Matthew J. Simoneau’s Weblog

My cousin Andy, who had never been to Las Vegas before, was excited to go to The Price Is Right Live! at Bally’s Las Vegas.

As luck would have it, he was chosen at random to go to Contestant’s Row, where it was not his ability to price outdoor space heaters, but his savy game play (going for the classic "$1!" bet) which won him the round.

Up on stage, his mastery of Cliff Hangers earned him a washer dryer set, along with shipping anywhere in the continental United States. They are on their way to his parents’ house right now, who will enjoy them until he moves into a bigger place.

The hosts Todd Newton and David Ruprecht, who both did a wonderful job, stuck around to have a drink at the bar with us after the show.

By the way, if you want to make friends in Las Vegas, walk around with your Price Is Right name tag and have a good story about your cousin winning a washer/dryer set.

More photos on Flickr.

Spot Instances enable you to bid for unused Amazon EC2 capacity. Instances are charged the Spot Price set by Amazon EC2, which fluctuates periodically depending on the supply of and demand for Spot Instance capacity.

–How Spot Instances Work

For batch processing, this new system allows you to trade urgency/throughput for cost. If you have some non-time-sensitive computing, you can wait until demand is down an the cost is low.

The price started climbing after they announced the service, but is still only about $.50 per hour. The regular On-Demand Instances price is $1.20 per hour. As more people use this service, I expect the average price to rise and to start to show daily, weekly, and yearly cycles.

Amanda Palmer liked American Repertory Theater’s "Sleep No More" so much, she announced a performance at the bar within the venue

I highly recommend Sleep No More Don’t think of it as a play with a plot, or a puzzle to be solved, but a series of surreal experiences. Being able to see Amanda Palmer perform in the cabaret within the space was wonderful bonus. By the end of the show, there were only about 50 of us left in the lounge, a now-rare intimate performance for her.

To top it off, my friend Rusty Scott happens to be in the house band and shared the keys with Amanda over the course of the night. And he had a flask of scotch to share with me, making the night complete.

crossposted to Flickr, Facebook

I’ve been following The Long Now Foundation for some time, starting with the essay in Wired Magazine in 1995 which inspired it. Its mission is to inspire long-term thinking in a world with an increasingly short time horizon. They organize around several projects, but their signature effort is to build a clock that will run for 10,000 years.

They’ve purchased a mountaintop in Nevada to house the clock. Stuart Brand described their progress in this 2004 TED talk. Last spring they issued a a call for guides. I answered.

About 40 of us spent the weekend in Nevada, becoming familiar with the mountain and making infrastructure improvements to the base camp. We also spent a lot of time getting to know one another. This self-selected group was an interesting bunch. Over the campfire one night, Stuart called us the clock’s first docents.

They’re holding an unconference about long-term thinking in June, and I’ll be back to help.

click to view all my photos from the trip

Facebook announced today that they are allowing users to pick usernames. The primary use of these seems to be vanity URLs, so you can put http://www.facebook.com/JohnDoe on a business card instead of http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=123456789.

You can only pick one username, and once chosen, it is permanent. This is a lot of pressure.

I think I’m going to go with my full name, “matthew.simoneau” and not the “matthewsim” I use on all other websites, and even in the URL my personal blog. In addition to keeping with my usage elsewhere, the shorter version is quicker to type (especially on my tiny iPhone keyboard), and makes it unnecessary for others to navigate all the vowels in my last name when typing it in. But facebook has always been a real-name culture, and is used for both personal and professional reasons. And I don’t want some other jerk to take it and show up as the “first hit” when someone typed in my real name.

To dot or not to dot? The dot in “matthew.simoneau” definitely helps with clarity, though you could probably write it as “MatthewSimoneau” and it would still work (they haven’t made any statements if they’re going to be case sensitive, case-insensitive, or case-preserving). It would probably move me up in the search engine rankings for “simoneau”, since the word is standing alone. To my eye though, the dot in the URL is about as cool as a hyphen in your domain name. But based on the screenshots, it seems that they’re suggesting the dots as the preferred standard. I’ll probably go with the dots. I hope they make the usernames period-insensitive like Gmail. That is, “MatthewSimoneau” would map to the same ID as “Matthew.Simoneau”. Or at least, as soon as one is registered, block the other and all other variations. I can’t find any info on this.

They are going to distribute them Friday night at midnight on a first-come-first-served basis. See you there!

We’re finally seeing a viable rich editor for MediaWiki emerge. Wikia, the commercial venture of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, is beta testing a WYSIWYG editor.

It isn’t perfect, but they’re making great progress. You can try it yourself on their test Wiki. It’s built on the open source FCKeditor, but they’ve taught it to emit Wiki markup instead of HTML. Impressively, you can toggle between WYSIWYG and Wiki markup while editing. Efforts to build a rich editor has been stymied for years by MediaWiki’s complicated markup, which includes templates and other “active” elements. They’ve taken the reasonable strategy of focusing on the 5% of markup that’s used 95% of the time and just isolating and preserving markup it can’t yet handle.

Wikia uses a project on Google Code to manage their source, building on top of the standard MediaWiki codebase. The rich editor is mostly implemented as a MediaWiki extension, but requires changes to some core files as well. It is easy and legal to migrate Wikia’s changes back into MediaWiki’s codebase, and surely someone in the community will do this as the editor approaches production quality. It won’t be long before we see it on Wikipedia and other MediaWiki-powered Wikis.

I saw Steve Sweeney live ages ago, mainly doing the same material he does here. I’ve always remembered his Bostonians’-take-on-weather bit, and it’s been popping back into my mind as people discuss the beautiful weekend weather swinging back into snow on Monday. Starting around 4:10, paraphrased:

“Positive people we are.”

You: “Jeez, it’s a nice day.”
Bostonian: “Ya, we won’t get many more like these.”

You: “Jeez, it’s a nice day.”
Bostonian: “Ya, well we waited long enough.”

You: “Jeez, it’s a nice day.”
Bostonian: “Ya, outside! I’m inside.”

No, I haven’t taken up building miniature models of Tuscan towns. This is a digitally processed version of a photo I took in Siena on vacation 2006. Is it convincing?

Enthusiasts have been playing around with tilt-shift miniature faking for a while, but the website TiltShiftMaker makes the process easy as pie.

Man, I love listening to rebroadcasts of TED talks on my iPod during my commute. Sadly, I’m not interesting enough to be invited to attend, but by becoming an associate member ($1000), I can access a live webcast of the TED conference and show it to ten of my friends.

This year I’ll be on a cruise, but it would be fun to organize a TED Boston in 2010. I could get together 10 interesting people, take a couple days off from work, watch the conference together, and chat about it.

Peter pointed me to CHDK, a firmware enhancement for Canon cameras, including my trusty rusty SD630. CHDK lets you hack your camera’s software to make it do a bunch of stuff that the built-in software doesn’t let you do. It’s not as scary as it sounds. You just need to put the new software on a bootable SD card, turn on your camera, and it will load this replacement software instead. It works just like the old days of the PC, when you could insert a bootable floppy instead of booting from the hard drive.

Scanning the list of features, I noticed that CHDK includes a scripting language. Two, actually. They can automate any of the camera’s functions. One of the user contributed scripts was an intervalometer, which you can program to take a picture every so-many seconds. Putting all those pictures together makes a time-lapse movie.

This video is my first attempt. I pointed my camera out my office window, and told it to take a picture every minute. The battery ran out, so it isn’t as long as I would have liked. I had no tripod, so the composition is poor. You can even see the reflection of the camera in the window. Nevertheless, I’m tickled with the result. Clouds, man. Clouds.

I’m already accumulating a list of videos to make. Mount it on my dashboard, and record my commute. Get my tripod out of storage, and capture the buzz around the coffeepot at work. Leave my camera on the dashboard of my truck parked across the street, and see sunrise on the Airstream.

It used to be that forking the code was interpreted as a failure in leadership. Forking would split the code, community, and users into competing factions and generally make life more confusing for everyone (see XEmacs).

In the world of distributed revision control systems like Git, forking means something different. These systems were designed to support a web of related revisions. Forking is just the way you roll. A multiplicity of forks is a sign of a healthy developer community. In fact, GitHub advertises the "5 Most Forked Projects" on their home page.

I was sending someone directions to my office, and I noticed that the placemark that Google Maps puts on the map of the office address is more accurate. It used to be nearby on Route 9, but is now exactly on my building.

Back in November 2007, Google introduced a feature to allow editing of addresses and other information by anyone with a Google account. When viewing a placemark, you can now click "Edit" and move it to the right place. You can also see the history of the edits, which appears in this picture in reverse-chronological order.

You can see Google’s original guess with the gray arrow in the lower picture. It looks like it was moved three times: to the right spot in November, a little off the right spot in January, and then back to the right spot in March.

Community editing is often abused, but I’m coming to expect this degree of interactivity from websites. When I see something amiss, I’m frustrated when there’s not a "submit correction" or at least a "flag spam" link. In this case, I was the happy beneficiary of my peer’s contributions.

I’m on the design team for MATLAB Central, the MathWorks online community. Whenever we solicit feedback, we always hear from a user "joking" about adding a dating service.

True to form, it wasn’t long after I created the MATLAB fan page on Facebook for similar comments to start showing up on MATLAB’s wall. An excerpt is pictured here.

On a more serious note, the MATLAB fan page has already grown to 2,434 fans without any promotion at all. Crazy.

Not bad, eh?

Look carefully at the Wikipedia page on Linda Hamilton. Notice anything strange about the photo? Yes, that is my friend Peter who has his arm around her. Though I am an occasional Wikipdia contributor, I had nothing to do with this. Peter is thrilled to be in this position and calls it a “Christmas miracle”. How could such a thing happen?

It starts back in 1997. My friend Zach was just starting his career in special effects. He had just finished up work on was a small independent film, The Titanic. Maybe you’ve heard of it? The crew was having a wrap party on the Queen Mary, and somehow Zach convinced his employer to let him take a handful of his scruffy friends to the party instead of a date. James Cameron, the director, was there with a real date, actress Linda Hamilton. The details are debated, but at some point in the night someone started a conversation with her, producing many awkward moments and a photo.

Fast forward to 2007. Flickr, where I host my photos these days, introduces a new stats feature. In addition to the number of times someone views one of your photos, they now also record the referer. Most web browsers, when loading a new page, will tell the page the last page it was on. That is, you can often tell the last page a visitor was on before he arrived at your site. I noticed a bunch of traffic coming from Wikipedia and investigated.

The visitors were arriving at this group picture with Linda Hamilton from her entry’s talk page. Every page on Wikipedia has a companion talk page (which you can access via the “discussion” link at the top of each page) where contributors can chat without muddying the page itself. They had conducted a long debate about fair use. Wikipedia’s goal is to create a free encyclopedia. Not just free to read, but free for anyone to use anyway they want. (Free as in free speech, not just free as in free beer.) As such, they’re very concerned about including content, including images, that have are under normal copyright. In 1989, the United States adopted the Berne Convention, which automatically puts anything you produce under copyright. On top of that, copyrights in the United States now last at least 70 years (usually much longer). This makes it tricky for Wikipedia contributors to find content they know is safe to use.

I’m happy to have people reuse my photographs. Creative Commons is an organization that wants to make it possible for non-lawyers like myself to say this in a legally-valid-type way. They developed a suite of licenses to help. You can choose under which conditions you’ll allow people to reuse your work. Flickr makes it easy to select the one you like for your photos, creating huge collection of images that people or projects can reuse in their own work without fear of being sued. I’ve released all my photos under the Attribution license, the most permissive license, which says “do what you want but give me credit”. This allowed the Wikipedia contributor to crop my photo down to (mostly) Linda and to upload it to Wikipedia. They credit me by giving my name and a link to the original on the image’s detail page.

And create a Christmas miracle.

Google finally added Street View data for Boston. The first thing I aways do is check Waltham Street, where I used to live. Here’s a shot of my old apartment building:

They let you create a link to a view like this, but it seems to only include the camera position when you use “Link to this page” on the “My Maps” tab. The range of their coverage is impressive. Zoom out on the map and you’ll see the spidery coverage extending as far as Ware.

(via Google Operating System)

While walking by Fenway Park last night around 11PM, I saw a stream of sparks raining down from somewhere up on the scaffolding. It was cool, in an industrial sort of way. As it turns out, also dangerous.

I saw this news item on Boston.com. I don’t visit that site regularly, but I received a “Check out the new Boston.com” e-mail and figured I’d check out the new Boston.com. The e-mail lists eight improvements they’ve made to the site. The first is “Our pages are wider”. Having been involved with the design, development, and maintenance of another complicated website, I know how painful the seemingly-simple change of widening your site’s standard width can be, but this feature is unlikely to impress a potential visitor. I wouldn’t lead with it.

IKEA’s America at Home campaign features a sequence of non-traditional images of "home", starting with an Airstream trailer.

This is a repost of a video that first appeared on this site in December 2002. My camera recorded the video to QuickTime format, which made it tough for some people to play. Between then and now, YouTube happened. You may have heard of it. So here it is again, this time in a friendlier format:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8l9a0lf6-s

Five years later, Lucky still makes these excited noises whenever she’s in the car, especially when Dad is taking her to the b.e.a.c.h. (If you have dogs or children, you now why you can’t say this word casually.)

I expect all of you to repost my viral video on your respective blogs. I’m looking at you, Ned. And think of something pithy to say about it.

Here is the code to cut-and-paste:

<object width=”425″ height=”353″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/H8l9a0lf6-s”></param><param name=”wmode” value=”transparent”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/H8l9a0lf6-s” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” wmode=”transparent” width=”425″ height=”353″></embed></object>

Together, we can bump poor Miss South Carolina out of her top spot(s) on YouTube’s Most Viewed This Week and make Lucky the Queen of the Internet.

Amazon remembers every order you ever placed. My first order was on March 3, 2000. Here’s what it contained:

• Red Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson
• The Hedgehog and the Fox : An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History, by Isaiah Berlin
• Cocktail : The Drinks Bible for the 21st Century, by Paul Harrington, Laura Moorhead

I liked Red Mars, but never got around to reading the rest of the books in the series. The Hedgehog and the Fox was good too. I was reminded of this book recently in an excellent SALT podcast by Philip Tetlock called "Why Foxes Are Better Forecasters Than Hedgehogs". The real winner in this batch is Cocktail, which I still reference regularly. This is no surprise though. I was already familiar with this same material from HotWired’s Cocktail, which introduced me in 96-97 to what are still my three favorite drinks, the Gibson, the Rusty Nail, and the Sidecar.

Viewing the payment info and it said I used a gift certificate for that order. I searched my e-mail and found the original gift certificate. It was a gift from Diana, the same Diana I would start dating later that year.

Embarrassingly, the search also turned up the fact that this gift certificate originally expired before I cashed it in. Amazon was nice enough to send me this e-mail a month later:

We’ve discovered that you received a $<INSERT_AMOUNT_HERE> Amazon.com gift certificate, and that it expired without ever being redeemed. That’s no fun. So, as our gift to you, we’re reactivating it.

In spite of the honkey-tonk mail merge that left in INSERT_AMOUNT_HERE, I was able to reactivate it and make my first purchase.

(via Matthew Oliphant)