Monthly Archives: December 2007

Popovers

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Back in college one of my schemes for impressing the women was to make popovers and more recently I have received (indirectly) a request for instructions. So.

1228popovers.jpg

My mother made this recipe for Yorkshire pudding; and in that variation you eat them with roast beef covered in gravy.

They are mind boggling simple. In a hot oven, 400F degrees say (convection is good too), you heat the muffin tin.

For six you mix: 1 cup milk, 1 cup flour, and 2 eggs. So, of course for 12 you double that; or you can also make 12 smaller ones.

Once the oven and tin comes to tempurature you cut table spoons of butter into quarters and place one bit into each tin to melt. Then pour in the thin batter and cook for 30 minutes.

Some recommendations that I follow but don’t actually put much faith in. When they come out, poke a hole  in the top of each one with a knife so they can crisp up a bit. Have all the ingredients warm before you start, i put the cold eggs into a bowl of warm water and microwave the milk a bit. Don’t obsess about how well mixed the batter is. Let the batter sit for a bit before you use it, but not more than an hour.

Taming Gorrillas

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My thoughts keep turning to this effort by the publishers to update the robot exclusion protocol, i.e. ACAP. The current situation with the robot exclusion protocol certainly doesn’t look stable. We are going to get a revision, or substitute to that protocol. But who has the market power, the legitimacy, the technical and legal chops to create one? It just makes your brain hurt!

I think you could say … the current protocol is works. But why? A combination of factors? A gentleman’s agreement (that doesn’t sound stable). A concern that failing to conform would blacken your spider’s reputation. Why wouldn’t search engines wouldn’t associate with such spiders? That the protocol appears to work is surprising. These are very weak drivers.

It’s a great edge case in the world of protocols. It isn’t technically or legally enforced. It is impossible to enforce it technically; and any attempt to enforce it legally would rapidly bring a lot of issues out from under the rug.

It is a case study in the general problem: how to tame a pure public good. In this case information. So the usual circus of issues come to play. “Pee in the pool.” “Information wants to be free.” Copyright. Trade secrets. Privacy. Good manners. I guess it’s possible to imagine a perfect descendant of the robot exclusion protocol what would all me to mark a communication with some metadata that states exactly what purposes I license it for going forward.

Marking pages with permission metadata is exactly what the robot exclusion protocol is doing. Off to one side it says “sure index this” v.s. “no peeking!”. In that way it is almost identical to a copyright license, plus the convention that spiders tend to know where to look for it.

I suspect that something like ACAP is inevitable. I suspect it’s inevitable that the tie to copyright licensing will be strengthened. Spiders can look forward to some regulatory arm twisting.

With the big wealthy content owners on one side and the big wealthy search engines on the other it’s going to be fighting gorillas. That can’t be avoided. A shame really, given the ties to the privacy problem. Since it is tempting consider using copyright law as a lever in licensing limited use of one’s personal data.

Update: Andy Oram offers an interesting perspective.

Income Trends, by State

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This chart is so cool, that I can’t resist in-lining it directly; I hope it’s creator doesn’t mine. The states are sorted poor to wealthy, vertical scale is log of constant dollars. The upper lines are the median income of the top 10% while the lower lines are the bottom 10%. Horizontally shows 40 years. If the lines grow closer together, as they do in some of the poor states, income inequality is declining. Contrast that to some of the wealthier states. Note that there are a number of reasons arising from the highly skew’d distributions involved that make this chart a poor lens for viewing the data. For example, most of the population lives in just the few largest states (51% in the top 9) and most of the income is actually captured the top 1%.
income_trends_by_state.png

Click thru to the original posting for some additional charts that play with this data set.

Take a Number

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pleasetakeanumbersign_rainbowsigns.jpgWaiting the other day my thoughts turned again to coordination problems, since I was thinking about how the store needed one of those take a number, now serving schemes.  I don’t think I’ve seen a scheme like that in a software system, wonder why?  Wouldn’t be too hard, in the abstract, to add one to HTTP.  It would be a slight variation on the temporary redirect.  The server’s redirect would include the number, along with a time to delay before the retry.

Today I was tinkering with a Freebsd installation.  It includes a tool that fetches system updates.  The instructions advise me to invoke that tool in a mode that forces it to do a random delay before it actually fires off.  This is to avoid having the entire installed base of systems hit their upgrade server at the top of the hour.  It’s brittle since it depends on the users to use the right mode.  A scheme like the one above would avoid that risk, and it would could be used to help the server tune the load so it can run flat out when the bursts of users show up.

It is almost possible to do this without changing the existing HTTP spec.  For example you set up a Rube Goldberg device with three servers.  One to hand out numbers, one to queue up users, and finally one that actually provides service.  Say you want to sell concert tickets on a first come first serve basis.  As buyers arrive at your server you redirect them, providing a number, to a second server.  This server has only one purpose in live and that’s to make them wait.  A HTTP server configured to do that for a huge number of users is a bit odd to set up but it’s not particularly difficult.  This waiting server finally redirects them to the actual selling server at the appropriate time.  The nice thing about this approach is that it removes the incentive for buyers to attempt to poll as fast as possible.
Curious, I’ve mentioned take a number systems before (includes more amusing picture).

The Wrong Default

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End to end encryption should be the default, but it’s not.  So, I find it interesting to look for the drivers that might change that.  What will create strong enough demand that it will become unacceptable to ever allow any data to move thru public networks in the clear?

Fear of identity theft is one such driver.  A significant portion of the public lives in fear that their identity is at risk because we regularly hear reports of data that has gone missing in transit.  Public fear raises the temperature; but it is a very diffuse driver.
Recently the US congress has been rushing to pass a bill that might create another driver.  Unlike the fear of the general public this bill should scare all of us who move bits around.  Who are these intermediaries?  Well of course it’s the telecommunication companies and the internet service providers.  But, it also all of us who kindly let random visitors use our internet connections.  So if you ever let a visitor to your house use your Wifi you are at risk.  The stick in the bill is a huge fine; 150 thousand dollars for the first offense, and 300 thousand dollars for the second offense.

The kindest way to describe this bill is that if you witness a crime and then you fail to report it you maybe fined.  For example say you glance at your logs and you see some suspicious behavior.  The bill requires that you report that suspicious behavior.  It’s slightly more specific, having a focus on child porn, but it’s also extremely weak on exactly what amounts to suspicious.

My point is not to point out what a obnoxious law this is, but rather to point out how this creates demand for better encryption.  I want a toggle I can throw on my wireless access points that says “Pass no data in the clear.”  Since with such a toggle I can then assert there is zero chance I even had the opportunity to observe the crime.

I think that’s neat.  A driver for a better safer default that targets the intermediaries.  Since I think they are the folks likely to be able to change the default I think this law offers up an interesting class of moves in the game we are playing.    It leads me to a more general question.  What can we do to create incentives for intermediaries to drive the defaults toward safer settings?

Actually, it’s baloney.

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The first sentence reads:

It has long been known that dyslexics are drawn to running their own businesses, …

This is bull.  Speaking as a practicing dyslexic it should say that dyslexics are driven into running their own business.  The rising idiocy which is the meritocracy movement drives out of the main stream talent with any learning disability that runs counter to their fetish for testing.

That’s my opinion.  I have experience; and I have considered numerous hypothesis over the decades.  Many of which I’ve discarded and some I still nurture.  I certainly don’t have data from well run experiments.  This article, in the New York Times, pretends it’s reporting a legitimate conclusion.  But yeah, the  article stands upon the result of one question in one survey of small business owners.  Here’s that result:

35 percent – identified themselves as dyslexic

And it’s off to the races … the author, and possibly the researchers doing the survey, decided to adopt the Pangloss position.  Sweet of them.  They then called around and collected quotes from various successful dyslexics.  Who, understandably, got with the program.  It is certainly in our best interest to pump up the impression that we bring some secret talent to the party, and no doubt we do.  But, it ain’t got nothing to do with some magnetic attraction to running a business.

I did take some delight in reading between the lines.  The various “dyslexics speak” pull quotes are a study in one of the talents dyslexics have; that most anything they say has layers of hidden meanings.  I enjoyed the subtle undercurrent of bemusement at the invitation to play into this farce.  The best is this quote the article ends with; I’m quoting this a bit out of context but this is from the last quote in the article:

Actually, it’s baloney. But that’s what our marketing people came up with.

Exactly.

Standards in Fast Changing Industries

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This is a delightful sentence:

I have a T-Mobile cell phone, which uses GSM technology; it works all over the world – and in parts of New Jersey. – Paul Krugman

It’s delightful, of course, because New Jersey is the home of Bell Labs.  Paul’s posting is a short musing on the current state of play in the standards battle about cellular phone.  He’s sense is that European standards practice appears to have bested the Americian ones at this point.  Maybe so, I tend to agree.

There are lots of aspects to this story.  For example an interesting one is how American standards practices appear to give us the upper hand the computer industries standards battles.  While it is my impression that the European approachs have given them the upper hand in industries that are evolving more slowly.    Another aspect of this is an American affection for that oxymoron: multiple standards.  That tends to blind us to the winner take all nature of these things – these are standards battles and wars, not competition in the commodity market sense.

T-Mobile positioning in the US market is as a second or third tier player. The different vendors in the US have core markets which overlap less than one might expect.  T-Mobile’s focus is on down market urban customers.  Their network’s coverage is great in cities, and pretty lousy in the suburbs, and it’s useless in the country side.  You become quite aware of that if you use t-mobile’s cheapest offering, prepaid, as I do.  If you take the path of least resistance (monthly subscription/lock-in, loss leader phone, 2 year contract, screw you occasionally on overcharges) then you get access to the emerging AT&T GSM network; which has more coverage.  Though still it’s useless in rural locations.
GSM was designed with a higher population densities in mind.  In Europe those higher density venues aren’t as down market as they are in the US.