Up On the Roof…

Before you think this is a trick headline, written just to get clicks, please read on just a bit more.

We seem to have a serious but totally ignored problem here in the New York/New Jersey area. I’d be surprised if its not just about the same everywhere else in the US. Our State Highway Departments are foolishly wasting barrel after barrel of diesel, gasoline, oil and man hours too, mindlessly clipping the tips off of just sprouted spring grass along miles of highway medians and shoulders.

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China drives tech as US becomes the backseat driver

A report released from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and Georgia Tech today link to pdfs, shows that China will soon overtake the US as the driver of high technology innovation. Press release. Anyone following the economy in the last year or two knows that China’s demand for raw materials (high oil prices) has already caused a dramatic shift in our daily lives.

Over the next week or so the government will work out details of a stimulus package to put dollars into the hands of Americans to avoid or delay a recession. When it finally is signed, people should see checks by late spring. I’m not going to debate the value of it here, or justify bailing out those who took risky mortgages. I have no idea, but maybe we can get the stimulus in an oil voucher? or if this report is right, in Chinese Yuan?

Back to the report. The have been studying these high tech indicators since the 80′s. It started as a way to measure what country would become the next Japan. In the last 14 years (93-07) the US has dropped some, but China has gained a HUGE amount. See their chart below.

Today the US has some leverage over China. We innovate and they manufacture. Even with the lost value in knock-off or bootlegged material, we still get value out manufacturing our goods there.

In the near future, they will not only manufacture, but innovate and create new products to sell to us, possibly keeping both slices of pie. China is growing fast and the younger leaders in charge are slowly opening up their economy embracing a more western outlook. I think its too soon to tell what the impact of this inevitable change in the world economy will have for us here in the US.

UPDATE: just received word over an hour ago that comcast has lifted the block on our IP range. Better late than never. Thanks to comcast, they must have real people, paying attention to things after all.

I’ve never posted work related material to this blog before (my real job, that is), but I have to rant and expose the nonsense going on over at comcast. Maybe I’d be going too far in calling it censorship, but I work for a medical news and information site.

It seems that a few weeks ago they implemented what is called a feedback loop. Basically, it means that if one or more users click a “This is spam” link or button on the comcast webmail website, not only will that email go into the users spam or junk mailbox, but they’ve taken it to another level, and blocked ALL email from our server to EVERY comcast.net mail account holder.

We have a decent number of comcast users that have requested daily news emails from us and are being denied a legitimate piece of email. (BTW, we are a 100% opt-in list and don’t buy or sell addresses to send to) As I said, we’re a medical news website and we don’t sell anything in our emails or on the site.

The outrage in this is that “one man’s junk is another man’s treasure.” So denying someone a legitimate, requested email because someone else marked it as spam, is a bad thing.

Despite several attempts to resolve this, comcast is unresponsive. After sever weeks, comcast has not taken any action on our requests. Comcast ignores their users as well. We forwarded to them, copies of email from our users demanding that we restore their medical news email. We’ve also reccomended that our loyal readers contact comcast directly as well. So far, comcast continues ignore their customers and to deny their customers wishes.

I am not in favor of spam, I get several hundred or more spam messages per day that I could do without.

I also get email that is not spam, that like the emails we send out, I have signed up for at various businesses, news or tech websites. Many times I don’t get to read them. Many times I sign up because I think I would like to read them, but it turns out they are not what I expected or just don’t have the time.

As you may know, most users have been taught to NEVER click on the unsubscribe at the bottom of the emails, because you’ll just get more emails.

There’s a good chance some of our comcast.net readers may not remember signing up for our email. Surely some of these comcast.net readers decided our email wasn’t right for them. Maybe some of them clicked the “SPAM” button because its faster, easier and as they’ve been warned, safer for them. Why chance being bothered with an unsubscribe process fraught with the consequence of getting more junk mail (although, I assure you, ours doesn’t sign you up for more mail).

Thanks for listening. If there’s anyone out there in the same boat, please add a comment. I’d love to hear it.

I can see myself.

There it is. Right up there—first sentence. That’s the biggest reason for the lack of use of iChat videoconferencing (in the workplace, at least). At home its a big hit with the kids. They eat it up. Especially in Leopard, with the addition of cool “Effects” that let you distort your image like a Picasso or have a dynamic background using a poor man’s green screen. There are also developers creating add-on effects for it.

Back to the work issue. I think iChat would be a great tool at work. Especially with increased telecommuting, increasing numbers of permanently remote users, and for groups who need to collaborate, it can be a valuable tool. All of the new MacBook and MacBookPro laptops in our group have the video capability built-in. I can count on one hand the number of times it has been used.

I was wondering why we use it so little, then it hit me. I don’t want to see my ugly mug on screen and if others feel the way I do, that explains it. Its not that I or any of my friends and co-workers look particularly unappealing (People have told me I look a little like Andre Agassi and Uncle Fester, so go figure).

Nobody, wants to see themselves on screen. When you’re speaking to someone, you don’t see yourself. When I’m talking to someone, in my head I look like _______________ (fill-in the name of some Hollywood mega-star), but on iChat, its not that guy.

So rest assured, there is a solution, in Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), but it is not enabled by default. From Apple.com:

Link: http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/300.html#ichat

So, the challenge for me now is to fix this on every machine in my group. Which I will attempt to do next week. I promise to report back if the use of iChat video increases.

Today I wrote a small piece of code that I have wanted to use for some time now. I would rather have had found and ripped this code off of someone else online using a Google search, but either I wasn’t entering in the right phrases or no one has made their code easy enough to find.

Enough with the suspense already. I needed to run a bunch of SQL updates, but I didn’t want to tie up the system, so I was looking to, for lack of a better description, “pace” the batch processing. When looking at it, its admittedly simple, but I had a mental block trying to do this exclusively in coldfusion. This solution is a mix of CF and plain old web server plus web client.

Sure, I could have used cron, but this was a small job, and not worth the hassle for me. I’m sure someone has done similar before, but for those who are endlessly searching for this, like I had been, here you go. Also, I imagine many will have alternative methods or suggestions on improving this, please share with us and comment.

<cfparam name="start" default="1"> <!--- start with 1 --->
<cfparam name="next" default="0"> <!--- start with next as zero --->
<cfparam name="wait" default="60"> <!--- change the duration of the page refresh --->
<cfset start = next + 1> <!--- the counter --->
<cfif start eq 3> Done. <cfabort></cfif> <!--- puts an end to the refreshing --->
<html>
<head>
<title>Batch process</title>
<!--- this will use the parameters above and/or from the URL you enter to change the refreshing
in this case, I named the file "pace-batch-process.cfm" --->
<cfoutput>
<meta HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" content="#wait#;URL=http://www.yourdomain.com/pace-batch-process.cfm?next=#start#&wait=#wait#">
</cfoutput>
</head>
<body>
<cfif start eq 1>
Run the first thing
</cfif>
<cfelseif start eq 2>
Do the second thing
<cfelseif start eq 3>
Run the third thing
<cfelse>
Do nothing
</cfif>
</body>
</html>

Again, I imagine many will have suggestions on this, both positive and negative, please share and comment.