The Daily Technocrat

After reading countless articles on how to improve on traffic, and since traffic ultimately helps me share this valuable info, I've decided to move back to Blogger. I'll be doing a few posts on my reasons for doing so, but they are plentiful.

In general, the customization is just something I can't live without, but problems with WordPress definitely contributed to my decision. WordPress is great, but doesn't work well for me in this hosted setting.

The Daily Technocrat will continue on at the following address: http://the-technocrat.blogspot.com/. As you can see, I've already started the customization process by inserting a site search and a del.icio.us-linked tag list. For those of you who subscribe to my RSS feed, don't forget to update the feed address: http://the-technocrat.blogspot.com/atom.xml

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Also – check out my new blog project: HelpDesk KnowledgeBase (rss)

Here's the idea of Helpdesk-KB:

This blog is a play-by-play of the issues and solutions I come across while administrating 400+ machines and 1200+ users.  This is where I track my past issues, and share my solutions with other IT pros, people interested in the IT life, and you!  Think of it as a virtual apprenticeship in the IT world!

See you all over at Blogger!

In writing my last post on email client satisfaction and dependence on users, I dedicated the 45-minute commute home to thinking about the nature of people’s intelligence, whether technological and otherwise. No radio, etc.

I’ve thought up a basic roadmap, but need other’s comments to fine-tune it. Here’s what I came up with so far:

Knowledge
Otherwise known as ‘book smarts’ Being knowledgeable is something to can attain experience or study. Being knowledgeable seems to be useless without the intelligence to know what to do with all of that information, except for on Jeopardy.

Intelligence
Intelligence seems to be inherent in a person, though there seems to be ways to increase one’s intelligence. Intelligence seems to be the ability to know what to do, even if you don’t know how. Suprisingly, intelligence seems to have the ability to grow via the brains situational profiling.

dependencies on each other
It seems that knowledge is the useless storage of information without intelligence. Intelligence is the inability to accomplish recognizable goals without knowledge.

Conclusion
It seems that the ideal environment for making one’s self more “intelligent”, then, is to start with a basic library of knowledge to work with, and to be placed in enough situations where your mind becomes efficient in searching through that knowledge and coming up with the best solution to a given situation.

Example
There are two venture capitalist investors.

The first has seven years of training, and seven years of practice. After 14 years, the first investor is able to recognize good investments in the area of his expertise, and to be successful.

The second investor has 14 years of training, but no practice. Although the second investor is more knowledgeable about investing, he/she has a hard time applying that knowledge practically since he/she can’t recognize what situation they are in.

Something interesting happens as time goes on, however. At this point, the first investor is able to leverage 100% of their knowledge at year 14, and will continue to do so until year 21. The second investor can leverage 0% at year 14, and perhaps 100% at year 21. In short, the second investor could possible be twice as good as the first, but perhaps take 1/3 (133%) more time to get there. In this respect, it seems as if the second investor has an advantage.

However, as we all know, the learning process doesn’t stop at the end of the knowledge-gathering. The use of knowledge via intelligence opens up more opportunities for knowledge, and this continues in cycle.

If we apply this principle to our example, the first investor is at 100% knowledge in year 7. As they approach year 14, they approach 100% intelligence, as they learn how to leverage that knowledge. Through years 7-14, however, this process opens them up to more knowledge-gaining opportunities, and they may, perhaps, be at 200% of their original knowledge, and since they were utilizing this knowledge along the way, at full efficiency. Therefore, the first investor would arrive at year 14 with the ability to make use of all 14 year’s work of knowledge.

This is in contrast to the second investor who arrives at year 14 at a much lower efficiency, as they are only able to utilize the intelligence naturally inherent, not learned.

What does it all mean?
It seems like this makes the case for not only a broad-spectrum, short-duration education (such as a 4-year liberal-arts, or ’something of everything’ education) to facilitate multi-situational effectiveness. In addition, it also seems that the stockpiling of knowledge needs to be weighed against the cost of not using the majority of it, as that would have been time better spent a.) efficiently using the knowledge you have, and b.) opening opportunities for knowledge that is more relevant to current situations.

Help me out here, and post your insights!

ThinkGeek :: eStarling Wi-Fi Gmail / Flickr Enabled LCD Frame: “The eStarling frame is a standalone Wi-Fi LCD photo frame that connects to a wireless network and automatically displays photos e-mailed to it in a slideshow format. Additionally you can specify an RSS photo feed…”

Very cool. All they need now is a fuel cell that will last a lot longer than a battery, and to replace the LCD with an OLED or similar low-power display, and you’ve got a picture that can hang on the wall, with a shelf life (no pun intended) of at least a year, I would think. All they have to do now is enable them to communicte with each other to display like pictures at the same time. (for example, the four frames on the wall would display pictures from a certain vacation, then all of them would switch a few hours later to pictures from last Christmas, etc. Cool effect!)

Quick Vibrating Lockpick – Overview

A $9.00 tool you can make yourself out of drugstore parts that opens a padlock in about 2 seconds. I actually have one of these hummingbirds lying around…time for a project…

Check out the video too – it’s hilarious:
Video

or, more appropriately, what will be going on above you for 2006…

mininova : Books > Ebooks > What’s Up 2006 – 365 Day’s of Skywatching:

“What’s Up 2006 – 365 Day’s of Skywatching”

This is a free e-book you can download that will tell you if anything substantial is to be seen in the sky that night. Cool!

People are strange. Every year, you hear about the people who are offended when a Walmart greeter says ‘Merry Christmas’ to them. They don’t believe in the reason for Christmas, so they prefer ‘Happy Holidays’.

Isn’t this a little self-centered? I don’t see this as any different than the following scenarios:

I’m having a good day, so I say ‘have a nice day’ to someone. Well, they object to me assuming that they want to have a nice day, they prefer ‘have a good one’. So everyone should say ‘have a good one’.

See the problem here? It’s not that their belief is the problem. They think I should be saying what they prefer, not what I prefer.

Here’s the thing, though. Every major advance in history was done because someone thought for themselves. So, no, I will greet you how I prefer, and in doing so, I am showing you that I am an individual, and am extending my individuality to you in a show of good faith, this being the holiday and all. Please feel free to respond in kind!

Merry Christmas!

When my home state of Illinois originally rolled out its electronic tolling program, I-PASS, the toll authority, said that the transponders in the vehicles would never be used to track your location, only to collect tolls as you pass through the tolling gateways. This being state government, no-one believed them, and it appears that that day is upon us.

During the last year or so, Illinois has virtually forced its residents to purchase the electronic tolling transponders by doubling the tolls for users paying with cash. For me, that would mean going from $0.40×4 tolls ($1.60 for about a 20-mile commute) to $0.80×4 tolls ($3.20 per day, $16/week, $64/month, $768/year). I can’t afford to pay the extra $384 per year, so I had to purchase the $15 transponder, along with just about every other commuter in Chicago.

Once everyone had the I-PASS transponder, all toll plazas in the Chicago area went under construction to have “open-road tolling”. This basically means that you don’t have to slow down to pay your toll, they get your transponder number as you go underneath the sensor array.

Case in point, there is a toll booth for motorists entering or exiting I-355 to/from I-55. Here is a satellite map of this toll plaza. You can plainly see the open-road tolling lanes on the inside, and the toll booths on the outside, both for motorists without I-PASS, and people with trailers, etc. that have special tolls they need to pay.

9 blocks north of this toll plaza is the 75th street overpass, about a half mile away. What you can’t see on the satellite map is that there are a second set of sensors hidden between the girders underneath this bridge. I wouldn’t have noticed them, if it weren’t for the spotlights that enable a set of cameras to record the rear license plate of cars as they go through.

It does seem a bit odd when you approach the bridge at night. Most bridges are lit from a few fluorescent rods at night, while this one is incredibly bright. It isn’t until you pass under the bridge that you notice that all of the lights are facing with traffic, pointing at the back of the cars as they go through the overpass. It’s blatantly obvious coming the other way, as the lights are shining towards you. There are no lights or sensors on the southbound side.

In the old days, the older I-PASS transponders used to beep when they were read. I think this caught the Illinois DOT by surprise, because some people still have them, and her is now a sign next to the highway, reading “I-PASS Users: ignore beep, you were not charged.”

So what purpose, exactly, would an installation like this serve, if not to catch speeders? Can we expect this on every overpass? Setting up a system like this only seems to serve two purposes, as I can see:

Traffic/Congestion Monitoring
I’m sure this will be IDOT’s excuse for installing more of these. This is completely bogus, since there are already thousands of sensors buried in the roadways that can accurately record traffic conditions. Here is a great implementation of the usage of these sensors, which update every few seconds. Unfortunately for IDOT, this doesn’t give you any personally-identifiable information about the motorists.

Speed Traps
By taking the distance between the sensors (let’s say a half-mile) and taking the posted speed limit (let’s say 60 miles per hour), IDOT knows that it should take you exactly 30 seconds to get from sensor to sensor. If you got there in 25 seconds, they can figure out (via basic math) that you were doing 72 miles per hour.

Now I’m not saying that catching speeders is wrong. The speed limit, however wrong that may be, is still the law. The debate as to safety vs. speed limits could go on forever, and it’s widely known that there are much less speed-related problems on the interstate than on the streets.

Anyway, my problem is with forcing people into the system by jacking up tolls, knowing that you’re going to turn it into a speeding-ticket revenue machine in the near future, and all the while saying that you’re not going to use it for that exact purpose.

In addition, the half mile laid out on I-355 is prone to errors. People stopping at the booth would be able to accelerate all the way to the 75th street overpass, exceeding the speed limit, since their average speed would stay below the limit.In effect, starting from 5 mph at the toll booth enables them to basically ‘earn’ the right to speed later by going below the limit while leaving the toll plaza.

Also, the distance between the sensors is prone to errors. Just one second of delay with either sensor reading (or if one sensor is off by one second compared with the other) would make a computing error of 2.4 miles per hour. (if we used the example data above)

All in all, these sensors seem to be in the testing phase for catching speeders. Due to the problems I list above, anticipate trying to explain yourself when errors occur, and still being fined because you couldn’t explain it in simple-enough terms to your state’s EnforceBot.

Also, if you don’t live in Illinois, don’t laugh. It’ll come to you soon enough.

OK, as I mentioned previously, we know RFID tags have the potential to give away our private information. So far, usage of RFID for personal use has been a nightmare, to put it lightly. The people who have been trying out RFID so far have proven that they didn’t think it out compltely before they started trying this technology out on citizens, or simply refuse to let their privacy get in the way of profitability or ease of monitoring.

Here’s the deal. For companies like Wal-Mart (that allow partners to watch you in real-time while making your product selection), you’re pretty much out of luck. Until you purchase that item, it’s not yours, and you’re on their private property, so in addition to the video at the door, the cameras in the ceiling, and the RFID tags in the products, you have a group of marketers watching you, and it’s all legal.

But what happens when you leave the store with the products? They’re still able to broadcast their tags to anyone who asks. BellSouth recognized this, and filed for their patent to scan a garbage can, pick up, and record all of the RFID tags contained inside before dumping the trash into the garbage. Add a GPS unit on the truck, and it wouldn’t be difficult to record this information and build quite a database on people over the course of a few months. Since garbage is in the public domain, (i.e. you “willingly” gave up your rights to it) this marketing research can be used or sold to anyone willing to pay for it.

Starting to get the idea that RFID isn’t your friend? I’ll get into how to make it a little more friendly in the next, and final, blog in this series. In the meantime, try not to let anyone see your tinfoil hat…

You may have heard of the plans for putting RFID tags in American passports. This isn’t anything new, Wired wrote about it some time ago. RFID chipping a passport is no different than chipping your dog. A reader gets close to your chip, sends a signal to it, and the chip responds with whatever information it has been programmed with. In the case of passports, people are afraid that their passport will be broadcasting personal information like a social security number. The bad part is that anyone can provoke the RFID chip to broadcast its information, simply by asking for it with a reader, which can be concealed easily. Some states are starting to put them in driver’s licenses also, which really makes security a problem.

Obviously, the correct solution to this problem is to have the RFID tag not broadcast anything that can be used to personally identify you. Perhaps it can broadcast a unique “RFID number”. Only the people authorized to have your information would be able to link your harmless RFID number to your bank information, for example.

However, as we’ve seen in the past, you can’t leave it up to the government, hotels, etc. to guard your information. Past expirience has shown that they simply don’t care enough to take the proper measures to protect your information. In this last link, you can read about how many hotel keycards have your information on them, sometimes including your credit card number, in unencrypted format. You can buy a card reader for under $75, which would turn a hotel garbage can into a multi-thousand dollar jackpot.

As far as RFID goes, if the companies/government use the same lax security, someone can steal this information simply by standing near you, putting a reader in a fake switch on the wall of a public place, etc. In addition, if your company/government waned to, they could install readers everywhere, and record your every movement.

So far, you’re pretty much stuck begging the legislators to promise to be secure with your information. I’ll get into how to protect yourself in another posting.