Scott Iekel-Johnson's Journal
[Most Recent Entries]
[Calendar View]
[Friends]
Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Scott Iekel-Johnson's LiveJournal:
[ << Previous 20 ]
| Wednesday, March 12th, 2008 | | 5:14 pm |
| | Friday, January 18th, 2008 | | 7:40 pm |
My Saint And I should mention that I'm only here at Confusion because my saint of a wife ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) sueij was willing to watch our children by herself all weekend long, even after her friend who was going to come help couldn't make it. Thank you, Love! Current Mood:  thankful | | 7:30 pm |
A cold and... So on top of having a cold, I've also been having some mild abdominal pain. Nothing serious, but it's pretty localized to the lower right abdomen, right where you expect the appendix to be. After 3 days of this and it not getting better, I called my doctor for an appointment this morning. Their resopnse? "We don't have time to see you today, but you shouldn't wait to get this checked out. Go to the ER!" So rather than go in to a half day of work before heading over to Confusion, I spent the morning in the ER getting poked and prodded and blood drawn and fluids pumped in. The good news is that all of the tests came back negative, so at this point they think the likelihood is a deep muscle strain, but they can't rule out appendicitis for sure. So I get to spend Confusion waiting to see if it gets worse or better, and if it gets worse I'm supposed to go back to the ER right away. Joy. In better news, my cold is getting better. Now instead of aching all over and wanting to curl up in bed all day, I'm just sniffly and tired and want to take long naps. Eh, but it's progress. Confusion is going well do far. My GoH ( Kevin Dunn) is having fun, and looks like he'll fit in really well. I'm looking forward to a (hopefully) fun con. Current Mood:  blahCurrent Music: random folk | | Thursday, January 17th, 2008 | | 9:37 am |
Another step on the journey I'm excited to finally be able to talk about this. Today my company (Arbor Networks) announced it's acquisition of Ellacoya Networks: http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release.do?id=811433It's very interesting to see how a business grows, and to be a part of it. It's going to be an interesting challenge to integrate our two platforms to do some really amazing stuff. This is also the direction the entire market is heading, so I'm glad we're able to make a strong entry into it. Update: A really nice writeup on the merger is now up on LightReading. By popular demand, it even includes a cursory mention of the financials. Current Mood: excited | | Wednesday, January 16th, 2008 | | 9:13 pm |
Noo! I do NOT want to come down with a nasty cold the day before Confusion. It's not fair! Current Mood:  sick | | Saturday, December 29th, 2007 | | 8:45 pm |
Touch Typing Saw this on Tammy's and thought it would be fun. This was on my second try: 109 wordsTouchtyping online Note that I type for hours a day, 5 days a week, so I've had lots of practice. :-) Current Mood: accomplished | | Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007 | | 4:48 pm |
Cool Arbor News My company, Arbor Networks, has been quietly working for a while with BT (British Telecom) to develop a network security service. The service uses our products (Peakflow SP, which I am a development team lead/architect on, and Peakflow TMS, which is our packet filtering/mitigation device) to detect DDoS attacks and filter the malicious traffic within the BT network, before the traffic hits the customer and takes them offline. This type of managed service model is becoming increasingly common in the network provider world. It's really amazing to see the kind of sophisticated integration of a number of different technologies to provide new network capabilities to their end customers. This service involves integrating our products with their routing infrastructure, and tying it all in to customer accounting and management services. This is a new version of the type of service Verizon and AT&T have announced, and which are also based on our products. BTToday.com Safer networks with BT http://www.btplc.com/today/art69717.html SC Magazine BT launches managed service to tackle DDoS attacks http://scmagazine.com/uk/news/article/74 1509/bt-launches-managed-service-thwart-d dos-attacks/ Current Mood: excitedCurrent Music: My Foot, the pillows | | Tuesday, September 4th, 2007 | | 2:47 pm |
Pink for boys, blue for girls? An interesting analysis of a recent study that got a lot of popular attention. The study purported to show a link between gender and color preference, but has been widely taken out of context to justify all kinds of goofy gender stereotypes. My favorite part is the excerpt from a Ladies Home Journal article from 1919, talking about how pink is the preferred color for boys, and blue for girls. My, how times change! Current Mood: amusedCurrent Music: My Foot, The Pillows | | Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007 | | 9:51 am |
iPhone First Thoughts I've now been using my iPhone since Sunday so I've had some time to form some early impressions. Things you've probably read elsewhere that I agree with: - Overall it's a beautiful device. The display is crisp and detailed. The contrast is perfect -- deep blacks and bright colors. You can really read small text easily such as a zoomed-out web page.
- As I've come to expect from Apple, it basically just works. Assuming that the way you want it to work is the way that Apple thought it should work. But for the most part, that seems to be the right way.
- AT&T's EDGE network is really slow -- it's like being on dialup again. However, the phone does seamleessly switch to wireless whenever it's available, and that works reasonably fast. (Though not as fast as I would have expected, actually).
- Except for network slowness, the phone really does work like the tv ads and website movies show. It is very responsive.
- Google Maps on a phone with this great display is really, really amazing.
Other impressions that I haven't seen described elsewhere: I think the single biggest innovation, and the thing that makes the iPhone work across the board, is the new user interface. You've no doubt heard all the talk about the multi-touch interface, and that's important, but I'm not even talking about that. No, the thing that makes this work is that they've designed the first computer interface I've ever used that interacts as if it were a physical object. It has a physics to it that makes it immediateliy intuitive to use, and enables you to do quite sophisticated operations. For example, when viewing something larger than the size of the screen (say, your contacts list), you can flick your finger up the display to scroll down the list as if it was a price-is-right style veritcal wheel. The faster you flick, the faster and farther the list scrolls until it coasts to a stop (unless you flick it again to keep the momentum going). Touch the list as it scrolls by and it stops right on your finger, just as a real rotating wheel would. Leave your finger in contact with the screen to scroll the display exactly with your finger. It all works because the interface implements a consistent, intuitive physics that makes perfect sense for the application. You really need to try it to see what I mean, but you can get the idea from watching some of the videos on Apple's website. As you can probably tell, this is the thing I'm most jazzed about with the phone. Go check out some of the apple website movies if you haven't seen it. Other impressions: - The keyboard works pretty well, but I'm still getting used to it.
- Text editing is pretty weak -- I haven't found a way to highlight text for mass deletion, for example. Simlarly, the notepad application is incredibly basic and could use a lot more features.
- I really wish it had a todo list manager (synced with the iCal todo list).
- Coverflow is really nifty (it's fast and uses the physical interaction I described above). I could see that becoming my main ipod interface.
- Video quality is great, and the sound is good as long as you use a decent pair of earphones and not the crappy ones they include with the phone.
- The camera is 2 megapixels, but the picture quality seems to be mediocre.
- I want to write my own apps, dammit!
I'll add more observations as I have them, but I wanted to get my first thoughts out there. Overall I'm really glad I got it, and I think I'm going to be very happy with it. But I can't say for sure I would still have bought it for the money if I hadn't already been planning to buy a new phone and an ipod anyway. YMMV. Cheers! Current Mood: geekyCurrent Music: NPR | | Sunday, July 1st, 2007 | | 5:59 pm |
Succumbed
I'm posting this from my brand new iPhone. I feel so wired!
Current Mood: enthralled
Current Music: Alex crying, uh oh | | Friday, April 13th, 2007 | | 3:01 pm |
Gaming Saturday
Anyone reading this is invited to gaming at my place on Saturday, starting at 11 am and continuing late into the evening (hopefully!). I'll provide some drinks and snacks.
Call or email me if you need directions. I hope to see you there!
Current Mood: hurried
Current Music: The Pillows | | Wednesday, February 14th, 2007 | | 3:39 pm |
The Sweet Taste of Liberty Mmmmmm.... Current Mood: amusedCurrent Music: "No one knows my plan" -- TMBG | | Thursday, February 1st, 2007 | | 11:25 pm |
Scientific Experiment Update Thanks to those of you who submitted a number in my last post. For those who are wondering what it was all about, I was participating in a little ad-hoc science experiment started by this post on a great Physics blog I enjoy reading called Cosmic Variance. The experiment was based on a phenomenon discussed by James Randi, which is that for some unknown reason if you ask people to pick a random number between 1 and 20 (integer for the Mathematically rigorous among you :-)), the number 17 is picked significantly more often than any other number. Wiggy! The Physicist writing the blog offered to collect data from those who were willing to poll their friends and see if this phenomenon actually happened. For the record, here is the data that I got from all of your answers:
| Number: | Count |
|---|
| 1 | 1 |
| 4 | 1 |
| 6 | 1 |
| 12 | 1 |
| 13 | 1 |
| 14 | 2 |
| 16 | 1 |
| 17 | 3 |
| 18 | 2 |
| 19 | 1 |
Obviously, this is way too small a sample size to draw any conclusions from. Still, I was struck by the strong bias toward high numbers: 80% of the responses were over 10, and 50% were over 15. I think there may be a psychological bias to pick high numbers because they are "better" -- perhaps because most of the people who read my blog are gamers. ("I roll 20s.") These days I think it is pretty well known that computers can't pick random numbers on their own (though modern Operating Systems have ways to work around that). But I wouldn't have guessed that people were even worse! And, of course, we had 3 17s, or 21%, which beats the truly random 5% probability quite handily. Well done. P.S. Since I mentioned it, for those interested in how newer Operating Systems generate random numbers here you go: rather than rely on repeated calls to pseudo-random mathematical functions that only appear to be random, many operating systems now maintain an "entropy pool", which is filled by measuring the timing of system events (either user-generated events like keypresses or irregular internal events like disk read/write operations or network traffic arrival/transmission). When one of these events happens, the operating system stores the insignificant digits of the time that the event occurred. It may not be very random to say that something happened 05:25:54 pm, since lots of things will occur on a computer in that second, but if you say that something happend at 134 microseconds past that second that's a lot more unique or "random". Then, when a random number is needed, these random inputs are used to derive numbers that are much more random than any deterministic calculation could hope to be. Having dealt with bad pseudo-random numbers while trying to write D&D character generators in my earlier computing days, I really appreciate the fact that we now have such sophisticated means of generating random data on deterministic machines. I hope that the two of you still reading at this point found that interesting as well. :-) (This is actually an incredibly important subject, since the security of most encrypted internet traffic depends on exactly such random inputs. Every time you establish a secure web session to enter your credit card number online, random numbers are used to create temporary encryption keys to set up the session. The more truly random those numbers are, the harder it will be for an outside eavesdropper to calculate the key and break your encryption. One of the earliest versions of netscape had a bad bug where it only randomized a small part of the initial session key value, making it many millions of times easier to guess the key by brute force.) Current Mood:  contemplativeCurrent Music: Cyberbird, by Yoko Kanno | | Tuesday, January 30th, 2007 | | 11:44 pm |
Scientific Experiment I'm helping someone out with a scientific experiment (no, really!). And you can help! Simply choose a random number between 1 and 20 (inclusive), and reply to this post telling me what it is. I'll follow up later with the results and a link to more details. (I hope it goes without saying that if you've actually heard of this experiement, please don't submit an answer or you'll skew the results. I also just set the comments to be screened so the answers will be unbiased.) [Edited 2/1/07: The experiment is over. I unscreened the comments in case anyone wanted to see what people picked or discuss it further.] Current Mood:  curiousCurrent Music: Colbert Report | | Tuesday, January 2nd, 2007 | | 3:23 pm |
| | Tuesday, December 19th, 2006 | | 4:44 pm |
| | Tuesday, October 10th, 2006 | | 12:28 pm |
Toronto Food Recommendations?
I'm going to be in Toronto for dinner tonight. Anyone have any good food recommendations? I should keep it under $50 per person, but I'm open to just about anything. I'm going to be staying right in downtown on Front St., near the convention center. | | Friday, September 8th, 2006 | | 2:05 pm |
Republican Propaganda Many of you have probably heard about the made for TV movie about 9/11 which is soon to be broadcast by ABC. Unfortunately, this movie appears to make up scenes and events out of whole cloth in order to make the Clinton administration look like it could have stopped 9/11 and failed. To quote from an email sent out by MoveOn.org: The Path to 9/11 appears to be part of a coordinated push--including speeches by President Bush and millions of dollars in advertising--to exploit the five-year anniversary of 9/11 for political gain. That's not acceptable from anyone--especially not a news organization like ABC.
It's not just that ABC's movie is slanted. Big parts of it are simply untrue. The producer himself even admitted to simply improvising a key scene which depicts the Clinton administration letting bin Laden go when
they had him in their sights--a complete fabrication [5].ABC is calling it a "Docudrama", but I don't think the name disguises what is really going on here, which is a concerted effort by the right wing to push public opinion back their way by misrepresenting the facts. Moveon.org is holding a petition drive. I urge you to speak out and help keep the 2006 election honest: http://pol.moveon.org/abcdoc?id=8709-3532385-tnPNXln9AVWbrwyrbsHoHg&t=4 Current Mood:  angry | | Monday, June 12th, 2006 | | 12:14 pm |
Kicking it old school
telnet ascii-wm.net 2006
Live, full-motion video feed of the World Cup... in ASCII! | | Thursday, May 4th, 2006 | | 10:35 am |
Hmm... Just came across this article on The Register which reports that the BBC is doing a 6-episode remake of The Prisoner, with Christopher Eccleston supposedly playing the lead role. That has a lot of potential! (Christopher Eccleston, for those who don't know him, is the actor who played the new Dr. Who last year and did an absolutely fantastic job. Even if you don't like Dr. Who, it's almost worth watching the new series just to see him.) Now I just have to hope that (a) they do a good job, and (b) the Scifi channel or someone picks it up over here. Current Mood: excitedCurrent Music: Ghost in the Shell OST |
[ << Previous 20 ]
|
