Toshiba Satellite Lap Product Review

I just purchased a new Toshiba laptop because the old HP dual core just died. Actually it is in the process of dying. It is having mini-strokes. When I boot it, it doesn't boot. It doesn't POST. It just sits there and the HDD disk light flashes orange. This usually flashes orange when the accelerometer detects that the laptop is moving and parks the disk heads. After a while, the thing boots up, runs for awhile and then dies again. It is a crapshoot as to whether it boots and how long it takes.

So onto the Toshiba. It has a dual Core i3 genuine Intel processor and the hard disk is half a terrabyte. It should scream, but it comes with Windows 7 so it just marches. Nothing like an old XP for speed. (Did I mention that Microsoft sucks?).

Well, I am generally pleased with the laptop except that for human factors engineering, it is a FAIL. The keyboard is all wrong. When I am typing without looking and want to hit the shift, I hit the control. The shift on the left is way too small, and way too high. The return key is small below but enlarges into the row above, where the little pinkie on the right hand can't reach it. It is a pain to type on.

Other ergonomic things bug me. It takes me forever to find the little button to eject a DVD or CD. The delete button isn't handy. The track pad is over too far left. It is not centered like on any other normal computer.

The other thing that is slightly ticking me off, is that it regularly makes weird noises like a chirping for a few seconds then quits for a couple of minutes. I have to debug this one.

So while the computer seems okay, it is a bit of a pain to operate it. I have to learn to live with it, because Future Shop, where I bought the thing, had the wrong price on it, and they honored the tag that said it was $120 less that it should have been.

Update: The keyboard is huge pain, but I love the way that it runs cool compared to the HP.

And it really boots up fast and shuts down fast unlike the HP. I used the like the HP, but this

one is growing on me. The keyboard is still HUGELY frustrating though. But there are no more cooked skin marks on my thighs from an overly hot laptop.

Update 2: The speakers on the Toshiba sound tinny compared to the HP laptop. Still having difficulty with the keyboard, and now the sound sucks. But I really like how cool it runs. The HP actually left burn marks on my lap when I took the computer outside to program on the balcony overlooking the water.

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Mechanized Attack Detection Algorithms

I was on a CNN sub site and they were talking about security and threat of attack. One of the types of attacks that they were profiling, was a mechanized terrorist attack by robot or remote control machines.

This got me to thinking. I am a technical architect for software, and its about time someone starting putting down some thoughts about algorithms for detection of mechanized attacks. Here are my thoughts on the subject.

1) The "Does This Thing Belong" algorithm. This algorithm is for machine monitoring of real time CCTV images. A camera aimed at a street would have a shapes learning module where each shape that went by the lense would be recorded. If a shape of an anomalous thing went by, an alarm would sound. A good analog of this is an electronic filter. You have high pass, low pass and bandwidth filters. In our algorithm, if you had a city street with no commercial traffic, then you would have a low pass object filter. Only small cars would be unalarmed. If a truck (possibly filled with explosives) went by, then the alarm would sound. The opposite of that would be in an industrial area, if a small vehicle was in an area where large trucks were the norm, an alarm would sound. The bandpass filter would detect things like robots, and remote controlled small vehicles sent against an urban target. Anything extremely large or extremely small would get noticed.

2) The purpose of movement filter would be next. Say you have a robot moving down the street, self navigating. One would expect some jitter in the movement. There would be small delays and corrections in self-navigation. However, if a CCTV camera was near a potential target, and it detected movement with no jitter or no evidence of a random walk navigation, it could mean that the direct route to the target was programmed in, and an alarm would sound.

3) The aerial threat probabilities calculator. If I were looking for aerial threats from airborne machines ranging from a toy helicopter with a hand grenade attached to a drone, I would create a huge software 360 degree virtual pillar around the sensors and camera, and then do a threat probability assessment of each sector of that virtual pillar. The highest probability sectors are from where the sun is the brightest (one of the tenets of air attack is to have the sun behind you to blind the observers). Then I would consider line of sight cover. Other factors that would either mitigate or enhance the risk would be no-go zones for an attack (a tall building is in the way). The threat probability from each sector would be calculated and monitored, and the system resources would be concentrated where the biggest threats lie.

4) Potential launch site evaluations. If one were to launch a mechanized attack, is there somewhere (either an entrance or egress) from where the attack would come. These areas would be heavily monitored.

These are just some of the algorithms to consider. The idea of a terrorist or other threat by robot or some other mechanized means is sort of remote now, but in ten years, I bet that this kind of software will be ubiquitous, and built into cameras. And you read about it here first.

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If Browsers Were Guns

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One of my business partners sent me this graphic. This tongue in cheek graphic is so true. We have been struggling to make our mobile web app work as intended with that stupid piece of crap called Internet Explorer 9, by that dead-man-walking company called Microsoft.

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The Perils of Technical Trading in Stocks

I was first introduced to technical trading as a software analyst. I was hired to write some proprietary algorithms for a stock and commodities trading group. When I was first introduced to the principles of technical trading, I was blown away. I had thought that fundamentals were the only way to trade (in fundamental trading you look at the companies balance sheet and how well it is doing and whether its markets are expanding and contracting. In technical trading, you just look at the performance of the price alone to gauge what will happen next.)

Here is an example of a very simple algorithm in technical trading. The red line is an exponential weighted moving average of the stock price plotted against the actual price day by day. The rule is when the red line is above the stock price, the price will fall, and when the red line is below the stock price, the price will rise. And it can work rather well. Look at the 5 day example below:

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It works even better on the long run. Here is a one month run. It is all neat and tidy. It looks like any fool can make money, and that this is a huge money spinner. It truly is the Dummies Guide to Getting Rich. So what's the catch?

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The catch is that technical trading doesn't work all the time. Fundamentals can trump technical trading. Emotions of the marketplace can trump technical trading. If there is panic because of a terrorist attack, or if there are bad job creation numbers, stocks fall. That is why I don't trade stocks based on my proprietary systems. But I do like to watch what happens.

Do you know why they call computerized stock traders "day traders"? Because it is too dangerous in technical trading to hold a stock overnight. This is a prime example illustrated below. I am using my favorite whipping boy stock Facebook. All of the above charts are the official stock prices during stock market trading hours. But there is pre-market trading going on. Examine the stock chart below. If you will notice, the blue stock price is above the red line meaning that the stock should go up and up. But the stock is Facebook, and today Facebook will announce their earnings. They aren't expected to be that hot.

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So if you went to bed last night, dreaming of counting your money after Facebook stock rises, you woke up this morning to a nasty surprise. The stock is down over 6% before the market opens. If you were holding a long position overnight, it's not champagne and caviar tonight, but dog food spread thin on crackers.

Technical trading is not for the weak of heart, and as the Gambler says " You got to know when to hold them, when to fold them, when to walk away, and when to run"!

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Simple Yet Effective UIX For Dummies

Let's get real for an instant. A website generalist is someone who knows less and less about more and more, until he knows nothing about everything. An SEO/UIX website guru gets to know more and more about less and less until he knows everything about nothing. They both end up in the same place.

When building a web site, all sorts of UIX experts tell me that I have to wireframe websites, and then use video to watch people using them to optimize the (sarcasm on) user experience (/sarcasm off). UIX is king.

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know that I follow the Google sect of online design -- a super powerful website with minimalist design. When you abstract to the layer of why have a website, you come up with two answers: to sell and to inform.

The primary raison d'etre for a business is to sell. So never mind all of the booshwa design crap for a minute. Malcolm Gladwell tells us that people thin slice -- make a decision within the first thirty seconds. I was told that when I wrote for a major outdoor magazine. You have to capture them in the first thirty seconds. Your value proposition will do that.

So if I am a business, and the sole purpose of my website is to sell and inform, then the landing page of my website has to boldly proclaim my value proposition. Let me repeat that: the landing page of my website has to boldly proclaim my value proposition.

When my value proposition is accepted by the surfer, I have to account for two alternate possibilities. That is where UIX comes in. The first possibility is that I have made the sale. You have to get the customer to get to the buy zone quickly. The second possibility is that I have sold the value proposition, and now the consumer wants details. Simple. (There is a third possibility in the fact that my value proposition bombed, but then the surfer is off elsewhere and out of the equation).

So, I have to unambiguously give the consumer the immediate buy option or arrange the information to answer the putative questions in his/her quest for more information. I have to arrange it such that the most frequently asked question is answered first.

Psychologists tell us that we like a lot of choice when it comes to menu items, but more than 4 or 5 choices actually hinders the buy process.

So the navigation and usability of the website hinges on providing more information to support the value proposition. In a general sense you can't go wrong with W-5 - Who, What, Why, Where and When. When is always NOW, so HOW can be substituted. And of course, you need a call to action. If you don't ask, you won't get.

The above graphic illustrates these principles completely. You don't need to pay big bucks to a UIX expert to produce wireframes and usability reports. Most consulting work is applied common sense. When usability experts fail, is that they are not subject matter experts in whatever you are selling. They would tend to put the specs and fine print in the back, but if you are selling electrical couplings and such, those data sheets are what is required up front. Or they would spend $10,000 filming someone using wireframes to discover what you already know.

If you put considerable amount of forethought into the value proposition and how the user gets to the supporting information, then you have already mastered the Dummies Guide to Extreme UIX.

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Facebook's Socialcam app shows friends what you watch - FOX Carolina 21

Facebook's Socialcam app shows friends what you watch - FOX Carolina 21 (Click to read) If you ever needed another reason to quit Facebook, here it is.

DISCLAIMER: I AM NOT A REGULAR OF FOX NEWS or EVEN A FAN !!!!!!!!!! However this article is interesting.

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MySQL Cleaning Out Database Duplicates

I had a MySQL database that was automatically populated with raw data and no checking. So as a result, I had duplicate rows of data and each data row had a unique key id number (auto increment). The idea was to get rid of the duplicate rows. I was lucky that one of the fields in the row was an equipment serial number, and I used that fact to easily eliminate the duplicates.

Lets say that the table was called equipment_table. I would copy the table to make equipment_table_clean with the following:

CREATE TABLE equipment_table_clean LIKE equipment_table;

We know that the the serial number is the thing that defines duplicates so:

ALTER TABLE equipment_table_clean ADD UNIQUE (serial_number);

Then feed the data into the new table with the following command:

INSERT IGNORE INTO equipment_table_clean (serial_number, name, col1, col2) SELECT serial_number, name, col1, col2 from equipment_table;

Works like magic and saves a lot of work. Then drop the old table and rename the new table (after you have checked the data).

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