Operation Commando

Anyone care to comment on the feature differences between these two free products and which they like more? I know Google Latitude is only a few hours old, but hey, someone must have used it!

I’ve slowly adopted Loopt on my iPhone 3G and found it only marginally useful. I’m pretty much not a “status updater” (I don’t even have a Twitter account). So I’m interested in accomplishing a few specific tasks:

(1) Find people late-night when everyone is hammered and in loud clubs. In the past 6 or 7 years people have adopted SMS for communication in this environment, but that’s only useful if you can susinctly describe where you are. Drunk people can’t do that. Neither can girls. So with people who have the right phones you can now use Loopt.

(2) Tracking people in-transit, for example when my parents come to visit and I’m wondering when they’ll get here. Of course, Loopt’s Terms of Service specifically forbid this for some reason

LOOPT IS NOT SUITED OR INTENDED FOR FAMILY FINDING PURPOSES, FLEET TRACKING, OR ANY OTHER TYPE OF BUSINESS OR ENTERPRISE USE - OTHER PRODUCTS EXIST TODAY THAT MAY BE USED SPECIFICALLY FOR THESE PURPOSES.

Seems like they are being a bit overly conservative with their ToS since this is an obvious use of their platform.

I also use InstaMapper to do the same tracking as Loopt, and I actually like it a bit more when I’m at home, but it is a bit tedious to use a webpage via my iPhone if I’m out to check where someone else is.

Anyone who knows my professional history is aware that I have been involved with the online adult industry for many years, both during my half-decade-plus at Inktomi/Yahoo! and through my consulting company, Universal Curve.

Over time I’ve acquired two unwritten traditions with my friends with respect to online porn:

(1) I do my best to fulfill any requests of where to find weird crazy content. At this point I seem to know the online porno industry well enough that it has become a sort of game where my friends think of weird things and I either know what site to find them on off the top of my head, or I track them down and follow up later. I know I’ve been stumped at least once, but I can’t remember what it was.

As a quick tangent: People ask me all the time what the weirdest form of “porn” I’ve run across is. Hands down it is “eyeballing;” something I’ve only seen once and it was so rare it wasn’t even in UrbanDictionary yet. It is one of those unique forms of fetish content that really has nothing to do with sex at all, but for some reason there is a large enough class of people in Japan into it to make a dedicated site (no, I can’t seem to find the link anymore!).

(2) I pass along any extra good stuff I run across in my daily duties.

Weeeeeeeeelll… today is y’all’s lucky day, just keep reading.

In my opinion the future of online media content, of which I’d say adult has been, is, and probably always will be leading the pack, is High Definition (like it or not Mr. Christian Morally Conservative, sites like VideoBox have some of the most innovative User Interfaces I’ve seen).

I don’t really mean to say that any of the current “HD standards” are the wave of the future specifically (i.e. 720p, 1080i, Blu-Ray, etc). I mean that quality will always be king and it will continue to be the most consistent driving factor behind innovation in web media technology (well “always” until we surpass the capabilities of the human eye, then other factors will prevail).

Let’s think about that for a second… yes… that’s right… steaming media is not the next big thing and it never* will be (*see “always” above). Sure NetFlix can stream movies, but that feature happened after Blu-Ray and HD-DVD - so long after both that Blu-Ray officially won the “format wars” just a month or so after NetFlix streaming. In my opinion the concept of steaming should be treated like an online commodity; something every platform should support as a core (and free) feature. Especially here in the US, where we lag pretty badly in overall home bandwidth speeds, you’re never going to be able to stream the latest-and-greatest stuff effectively until we solve fundamental bandwidth issues, which are really fundamental connectivity business model issues and thus aren’t getting solved soon. In addition to the technical limitations of streaming, most of the original streaming media platforms sucked. They were (are?) so bad that one of them, Real Player, got #2 on PC Magazine’s “Top 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time”.

Anywhoo, HD is awesome. In fact, as a general rule “quantity is quality” (think: beer), hence more pixels is better. You could also use that same same reasoning to mathematically understand why video is better than still images - it just plain has more pixels! That’s obviously not the only reason we like videos of porn better than images, but it’s one. I digress…

Well, here are two (mostly) still photography content sites that are so damn good they outshine many videos sites out there. Frankly, I think it’s due to good quality photography, high quality post production, and what certainly seems to be high quality models (yeah, who knew, good ingredients make a good product!?). We’re talking images at 4480px × 6000px - that’s 25 megapixels if you want to compare to what you might try to produce in your, um, “private studio.”

I’ve sent out so many links to the following two sites in the past few years that I just had to post about them. They deserve it. So, without further ado, do yourself a favor and check out:

MC-Nudes.com:
http://www.mc-nudes.com

and Petter Hegre’s Hegre-art.com:
http://www.hegre-art.com

Enjoy! If you poke around hard enough (no pun originally intended) you can find tons of free content that will surely convince you of the value in actually buying a membership to one or both of these sites. If that doesn’t convince you to buy a membership, perhaps these statistics will: Hegre claims 110,186 images, assuming they all are available at 4480px × 6000px that’s 2824592 megapixels, about 2758 gigapixels, almost 2.7 terapixels (if you stiched all those together you’d have the worlds largest digital picture, although quilted, by having 171 times as many pixels as the current world record largest digital photograph!).

I’m having a tough time getting RDP to work over a “backwards” PuTTY tunnel. Rather than the normal idea of creating a tunnel into an intranet by doing something like “putty -L 4444:192.168.0.x:3389” (where “x” is the IP of the server you want to get to), I’m trying to do the reverse: The XP host that I want to get *to* is automatically creating a remote tunnel into my intranet like “putty -R 4444:localhost:3389″. Given, of course, that the SSH server has “GatewayPorts=yes” then any computer that can TCP directly to that server can theoretically connect try the RDP protocol like so: “rdesktop server_ip:4444″. That traffic gets routed “backwards” over the PuTTY ssh tunnel and lands on “localhost:3389″ on the XP machine, which is what you want.

I’m able to get data through without a problem, and RDP actually gets an authentication challenge. However, after authentication (yes, the auth mechanism seems to operate just fine) the session simply never opens - the screen just hangs black. The screen size handshake happens fine beforehand, so I have a feeling Windows Terminal Services isn’t bothering to check the IP address for the remote connection until after the auth (which is retarded, if true). Once the auth happens it notices that the incoming connection is from a local address (localhost, to be exact), and drops it thinking that’s ridiculous.

Can anyone confirm this and/or propose how to fix it? Hopefully there’s a registry entry like “DisableLocalhostTSClients”?

Here are two posts online asking for the same thing:

http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=128735

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/expertzone/newsgroups/reader.mspx?dg=microsoft.public.windowsxp.general&tid=483231e5-25e9-472f-8370-3c7cd8250a71&cat=&lang=en&cr=US&sloc=&p=1

Seriously? Who buys services like FinallyFast.com? I think something is wrong with society in general that we can have members dumb enough to allow others to conceptualize and execute on a business plan like this one:

Notice how the Mac computer running OSX gets a Windows Blue Screen of Death?

I mean, did the techie who edited the commercial do that as a tongue-in-cheek joke making fun of their own product, or perhaps the people who buy it? I hope that’s it, as opposed to them just liking the pretty white computer…

I just saw this neat tutorial on how to photograph fire thanks to lifehacker. I’m particularly happy with a few fire photographs I’ve taken and edited myself, mostly on pure-digital platforms (I started my fetish with fire photography around the time of my first digital camera back in 2001).

Without further ado, here are two of my personal favorites, both taken in the same session:

I took both these pictures within a few days of getting a new Nikon D80 for Jewmas (Christmas) of 2006. To be fair to the platform, I’d owned a Nikon D70 for two years and had plenty of time to get used to the camera.

The first shot with the blue hearth was done at ISO 400 f/4.8 and a 1/2 second exposure, obviously no flash, auto white balance (yey Nikon awesome colors!) and pretty close up with 40mm focal length. I essentially focused on the embers about mid-depth.

The second shot was done at the same ISO 400, but with slightly higher f/6.0 and a full 1 second exposure. Again, no flash, but to allow for greater depth of field (and hence the higher F-stop), I backed the camera away a few feet [and zoomed in for a similar frame]. This time I focused on the same spot, but that turned out to be about 170mm focal length.

How did I get the cool exploding embers in both shots? Easy - do what ever nature photographer does - click a billion pictures patiently over a long pertiod of time and choose the best shots later! With enough snappy-snappy you’ll get lucky and have something awesome for sure!

I have an iPhone 3G and I would love to see someone come out with a seamless call and conversation recording application. Frankly I’ve been looking for one of these for years. In the past I would have asked for it on Symbian Series 40 (like my Nokia 6230i) or perhaps just plaing old J2ME since that supports just about everything but the iPhone.

At this point I’m really looking for an iPhone solution. I’ve found SpoofApp, which allows you to record outgoing calls that you place through their system. This isn’t a good solution for a few reasons: it requires paying by the minute for their service, it only works on domestic calls (both ends have to be domestic), and you can only record outgoing calls. I feel like I have a smart enough computer device in my hand running a complex enough OS that I should be able to locally record audio files, perhaps AMR format, of any call.

I don’t seem to be the only person asking for this, as it has a few other supporters on PleaseFixTheIphone.

Frankly conversation recording is really useful for subsequent note taking and reference. I get that it probably isn’t useful in court, but that’s ok. Let’s create the technology and leave it to the user to decide how to utilize it correctly and legally.

Anyone else tired of the janky Caltrain ticket machines that almost never allow payment by credit card? I try plastic every time I ride, maybe averaging once a week, and been sucessful either two or three times (one way).

These machines stand out in my experience with the highest rate of failure of any credit card point of sale machine I’ve met yet. Can Caltrain not afford working ones? Is there something particularly hard about making these machines work that I’m not taking into accout?

Come on Caltrain- get your shit together!!

I’ve always wondered if there is a source for looking up the locations of call boxes on the sides of roads here in California (and across the country). These are sometimes more verbosely referred to as Motoris Aid Call Boxes, which are each uniquely identified with a code of some kind. Although I’m sure that data exists somewhere, I couldn’t find it on any government site, database, or nice Google Maps/Yahoo Maps mashup with a clear answer.

The real answer so far is that there probably isn’t a clean way to do this. However, if you know how to decode the signs you can get quite a bit of information. The California Postmile Wikipedia entry has some information to this end.

The format is roughly XX-YYY-ZZZ (uhh… see the regex below for a more quantified and precise algorithm)
Here’s the explanation of the sign to the left:

XX: The two letter abbreviation for the county the sign is in, for example, “SC” is Santa Clara.

YYY: The one, two, or three number road the sign is on, which is often an Interstate Highway, for example “280″ is Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways number 280.

ZZZ: The “postmile” distance, in deci-miles (tenth’s of a mile) from the end of the road. I’m not sure how to tell which end, but that’s what I’ve heard. For example, “126″ is twelve point six miles from the end.

Here’s the regex to match and backreference the code from a sign: /^([A-Za-z]{2})-([0-9]{1,2,3,4})-([0-9]{.*})$/.

$1 = County code
$2 = Highway code
$3 = Postmile in tenths of a mile

I recently updated my media PC from Fedora 8 to Fedora 9. I’ve been running a Logitech diNovo Edge keyboard-mouse combo on that host via bluetooth since Fedora 7. During Fedora 8 I actually added a Logitech diNovo Edge Mini as well (yes, it has two keyboards now). After my update the mouse, aka trackpad, aka TouchDisc, stopped working. The whole reason I bought the diNovo in the first place was that the trackpad was built right in to the keyboard - so sitting on my couch I don’t have to try to operate a wireless mouse separate from my keyboard.

Well, I posted on Fedora Forums about the problem, unfortunately nobody knew the answer. I went over to post a bug on Redhat’s Fedora Bugzilla, and while searching to make sure I didn’t duplicate a previous bug I found the solution. It turns out I was already on the right track trying to manually specify the trackpad via xorg.conf, I was just missing one line.

In short: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=456936 has the solution.

In long: It turns out that with Fedora 9 and the following two packages, the way Fedora automatically detects keyboards, mice, and the like, has fundamentally changes:
xorg-x11-server-Xorg-1.4.99.906-1.fc9.i386
xorg-x11-server-common-1.4.99.906-1.fc9.i386


Where X used to rely heavily on xorg.conf for input device (”InputDevice”) information, it now talks HAL directly to get that information. This is not a problem in-and-of itself. For example, if you have a physically different keyboard and mouse plugged in, everything should still work fine. Also, most combination devices announce themselves as a keyboard and separately as a mouse, which also supposedly works (I can’t verify this). However, devices like the Logitech diNovo Edge and Mini that announce themselves as keyboard and mouse now have a problem.

There are a few solutions in the bug, the easiest is to manually reference your pointer device (mouse) in your xorg.conf. Don’t forget you’ll need to create an InputDevice like this:
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse0"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "Protocol" "Auto"
EndSection

and you will also need to make sure you reference the new device in your ServerLayout like this:
Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "single head configuration"
Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0
InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
InputDevice "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
EndSection


Investing is a complex business. Investing without good research and a good strategy is risky. With today’s market I hope more people will begin to understand the difference between wealthy management (in my opinion, newer style) and stock brokers (older style). That understanding is the first step in preventing a total loss in situations like today’s record stock market drop.

You likely aren’t trying to make you a ton of money instantly when you’re handing over your life’s savings. After all, we all know that high reward usually involves high risk and you probably shouldn’t risk your entire savings. Plus, people in the stock industry professionally are often barred from giving the kind of secret aka “insider” information you wish they had to make you that instant million or two on a stock tip. Instead of get-rich-quick schemes, wealth managers are supposed to manage your risk in a way that suites your life and goals: perhaps that leans a bit toward risky short-term stuff, perhaps you’re gearing up for retirement. Whatever.

Anyway, way back in 1999 I discovered a simple, yet excellent, online Java tool to view the American stock market. Amazingly enough the tool almost hasn’t changed in close to a decade, despite it being the best overall and quick drill-down tool I’ve seen to-date. Feel free to point me to other two-dimensional information dense whole-market-view tools like this. I haven’t seem many. The tool is on the SmartMoney.com website, called, Map of the Market. SmartMoney is publication created by a joint venture between Hearst Corporation and Down Jones and Company. Smart people.

Today marks a 778-point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average - the largest point drop in history according the CNN.com right now.

Here is my point-and-case, both (1) why to invest in Barrick Gold, the worlds largest pure gold mining company, and (2) what a bad market looks like, visually:

Look closely for the only well performing stock today and you’ll see my point!