Dellanave

Every time I am stuck in snarled stop-and-go traffic I am reminded of the same thing: it shouldn’t be this way.

The unstoppable march of technology has made it possible for the vast majority of the people sitting in their cars, parked on the freeway sipping their latte to do the exact same job without going to the office. Between video conferencing, collaboration tools, wikis, email, Skype the “office” is an obsolete relic.

The advantages to reducing commuting to those people who must necessarily commute to perform their job would be tremendous.

1) Fewer cars on the road, everyone would get to their destination more quickly. Less time stuck in traffic = enormous increase in work output. This would be instantly reflected in the GDP.

2) Fewer cars leaving their garages would mean more cars available for car-sharing programs like Relay Rides. Suddenly, the household with 3 cars (1 for mom, 1 for dad, 1 for the high school junior) only needs 1 or 2 cars at most. And one of them can be shared out to someone who can give up their car completely.

3) There is a a growing mountain of evidence that commuting is measurably bad for your health. Nearly 50% of Americans commute. Call it 120million people. If even 20% of them (it seems likely that a much, much higher percentage of commuting is unnecessary) would stop commuting, you’d instantly make almost 30 million Americans more healthy.

4) Consider the ancillary benefits of people not spending 2 hours a day in their car. Less time in the car, fewer stops at Burger King for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. More time at home to cook good meals for themselves and their families. Finally that extra hour in the day to get a quick workout in. Or another hour to spend with the kids. In some families it might be the only hour they get with their children.

What are the downsides? There aren’t any.

One of my favorite logical screw-ups that people make is confusing correlation or association with causation.

Reading this article on the BP mess I noticed a blatant confusion of causation and association.

“These individuals are working out in the heat of the sun. These are long days. They start early in the morning, and they stop early in the evening,” he said. “So the fact that they were leaving the location late in the afternoon was not unusual. It’s not associated with the president arriving.”

Wrong, Dougie. The fact that your workers were leaving is ABSOLUTELY ASSOCIATED with the President leaving, by virtue of the fact that it happened at the same time or we wouldn’t even be talking about it.

Whether or not the President leaving was the CAUSATION is up you to know.

A few weeks ago I tried to export a video from QuickTime Player to Youtube and I got this message:

Sign in failed because YouTube service for the account “ddn3d” is temporarily unavailable.

I figured YouTube had a temporary outage and I moved on. Today I tried to export the same video and got the same error. At which point, I realized that I had recently merged my previously-standalone YouTube account (ddn3d) with my Google login (david.dellanave). Something along the line doesn’t understand the difference, so it spits out this general error.

Logging in with my Google account credentials fixed it immediately.

Don’t get me wrong, I love TechCrunch. Often times though, the quality leaves something to be desired. Like the other day when Leena Rao spelled Duluth, Minnesota: Deluth. Multiple times. Never corrected it.

Today they posted an epic Chartfail:

50 what? 12.5 what?

Wait what is this?

Also, a sample of 5 days?

Seriously?

Have you ever had an email come in with ALL of the recipients in the To: or Cc: field and thought “This sure would be a handy list to mail asomething to.”? Well, I have. Of course I would never email those people since they didn’t double opt-in. Here is a very simple tool to parse that huge block of addresses into a usable CSV. I’m open to submissions of code or formats if it doesn’t work for your format of email client.

The format it was designed to work on is:

FirstName LastName

Here is the tool

Have fun!

I really want to hate this health care law. I want to tell everyone how stupid it is. How socialist our country has become. How this is the beginning of the end.

The problem is I can’t. Because honestly, the bill law just isn’t that bad. Once you get past a few things anyway:

• We currently provide care in the most inefficient way possible. By some estimates up to 40% of health care spending is waste in the system. This law changes none of that, except pours more money into the broken system.
• Nothing in this law changes the ratio of personal responsibility to public assistance. I eat good whole food, exercise, and keep my body as healthy as possible. And the other 30% of America, the obese 30% who easily absorb 50% more health care costs than fit people? They get lumped into the same pool, the same system, with no repercussions. This is broken.
• Putting a private, for-profit corporation in between a person and medical care is a recipe for disaster. Health insurance companies have an obligation to maximize profits to their shareholders. The notion that they are supposed to balance profit and good on their own terms is a fantasy.

There are a few more smaller (big) reasons, but those are enough to trash the system whole-sale and start over. There is no fixing this “system” and patching more law on top of it isn’t going to doit.

Sources: http://curiouscapitalist.blogs.time.com/2009/07/09/lets-just-blame-the-fat-people/

Scientists in lab coats?

Billions in government grants?

Stem cells?

Or just one guy armed with the knowledge that you can change your own body and the will to cure Tourettes.

I’ve got some interesting data following the ShoeMoney System launch that I want to share.

This time around I used genetify to do multi-variate testing with an optimizng algorithm.  Let me show you why this is important.

Let’s say we got 50,000 unique visitors to our landing page.

3.0% conversion rate	5.0% conversion rate

So you say, great, orange converted better. So what? Everyone knows orange buttons convert better. Well you’re right, but we also tested some much more interesting things that I’m not willing to share. But, let me show you something more important.

Assume we had 50,000 unique visitors, with a $200 sale price.

50,000 * 3% = 1500 = $300,000
50,000 * 5% = 2500 = $500,000

If we had simply 50/50 split tested to SEE which result was better:

25,000 * 3% + 25,000 * 5% = $150,000 + $250,000 = $400,000

But using a genetic algorithm that optimized in real-time for the best conversion rate:

10,000 * 3% + 40,000 * 5% = $60,000 + $400,000 = $460,000

Because our algorithm optimized itself for the best conversion, we made an extra 15% in revenue.

The coolest thing about MVT with a genetic algorithm is that it will find combinations that work the best that you would never have dreamed of.

If you aren’t using the tools available, you are leaving money on the table.

I recently picked up a Withings scale because I am tracking as much data as I possibly can while using the Perpetual Progress protocol.  It is neat and everything, but it has one massive design flaw.  It is a Wifi scale that uses AAA batteries. Suffice to say it chewed through a set of batteries in 1 week.  There is no option to use a power adapter at all.  Horrible, horrible design decision.  Fortunately, it was pretty trivial to hack.

UPDATE: A few hours after posting this I got an email from the CTO of Withings.  He checked out the debug logs, and determined that the batteries that shipped with the scale were defective (voltage logs at the bottom).  According to Withings, the batteries should last 6 months on a good set of alkaline batteries.

The prompt and thorough follow-up by the CTO just shows how well they’ve thought out this product.  I don’t want this to be a full review, just a quick hack post, but I have to say the product is exceptional.  All the setup and out-of-box stuff was fantastic.  The Withings scale is a great product.

Nonetheless, I am sticking with AC power.

First thing you need is a power adapter or wall wart.  You’ll need something that outputs roughly 6 volts, and I’m just guessing on current requirements but 500mA should be more than enough.  I happened to have a Nokia phone charger laying around that was rated at 5.7V and 800mA.  Perfect.  If you don’t have things like that laying around, make a trip to Radio Shack and buy a 6V wall wart.

Next step was to determine the polarity and which of the battery contacts mattered.  The way these things work is that the metal tabs are just connect different ends of the batteries to each other in series.  So only 2 matter, the negative and the positive connected to the device.  They’re marked on this image:

Next up you’re going to strip the wires and determine the polarity of the wall wart.  I can’t think of any way to explain how to do this without using a voltmeter or at worst an LED.  Then again, if you don’t have a voltmeter around the house you probably aren’t trying to hack your Wifi scale to add a power adapter.

I could have made this next part a lot more complicated, but I am a fan of getting things done, not coming up with impressive complex solutions.   All I did was strip the wires, insert them behind the batter tabs, and pop the batteries in.  This pushed the wires against the case so hard, that there is no way they are going anywhere.

Since the batteries are there for no purpose but to hold the wires, and you’re leaving the middle 2 batteries out, they aren’t even part of the circuit.  I added a couple pieces of tape to keep everything in place, but they are very very snug anyway.

Magic:

I would really hope that the rev 2 of this scale would have a jack for a power adapter.  Using batteries for something like this is inexcusable.

[DBLIB] DBLIB_IE_PWR_DEBUG            : “6.49V (6.15V, 2.77Ohm)  97%”

4 days after you packed out the scale

[DBLIB] DBLIB_IE_PWR_DEBUG            : “6.23V (5.78V, 3.89Ohm)  77%”

Setting up Apple Qmaster and Compressor to use as many machines as you have for rendering can save a ton of time when compressing video for the web.  You’ll need to install Compressor on each machine, and then load up the Qmaster preference pane.  Here are the settings.  One absolutely crucial thing is the Cluster Storage path.  If all the computers can’t access this, then the render files can’t get passed around and the cluster will fail miserably.  It does NOT fail gracefully.  Here are the 2 best solutions that I can come up with:

1. Use a shared NAS or SAN drive and set all of the paths to the exact same path.  This would work well I think if you had extremely fast network attached storage.
2. Set them like I have, and make sure that all the nodes are running under the same username and the machines can access each other.  I don’t specifically know that this is how it works, but I’m pretty sure it is.

Here are the settings:

On your main cluster controller machine:

Advanced tab:

Setup tab for worker node:

Advanced tab for worker nodes:

Also, set this in Compressor->Preferences: