Archive for October, 2005
If you are a frequent flyer like me, you are probably constantly frustrated by the inconsiderate throng of people packing around the baggage claim carousel preventing you from seeing and retrieving your bag while they are waiting for their checked bags to show up. What i do not understand is why can’t those carousel hoarders, as i like to call them, move next to the carousel only after they have seen their bags. By merely moving back from the carousel by a few feet while waiting for the bags, so many more passengers will be able to have a better view of the carousel and therefore be able to get to their bags quickly without having to fight through the heedless crowd.
I think i have a perfect solution for this problem. Loosely based on the theory of “negative reinforcement”, the Hog Buster will make sure that only passengers with bags physically on the carousel are allowed within 5 feet (naturally, this range is configurable) of the carousel. If passengers step onto the “courtesy zone” without their bags on the carousel, they will be subjected to a mild localized eletric shock. If this mild electric shock fails to do the trick, the strength of the shock will be increased gradually, until the offenders are rendered uncomfortable enough to leave the “courtesy zone”. Eventually, the passengers will learn, most likely painfully, that they should only be next to the baggage claim carousel when their bags are actually on the carousel. Problem solved.
So, how can this be achieved? During the check-in process, as it is now, you are issued baggage claim ticket for your bag to be checked in. With the Hog Buster system, each claim ticket is inserted with a RFID device which has a unique signature. A similar RFID device is placed on the baggage label attached to your bag. On top of the baggage claim carousel at the destination airport, there will be a giant electronic display board. When your bag is placed on the carousel, the RFID sensor on the carousel will acknowledge that and will send the information to the giant display notifying you that your bag is ready to be picked up. When you stand next to the carousel to retrieve your bag, sensors around the “courtesy zone” will confirm that you are indeed permitted to be in the “courtesy zone” by validating with the RFID claim ticket that you have on you. Passengers without their bags on the carousel are subjected to the localized electric shocks. The only remaining technical issue is how the electric shocks can be applied to the offending passenger without affecting other legitimate passengers?
More questions? Check out the Hog Buster FAQ below.
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Can the Hog Buster be configured with a more “humane” negative reinforcement system?
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| Yes, most definitely. Instead of sending electric shocks which could potentially be fatal to some inconsiderate fools, the Hog Buster can be configured with an audible notification system. For example, instead of sending a mild electric shock to the offender, the audible notification system will announce, over the speakers, with a message like “Mr. John Doe, please kindly step away from the courtesy zone until your bag is ready.” If that offender chooses to remain there, the message will be upped to something like “Mr. John Doe, move away from the courtesy zone until your bag is ready.” If offender continues to ignore the previous messages, the next warning can be something like “Mr. John Joe, move your inconsiderate ass out the courtesy zone. You are blocking others from retrieving their bags, you stupid fucking moron…”, you get the point. |
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What happens if English is not the native language of the passenger?
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| Very simple. During the check-in process, the native language of the passenger can be stored in the RFID claim ticket. If that passenger is in the “courtesy zone” before his bag is ready, the system will make announcements in the passenger’s native language, making sure that the passenger fully understands his/her selfish behavior. |
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What happens if the passenger has lost his claim ticket?
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| If the passenger has lost his claim ticket, by right he should not be able to claim the luggage unless he can prove that he is the rightful owner. The system can be configured to disable the electric shock applicator or the audible notification system if more than 90% of the bags have been retrieved. So when the “all clear” sign has been issued, the passenger can move on to the “courtesy zone” to retrieve his bag. |
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What other options are available to deal with unruly passenger who refuses to budge no matter how much electric shock and insults have been hurled at him?
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| For the extremely difficult passenger, if both the electric shocks and verbal abuses proved to be ineffective, the Hog Buster system can be configured with the Bamboo Kabob module. The Bamboo Kabob module is basically a bunch of sharpened bamboo sticks coated with Komodo dragon saliva and wild boar feces that, when combined, is guaranteed to cause maximum infection in the shortest amount of time. The Bamboo Kabob module works like this: when final attempts of both the electric shocks and the verbal insults have been exhausted, the bamboo sticks will pierce upward through the perforated floor in the “courtesy zone”, into the feet of the offending passenger. The severe pain and the infection that will soon follow should be sufficient to remind the passenger not to repeat his thoughtless act again. |
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Can the Spotlight module be added with all other modules?
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| All the modules, including the Spotlight module, are designed to work individually as well as together for the most effectiveness. The Spotlight module will be crafted with one of the most powerful lighting elements available in the industry. When the offending passenger is identified by the sensors in the “courtesy zone”, at least three separate spotlights will be shined upon the individual. If the embarrassment alone is not enough to make the offender move out of the “courtesy zone”, the G.I Joe-plastic-toy-melting heat from the spotlights will. |
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miscpicsforblog/yahoo_nonsecurelogin.jpg
For the longest time, i have been - i still am - bothered by how Yahoo! implements its login screen. For example, if you go to mail.yahoo.com, you will be greeted by the standard login screen which gives you the option for a “Secure” login. In this day and age when online identity fraud is at the all time high, just by giving an option for transmitting your login ID and password in clear text over the internet is pure stupidity and ignorance. I liken that to a bank giving its customer his 5 million dollars cash in clear grocery bags without clearly informing him that he can transport his cash in an armored vehicle with armed guards. The fact that Yahoo! is making this its standard login procedure is unfathomable.
So what is Yahoo!’s excuse for not forcing everyone to use the secure login? According to the Yahoo! Sign-In and Registration Help, “pages will take longer to download.” It is not like every pages after the login will be over SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) anyway, in fact, Yahoo! redirects the user to the non-SSL pages right after the initial login. I am pretty sure most, if not all, users can handle a little slowness during the initial login for the comfort of knowing that their login information are not sent over the internet in plain text. So this “slowness” excuse given by Yahoo! is moot.
Another reason given by Yahoo! in not sending the user directly to the secure login page is that “SSL is not supported by all browsers.” That might have been true 10 years ago but name me one browser out there now that does not support SSL. I can’t think of any. In fact, even my text-based browser Links supports SSL. Let’s just assume that Yahoo! does not want to displease the 1% of the web users that are still using browsers without any support of SSL. What Yahoo! could have done is to, by default, send 99% of the web users to the secure login page and simply redirect remaining 1% of the web users to the standard (non-secure) login page. Why is this not done? I don’t have a freaking clue!
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I am currently reading Beyond Chutzpah by Norman Finkelstein. Neve Gordon, who teaches human rights at Ben-Gurion University in Israel, wrote a pretty decent review on Beyond Chutzpah. Prior to the book being published, Alan Dershowitz hired a law firm to threaten the University of California Press into not publishing the book. When that failed, cry baby Dershowitz sent letters to the university’s board of trustees and even to Governor Arnold Schwartzenegger, asking them to intervene. When that shameless attempt failed as well, Dershowitz and other die-hard Israel supporters exerted pressure on bookstores to cancel the speaking tour of Beyond Chutzpah.
In Beyond Chutzpah, Finkelstein meticulously picked apart Dershowitz’s dubious claims that Israel has a “generally superb human rights records” in his book The Case for Israel as easily as an untrained 120-pound Rottweiler ripping apart a poorly-made chew toy. Indeed, it is amazing that apologists like Dershowitz chose to ignore and disregard the indisputable findings of mainstream human rights organizations like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and B’Tselem to make that spurious claim. In the words of Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, people like Dershowitz are trying to “justify what cannot be justified.” Finkelstein said it best in the conclusion of Beyond Chutzpah when referring to The Case for Israel:
‘Yet the biggest fraud is the title itself. Dershowitz hasn’t written a case for Israel. How could anyone genuinely concerned about the Israeli people counsel politics certain to sow seeds of hatred abroad and moral corruption within? What he has in fact written is the case for the destruction of Israel. Letting others - Palestinians as well as Jews - pay the price while he plays the “tough Jew”: isn’t this what Dershowitz’s chutzpah really comes down to?’
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There is one “feature” of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger’s Spotlight search that has irritated - and still is - the hell out of me. If you open an image after searching for it in Spotlight and that image happens to be in the “iPhoto Library” folder, you will notice that instead being opened by the default application (which in my case is Preview), the image is opened by iPhoto. Anyone who has more than a few thousand photos in iPhoto knows that it is a hog and it takes quite a bit of time before the image could be displayed in iPhoto.
At first, i thought i might have corrupted the preference file for iPhoto, which is in ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iPhoto.plist. I removed it and rebooted my Powerbook. It appeared to have worked when Preview opened the image from Spotlight. Then i ran iPhoto, which recreated the preference file. On reboot, this irritating “feature” of spotlight came back.
Then i thought may be my iPhoto application was corrupted. I trashed it and reinstalled it. Same thing. I searched through everywhere to see what could have associated those images with iPhoto even though the default application was Preview. Nothing.
Next, i searched for the same image using the find feature in Finder, which i think is essentially the same as Spotlight since i get the same search result as Spotlight. When i tried to open the image in the search result, the application was Preview! This made me realized that Spotlight is hard-coded to open up any images in the “iPhoto Library” with iPhoto, regardless if the image is imported by iPhoto or if it is moved there by other means. I did the following tests to confirm it:
- Use Spotlight to search for an image that is known to be in the “iPhoto Library” folder.
- Opened the image in Spotlight.
- The image was opened by iPhoto.
- Moved the image out of the “iPhoto Library” folder.
- Opened the image again in Spotlight.
- The image was opened by Preview.
- Moved the image back into the original sub folder in the “iPhoto Library” folder.
- Opened the image in Spotlight.
- Again, the image was opened by iPhoto.
I then did another test to see what would happen if i move an image, which has not been imported into iPhoto, into the “iPhoto Library” folder.
- Moved the image into “iPhoto Library” folder.
- Searched for the image in Spotlight and opened the image.
- iPhoto opened up but it did not display the image!!!
- Moved the image out of the “iPhoto Library” folder.
- Searched for the same image in Spotlight and opened the image.
- The image was opened by Preview.
I wonder who was the smartass developer at Apple that hardcoded Spotlight to open up images in the “iPhoto Library” folder with iPhoto. I have no doubt in my mind this is more of a result of laziness than a “feature” by the result of my second test. This would not have been such a big deal for me if there is an option in Spotlight to do “Open with…”.
To get around this “feature”, there are two ways:
- Make sure the iPhoto preference file is removed before logging out. If the iPhoto preference file is not there when you log in again, Spotlight will open up any images with your default app.
- Instead of using Spotlight to search for images, use the “Find” feature of Finder.
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| food/beef_noodle_clear.jpg |
clear style beef noodles |
| food/beef_noodle_szechuan.jpg |
szechuan style beef noodles |
| food/beef_noodle_brown.jpg |
brown style beef noodles |
I went back to Szechuan Noodle Bowl again, only this time i went with Gaurang and Meng Hua. Meng Hua had the clear style beef noodles with beef tendons only, Gaurang had the Szechuan style beef noodles with beef only, while i had the brown style (紅燒) beef noodles with mixture of beef and tendons.
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I am not alone in feeling that the beef noodles at Sandie’s Gourmet Restaurant is no longer what it used to be. I remember when i first “discovered” Sandie’s at the old location on 4th and Main, her beef noodles was all i wanted. Sandie has this sign outside of her restaurant that literally means “the king of beef noodles” (牛肉麵大王). The last few times when i had beef noodles at Sandie’s, it seemed to me that the soup was more like water with hot chili oil. Needless to say, i was quite disappointed.
Well, i am happy to say that i have found another beef noodles restaurant not too far from Sandie’s that fully deserves the title of being “the king of beef noodles”. I stumbled upon Szechuan Noodle Bowl when i was trying to get to the Malay Satay Hut. Located at the corner of 8th Ave and Jackson in the International District, the outside of Szechuan Noodle Bowl does not look very inviting. That might explain why i had not been there until now. Szechuan Noodle Bowl serves three different kinds of beef noodles - the Szechuan style, the brown style (紅燒) and the clear style. The moment i tasted the broth of the brown style beef noodles, i knew i would be coming back for more. The beef was amazingly tender and even though the noodle itself was a little too soft for my taste, it was home made and for $4.75, you really can’t find a better value for that meal.
In my opinion, the beef noodles at Sandie’s no longer deserves “the king of beef noodles” title. That said, i would still go back to Sandie’s for her other mouth-watering Taiwanese dishes.
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I have been using the Salling Clicker by Salling Software, a very innovative company founded by Swede Jonas Salling. The original version of Salling Clicker allowed me to use my Bluetooth-enabled Sony Ericsson T610 - in my opinion, this is one of the worst cellphones ever made - to control my 17″ Powerbook. Things that i could control included iTunes, Powerpoint, VLC, iPhoto and including the mouse pointer.
In version 3.0 of the Salling Clicker, Jonas has totally outdone himself. In this new release, he added support for WiFi and expanded the support to more than 90 devices. I have a HP6510 and i can use WiFi, in addition to Bluetooth, to control the above-mentioned programs on my Powerbook. Because the HP6510 has a big-ass touch screen, it makes using remote control feature of the Salling Clicker a lot easier. I can see myself using it quite a bit more often now :). Jonas also released a version of the Salling Clicker for the PC users. So really, there is no excuse for the PC users not to get it now.
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