Ho John Lee’s Weblog

We spent the Memorial Day weekend at the Davis World Cup with the Palo Alto AYSO spring U12 girls team, the Blue Bandits. There were over 120 teams, and each team in the tournament gets the flag of a FIFA World Cup country. This is fun, but can make it difficult to figure out who you’re playing, as the schedules are all published under the names of the countries, not the actual names of the teams. We were “Bermuda”, although I spent the first day thinking we were “Bahamas.” 

The girls had a lot of fun. The highlight of the series was a rematch with the Concord Chaos (Tanzania),  who we tied 2-2 at last week’s Concord Cup. This weekend we placed 3rd in Bracket A, while the Concord Chaos placed 2nd in Bracket B, which put us in an elimination match to get to the next round.

A fine depiction of field positions in a typical youth soccer match, from Rhymes With Orange.

• Taking your laptop into the US? Be sure to hide all your data first | The Guardian
  Bruce Schneier summarizes the current (bad) state of data privacy at US and UK border crossings. Personal computers are subject to full file download and investigation.
  (tags: security data privacy personal technology airline travel business government computer crypto policy politics)
• Ma.tt » Don’t Check Your Valuables
  Matt loses a raft of very nice photo equipment in his delayed checked baggage at PHL, which always seems to have its own special baggage handling issues.
  (tags: airline travel security photo equipment risks)
• breakingviews | Yahoo board
  Carl Icahn’s proposed alternate board for Yahoo, presented in the style of the crew in Ocean’s Eleven.
  (tags: finance activist investing business yhoo siliconvalley culture humor)

• Afghanistan swaps heroin for wheat
  Afghan farmers changing crops - with wheat prices doubling in the past year, and the street price of heroin falling, it is now more cost effective to grow wheat.
  (tags: agriculture commodity wheat markets globalization politics food economics inflation drugs)

• FINVIZ.com - Stock Market Screener, Charts, Quotes - Financial Visualizations
  Lots of nice market maps, screeners, and charts
  (tags: finance investing trading markets data research stock screener)
• OLSOFT - Technical analysis software add-ins for Microsoft Excel
  Interesting Excel-based analysis tools, including integration with QuoteTracker, Interactive Brokers, and assorted backtesting tools
  (tags: finance investing automated trading stock futures quotetracker software quantitative technical analysis)
• View All Demotivators®
  AT DESPAIR, INC., we believe motivational products create unrealistic expectations, raising hopes only to dash them. That’s why we created our soul-crushingly depressing Demotivators® designs
  (tags: business humor design motivation marketing parody satire random)
• WorldWide Telescope
  An interactive browser to pan, zoom, and build narrations with astronomy images of the night sky, from Microsoft Research
  (tags: astronomy science education space earth images media maps microsoft msft research)

This morning the IBM service tech came to replace the failed fan assembly in my Thiinkpad T42p. The Thinkpad has been fairly indestructable, having gone around the world several times without any problems. So I was surprised when I started getting “Fan Error” messages just after the BIOS splash screen while setting up on Sunday evening. Fortunately, I also got the 24-hour onsite support contract back when I got the system. It ended up taking more like 36 hours to get someone out here, but I did call in the middle of the night.

That reddish assembly at the middle left is the heatsink and fan. The system board runs a test to make sure the fan will spin up before proceeding with the system boot process; the original fan will spin manually, but the motor seems to have failed. I’m glad to have the technician replace the fan instead of doing it myself. Getting the heatsink off the graphics chip required some significant prodding with a sharp knife to unbond the heat compound sticking them together.

• Venu Anuganti Blog » Notes from Scaling MySQL - Up or Out
  Interesting data on back end implementation at Flickr, Wikipedia, Facebook, Youtube as of spring 2008. Lots and lots of servers running MySQL.
  (tags: database mysql scalability scaling webservices)
• Bloomberg.com: The Improvisor
  A lengthy profile of Ben Bernanke’s, his background, and his expanding efforts at the Federal Reserve in the face of the US banking system crisis.
  (tags: bernanke federal reserve policy finance us government markets economics banking history risk)
• Concord Cup
  (tags: soccer ayso tournament kids sports)
• National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) Home Page
  NREL is a national laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy, operated by Midwest Research Institute • Battelle
  (tags: altenergy energy conservation power generation solar biofuel government green research)

I’ve never seen a search result page like this before. The meta text “Conservative think tank claiming to report about events and nations strategically important to the United States” doesn’t appear any where in the referenced page, which doesn’t contain any useful <META> content. Searching for that text, it looks like the text originated from the DMOZ directory listing.

Another entry from the same DMOZ list, the Kensington Review, also returns the DMOZ meta text, this time in place of the <META> text in the actual page. DMOZ says “An e-magazine of political and social commentary. When the left says the glass is half full and the right says it is half empty, Kensington suggests that it might be too big.” Kensington’s own META says “An electronic journal of political, financial and social commentary”.  DMOZ is a more interesting description, but again does not originate from the content itself. 

• Myanmar Cyclone: Before and After: Scientific American
  Satellite imagery before and after (April 15 and May weather disaster in Myanmar (Burma). The river delta areas are nearly all flooded.
  (tags: global disaster weather asia myanmar rice)
• GOS - Geospatial One Stop
  Access to US government map data.
  (tags: us government mapping database maps)
• BBC NEWS | Business | Cyclone fuels rice price increase
  Most of Burma/Myanmar’s spring rice production has been wiped out, adding to pressure on rice markets.
  (tags: asia food rice global commodities agriculture futures trading)
• FreeRice
  Practice your vocabulary and help raise funds for donating rice. I was skeptical, but it doesn’t appear to be a fraud, and does actually provide interesting practice.
  (tags: charity rice food children education vocabulary global collaboration donation marketing)
• El CAPTCHA definitivo para desalentar a los usuarios gratuitos de RapidShare | Microsiervos (Humor)
  “No Premium User. Please solve the Riemann Hypothesis.”
  (tags: blogging math random internet humor)
• Is It Time to Invade Burma? - TIME
  The Myanmar/Burmese military government is largely blocking international relief for the cyclone and flooding, leading to discussion of “coercive humanitarian action”.
  (tags: asia food myanmar global politics strategy ethics)

“No Premium User. Please solve the Riemann Hypothesis.”

It’s difficult to get a sense of scale with natural phenomenon, including weather disasters, since they’re so much larger than what we normally deal with in every day life. There is some amazing before-and-after satellite imagery of the recent cyclone in Myanmar (Burma), in which the flooding in the river delta areas is clearly visible. For comparison, I’ve made a Google Maps view of the Bay Area in a similar (not identical) scale. The NASA imagery has a 25km reference scale, the Google Maps image I’ve scaled here was originally at 20km reference scale.

• High Probability Trading: Trading against the plan
  HPT wipes out for the second time this year. Got to give him credit for putting it out there, but he is a case study in problematic trading behaviors.
  (tags: trading stock futures training psychology culture markets finance business)

(The automatic link posts stopped working as a side effect of cleaning up the keymachine.de spam attack, here’s what you missed)

• Bitdrip - RSI Gadget 
  The RSI Gadget calculates the relative strength index for stock symbols. This gadget can be added to your iGoogle Homepage, Google Finance or any web page you can edit.
  (tags: rsi billcara stock technical indicator gadgets)
 
• Bill Rempel, a.k.a. NO DooDahs! » Seven Quantifiable Ways To Define Trend  
  A summary of seven popular methods for determining whether a market is trending or ranging.
  (tags: stock futures markets trading technical indicators)
 
• Paul Kedrosky: Drunks and Lampposts, and Stocks 
  Random walk data can generate recognizable chart patterns. One difference with real markets is that humans placing trades based on those patterns can render them non-random.
  (tags: trading markets random statistics)
 
• Inspectd.com - Training Tools for Traders 
  A game using historical stock data in which you choose to buy, sell, or hold using only the chart of price and volume bars.
  (tags: finance investing trading stock markets game chart technical education)
 
• Greenbox: Flash Creators Tackle Energy in the Home « Earth2Tech 
  On various work in progress towards home energy consumption monitoring and recommendations for change.
  (tags: energy environment electricity power conservation green)
 
• Morgan Stanley’s March Internet Trends Report: Social Applications Dominating 
  Slide deck with lots of current data on changing use patterns, growth rates, big shift towards social applications. Also see emerging markets growth.
  (tags: internet trends web2.0 socialsoftware 2008 global marketing finance investing research)
 
• Karl Rove: My Advice for Barack Obama 
  Six suggestions from Karl Rove (!) for Barack Obama, which seem fairly sensible.
  (tags: politics us 2008 election)
 
• Review: Smart Strip Saves $1.60 to $5.70 of Electricity per Month 
  Slide deck with lots of current data on changing use patterns, growth rates, big shift towards social applications. Also see emerging markets growth.
  (tags: power electricity energy conservation green personal computing)
 
• All of Inflation’s Little Parts - The New York Times 
  Slide deck with lots of current data on changing use patterns, growth rates, big shift towards social applications. Also see emerging markets growth.
  (tags: economics visualization graphics finance us economy)
 
• Gooruze - My experience investing in Nik Cubrilovic and Omnidrive 
  A cautionary anecdote on angel investing
  (tags: angel vc investment risk management entrepreneurship)
 
• All of Inflation’s Little Parts - The New York Times 
  Slide deck with lots of current data on changing use patterns, growth rates, big shift towards social applications. Also see emerging markets growth.
  (tags: economics visualization graphics finance us economy)
 
• McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Word Problems for Future Hedge-Fund Managers. 
  1. Dick has $1 million. Jane has $1 million. If Dick and Jane both give their $1 million to T. Boone, how many millions will he claim he can turn it into?
  (tags: finance vc investing trading humor hedgefund business)