entirely safe and fun

As you may have noticed, I’ve been compiling a list of configuration information for a totally new, configuration-free Windows Mobile 5.0 Smartphone. This is, of course, because I have one and need to get it working.

It’s thin, it’s light, and it handles stereo Bluetooth: it’s the QTek 8500. There are a few things I’d like to say are awesome about this phone. The QVGA (320 x 240) screen is excellent, especially if, like me, you enjoy browsing the Web from your phone. A2DP, more familiarly known as stereo Bluetooth, rocks unfairly - listening to web radio with no wires in the signal path is pretty tech. Windows Mobile 5 also includes push email, which I haven’t gotten set up yet. These features make the 8500 the ultimate gargoyle phone, Snow Crash style. Furthermore, the form factor is sexy as hell. Master sexy artisans carve the case out of a solid block of matte black sexy.

I’m still not done getting all of the 8500’s features set up, but so far I have no complaints that I haven’t been able to address by tweaking some configuration. The most frustrating part, when I was getting started, was correctly configuring the network settings. No one has up-to-date information on the web, as far as I can tell. I called and emailed Cingular, and the fruits of that research are now on my list of useful things to know. Then, the thinness of the documentation became an obstacle; I’m pushing through that with sheer experimentation at this point. I’ll update the info page from time to time as I figure things out. Every time I find myself wishing I had a nice, four-color-glossy manual from Cingular, I remind myself that I’m using a product too new to even have US distribution channels (mine came with a charger plug that no one could identify, possibly for Outer Buzkashistan or someplace (see update, bottom)), and that something has to give, and that smart engineers, faced with a choice of what will give, have always chosen documentation. “Well, the History Eraser Button seems to be working great, but we need to ship tomorrow. Copy that wishlist Marketing gave us last year and slip it into the box.”

The one irremediable problem with this phone, right now, is that no carrier is supporting it. You’ll have to buy one with no carrier subsidies, making it expensive, and with minimal expectation of technical assistance, which can be frustrating. Just finding the MMS configuration dialog must have taken me an hour, for instance. I pre-ordered mine from GBT Mobile, who were honest, forthright, and easy to get in touch with. There were some shipping delays, but they kept their customers informed, and didn’t dodge or go silent. There are a lot of really awful cell phone dealers on the Web (e.g. Wirefly, to whom I won’t link), and I am happy to report that my experience with GBT was quite pleasant.

I’ll try to get a more thorough review of the 8500 up shortly. In brief, though, I’m enjoying it.

Update: The type G plug is, in fact, widely used in Outer Buzkashistan, but my bet now is that my phone came either from the UAE or the UK, and if I had to choose, my money would be on the former.

Rob Cockerham, of cockeyed.com, admonishes you to “Always bring your camera.” With the increasing quality of phone cameras, this gets easier and easier. Having my camera, plus my usual atavistic gift of hunty sneakery, enabled me to get within about ten feet of a black-throated hummingbird in the garden section at Orchard Supply, and document it by snapping this reasonable-quality photo.

Another step was one too many, and my subject took off, denying me the pleasure of roast hummingbird or whatever she might have imagined I’d do with her tasty, tasty flesh. It is a little-known (or at least little-considered) fact that hummingbirds are made almost entirely of meat… and filled with sugar!

As described in comment-#557, an excerpt from the testimony of Inspector Legrasse:

The devotees of the tiny, foul thing gathered in the fane of the QTek 8500. Bluetooth accessories, including adherents of the debased A2DP, found their place with the MicroSD card among the caffeinated beverages and the office supplies. As the fluorescent lights shone eldritchly upon them, they called upon their absent master for its favors.

Suddenly, a hush - the arrival of the priest! It was a black can - not a Negra Modelo, but a truly black can - and it led the trembling half-and-half into the midst of the unclean company. It raised the knife, and a pongoid yawp arose from the throats (can I even call them throats? gorges?) of the congregation.

Unified in abandon and ecstasy, they cried as one: “Ph’ nglui mglw’ nafh 8500 Yoopies’ Shiping-center wgah’ nagl fhtagn.” The knife fell and fell again, the priest transported and possessed by his task, proxy to the One Who Will Ship Real Soon Now. The rite reached its unholy climax as the priest spat into the spilled milk.

The atmosphere was electrified as the milk spread and soaked into the paint of the cube shelf. A voice low beyond hearing spake unto each of the celebrants:

Colin, We are emailing you today to give you an update on your order of the QTEK 8500. We just received word that there has been a last minute delay by QTEK on shipping these devices. Due to this delay we now expect to ship your phone the middle of next week. We are very sorry for this delay and we are doing everything we can to get your order in and shipped out as soon as possible. We will send you an update next week if there are any other delays. Otherwise, you will receive an email with your tracking number as soon as it is shipped to you. Thanks, Shawn

And now, an actual picture of my shredded meniscus.

Click the photo to enlarge. The torn bit is being depressed by the probe a little behind the focus plane on the left side of the field, and bits are floating around in the tear itself. Obviously, in need of repair.

As an aid to visualization, I’ve drawn a little diagram, left, of the top of the cartilage, as seen from above. It shows the line of the tear following the contour of the cartilage for most of its length (red). In the drawing, I’ve taken the liberty of lengthening and narrowing the whole shape of the meniscus - in reality, it’s closer to circular, as you can see in the photo, right. A normal meniscus (click to enlarge) looks like what it is: a smooth, padded surface that allows a joint to absorb shock and glide through its range of motion. This is my healthy medial meniscus, from the same knee. Ideally, by trimming away damaged tissue from my lateral meniscus and sewing together the two torn portions, it will be restored to a state more like this.

In other knee-related news, the cult classic capoeira kung-fu flick Only the Strong finally was released on DVD. Among other things, it provided the soundtrack to the “Zoom Zoom” Mazda ads, introduced Mark Dacascos to a wider (non-zero, I suppose) audience, and made the spectacular martial art of capoeira internationally visible, probably inspiring more people to wreck their knees than any other non-football movie.

I have some pretty nifty souvenirs from my knee arthroscopy, chief among which is a CD full of stuff including an MPEG video, which I have yet to watch but am definitely looking forward to (it’s the feel-good movie of the year!), and some photos of the work done on my knee. Here’s one I thought was especially cool:

Part of the problem was that my lateral meniscus - the cartilage that sits on top of the tibia and cups the lateral condyle of the femur - was shredded, as you can see near the arrow. Since the femur slides across the meniscus during knee flexions, every movement of my knee was attended by rather unpleasant sounds and occasionally unbearable pain. (edit 12 May 2006: But this picture is actually of the other side of the lateral femoral condyle-lateral aspect of tibia interface - it’s of bone and cartilage grown over the tunnel through which my ACL runs. Same complaint about every movement of the joint making awful sounds/pain applies to this injury, as well as to the meniscal tear off screen in this shot.) From the inside, the meniscus cartilage looks like it’s been TPed. The sharp-toothed tool there was used to give my knee a haircut and remove the overgrown bone. Now it just needs to get a job.

At any rate, I’m doing fine, hoping to be be back at work “for reals”, as the kids say these days, by the end of the week, and ready for the Team Constructed Pro Tour Qualifier this weekend. I’m not quite a big enough geek to schedule my surgery around a Magic tournament, so I’ll have to play through my injuries, like Curt Schilling in the ‘04 ALCS. Hopefully, not so much blood, though - it warps the cards.

So I’m getting arthroscopic knee surgery today. Last time I had one of these, I learned all kinds of cool things! For instance, a pair of achilles tendons from a cadaver, prepared for transplantation, showed up on my itemized bill at $1500. So now, if I need to buy cadaver connective tissues, I have some sense of the market for them. Tissue dealers are always trying to rip you off, but since my ACL allograft I’m an educated consumer, and now you are too.

What fresh wonders await me? I am so psyched! I may even be pumped up, jazzed, or even enthused! This is definitely the coolest thing that’s happened to me on a recent Tuesday.

I’ve been going back over my comment spam a bit, and I noticed a few things that really disturbed me. Probably the strangest thing was the ubiquity of ads for the proton-pump inhibitor (stomach acid reducer) Prilosec. You expect to see online sales for drugs that people are embarassed to ask their doctors for, or drugs with recreational uses. Sure enough, the most commonly advertised drugs I’m seeing are C1alis and Via.gra, or substances with similar names, and perco-cet/VIC0DIN/fen+an yl/Lora%epam/etc. Most Internet sales are probably to abusers.

But almost every comment spam offers Prilosec. In the same spam as the tram/a-dol and the alpra%o1am. What’s the attraction?

“Yeah, man, when your heartburn goes away, it makes you feel real good. If you snort it, man, that’s a rush, like six hours later… wow. Your whole esophagus feels, like, you know, the fire is going out. Cosmic. One time, Phish were in town, maybe in ‘01? - and I got backstage, and ate, like, a spicy hummus pita off the sandwich tray… the one I took that morning, that was the best ‘Sec ever, and I was feeling it while they were jamming to ‘You Enjoy Myself’ for, like, an hour. Yeah, like, totally feeling it. Wow. The helping, friendly purple pill.”

“I was at this party in a warehouse in Pittsburgh, and I had been dancing for so long my glowsticks were fading. Also, I was getting kind of faint, so I scarfed a hot ham Primanti’s. But then I starting feeling pretty bad, and the music started to all sound the same. Then, this guy came over, and he gave me a purple pill, and wow! What a rush! Like right away, five or six hours, tops, I was dancing again, and I kept going for at least another hour before the sun came up. Now I always roll with a ‘Sec when I go out. Peace.”

“Prilosec was the technology of Control. In the Zone, only foods of the most dubious biological, even chemical, makeup could be found, and so all citizens had reached an arrangement with The Man about their gastric pH. Most, in exchange for their fix, lined up to submit to masochistic sex acts in the public pharmacies, where secret degradation junkies sat behind one-way mirrors, lipless white faces practically priapic at the parade of assholes arranged for their pleasure. The acid-reduction metabolism had replaced sex for them. I had started working a short con with Fruity Moe, painting Flutamides purple. Now, Fruity Moe had a prolapsed esophagus…”

akismet is an excellent WordPress plugin is a Web-based service combined with a WordPress plugin that, with essentially no configuration from the blog administrator, automatically kills comment spam. I’ve had it up for a day now and it seems to be 100% effective, in that I was getting dozens of comment spam a day before, versus zero that have gotten through since, I brought up akismet. I’m impressed; this solution kicks a thousand kinds of ass. But installing it did have one little catch, and I had one other concern I wanted to get out of the way before going down this road.

The instructions on the official site, brief as they are, manage to be confusing. They instruct you to get an API key from the “My Account” page on your WordPress blog. But you don’t get an API key from the WordPress installation you’re adding akismet to - you have to sign up for a wordpress.com hosted blog (on this page) and get the key from the totally separate blog you create there, which blog you’ll presumably never use if you have your own.

The whole thing is kind of awkward and wasteful, and I wonder, just a little wistfully, why the akismet folks would put this hoop here for us to jump through. Isn’t there some kind of identifier computed as a secure hash on some combination of configuration options that could be used instead? Something like the MD5 of the blog’s name concatenated with a user-supplied password? Or a key managed within the framework of the akismet website, and associated with the blog that is actually running the akismet plugin? I can’t make sense of the current scheme, which encourages users to use the same API key for multiple blogs and is not especially useful as an identifier.

The only other thing that slightly bothers me about akismet is its opaqueness. This I have reconciled myself to. Just as with Google’s PageRank, akismet’s spamminess tests actually do benefit from security through obscurity. You only need to keep the algorithm from being gamed by would-be spammers until you change it again, not for the long term, and that’s precisely the kind of protection that obscurity grants. You get an additional period of time (a constant term added to the complexity), rather than having each period getting longer (some higher-order operation on the complexity) as you would by strengthening the algorithm or building its knowledge base/bias. Even that increment is useful in this setting, as opposed to being useless in (e.g.) crypto. For AI-related reasons, it is harder to improve comment-spam-fighting algorithms than it is to improve spamming techniques, so those extra days and weeks are important in buying time to improve the algorithm, or its bias, again. Hence, I’ve chosen to accept some unknowns in order to get function, rather than mess around with a really open solution that will certainly have greater vulnerabilities.

That said, I bet they’ve got some really cool stuff going on under the hood - a collection of hacks and sidecars and special-purpose classifiers that a biologist could recognize and love. I would love to get a look.

Since I have evidence that I am a talented futurologist, you should listen to my predictions about technology.

In a previous incarnation as an academic, I marvelled to the PI on my team that my (reasonably efficient) implementation of the machine-learning system we were working on had runtimes, on even moderately-sized datasets, in the week range. He told me that we’d be living almost our entire lives more than five years in the future, and it was reasonable to write software for the speedy computers of that era. As soon as I grasped this wisdom, I realized that I should also account for our interface color schemes, which would have to still be usable in the blue light that would characterize the future.

If I were allowed to photograph the inside of the colocation facility where are kept my employer’s servers, you’d see that the future is more of a purple color than a blue, but my futurological prowess is nonetheless demonstrated. So, what follows is a hot tip from the Only Accurate Technology Oracle(TM):

Continue reading ‘The Oracle speaketh’ »

Spring feels early this year in Northern California. I took this picture of a Scoliopus bigelovii in Muir Woods, just north of San Francisco, on 15 Jan. It looks like an orchid - enough to take me in at a fence-enforced four-foot remove - but it’s actually a member of the Liliaceae (lily family). It’s not really germane to anything, just a pretty flower to look at. Look at the pretty flower! Look, damn you! Look!