Posting Drought

Some of you may have noticed that my post frequency has gone from one-a-day to about one-a-week. I reduced posting over the break as I had originally intended to be in Thailand. When that fell through I decided to try and take a vacation locally–that meant I quit my RSS habit and my blogging as well as school and work. In general, posts should decrease because I’m sharing interesting articles over Google Reader instead of my blog, so some of the shorter, link posts are out. I’m still wickedly entertaining and full of great links, but less frequently on the blog.

Now that the semester has started back up, I’m busy! I’m working hard to get SEAP off the ground as my PhD topic. SEAP is an awesome idea that could change the world and bring aware homes to the masses–who doesn’t like that? With a number of exciting directions, I’m jazzed to research more!

I’m taking INF385, Introduction to Usability in laymen’s terms. It’s an awesome class taught by Dr. Randolph Bias; he has a great style, lots of cred, and teaches the closest thing to HCI that UT has. The class also ties in nicely to possible directions for SEAP. I’m taking it in and enjoying every minute.

I’m also getting back into the swing of things with the Students in Software Engineering. This semester we’re offering fewer meetings with an emphasis on creating community and providing useful knowledge. We’re starting off right with a lecture by Herb Krasner on the cost of quality in software. I’m looking forward to it!

Also, while I’m on campus I’m working out again! I’m going with my brother-in-law, Ryan, which gives us a good opportunity to get our beach bodies back while chatting about life. The exercise beyond biking is necessary–I can’t let the Three Kings down.

Then there’s IBM. Unfortunately, they’ve been laying people off and I’m left a little uncertain of my position. It’s stressful, but I’ll manage.

So that’s what’s keeping me busy. What’s up with you?

Invest in restful sleep

We spend 1/3 of our lives sleeping, so why not enjoy that time? Beyond being a large part of our life, sleep is essential to proper brain function. Sleep affects memory, mood, and physical performance to name a few. Modern scientists recommend 7-8 hours of sleep per night, although before the advent of lights, humans slept 10-12 hours per night.

I was not a believer myself until last summer. I slept on a $400 mattress+box springs, and I planned to continue doing so until several years after the bed rotted into nothingness. However, that plan did not work for my wife. She encouraged me to go try new mattresses, so we did. The difference between the bed I had and the pricier ($800+) beds was remarkably apparent! It took me another couple days of thinking, but finally I decided to invest in restful sleep. (I got a Tempurpedic if you’re wondering.) Since then I have slept much more soundly and been more comfortable.

Hopefully Ive convinced you, or you already know, that sleep is important. However, very few people invest in restful sleep. For instance, a nice bed. Beds are relatively cheap with expensive mattresses still coming in under $5,000. Compare that price to a car which can easily reach six figures–and you probably spend far less time in your car. I assure you the ROI of restful sleep is huge. A comfortable bed is worth every penny!

Do you believe? Have you upgraded your bed yet? When do you get the most restful sleep? Does the bed make a difference?

Setting up the PS3 as a media server

I bought a PS3 as a media server: a central hub that would manage my entertainment. I struggled for days with Windows Media Player 11. Orb solved my problems; however, I ran into issues with it. Broadly, Orb allows users to watch their media from anywhere. Orb is an amazing product! Just not what I needed.

The easiest method to setup the PS3 as a media server is TVersity! You can find two good tutorials here and here. The most recent guide I’ve followed, here, helps set up subtitles as well.

No matter what product you use, you’ll likely have to adjust your OS firewall and your router’s open ports. Luckily, the Google serves up the information quickly and easily. If you run into problems, let me know and I’ll try to help. Good luck and enjoy!

Forget Ocean’s 11, these heists are all digital

Over the holidays Wired published an article, the Seven Best Capers of 2008, that ran down a list of crafty, entertaining schemes that ultimately resulted in the perpetrator getting caught. I encourage you to read the entire article; you’ll find that every story involves a digital component. Here’s the top rated heist:

The Snohomish Smokescreen

In September, a robber disguised as a gardener pepper-sprayed an armored car driver using a pesticide sprayer and ran off with a bag stuffed with $400,000 in cash. When police arrived seconds later, they found the sidewalk crowded with dozens of men decked out in the same attire as the perp: blue shirt, Day-Glo vest, safety mask and glasses. While the cops hacked through a forest of suspects, the real perp fled to a nearby creek and escaped in a waiting inner tube.

Turns out the unwitting decoys had been lured to the crime scene by a Craigslist ad that promised construction work to those showing up in a “yellow vest, safety goggles, a respirator mask … and, if possible, a blue shirt.” A month later, following a lead from a homeless man who witnessed the preparation for the Brinks job, police arrested 28-year-old Anthony Curcio fresh from a Las Vegas vacation. Curcio is now charged with “Interference with commerce by threats or violence,” because “Pulling the most awesome robbery ever” isn’t listed in the U.S. code.

Missing from the list are the scams by Wall Street, car companies, and any other bailout recipient as well as individuals like Bernie Madoff

While not as entertaining to watch as the daring Ocean’s 11, the list helps to highlight how new media (using twitter to create flashmobs, for example) and cybercrime are the way of the future. A realistic movie about any one of these heists would involve a kid at a computer for days on end, slowly accumulating wealth.

Stealing physical items was much easier to catch and prosecute; with modern plots siphoning off fractions of a cent per transaction, we face a brave new world. America has to increase technological infrastructure, educate citizens about risks, and allow greater research into security.

What do you think? Have I misinterpreted? What’s the future of crime and high-stake heists? How can we prevent it or at least mitigate the losses?

Happy Birthday Andrea!

I’d like to wish my lovely bride, Andrea Mire Holloway, a happy birthday! It’s not everyday you have a birthday after all!

For the rest of you, happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day. If you’re still not affected by my glee, happy Monday

Is the Ivory Tower crumbling?

An article, Rejecting the Academic Fast Track, was posted January 15 on Inside Higher Ed. The article summarizes a study of over 8,300 graduate students in the University of California (UC) system; the study reveals that fewer graduate students are interested in pursuing tenure track positions at research universities. This is particularly interesting due to the large sample size and the strong academic performance of the UC schools (two schools in the top 25 and 8 in the top 100, Berkeley is top 5 in several engineering disciplines, and high rankings in law, medicine, and business).

Study participants seem to echo Generation Y’s desire to live a well-rounded life full of experiences and relationships (family) which academia does not foster. About 40% of the participants entered the PhD with academia in mind; after being part of the ivory tower the number had dropped ~10%. Roughly a quarter of the female PhDs said they would go into academia. With the number of female professors in the sciences and engineering already disproportionately low, this statistic should concern universities. The majority of those surveyed felt that teaching colleges were more in-line with their goals.

The study points out the issue and provides suggestions on how to alter future-professors’ attitudes:

• Allow faculty members to shift to part-time status or temporarily elongate timelines over their academic lives without suffering career penalties.
• Allow faculty members to take time out temporarily from their academic lives for care-giving and support their return.
• Abandon the idea that academic stars are those who move through the ranks very quickly. and embrace the idea that the stars are those who produce the most important or relevant work  faster is not necessarily better.
• Embrace the idea that it is fine to have children at any point in the career path because a full array of resources exists to support academic parents.
• Challenge the stigma in which having children, particularly for women, is often equated with less seriousness and drive.

The suggestions looks surprisingly similar to options in industry. It seems that the economy will change dramatically in the next decade: baby boomers will retire or expire leaving a hole in the workforce; 70% of young people want to work for themselves; the economy has taken a slant to services; Gen Y is collaborative, socially-minded, and entitled–ideas that go against the grain of current work culture.

What do you think? Is the ivory tower crumbling? Will teaching colleges get the top talent? How will that affect hiring at research universities? Will colleges be run more or less like businesses in the future? How will Gen Y affect the future of academia?

Fundamentals matter in the end

I am an experience junkie and a lifelong learner. I love trying new things and learning a variety of topics, so I have a very broad knowledge base. My self-taught methods are extremely effective in learning ~75% of a topic, however, I’ve now seen the value of fundamentals.

Typing. I’m an above average (100 WPM) typist. On the command line I can fly; with chats I’m fast. However, whenever I have to type random words (like on a typing test), my speed decreases to ~80WPM. My difficulty is that I learned to type by chatting and playing computer games when I was an early teenager. I went from hunt-and-peck to touch-typing, getting up to a workable ~60 WPM. But I avoided using my pinkies, I crossed the center line (r, t, y, u, d, f, g, h, j, c, v, b, and n were pressed by either hand), and did not use my thumb on the space bar.

Guitar. I was above average. At my best I could play virtually anything: Eruption, tons of Metallica, Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughn, classical pieces, and I was on my way to learning Dream Theater. However, as I got into extremely fast pieces my poor picking technique became a limiting factor. When I held my pick, my thumb pointed up instead of down. This made it slightly slower to transition between strings and create harmonics. I also could not transition between strings as quickly as was necessary in the fastest of pieces.

There are other examples, tennis for example, that helped teach me this lesson. I don’t play guitar anymore, but my typing has improved dramatically over the years. Since finding that fundamentals matter, I have worked to correct my methods, and I try to start properly. The web is a wonderful place to find information! Videos on YouTube and tutorials on various sites are helping me to right the wrongs and make it all the way to grandmaster in my pursuits

What’s new? Ads!

I hope my lovely, intelligent readers do not mind the two new ad panels (at the bottom of individual posts and in the sidebar); RSS readers should not notice any changes. This was a fun technical project that may make me a dollar over about twenty years

Here’s how I added ads to the sidebar and the end of single posts in my WordPress blog. You may be able to do it easily with a plugin, such as one of the ten featured in this article, but I chose to do it manually to learn more.

For ease, I used two tabs. In one tab I generated ads and another tab was used to edit pages.

Generating Ads. Google makes it easy with AdSense. You can see your options for ads here. First, sign up for AdSense then enter the AdSense Setup page, the Get Ads tab. Both my units are AdSense for Content; one Ad Unit and one Link Unit. After choosing the options I wanted, I was given sample code. I copied this code and switched to the other tab.

Editing Pages. First, get to the Theme Editor:

• Log into the administrative panel.
• Click the Design tab
• Click the Theme Editor

I put the banner ad at the bottom of the single post. To do so I copied the generated code then performed these steps:

• Selected Single Post (single.php)
• Pasted the following code above the line “<?php get_footer(); ?>”:

<!— Ad support. Added by Seth Holloway on Jan 9, 2009 —>
<div id=”ads”>
<script type=”text/javascript”><!–
google_ad_client = “pub-2003017988956692″;
/* 728×90, created 1/8/09 */
google_ad_slot = “5798236936″;
google_ad_width = 728;
google_ad_height = 90;
//–>
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript”
src=”http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js”>
</script>
</div>

For the sake of looks, I then needed to edit the stylesheet in the following manner:

• Selected the Stylesheet (style.css)
• Added this to the code:

/* Ad support. Added by Seth Holloway on Jan 9, 2009 */
#ads {
text-align: center;
}

I then generated the sidebar link unit, copied the code, and followed these steps:

• Selected the Sidebar (sidebar.php)
• Pasted the generated ad unit to the code above the final “</ul>”:

<!— Ad support. Added by Seth Holloway on Jan 9, 2009 —>
<li>
<script type=”text/javascript”><!–
google_ad_client = “pub-2003017988956692″;
/* 120×90, created 1/8/09 */
google_ad_slot = “2887058896″;
google_ad_width = 120;
google_ad_height = 90;
//–>
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript”
src=”http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js”>
</script>
</li>

And voila! We now have two unobtrusive ads on sethholloway.com.

Later, I would like improve the relevance of the ads and to add Digg, Reddit, and Sharethis buttons.

Any tips for items missing from the blog? Did you notice the ads? Do you hate them?

Why not make use of loading screens?

I’ve seen a lot of loading screens recently: in video games, movies, TV shows, cable box resets, iPod power ons, etc. Most are effective yet bland–a logo and a progress bar. These brief moments break my attention, but do not offer enough time for me to switch context and do something else. Producers and developers could use this time to educate and inform users while simultaneously keeping people engaged. Watching Once? You’ll get to read a blurb about the star, Glen Hansard. Playing World of Warcraft? Read the storyline for the zone you’re entering while you wait!

Taking the idea a step further, a platform could allow for loading screen customizations. Imagine if your iPhone had a common thread across all applications! With the aggregate time you could read a book, polish your vocab, increase reaction speeds, read the latest headlines, learn a language, or anything else that can be chunked into simple, discrete pieces! I’d love to get a couple lines of Atlas Shrugged in every loading screen. It’s not the fastest way to read a book, but I’d get through it (eventually )!

The code necessary to change the loading screens should be easy: add a variable to track the message number and modify the load screen to accept a variable corresponding to the message number; then increment the message number every time you display a load screen.

I’ve seen the idea partially in action; for example, while loading a song in Rock Band, trivia is displayed. The problem is that the pool of messages is very slim and never updated. The platforms for this game (PS3, Xbox360, and Wii) are all Internet-enabled so it should be possible to periodically update or replace the stash of messages.

Another (somewhat) similar service, Daily Lit, allows you to read books in email messages or RSS feeds. Daily Lit provides a proof-of-concept demonstrating first, that it is possible and second, that people want this form of entertainment.

What do you think? Would you use this service? What would you want in your loading screens?

Passively heated homes

I love architecture and green building! I’m not as well-informed as I should be, but green homes are an area I would love to explore later in life. One of the best ideas I’ve seen is the passive house (Passivhaus). Passive homes seek to retain the home’s heat with little or no extra energy usage. They achieve the effect by combining several features, notably superinsulation, a special airflow system, and optimized floorplans.

The NY Times has a nice article on passively heated homes and a family living in one in Germany. Germany is important to the tale because they are pioneering the practice, and many of the worlds 15,000 passive houses are in Germany. Unfortunately, America is slow to adopt similar practices. One explanation is America’s population center in warmer-weather climates. Because the passive house is designed to retain heat, it would probably not deliver a desirable effect in the summer in Austin

America’s green building code, the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standard, is lagging behind in achieving energy independence. (More information can be found at the US Green Building Council site.) LEED is more about using reusable supplies than it is about living off the grid. In any case, the  idea and innovation in the passive house brings me joy!

What do you think? Would you live in a Passivhaus? Is it worth an additional 5% upfront in order to never pay another utility bill?