Category Archives: Tech

Tech

Blocking Ads is Oppressing the Masses

As a friend of mine recently put it (to paraphrase him), “Advertising isn’t bad in theory, but it’s not about advertising any more. Now they know how to get in your head and make you want things.”

It’s freaky. Manipulative. Rather then provide (and advertise) what the market wants, why not create the market?

I’ve covered how and why I avoid advertising as much as possible already, here and here. Tonight, though, another thought occurred to me.

I resurrected my faithful old desktop from its file server role in the closet last week, and installed MythTV. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the term “DVR”, it’s an open-source version of TiVo.

But it does something that TiVo will not do. It can automatically find, flag, skip, and even totally remove commercials from your recorded programs.

The various recording and movie industry mouthpieces will tell you that skipping ads is stealing. Right. Skipping ads in any medium is not stealing. No, it’s something far worse.

It’s getting a free ride on the backs of the unwashed masses.

You see, for every person that watches a program or views a web site without viewing the accompanying ads, the value of the ad goes down just a little. One pair of eyeballs, in the parlance of the industry. Thus, if the cost of the ad stays the same, the price-per-eyeball goes up. Advertisers are going to want to make those ads worth the higher cost, so they will go to greater lengths to make the ads stickier. More ads will be inserted in the same time period to make sure the message is rammed home. More ads will surround and weave through web pages to make the remaining viewers shoulder the advertising load.

Who will be left with these ad-clogged shows and sites? People too dumb, too lazy, too poor, or simply too ambivalent to go through the hassle of installing AdBlock Plus or setting up a MythTV box. (The latter is no small feat — it’s perhaps better to just not watch TV, or wait for shows to come out on Netflix). Those not in control of televisions around them are also left behind. Ads are foisted on us in waiting rooms and airports, places where the only defense is to lower the brim of one’s hat and plug one’s ears with music and in-ear headphones. (The TV-B-Gone can only do so much.)

Advertisers and content providers aren’t clueless. Product placement and viral marketing remain current buzzwords. Advertising creeps in in other ways. However, keep in mind those left behind in the advertising gap, those on whom you foist the burden of watching ads and the subsequent impulsive buys.

Blocking ads is oppressing the masses.

Before you flame me, please note that this is a little tongue-in-cheek.

CESE Single-Cell Simulator

I recently discovered an interesting piece of open-source software, the CESE single-cell simulator. It’s based on Java and runs on a number of platforms.

The point of this simulator is strictly to run single-cell electrophysiological models. It comes with a few of the staples in the field (like the Luo-Rudy dynamic model), and you can buy more recent/complex models from a company called Simulogic. Alternatively, there are directions on the site for designing your own models.

Unfortunately, the program currently displays the output of all of the selected variables on the same plot, rather than breaking the plot into several panels, one for each current. The latter is the way we typically look at model data. Furthermore, I don’t see a way to import experimental data traces for comparison. I also had some rendering issues with pull-down selectors in Mac OS X’s Java implementation.

We currently have our own single-cell simulator with an ugly but functional GUI, linked to the ionic models in our tissue simulator. However, it might be nice going forward to make our models compatible with CESE, and to work with the CESE developers to improve the view mode. It would be nice to have CESE as a standard platform for model development.

If you want to download it and try it out, you just need a working Java installation, and you can get CESE itself here. Check the built-in help for a tutorial.

Have you used CESE before? What did you think? If you download it and try it out, please post something about your experience here as well (or email me).

How to Cook a Server (Sunny Side Up?)

Last night, just as I was falling asleep, I heard my phone ring out a text message tone. (Incidentally, it’s this sound, a customized version of one found on the Monty Python website. It can be startling.)

I leaned over to look at it. The head node from the cluster was checking in to let me know it was feeling a little warm (80 degrees F). The temperature in our server room keeps creeping up. Today it was blamed on a campus-wide chilled-water problem. The cluster is only using about 1/4 of the cooling capacity in the server room, and is almost the only machine in there. We should not be having these problems.

I use the IPMI capabilities of the head node to check the internal sensor every ten minutes, and it emails and texts me if the temperature exceeds some threshold. It is hard, though, to get a good idea of what’s going on from a single temperature at a single time. Has the temp been slowly rising? Has it jumped from 77 to 95 in ten minutes?

To make this easier to check, I wrote a little script that generates a plot based on the last 24 hours of my temperature log. You can see the results below. The image below is pulled straight from the cluster, so it should be up to date regardless of when you’re viewing this post. If you’re looking at it pretty shortly after this is posted, you can still see the spike that woke me up and the sharper one that got me worried this morning.

temperature plot over the last 24 hours

The temperature is of course not jumping like that — the precision of the sensor is limited. The rightmost edge is “now”, if that’s not clear. I used xmgrace to produce this plot from the command line / script. If you’d like any of the code for this let me know.

Call Your Congresspeople

As another blogger I know recently stated, this is not really a political blog. Nonetheless, this important enough that I need to bring attention to it.

The senate recently passed a new version of the Protect America Act that gives retroactive legal immunity to companies like AT&T for the illegal wiretapping of Americans that they have done in the past several years. The White House is pushing really hard for this to pass in the House now, because it grants immunity for their past illegal activity and that of their ‘friends’ at AT&T et al. However, if they were so desperate for continuous coverage, they would have accepted congress’ offer to extend the current PAA by three weeks, which they did not. Why? The extension did not provide immunity for the telecoms.

The EFF (to whom I donate regularly) has been pushing hard for over a year to get AT&T in the courts over this. This bill would totally halt their progress.

The Republicans in congress have walked out in protest, and are trying to say that the Democrats are compromising national security. This is nonsense. There are plenty of legal mechanisms for wiretapping with a warrant.

Please, take the time to call your representative’s office and let his or her staff know that you support their efforts to stop this bill. Or, if he or she is a Republican, a little chastisement might be in order. The list of representatives is here. It took me all of five minutes to find William Jefferson’s phone number and call his office.

As a guideline to help you, here’s a good basic framework of what to tell them, keeping it short and sweet:

  • You support delays and even a stop in passing the new telecom act on the grounds that it includes immunity for illegal wiretapping.
  • You don’t think that your representative will be endangering national security by not passing the bill.