, it'll still look just like a traditional traffic light, at least at first, but its state will be broadcast wirelessly to your car. As you approach the light, a little red light at least should be going off on your dash alerting you there's a red light up ahead. Similarly, it won't be long before we have wireless signs, where the information will simply appear on a screen in your dash or projected onto your windshield. And over time, the physical sign, the big flat broad part with letters on it will shrink and then ultimately disappear. Starting with speed limit signs, instead of having a physical sign, the speed limit should be transmitted to the car where it can be displayed on the speedometer where it belongs.

Finally, and this is the ultimate in sign killer, when cars drive us, and we don't drive them. Think what the road will look like when we just get in the car and tell it, "car: drive to work". Before we sit back and sip our coffee and type away on our laptops.

Traffic signs, I appreciate all you've done. I do. But you're done. Finis. It's time for you to start down the same path as the coin operated public telephone. I gotta tell you, I can't wait. All those signs, they uglify a perfectly good bike ride.

Three Cups of Tea

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 01:29:00 -0700

This is the story of Greg Mortenson's struggles to bring schools to an extremely poor, remote region of Pakistan, and ultimately Afghanistan. I think I made the mistake of reading it more like I would any other novel, except of course, this isn't a novel. I'm really glad that the publishers included the small section of photographs in the middle of the book, because it jarred me back into reality. What this man did, with help of course, is nothing short of miraculous.

The CAI, is his relief organization.

Milano-Sanremo

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 09:32:00 -0700

If you haven't yet watched the coverage of the 2008 Milano-Sanremo stop reading! You want to watch this race. For complete results you can hit up cyclingnews.com. This year there was a little bit of everything, an early break, a star-studded attack on the Cipressa, a furious chase and a masterful move on the Poggio.

The neat thing, and here's the spoiler, because CSC's Cancellara won the prologue of the Tour of California, Phil Liggett must have mentioned Palo Alto at least a dozen times. And it made me smile every time.

Driving Miss Chloe

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 13:04:00 -0700

I couldn't help but chuckle at this NY Times opinion piece Driving Miss Chloe:

YOU know her — that nice teenager across the street? Chloe. There she is, sitting in one of the two captain’s seats in the midsection of her mom’s Toyota Sienna, bopping along to the music on her iPod. Now and then she pulls out one of the ear buds so that she can tell her mom some forgotten bit of news or gossip; Chloe’s mom is up to speed on the dramas that are always unfolding in her daughter’s circle of friends, just as she can tell you the date of her next French test, the topic of her coming history paper and the location and scope of her next community service project. They have a great night planned out: they’re going to pick up Chloe’s best friend and then drive back home for a night of DVDs and popcorn in the family room. Her mom will putter around close by, and her dad will probably sit down and watch one of the movies with the girls.

When I was in high school in the 1970s, we had a name for teenagers like Chloe: losers.

Ouch! Man that hits home, right down to the Sienna (and the fact that I have a daughter named Chloe)! But alas we have the low end Sienna which has the bench seats in the back ... wait, I'm getting off track.

Her premise that today's teens aren't driving as much because they're over-coddled is ridiculous. This same theme seems to be constantly emerging, kids today are over-coddled by gum! Every generation says the same crap. I forget what was wrong with my generation ... and I'm afraid I'm getting off track again.

Here it is, I would have pegged the drop of teenage drivers on rising costs of insurance (which she mentions in passing) as well as gas (which she doesn't). But also to recent changes to the laws for teen drivers in California:

Teens who have had their driver's license less than one year may not drive between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m. unless the driver is accompanied by licensed driver age 25 or older. There may be exceptions for a job, school, a family need, or a medical emergency.
Teens who have held their driver's license less than one year may not transport any passengers younger than 20 (except family members) without having someone 25 or older in the front passenger seat of the vehicle.

In addition, effective July 1, 2008, a new law will ban the use of cell-phones (with or without hands-free devices), laptops, pagers, and other electronic devices by anyone under 18 who is driving.

And man, that last one is really going to hurt. A teenager without a mobile phone or ipod? I bet that's good for another 20% decline in teen drivers alone!

Libraries

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 14:48:00 -0700

I had left a comment on Philip Greenspun's blog about his post Our new library in Cambridge, but he deleted it. I can't remember exactly what I said, or how I offended, but the gist of my comment was this. He's right, people with more rooms in their home than they know what to do with, and with large enough incomes so they don't notice their Amazon or broadband bills, for those people, the library doesn't do much. For the rest of the population however, the library is a great deal.

I'm going off track from my original comment now, but seriously. Give kids a place to go study without a couple of their siblings bothering them every fifteen seconds. And we should have a place where someone between jobs can get away from the kids and put in some study time. It all comes back around.