Privacy

Maybe I'm a bit paranoid, but I've been trying to pay more attention to the app permission requests now flooding phones and laptops. For example, I was going to install Amazon's Wishlist Browser Button, but was informed by Chrome that it needs permission to access all my "data on all websites."

What scares me (besides the fact that Google knows everything about me) is the horde of people out there installing these sorts of apps, giving full legal permission to a company like Amazon to look over their shoulder as they read their bank statements and compose personal emails.

Meanwhile, phone carriers actively monitor their user's keystrokes. Okay, so there may be not "threat" to security or privacy there, but I'm sure there's certain concern brewing.

I'm a huge fan of Pandora (sadly not available outside the US), but raised an eyebrow when their app wanted access to all of my contacts. On one hand, playing radio does not require knowing who my friends are. On the other hand, this is probably a large part of why Pandora is still free to use because they can sell this info to third parties, which they certainly do.

So here I am, questioning my new friends, Google, Amazon, and probably a slew of nameless demographic analytics companies ("Consumer Recreation Services," heh). They likely know more about me than my closest friends and relatives. It's scary, but I'm an optimist that this will make my life more enjoyable. Someday. I just need to get over the paranoia and install that wishlist button...

Right Triangles && Integers

Now that I'm in the world of creating exams, I find that it is helpful to keep as many integers involved as possible so that students don't get hung up on significant figures and rounding. In the end, more integers means easier grading.

Also, the problems (it's a statics class at the moment ... stupid pun) involve lots of right triangles, and one can use a 3-4-5 triangle only so many times before it becomes passé.

A little ruby spits out leg dimensions of uniquely proportioned right triangles with integer legs:

http://codepad.org/O43BQ0H0

(lookUp marks legs that are a multiple)

Output:

4 x 3 12 x 5 15 x 8 21 x 20 35 x 12 40 x 9 45 x 28 55 x 48 60 x 11 72 x 65 80 x 39 91 x 60 99 x 20 105 x 88 112 x 15 132 x 85 *** 140 x 51 *** 165 x 52 168 x 95 180 x 19 195 x 28

Lightroom Backups

I've been using Adobe's Lightroom 3 for a few months now, and due to my limited laptop hard drive space, I need to start seriously learning backup options. I'm working with JPG / NEF pairs ("side cars" if I have my LR terminology down). A few things I've learned:

• Lightroom keeps all edits and metadata changes in its own catalog stashed somewhere out of sight
• You can choose "Save Metadata" on a folder in LR, which will output in the same folder an XMP file with all the metadata of all images
• Note: this does not save the metadata to the originals in order to avoid file corruptions
• So it's really just a means to move / copy / apply metadata to files via LR's catalog
• There are a series of "Publish" options for sending images to Facebook, Flickr, hard drives, etc. But this feels more like, well, a publishing feature and not a backup feature.

Because I want to backup a folder with edits, metadata, and original files, the proper choice seems to be "Export this Folder as Catalog..." This creates a new folder that contains copies of all the above: edits, metadata, and original files. Once this is done, I send these exported folders for typical backup.

Stormy Chicago Night

Over this past summer we had a wild storm roll over Chicago. It hit while I was on the train, and I realized that it would be leaving just as I arrived home. Upon arrival I ran inside, grabbed my camera and tripod, and headed up to the roof.

Lesson learned: long exposures are very difficult with gusty winds. In the end, I did not capture as much lightning as I had wanted, but a composite still looks cool:

American Prosperity

Unicode + PHP = Headaches

After plenty of googling, I have managed to get my company's web server to throw out properly-encoded Chinese characters from our database.

First, we're using MS SQL Server 2005 to store our information, so the text field(s) to be holding Unicode characters need to have a "N" (national) data type. For this case, I used "ntext". (As an aside, I believe MS is/has deprecated this data type and now wants nvarchar(max) or something equivalent.)

This allowed the front end client to enter Chinese characters into the database.

Then back to serving pages, I immediately ran into problems retrieving the selection set through PHP:

Warning: mssql_query() [function.mssql-query]: message: Unicode data in a Unicode-only collation or ntext data cannot be sent to clients using DB-Library (such as ISQL) or ODBC version 3.7 or earlier. (severity 16) in...

I determined that our web server was using a FreeTDS library and updated freetds.conf to use tds version 8.0 instead of 4.2 for global settings. (The file on our system was located in /etc/freetds/)

With that done, I could at least get the text out of the database, but PHP was still treating / serving it as single-byte encoded. The final settings tweak was to set the mssql character set. Before establishing any connection. I do this, so:

ini_set('mssql.charset', 'UTF-8');

This finally establishes a flow of characters from database to browser that are Unicode encoded.

EVO 4G: Speed Tweak

I came across this thread, which suggested some changes on a rooted EVO 4G to increase typical 3G speeds. Here are my quick results:

I was testing from my work desk, which is nested in a massive concrete warehouse building located on the west side of River North in Chicago. Said another way, I was testing from a bad location for signal and speed. (Yeah, that screen shot was not from my phone...)

I also restarted the phone for each series of tests. Each series was a run of 15 download / upload tests via speedtest.net's app, which automatically chose a close server ( sadly, I don't remember if it grabbed a Chicago server or not ).

Also, in addition to resetting the HTTP settings, I also did the same for the RTSP settings. I couldn't say whether this affects the speed tests.

Naturally, you can see, this is anything but scientific:





So, the tweak resulted in a suggested 41% increase in download speed, but a 30% decrease in upload. Meanwhile, the down / up standard deviation decreased by 32% and 40% respectively.

It seems that my phone will now download a lot faster with much more consistency, but will upload slower with the same consistency. Ultimately, better downs with overall more consistent connections sounds great to me!