Evilsoft.org

A few weeks ago, a video was passed around our office that was about Google interviewing people in Times Square about what a browser is. The results were fairly appalling. For the most part, people responded with various portal and search web sites instead of something like “IE” or “Firefox”. This coincided with a conversation I was having with someone in which I posited the hypothesis that IE as a browser would bias to the political right, and other browsers (specifically firefox) would bias to the political left. My reasoning was:

1. Conservatives would be more comfortable with a browser delivered by a major corporation that has faced antitrust charges over that browser then liberals would.
2. Liberals anecdotally are more prone to counter-cultural choices, and thus would be more likely to seek out an alternative to the default browser.

The Google interviews made me realize one other thing. In testing for this kind of effect, you would need to eliminate people who didn’t know what a browser was. Clearly, a person who doesn’t even know what a browser is is highly unlikely to proactively switch from their system’s default browser. Further, if a person’s political views are correlated at all with their likelihood of understanding what a browser is, not eliminating people who don’t understand could hide real results.

The company I work for, Knewton Inc, is becoming known in certain circles of its clever usage for the vastly underused (IMHO) Amazon Mechanical Turk service. When I mentioned my contention to our guy who’s been pioneering our MTurk usage, Dahn Tamir, he suggested that we build an MTurk task and get some real data to find out whether my hypothesis had any basis in reality. The rest of this post represents my findings.

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This is the first of a set of posts detailing projects that never made it to the blog. This last winter, I was working on a relationship with an ex of mine, and I decided to learn a new trade skill to make her something impressive. So I etched some copper plates using the electrolytic etching method outlined at steampunkworkshop.com and attached them to moleskin notebooks. It’s really quite an interesting process, and the results are spectacular. This is the first of the two plates:

Copper Plate Electrolytic Etching of Justice and Athena

And this is the second:

Copper Plate Electrolytic Etching of Justice

The rest of the photos are in my Flickr photostream.

So I know I have been silent here for a week or so, I have been busy with some releases. The first of which has been for work, but the second one is the topic of this post. PCGen. PCGen is an open source project that I have been working on for a number of years that is used for making characters for pen and paper RPGs. After a year of work, the team has finally managed to release a new stable version, and it has been a long and hard road. I work on software as a job, and I maintain connections to a number of open source projects, and I have to say, I think getting a stable release out on an open source project is much harder then getting one out in a professional environment.

Open source projects are very difficult to lead, because there are so many people that participate, with so many conflicting goals. Add to that: If your project is used by a business, especially if the business makes money doing something related to your project, even if you are unaffiliated with that business, you can expect regular and constant flame wars erupting. (I might add that normally the people who are most opposed to commercial involvement, and a “business stealing from the project” are people who have contributed absolutely nothing, and thus personally have nothing to be “stolen”). So this results in substantial amounts of our resource time going to fighting fires instead of working on the project.

The last big thing that makes releasing a “stable” release on an open source project is that it’s very hard to make a release good enough to go out the door. This particular issue is IMHO one of the strengths of the project. As an engineer it’s very hard to predict what will be important to your users. If you have constant feedback from your community, you can see how things break for others, and it means what you release in the end is far better.

All in all, I have learned a ton in the last year about how to have a leadership role in an open source project, which I’m gonna need this coming year, as the changes we are implementing in pcgen over the next calendar year are going to be very deep, structural and profound for the project. Hopefully the experiences of the last year has taught me and the rest of the team a lot.

I’ve had some strange habits in my life, but this one has got to be one of the more bizarre ones. In my life I have purchased a lot of gadgets. I mean a LOT of gadgets. And one universal thing is they all come with cables, and those cables are almost always tied together with twist ties. Well, for the past 5 years, I have kept those twist ties, and used them for somewhat stranger ends: The creation of little twist tie people and other beings that I can scatter around my desk, causing my office mates to conclude that I am most deffinitly something of a whack job.

Pair of lovers

The process is pretty easy, you need about 3 twist ties of roughly the same length to make a person. One creates the head and body, 1 creates the arms and chest (or breasts in the case of one of the two in the below picture “Pair of Lovers”) and the final one creates the abdomen and the legs.

Climber

Once you have a number of people, you can lay them out doing any number of things. Personally I find ones that unnerve your co-workers such as the below “Ctulhu Worshippers” to be the most enjoyable. But it’s very easy to create scenes that are allegories for political battles at the office, or scenes based on recent events.

Ctulhu Worshipers

After having done this for some time, it’s fairly easy to figure out how to do more unique things, such as dragons, ettins, or really anything your imagination can come up with. Personally I think my next project will be a twist tie darth vader for the upcoming release of revenge of the sith.

Dragon

Suggested tools:

• A pile of twist ties, varrying lengths
• a leatherman, or other needle nosed pliers (good for crimping the joints to make them hold well)
• Paperclips (I don’t show any here, but you can easily turn a paperclip into a number of things such as swords, staves, other handheld objects, even furniture)
• The odd mixture of motivation, creativity and boredom to take on a project like this

Ettin with victim

So I have a lot of things that need to have their batteries charged, and I find it kind of irritating to have to leave chargers all over the house because this or that plug is full. Never mind the irritant that if you live with someone else, charging items can *ahem* migrate as people need different plugs. So I finally broke down and decided to create a charging station where I could leave all my chargeable. So, first off, a materials list: (See Fig 1)

• Wine crate: These are getting a bit harder to find, but there are still plenty around. Ask your local liquor mart where you can get them, normally you can pick them up for free. They make a nice, organic, modular shelving system that doesn’t look near as bad as milk crates.
• 1-2 Power strips (4 things can generally be charged per strip): I recommend getting one where the plugs are 90 degrees off the line of the strip – you can generally fit 4 chargers on one of these. The thinner the power strips, the better.
• 1 strip of quarter inch wood, 3 1/2″ wide: Get this at home depot. In the first or second wood aisle, there is generally a series of cubbies. In one of the aisles there will be thin strips of wood. To get one 3 1/2″ wide, it’ll be labeled at 4″.
• 1 strip of quarter inch wood, 2 1/2″ wide: Same as above, but it’ll be labeled as 3″ wide.
• 2-4 screws that fit the back of your power strip (2 per strip used)
• Wood Glue
• Cable ties (optional)
• Screw driver that fits above screws.
• Jigsaw
• Drill

Fig 1: Materials

First off, you are going to want to drill some holes at the back of the crate, at what will be the bottom. You should drill these large, as this is what you will use to fit the jigsaw into, to cut a hole large enough for the power strip’s plug to pass through. Next, line up the power strip to figure out where you will need to hang it from the screws. You will want the bottom edge of the power strip to be 1 1/2″ or so above the groove that is in the wine crate. If you are doing 2 power strips, do the same with the upper groove. (See Fig 2)

Fig 2: Cut hole & add screws for power strip

After cutting the hole and screwing in the mounts, hang the power strip. If you are doing 2, I would recommend the second one be directly above the lower one. Run the power cable(s) through the hole in the bottom. (See Fig 3)

Fig 3: Mount power strip

Now, plug in all the gear that you intend to charge in the charging station. I recommend using cable ties to shorten the length of the power cable so that it’s not as hard to stuff under the shelf we’ll add in a minute. Make sure that if you do use cable ties, that there is enough length of cable between the plug and the loop that the loop can set on the bottom of the box (or above the top groove in the case of an upper power strip. Also ensure that there is enough length of Cable after the loop so that you can set the charger on a shelf that slides into the bottom groove. (See Fig 4)

Fig 4: Plug in gear

Mark and cut the 3 1/2″ wood strip so that it will fit in the grooves. If you are doing 2 chargers, cut 2 of them (there should be more then enough length on the strip of wood). Slide in the shelves, so that it is about a quarter inch back from the front of the crate. Then, set your chargeable items on the lower of the two shelves. You will want to tuck the extra length of cable under the lower shelf, and over the upper shelf. At this point, you can also optionally choose to mount some of your chargers on the side of crate, or on the clear space in the back of the crate. (See Fig 5)

Fig 5: Add shelf

Now, take your second strip of wood, the 2 1/2″ piece, and set it along the bottom, marking it so it will fit in the quarter inch of space you left between the shelves and the front of the crate. Cut 1-2 strips depending on if you are adding the upper shelf. Now, run wood glue along the edge of the shelf *but not on the crate, this shelf is to be removable*, and attach the strip so that it covers the wire den. If you are doing 2 shelves, you will probably want to remove all the chargeables from the box so that you can flip it over to glue the other strip in place. It’s much easier then trying to get it to stay put with no support. (See Fig 6)

Fig 6: Cover wire den

And there you go. A compact place with built in power to charge all your gizmos. Fig 7 shows mine in place at my house. You may decide you want to stain the front strip, or even the whole box. I still need to get around to that on mine.

Note: If you happen to have cradles for mp3 players/pdas/phones, the hole in the back is also great for running USB cables to your computer.

Enjoy!

Fig 7: Charging station in place