jawfish

Ad Blocking Tips for Firefoxcomment
john posted in technologies on October 26th, 2005

Browsers like Firefox, Mozilla/Netscape, and Safari have the capability to block pop-up ads. You have switched from IE by now right?

But you may not have discovered that these browsers can also block ads based on the URL of the source. Most sites don’t store their ads, they provide a URL to the ad server, where your click-through is recorded. So a relatively small number of well-known URLs can be eliminated to get rid of most obnoxious ads.

Sites need your click-throughs to pay the bills, and they may host ads that are actually interesting to you. However, everyone has been bombarded by overly aggressive ads, that irritate or even drive you away from the site. Many of these ads can be avoided by adjusting your browser. I’ll illustrate using Firefox, for others try searching on “ad blocking”.

How do you block ads?
First and easiest, right-click an unwanted image ( if its not Flash) and choose “Block Images from sitename.” If you end up blocking all images from the home site then use the menu choices below to correct the mistake.

Firefox allows you to block images by source. Go to Edit>Preferences>Web Features and look at “load images.” If you check both boxes, you will be loading images only when they come from the same domain name as the site. Then choose “exceptions” and add the domain names of images that irritate. Remember you have to reload the offending site by using a bookmark, or dropping your cursor in the URL bar and hitting Enter. If you block a legit image, you can still right-click on it and choose “view image.”

I used this successfully to block an annoying ad in the signature of a poster on a forum. This poster is a nice fellow, and has worthy things to say, but he unwisely put an ugly blinking ad in his signature. By adding his site’s URL to the list, I was quickly able to turn off his ads wherever they are placed.

I then tried a smarter approach and googled for information where I quickly learned that there is a user css file in Firefox that can be used to control your browser. Yessir howdy! A damn good idea. Go here to Mozilla get the instructions.

What domain names should you add to the list?
The Mozilla link provides a list. See the links below for others. For non-flash ads you can right-click the ad and choose “Copy Image Location” to get the URL.

How well does it work?

here’s cnn before…

and here it is after…

What about the free market for ads and support for your favorite sites?
Maybe you don’t care whether Fox News or CNN or the New York Times can make money on the Web. But everyone has favorite sites, perhaps for their hobbies, that have to advertise to pay for the site. Often the advertising is useful because it points to useful gear, or special deals.

Are you damaging your friends by blocking their ads too?
I don’t think so, in the long run. If you know the people behind the site, let them know in an email. Otherwise the drop-off in click-throughs will train the advertisers to do better. They’ll learn what works and what people avoid. That’s a result even Milton Friedman can applaud.

What about Flash?
As I said above, you can’t get the URL when you right-click on a Flash ad, and these are often the most annoying. OTOH some sites use flash for menus and such. Though losing those “loading…” gimmicks is an admirable result, some sites won’t work well without flash, particularly arty stuff, Italian stuff, and game sites.

This Mozilla extension will block all Flash, and then allow individual right-click choice to renable it by site. So if you love those graphics, you can turn the Flash back on for your favorites. If you are on a dial-up, this would be wonderful. You might think twice otherwise. There are some documented install issues prior to Firefox ver 1.5.

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Links:
floppymoose
mozilla support
better css list than at Mozilla

Project Censored Unveils the News
john posted in politics & culture on October 25th, 2005

If what you don’t know won’t hurt you, then switch back to I Love Lucy reruns.
A media-watch group called Project Censored maintains a list of news that has been ignored in the press. Whether you agree with all their choices or their priorities or not, you’ll find items in the list worth discussion.

Here’s a few from them:

Bush Administration Moves to Eliminate Open Government - a report shows how the administration attacks the process of open government at every turn.

Iran’s New Oil Trade System Challenges U.S. Currency - Iran switches to euros from dollars. No doubt there will be a lot of smoke blown about this - people in the administration who worry about it will still claim it’s nothing. Petrodollar issues, like the Chinese ownership of vast amounts of US government debt ( another poorly covered topic ), will have wide impacts. I don’t claim to understand what will happen, but the sheer size of the numbers means something is going on. We should be paying attention. Project Censored thinks the change to euros is affecting US belligerence toward Iran more than the nuclear issue.

The Real Oil for Food Scam - The US was aware and complicit in criminal arrangements to sell Iraqi oil far below market prices, and then used Kofi Annan’s nepotism and the UN’s own sloppiness or outright criminality as a cover.

Mountaintop Removal Threatens Ecosystem and Economy - Working with wink-and-a-nod regulators, coal companies are expanding their strip mining practices, and many new coal-fired power plants are planned. Huh? Global warming anyone? Hello? Acid rain, silted rivers, dead countryside? Anybody out there?

Here are some of my own:

Nuclear power generation is returning - For the first time in many years new plants are being considered for the US. Attacking the problem of global warming probably requires nukes to supplement sustainable sources ( want to disagree? write a comment ) but we still have no working system to deal with power-plant nuclear waste. In spite of our present vulnerability to much-feared terrorism at the existing power plants, we still store waste locally instead of in the national repository.

Terrorist Nuclear Weapons - If indeed sophisticated groups of international terrorists exist, with large financial resources, a terrorist nuclear attack is far more dangerous than any other threat. Citizens can’t know what the overall terrorist threat actually is, because their government will spin it up or down as needed to stay in power. When the government claims the threat is high, it probably means we are relatively safer, because this means the boffins in power feel safe enough to allow themselves to look threatened. Conversely a government that is under attack will downplay the threat in order to look stronger.

What citizens can know is the magnitude of a type of attack. An attack from known epidemics or chemical weapons could be bad, maybe worse than 9/11 in loss of life, but still well within the range of everyday dangers like automobiles and cigarettes. A small nuke detonated in Manhattan would not only kill and maim orders of magnitude more people than 9/11, it would close the rest of the New York area. That migration would make Katrina look like a dope-slap. It is really too horrible to contemplate, yet its very magnitude makes it the most important item on the anti-terrorism agenda, and therefore the subject we should investigate. Are the CIA and the various other spooks doing everything possible to keep stray nukes off the market? We don’t seem to have done well with Pakistan or North Korea.

Neo-Cons Want to “Drown Government in the Bathtub” - There is a substantial body of writing by Neo-Con leaders, and they have some very controversial positions, far out of even today’s right-shifted mainstream. There is good evidence that the Bush administration is proceeding with their recommendations for tax reform, regulation, environmental policy, and deficit spending, yet almost zero news or analyst coverage.

Bush Appearances are Staged - From so-called press conferences in the White House, to campaign town meetings, to photo ops among relief workers, the President can’t be trusted to speak freely or meet the citizenry. Each event is scripted even down to controlling the citizens present and the questions asked. This man works for us on our payroll, shouldn’t he be subject to some tough questions?

Microsoft Office, a Prisoner of Success?
john posted in technologies on October 25th, 2005

Around October 10th, Microsoft announced a Whole New Interface for its flagship product, Office.

from the MS site:

The biggest application in desktop computing is MS Office. It dominates the Mac and the PC market, so much so that many other applications copy its user interface. They do so because users are much happier with a familiar interface, even when it’s clumsy.

The redoubtable Jakob Neilsen reports that Microsoft is changing the interface in Office. No more deep menus, instead there will be something called a “results-oriented user interface”. On the website it looks like docked panels with new names. Look to your favorite reviewers for in-depth appraisals. The usability group at Microsoft has no doubt tested it thoroughly, but they have three large obstacles to overcome: existing feature-bloat, entrenched users, cost.

I can’t tell if this Microsoft interface is better. It may well be. Certainly it will be hyped. Remembering a PhD candidate who wrote his entire thesis in Word, but hand-formatted each footnote instead of using the automatic footnotes, I have my doubts. Since writing my first technical manual in Word, I have been a dedicated user of styles and templates, but I find it impossible to convince users who write shorter pieces.

The very long list of features in Word, itself creates an intimidating climate where users won’t experiment. In the first place, Microsoft is famous for unfixed bugs, and secondly, the interface is often confusing in the tabs and sub-menus. Every Word user has experienced the frustration of multiple unclear options and given up on the fancy way, to go back to highlight-and-format. Plus, once the interface for a particular feature is mastered, users have a resistance to change. The more complex the interface, the greater the inertia.

There are alternatives to Office, however. The much-talked about Open Software movement is maturing, and one of the best products is OpenOffice, a clone of Microsoft Office. OpenOffice is free and runs on Windows, as well as many other platforms. OpenOffice uses the MS Office interface and feature-set as its standard.

The licensing for Microsoft Office has changed since the 90’s, so you can’t copy it any more, because it calls home over the Internet to verify your license. All those users who want to work at home or give their kids a copy of Office, will have to pay for their own copies. Nowadays, that means as much money as a cheap PC costs. On cost alone, the WordPerfect suite that’s pre-installed on many PCs, and the free OpenOffice that I now use are likely to pick up a lot of users.

Now, Microsoft won’t lose any revenue from lost users who weren’t paying before, but they will lose market share. With government and corporate cost-cutting, free applications like OOo (OpenOffice) are bound to start percolating through the desktop market. The coming push for the Open Document spec will drive organizations to OpenOffice, too. OOo uses OpenDocument as its default format. If you reflect that the largest corporations are multinational, with numerous, competing local requirements to meet, then the push for the Open Document standard will seem inevitable in the corporate world too.

On the other hand, if Microsoft doesn’t improve the interface, they’ll lose customers to free applications because the switch is easy and free. They’ll lose or postpone corporate sales because there’s less reason for the customer to upgrade. Worse, free applications might actually fix the interface, without confusing power users, and become more attractive. Though to be sure, visionary design is not the strong suit in Open Software. It’s more likely that the OpenOffice folks will just copy Microsoft again.

Microsoft defeated the very popular Word Perfect and Lotus 123 and a slew of other apps to become dominant. Now, without any commercial competitor, Microsoft competes with itself. At the top of the hill, every way is down. They are stuck with their own success.

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More reading:

The issue of open documents and MS Office

OpenDocument and Massachusetts A sensible and thorough essay on the open document issue.
A very long paper on Open Source software standards and universal implementation by the same author.
Wikipedia on Open Document - good for a quick explanation.
Another long explanation of OpenDocument and the search by the EU for a competitive open standard.
Microsoft’s page.

Stanford Wins Darpa Grand Challenge
john posted in technologies on October 8th, 2005

Stanford’s Stanley, A VW Toureg, proved that in the end it was the software and not the vehicle that mattered. Unofficially according to Darpa Stanford crossed the finish line in 7 hours 30 minutes over the 132 mile course.

editor: the corrected official time was 6:53 and Stanford was the official winner of the $2million prize.

At the time of this writing both Carnegie-Mellon entries were close behind, and the Terramax truck, Team Insight, and the Gray Team were far off the pace, but still on the course. All other entries were declared DNF.

Darpa Grand Challenge 2005 Qualifier
john posted in technologies on October 7th, 2005

What is the Grand Challenge?
Second jawfish report.

For final results, and charts of how each team did, go to the Official DARPA site.

All pictures by Kyle Byrd-Fisher.

Watching the competitors in the DARPA Grand Challenge attempt the course at Fontana Raceway makes a few things clear. First, this robot racer thing is very tough. Tasks thats ants and bees accomplish easily are really hard to do with hardware and software. Organic brains are evolved for this and silicon ones simply are not. Second, good engineering can succeed, but not over good engineering plus money. Good engineering can’t be done without good testing and thats pretty hard when your prototype weighs two tons, can go 60 mph, and is about to be let loose without a driver.

The competitors are spending about ten days taking turns at the course DARPA has set up in Fontana California at the racetrack. Less than half will make the cut for the race in Nevada on October 8. The Fontana course is laid out using the infield road-race track, but it mostly follows a route over grass. It attempts to mimic turns on tight mountain roads, has a number of obstacles and cones to avoid, and a tunnel.

When we visited, the high speed sections saw 40 mph, but there was a lot of dead stop and slow crawl. A number of entries this day didn’t make it through the first part of the course at all, and at least one ignored part of the route.

Seeing a Jeep Cherokee get stuck in the tunnel, I asked the crew how they did previously. They said they had previously completed the course but had just changed a few parameters, obviously not for the best. The Jeep was confused by the walls, and finally couldn’t figure out how to backup and turn.

It’s important to keep in mind that the software in this race is very rough. Even if it is relatively free of mistakes, the algorithms are complex and need a lot more refinement. The only way to do that is test, try changes and test again. If a developer could just sit down and work it out on paper, robot racing would have been done long ago.

Why is the software so difficult?
The software that controls the vehicle has to look ahead and decide what the terrain is, watch the GPS and assigned route for the current location, pay attention to the attitude of the vehicle - the pitch and roll and yaw, monitor the hardware systems, decide what direction and speed to take, then do the control with steering, throttle, and braking. It has to do all this in real-time, no little clock icon with ticking hands allowed. Practically this means multiple computers running many different programs, talking to each other.

Two main types of visual sensor used by the teams are: laser radars, called LIDAR, and stereo cameras.
The image below shows two LIDARs, one with blinders.

You can see the stereo cameras in the Red Team’s pod, in the image, above.

The stereo camera software reads the camera images and by comparing differences tries to achieve depth perception. This view must be checked against the LIDAR information. One day this may be a finished system, but right now it’s at a rough prototype stage. For one thing. the data streams coming from the cameras can swamp a fast computer. The Caltech team told me they run four VGA cameras at 60 fps. Each of those streams would load a fast PC, though use of high-end video hardware can make it more efficient.

To make matters worse, the laser-radar sensors (LIDAR) aren’t really good enough. They don’t produce a complete image like a tv screen, what they return is more like one line from a sonogram. They can definitely sense small objects, like a traffic cone or a 2×4, but they can’t tell a boulder from a balloon. Some teams physically scan the LIDAR unit to get more data.

When you drive across a field, you can see a rock and tell how big it is, in 3D, and you can tell a clump of grass is soft and pliant. A shadow might hide a hole, but you avoid it from experience, or drive through because you know the area just doesn’t have holes like that. Your experience makes your interpretation of the visual data very reliable, but go scuba diving, or walking in the Amazonian forest, and you will soon be disoriented. The robots are always on the verge of disorientation. While I was watching every vehicle slowed during the fast section at the same harmless patch of greener grass. When humans are infants they crawl and touch everything around them. This joins the sensation of touch with the visual and trains the brain. These robots need the same training regimen, but there is no time, for the race is only days away.

What are the engineering trade-offs in choice of vehicles?
Some teams used cheap four-wheel drives that fit their budget, some chose a particular platform, like Carnegie-Mellon who chose H1 Hummers. Cornell uses a light-strike military car, very similar to a dune buggy. The Palos Verdes high school uses an Acura MDX because one parent had a contact with Honda.

It does seem as if many teams never considered the nature of the Mojave. Sure, they went for all wheel drive, maybe with some extra ground clearance, but many don’t have extra bumpers, skid plates, roll bars, or even stone protection for the sensors.

Here’s one proper bumper guard on #23, note the yellow feelers.

If the DARPA race course involves fire roads with a little washboard, these SUVs will be ok, but the moment it veers off into the hills and arroyos of the open desert, they are toast. It seems too obvious to point out that if you are racing across the desert, you need to start with a vehicle that a human can drive there successfully. The SCORE pickups and buggies that race in the desert have huge wheels, ultra-high ground clearance, multiple shock absorbers at each corner, and massive roll bars.

Team Ensco has a formidable buggy, seen here easily negotiating a set of turns.

The motorcycle of the Blue Team is a quixotic exercise, but there are even odder choices. Team Jefferson had four car wheels on its home-built, without off-road tires. The Terrahawk team built an articulated six-wheeler, but with a narrow track and little ground clearance, it’s not going far.

In this next sequence you see a brand-new Toyota pickup get through the tunnel, make a turn, hit a car with its unprotected stock bumper, the car rolls forward, the truck swerves around it, makes it to the hay bales, and finally drives over them, where it gets stuck. Fortunately its sensors weren’t damaged by the collision.

Less practical than the SUVs and pickups, there are several utility buggies, normally intended for work on ranches and golf courses. They are tough little vehicles, but not wide enough or with enough motor, and while very maneuverable, they don’t have the needed ground clearance either.

Here is a Polaris, note the clever use of PVC drain pipe:

That leaves the lone ATV, the mini-buggy, the home-built racer, the bizarre truck, and the true desert buggies.

The ATV has traction, maneuverability, ground clearance, and a wide stance. But like all of the smaller vehicles, it sacrifices space for sensors, computers, and electric power.

They’ve done a great job of packaging, though. here they are passing the last obstacle.

Several teams use portable 120v generators strapped to the vehicle. At least one SUV had a rank of four computers and UPSes, plus sensors, network switches, and control motors. That’s a lot of electric power. At the opposite end of the spectrum is the TerraMax truck, an all-wheel drive, rear-steering monster built for the military. It did well in the qualifying, but won’t be able to handle steep gullies or tight switchbacks. It is intended, no doubt, for military convoy duty, where it can drive in a line like elephants at the circus.

The street vehicles do have an advantage over the desert racers: they have fly-by-wire components already- with power steering, ABS brakes, and cruise control. Still, its easier to retrofit those items to a racer, than turn a car into something with 24″ of clearance.

My analog hardware performance bets are on the Hummers, the Cornell striker, the buggies, and a long shot with the ATV. The rest of these designers have clearly never seen a desert race.

More on the race to come.