Monthly Archives: August 2005

Google Desktop 2 — Better, But Still Buggy

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Desktop search is one of my obsessions, especially given how much data I tend to generate. Google’s first effort at a desktop search tool left me nonplussed, but the recently released Google Desktop 2 makes quite a few strides in the right direction even if it continues to come up short.

The good news is that Google now includes the ability to index and search a number of additional file types out-of-the-box, including PDFs as well as MP3s and graphics files that have embedded metadata. In addition, it includes a plugin architecture so developers can add the ability for the program to index additional file types.

The program is elegant and simple to use, though it also lacks a lot of the power that the best Windows search product, DTSearch, features. On the other hand, it lacks the unwieldy interface that DTSearch uses to give users access to all that searching power. There’s definitely a tradeoff between the two products in useability vs. complexity of queries.

But the real drawback to Google Desktop 2 from my brief usage is that, like the initial Google Desktop Search product, it chokes on very large file sets which causes regular crashes.

Google Desktop 2 made fairly quick work of my 260,000 archive e-mails, crashing only 3-4 times while indexing them. But when its crawler turned to the My Documents folder on my primary data drive, it was a whole other story. So far, the program has crashed upwards of two dozen times and after almost a week only reached the 46 percent complete marker. Yes, that’s more than 250,000 files so far, but it is very annoying that it cannot index all 160gb worth of PDFs and HTML files without the constant crashing.

It certainly takes DTSearch a very long time to index that huge volume of files, but DTSearch has never crashed on me while indexing. Google Desktop 2 also insists on playing nice and only indexing during “idle time.” The only problem is it never says what triggers “idle time.” I’d prefer to be able to override that setting and have an “index now” button that would just run through the indexing without me having to wonder whether this or that action is going to throttle it back down (for example, even a low-impact task like editing a text file seems to cause Google Desktop 2 to idle).

Probably for most people, the fact that Google Desktop 2 does much of what a product like DTSearch does and at zero cost will render it an ideal desktop search tool. Me, I’m torn between Google Desktop 2 and its elegant interface but crashing problems, vs. DTSearch and its rock-solid performance but uglier-than-sin interface.

Local Paper Screws Up Abortion Story

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This sort of story always annoys the hell out of me. The writer here, Emily Walker, had prime front page space for this story about the morning after pill and whether or not it reduces the number of abortions. But instead of helping the reader understand whether or not the morning after pill affects abortion rates, she simply drones on with pointless quotes from different interest groups.

You know its going to be a lousy story when the writer leads off with a statement that is never actually corroborated in the body of the story. So Walker writes,

Southwestern Michigan in 2004 saw its lowest abortion rates in more than a decade, which may be tied to a rapid increase in sales and use of an emergency contraceptive pill and hormonal birth control since 2000.

But there is absolutely no evidence that the abortion rate declined. Rather what declined was the total number of abortions. If the number of abortions declined from 20 per 1,000 to 10 per 1,000, then the rate of abortions has changed. The fact that there were 18 percent fewer abortions in 2004 compared to 1994 just says there are fewer total abortions. But the abortion rate could actually have increased but still result in fewer abortions.

How could that possibly be? Well, one possibility is that there are fewer abortions because there are fewer women of childbearing age in Southwest Michigan. Perhaps women are leaving this part of the state for other parts of the state or even other states. Or perhaps demographic changes such as the increasing aging of the American population or the increasing age at which people get married in the U.S. has also effected Michigan. Don’t worry though, Walker’s article is 100% free of any discussion of demographics that might illuminate a bit better why the total number of abortions declined over a 10 year period.

Something else that might be useful to know is whether or not the birth rate in Southwest Michigan has remained stable or not. If the abortion rate fell, for example, but the birth rate rose, then the hypothesis about the morning after pill would be much weaker. According to the state of Michigan, births are declining overall in Michigan because of the overall aging of the population, which would also tend to reduce the number of abortions. But, that sort of information just couldn’t make it into an article filled with pithy comments such as,

“We attribute it mostly to use of emergency contraceptives,” said Joy Brychta, director of Client Services for Planned Parenthood of South Central Michigan. “As our abortions go down, emergency contraception is skyrocketing.”

I’m sure Ms. Brychta is a nice woman, but what she or Planned Parenthood or Right to Life or the United Nations attribute the drop to is completely irrelevant.

It might also have been helpful to know how abortion rates in other parts of the United States, especially in the Midwest, compare with Michigan’s (assuming we knew what Michigan’s rate was). But all we learn from Walker is,

Michigan as a whole actually saw a four-year upswing in abortions before 2004. Nationwide, numbers have steadily declined in the past two decades.

How big of an upswing? How big of a decline? How about the abortion rate in a nearby state such as Ohio? If the abortion rate has been steadily declining nationwide, is there some demographic trend that Michigan’s finally catching up to? Again, no solid facts, but plenty of nonsense like,

“Those, I suppose, may be factors,” said Right to Life Kalamazoo President Rob Karrer. “But I really do believe that Michigan has been a leader in the country regarding declining abortion rates because of the aggressive nature of the Legislature dealing with the issue.”

Again, I’m sure Mr. Karrer is a nice man, but what he believes might be interesting for a story about whether or not abortion is moral, but it is irrelevant to the issue at hand. And, of course, if Michigan is in the lead in abortion regulation, why that apparent increase from 2000-04?

Source:

Abortions decline; cause debated. Emily Walker, Kalamazoo Gazette, August 22, 2005.
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Pakistan Jails Writer for Blasphemy of the Judaic Kind

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In Pakistan this week, 40-year-old writer Younis Sheikh was sentenced to life in prison for writing a “blasphemous” book that insulted the four Imams.

The four Imams are Imam Abu Hanifa, Imam Malik, Imam Ahmed bin Hanbal and Imam Shafi, who all lived and wrote in the 8th century. Their interpretation of the Qu’ran and Hadith forms the basis of Sunni Islam. Malik’s writing is the earliest surviving book of Islamic law.

According to a Pakistan’s Daily Times,

“The court has sent him to jail for life as he described the four Imams as Jews in his book,” public prosecutor Naimat Ali Randhawa said after the court in Karachi sentenced the man on Thursday. . . The writer also committed blasphemy by saying that stoning to death for adultery was “not mentioned in the Quran”, he [Randhawa] said.

Sheikh has had countless confrontations with Pakistani officials over such “blasphemies.” In 2002, he was sentenced to death for saying at a public lecture that the Prophet Muhammad was not a Muslim until the age of 40 when he had his first vision, and that Muhammad’s parents were not Musims when they died, since their death preceded Muhammad’s religious revelations.

Source:

‘Blasphemy’ author gets life term. Daily Times (Pakistan), August 16, 2005.

Cindy Sheehan and the Problem with the MSM

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Tonight I happened to be watching Fox News for an hour before switching over to watch CBS News. During its broadcast, CBS offered up a content-free profile of Cindy Sheehan, the woman who is currently protesting outside President Bush’s Crawford ranch demanding a meeting with him.

Now Fox had also mentioned Sheehan, in order to slam her ridiculous claim in an April 27, 2005 speech in which she said, among other things,

We are not waging a war on terror in this country. We’re waging a war of terror. The biggest terrorist in the world is George W. Bush!

The proper term for a person who believe this is “nutcase.”

Now Fox is a right wing news media outlet, so it has highlighted all of the idiotic things Sheehan has been saying the past few months. A lot of left wing blogs have highlighted all the non-idiotic things she’s said. Presumably, a mainstream media outlet would provide a balanced look at what Sheehan believes and let viewers decide for themselves.

CBS, of course, offered none of the above. Instead, they covered Sheehan as they covered the 2004 election, as if there is some sort of horse race between Sheehan and mothers of soldiers killed in Iraq who support the war. So we had Sheehan and her pain and some other woman and her pain, and absolutely no mention of what Sheehan actually believes and is on record as advocating (i.e., no mention that she’s said she wants Bush impeached for example).

This absurd. Imagine if the grieving mother who still supports the war had been giving speeches at far right events where she called for the nuclear bombing of Mecca, and major media outlets simply decided to omit that detail as irrelevant.

So the viewer is left with no information on which to make a judgement and instead presumably is left to choose between which grieving mother he or she preferred.

Ultimately, the entire Sheehan episode is an example of why broadcast media is in such decline. Its more programmed and scripted than many of the sitcoms and dramas that run in prime time.

Fraps — Screenshots on Steroids

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I’ve mentioned Fraps before, but until recently I never really used it that much even after paying to register it.

Originally I purchased Fraps to record in-game video for Unreal Tournament 2004. The problem is that even very fast machines have a lot of difficulty both running a game full screen and recording it at an acceptable frame rate and resolution. I just broke down and bought a Tivo with a DVD burner for video.

But that introduces another problem — any time you scan convert video, you lose a lot of detail. I’m very happy with the game video my Tivo records, except that it loses a lot of detail in the in-game chat (i.e., its unreadable on the video version). That, and there are times when I just want a screenshot rather than digging out the video.

Which is why I as impressed when I went back and looked at Fraps. It has a wonderful option that lets me hit a key and automatically take a screen shot every second. There is definitely a performance hit for doing so, but its more than acceptable. Typically, my machine will run a game like World of Warcraft at 45-50 frames per second, and taking a screen shot every second tends to knock that down by 3-5 fps. I can live with that.

Of course that does result in about 8 gigabytes/hour worth of screen shots, so those 5 hour marathons can really start to eat up hard drive space. I then use Zip Backup to CD to automatically Zip up the screenshots and burn them to DVDs.

Just in case there were some of you who didn’t realize the depths of my obssession for recording and archiving everything.

World of Warcraft

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Several months ago, some students who worked for me started raving about the MMORPG World of Warcraft, which they’d been playing apparently since right after it came out. Now it wasn’t like I hadn’t heard of the game, but mostly what I knew was how Blizzard had horrible problems with server stability at launch because it vastly underestimated how popular the game was going to be.

So after a couple months of badgering I bought the game, figuring I’d play out the free month that came with the box and be done with it. Riiight.

Instead I not only became hooked but got my wife hooked, so a typical evening is “lets get the kids to bed so we can go finish that Murloc quest or get the enchanting skill up to 175.” My wife took this to its dorkish obsessiveness by starting a Live Journal (ugh) for other Stormscale players.

And to be honest, I can’t tell you what’s so compelling about the game. It is really more of the same sort of paced reward system that has you staying up to get one more level or increased skill or better equipment. But there’s just something about the whole rat race that makes it impossible to resist.

I know, I’ve tried.

Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Unmentioned Victims of Japanese Aggression

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At Cliopatra, Greg James Robinson raises interesting questions about the morality of the atomic bombing of Nagaski, just three days after the bombing of Hiroshima. But in the comment sections, Allan Allport notes that the opponents of either/both atomic bombings typically offer a false dichotomy.

In their scenarios, the United States has two choices — drop the bombs (which kill hundreds of thousands) or try to wait out the Japanese government and military and hope they come to the table with some sort of surrender (waiting and negotiating, of course, would not involve killing anyone).

But waiting would also have meant death for potentially hundreds of thousands of people. World War II was still raging in much of Asia. Allport cites Robert P. Newman’s book, Truman and the Hiroshima Cult. In that book, Allport notes that the based on casualty rates, 10,000-13,000 people were dying each day in the Pacific Theater, 80 percent of those in Japanese-occupied territories. Every day of delay in ending the war would have added to the horrific death toll exacted by the Japanese military.

James Dobson on Raising Heterosexual Kids

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This nutty article by James Dobson on how to ensure your son or daughter doesn’t grow up to be gay is making the rounds. Its not anything that Dobson himself says that is so nutty (though there is plenty of Dobson’s usual nuttiness in there), but rather an unpublished manuscript by Joseph Nicolosi that Dobson quotes from extensively in his article. Dobson describes Nicolosi’s as “the foremost authority on the prevention and treatment of homosexuality today. His book will offer practical advice and a clear-eyed perspective on the antecedents of homosexuality.” So what does Nicolosi recommend? Stuff like this,

Girls can continue to grow in their identification with their mothers. On the other hand, a boy has an additional developmental task—to disidentify from his mother and identify with his father. At this point [beginning at about eighteen months], a little boy will not only begin to observe the difference, he must now decide, “Which one am I going to be?” In making this shift in identity, the little boy begins to take his father as a model of masculinity. At this early stage, generally before the age of three, Ralph Greenson observed, the boy decides that he would like to grow up like his father.

This is a choice. Implicit in that choice is the decision that he would not like to grow up to be like his mother. According to Robert Stoller, “The first order of business in being a man is, ‘don’t be a woman.’”

Meanwhile, the boy’s father has to do his part. He needs to mirror and affirm his son’s maleness. He can play rough-and-tumble games with his son, in ways that are decidedly different from the games he would play with a little girl. He can help his son learn to throw and catch a ball. He can teach him to pound a square wooden peg into a square hole in a pegboard. He can even take his son with him into the shower, where the boy cannot help but notice that Dad has a penis, just like his, only bigger.

Who knew the cure for homosexuality was as simple as a game of catch and showers with Dad?

Google’s CNet Tantrum

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Google’s tantrum over this CNet story strike me as a classic example of a corporate public relations disaster. In order to highlight the privacy concerns that some people have about Google, CNet’s story published personal information about Google CEO Eric Schmidt that it obtained through Google Searches on Schmidt. The CNet story begins,

Google CEO Eric Schmidt doesn’t reveal much about himself on his home page.

But spending 30 minutes on the Google search engine lets one discover that Schmidt, 50, was worth an estimated $1.5 billion last year. Earlier this year, he pulled in almost $90 million from sales of Google stock and made at least another $50 million selling shares in the past two months as the stock leaped to more than $300 a share.

He and his wife Wendy live in the affluent town of Atherton, Calif., where, at a $10,000-a-plate political fund-raiser five years ago, presidential candidate Al Gore and his wife Tipper danced as Elton John belted out “Bennie and the Jets.”

Schmidt has also roamed the desert at the Burning Man art festival in Nevada, and is an avid amateur pilot.

That such detailed personal information is so readily available on public Web sites makes most people uncomfortable. But it’s nothing compared with the information Google collects and doesn’t make public.

In retaliation for that story, Google has forbidden its employees from talking to CNet reporters for one year.

Aside from the obvious tantrum aspect of it, Google is simply giving more ammunition to its critics concerned about the sort of privacy breaches that the search engine allows. Until now, Google’s message has been that all it does is collect disparate published information for indexing and there’s nothing unseemly or wrong about that.

For example, here’s what Schmidt had to say when defending Google aganist critics who complained about Google-enabled privacy invasions,

Google does not discover things that are not public. Many people are disturbed to find their home phone number. But we found it because it was a public piece of information.

But the reality is that typically such information might be public but its in disparate forms and locations. Full text search engines allow the curious to quickly find, filter and collate that disparate collection of public facts and build a profile of a person that is — as Schmidt himself found out — a bit unnerving.

By conceding that and overreacting to the CNet story, Google simply lends ammunition to critics who say the company needs to do more to prevent just this sort of use of its search engine (though its difficult to imagine how they’d do so, especially for public figures like Schmidt).

I’ve had people do to me what CNet did to Schmidt. I’ve seen people who clearly used Google or other search engines who published a complete rundown of my personal information on Internet forums. It was creepy, but as Schmidt himself has said in the pass, the overwhelming value of having more information and having it more easily accessible far outweighs the problems that this also can present to people who suddenly discover that their privacy is largely illusory.