Category Archives: Web Finds

Twitter / CHRISMAL0NEY: A word of advice to @BarackObama: …

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Twitter / CHRISMAL0NEY: A word of advice to @BarackObama: ….

The picture attached to this tweet was in my Instapaper queue and I got a chance to look at it. As I saw the picture I noticed something really quite entertaining. The text of the tweet takes the President to task for misspelling Ohio. If you look at the way the four people, with the President in position 3 are standing, each one of them is making a physical gesture which is supposed to show a letter of the alphabet, to spell out Ohio; Each of them are in the correct placement if you read from right to left:

O-H-I-O

It is because the cameraman is standing opposite them and nobody was spending any time thinking about a 180 degree rotation of the horizontal plane. So, beyond what amounts to being a gaffe of position, the order is correct.

 

Hawthorne

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While running my SupportPress system for several months now it dawned on me that the  MySQL database that lurks just behind the scenes is collecting quite a bit of accidental detail on my coworkers that use the system. Nothing that would endanger anyones privacy, so quickly put that notion out of your head. What it does do is record the datestamp of when people enter tickets into the system. Generally people enter tickets right after they’ve identified a problem, of if they come to us, we start the ticket as the first thing we do, so again, the initiation of a ticket is in a general sense linked to just after the problem was detected and brought to our attention. For the remainder of this post, I assert that the datestamp on the ticket is when the problem occurred.

So with a middling amount of database skills and analysis under my belt I decided to run some aggregate queries on the data. Here’s what I found:

When I aggregate all the days of the month together and count how many tickets were initiated on which particular days I discover four notable days where things seem to on-average, go haywire: The 1st with 81 tickets, the 6th with 66 tickets, the 12th with 56 tickets, and the 23rd with 79 tickets. What’s really interesting about this dataset are the dates on the opposite side. The least haywire day is the 31st, with 11 tickets then the 28th with 20 tickets and the 3rd with 28 tickets. So now I can say, in general, that the 1st, the 6th, the 12th, and the 23rd are “Days That Suck”. The best day is the 31st.

I ran the same analysis but instead of days of the month, I used hours. In general the mornings are where people seem to have the most problems. 14 tickets at 7am, 201 tickets at 8am. At Noon the tickets drop by a hundred, then from 2pm to 4pm it rises gently but nowhere near the morning values and the afternoon peak comes between 4 and 5pm. After 6? The rush of tickets just stop. People don’t report problems when food is on the line. 🙂

The last analysis I did crossed day and hours together and counted the tickets. This had some interesting data in it, since I was just looking for any notable outliers. Hours and Days where the ticket level was say, more than 20 for that hour. Here’s some of the “Problem Days and Hours”: The 1st of the month at 10am and the 23rd at 10am.

What is to be determined from these really general findings? There are some cursed days at the office apparently. The 1st, the 6th, the 12th and the 23rd are really quite troublesome for people. Mornings are rough but on the 1st and 23rd, at around 10am the shit hits the fan.

SupportPress collects this data for as long as it runs and I’ve no intention of stopping so the further we go the more (or maybe less) pronounced these interesting bits of information will get. Those that work with me that also read my blog might have some insight or they may just find some of this helpful if they have spare vacation days to spend and are looking for some reason to not come into work.

SupportPress At Work

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Several months ago I became aware of certain workplace changes that were going to only be a problem if I chose to ignore them instead of doing something about them. There’s always been a part of my job that I’ve been kind of awkwardly ignoring. I lacked any kind of real instrumentation to one of the major aspects of my job, in fact, it’s the part of my job that I regard as being truly central and my “first hat” and that would be the Advancement Services Help Desk. First and foremost I go to work to help people use technology. That I didn’t have any online structure in which this fit has always bothered me. I always rationalized it as “My shop is too small to need such things.” or “It’s too expensive and I can’t prove that the ROI will justify the price.” but all that changed when given a purpose by a workplace change that was coming, and me discovering SupportPress.

SupportPress itself is a WordPress theme for a WordPress.org installation. We already had a hosting company that we had a great relationship with, [iPage](http://www.ipage.com]. It struck me that while we had a site with the host I certainly wasn’t making the most use out of our investment as I could. After a long while I logged into iPage and noticed their SimpleScripts service off their Control Panel. SimpleScripts is an interface to install very popular LAMP-based scripts that add features to a hosted website. Various scripts include WordPress.org, Drupal, and a gaggle of other ones including some eCommerce scripts that I really couldn’t care more about. WordPress.org is the free-to-use DIY version of WordPress.com. WordPress is a wonderful blogging platform and it serves as the bedrock that SupportPress runs on. So setting up the WordPress.org site was exceptionally easy. It was a click and some typing, followed by a few more clicks in SimpleScripts and it was done just like that. A fully featured and functioning blog running on my web host. After that, I looked at SupportPress and discovered that the theme sold for $100. One payment and you get a license to run it on as many blogs as you like. It wasn’t a subscription, just a straight simple sale. After buying the theme from WooThemes I downloaded it in it’s native form, one single ZIP file. I opened up and logged into my WordPress.org blog and navigated to the administration side of the system and right there, as easy as you please is “Install Themes Here” and the preferred option is “Install Theme from ZIP”, which I had exactly! So I uploaded the SupportPress Theme ZIP file to my newly made WordPress.org blog and when I applied the theme and went out to my blog, everything was functioning as promised! Everything! A fully functioning Help Desk Support System was running without any extra tomfoolery. I didn’t need to muck about with source files, fiddle with settings or update anything to get things to work as they should. This software, all of it, from end to end is what writing ELEGANT system code looks like. It works without guff, simply, directly, and elegantly. After that, all I had to do was create user accounts for all my clients, assign a few as “Administrators” like my assistant at work and I was done. I had the entire project from plan to finish in about an hour!

SupportPress has two distinct interfaces. The first interface, the one I use is the “Administration” interface. It very closely resembles the “User” interface but has a lot more options. If I need to perform anything more in-depth I can always call up the WordPress.org administration interface itself (which supersedes the themes administration console, wrapping around it actually) and I’ll show off both interfaces in this blog post. The system is organized on the management of Tickets. A ticket is a self-contained event that requires help from me to my clients. A ticket could be anything from a lost password to a report that a copier is malfunctioning. A ticket in SupportPress has a title, a description, a status, a type, an owner and an assignment. As an administrator I can see every single ticket and manipulate every single ticket. I can change ownership (the client), the assignment (who is to help), the status (which all new tickets start as new), the type which indicates what category the ticket belongs in and I can add comments and attach files, anything that can be done in email, except it’s logged in a database. The best way to describe it is to show it:

SupportPress Administration Screen

SupportPress New Tickets

SupportPress New Ticket

This administration interface is a full-view while the next few screenshots show what the client sees. It is much more direct:

SupportPress User View

The system is a pleasure to use and goes so far as to suggest top-ranked KB articles for clients as well as displaying all the clients tickets and their statuses with two buttons that are clearly marked for starting new tickets. When clients type in a title for a new ticket the system will automatically (while they type!) scan for relevant KB articles and display them. Eventually as the KB becomes more robust users will start to discover fixes in the KB on their own and in some situations actually be able to help themselves. When a user submits a ticket, the administrators get an email notification and the ticket resides in the system as “New” and assigned to “Anybody”. Any of the administrators can log in to the SupportPress system and look at these tickets and assign them either to themselves or other administrators.

When an administrator makes a change to a ticket, that change is sent as an email notice to the client. Everything you do to a ticket ends up being sent in an email every time you submit a change. So if I see a ticket, assign it to myself, set it’s status to “Open” and change it’s type to “question”, for example, the user will get an email showing what category was changed, the old value, and a graphical arrow pointing to the new value. If there is a comment or attached file, the client is sent an email indicating as such with the comment sent along in email so the client can read the update.

Tickets go from New to Open, then either to Waiting or Pending, then to Resolved. Sometimes tickets go into “Researching”, “Recurring”, or “Limbo”. The last status, “Limbo” are for those tickets where the situation is beyond waiting, but we still want it to hang around for some reason.

If all of this wasn’t exactly what I was after, the cherry on top is that this theme comes mobile-ready as well. It renders beautifully on an iPhone and iPad, and technically any mobile device as well but those are the only two devices I have to test the site with. Technically anyone can have an account on the site and anyone can submit tickets. I really like how clients are insulated from each other and only see community information in the KB. For admins, it’s all open and available. I really like how that’s structured.

Sometimes clients ignore that we now have SupportPress and elect to get our attention other ways. If they email us, I simply copy the email into a new SupportPress ticket, and set the owner to the person who sent the email. I love that I can create a new ticket on behalf of a client as if they sent it! Any other method of communication that isn’t SupportPress now gets a ticket for each event. If it’s a knock on our door, a ticket. If it’s a phone call, a ticket. If it’s an iChat, a ticket. Everything I do for a client gets a ticket and that way not only do I instantly document everything but the client can see everything about their tickets in one convenient place anytime they wish. They can go into old tickets and see who responded, when, and what they did about the issue. I’ve also started to use the standard blogging features of the WordPress.org site that still exist. SupportPress shuffles that off to the “Blog” menu item. If ever there is something I wish to record, I just send the SupportPress blog an email with the contents of whatever it is I want to record and it ends up being placed in the Blog section. I like to think of that as my “Captains Log” which lets me write odds and ends about the function of my office in one central place. If ever I need to refer back to it, search on it, or print something off of it, there it is. One handy place.

The hosting was inexpensive, the installation of WordPress.org was free and took about seven minutes. The cost of SupportPress was $100 and took about five minutes to install. It took about thirty minutes to set up all the clients and after that we were on the ground running. So for $100 and less than an hour I went from having no help desk infrastructure to having a damn nice one. Nobody has complained and so I count that as votes of approval. Some of my clients have started to adopt SupportPress directly and others have not. I don’t care since I stop people before they get going when it comes to in-your-face interactions to tell them that I first have to create a ticket for them.

I couldn’t imagine going back to the way things were. This is so much more convenient and safe for me in general. It keeps everyone feeling good, feeling honest, and provides a huge amount of CYA if ever a problem of help desk performance should ever pop up. Each ticket contains date and duration stamps which clearly display how each issue was handled. There is no he-said or she-said, there is only the ticket and what it says. Objective, clear, and rational. Again, I couldn’t imagine running a help desk any other way.

TOP 5 VILLAIN DEATH SCENES IN SCI-FI HISTORY | geekleagueofamerica.com

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TOP 5 VILLAIN DEATH SCENES IN SCI-FI HISTORY | geekleagueofamerica.com.

These five selections are indeed all excellent, however I must admit to my personal preference being the death of the final Alien in the rather poorly done Alien Resurrection. For all this films slogging along the last action scene in the film really is quite (and literally!) visceral to watch. After you witness the “birth” of the hybrid Alien, and after it knocks it’s Alien mothers head clean off it tries to show affection for the blended Ripley. The way she cuts herself on her “child” and then throws her acidic blood at the viewport out into space you can see right from this point where the film is going.

I think that this scene takes the cake for me because it’s quite disgusting to watch, essentially the hole into space with the pressurized atmosphere in the ship leads to an inexorable drawing in of the closest objects to that orifice leading out to space. Then the FX team toy with you, maybe the Alien Hybrid will make it in it’s escape away from the orifice of doom, but we all know that the movie wouldn’t be able to move forward if that was the case, so the hybrid has to die. So it gets sucked towards the orifice and in one very small moment it’s greasy flesh is protruding out into the vacuum of space and then, well, like a rollercoaster it’s all downhill from there. It’s screaming and growling at being betrayed by Ripley is the first bit, then as it gets progressively hoovered out into space through a very tiny hole, the screaming and growling become more of a surprise leading to a kind of painful pleading for help. There really isn’t any help possible, because as the events unfold, a majority of the creatures internal organs are being crushed, blended, and evacuated into space. Then quite gratuitously they show the hybrids literal disemboweling. The keening scream and pleading cries get more pronounced and I actually feel a sense of sympathetic panic for the hybrid. Then, and at the end where it gets really quite awful, the screaming stops because the hybrids pulverized lung tissue is now a gel being pushed out into space and you see just it’s head, then the skin gets hoovered off and the skull. Little waypoints of disgusting horribleness the whole way along.

I vote for this villain’s end because it wasn’t really technically a villain, it was an unwanted maybe-hero as it’s only real action was to kill the true villain, the Alien Queen that “birthed” it. But it had to be disposed of, and this particular approach, well, it reaches in deep and grabs you in the gut and twists and toys with you. Much like witnessing a car doomed to a very horrific collision, you can’t really respond, you just watch in a kind of sickened awe.

It’s the kind of scene that none of my squeamish friends should ever witness. The entire sequence is exceptionally gory, visceral, and the sound effects just push it over the top for me. What a way to die – blenderized and hoovered out into space. There is no playing dead and surprising the “hero” from that point!

Off To The Races

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Today we went back to exploring graveyards in the local area. We stopped as Weedsport Rural Cemetery with an educated guess that we’d discover some family there. My mother informed me that I should be able to find my great grandfather Charles Race there as well as my great great grandfather, Fernando Race there as well. After some wandering around we spotted the first grave. It held Fernando, Josephine, and Helen. Helen was only five years old when she died and so she was buried next to her parents. I never knew any of these people, but seeing that they buried their lost little girl right next to them started to color in the vagueness. I imagine Fernando and Josephine to be salt-to-the-earth people with huge hearts and kind dispositions. They had MANY children and when they lost one too early, they made sure she would always be with them, even in the hereafter. I had to pause and take it all in. Helen was born in 1907 and died five years later in 1912. As I paid my respects to my long dead super-great grandparents I started to look around their headstones. I immediately ran across Clinton C. Race. Clinton served in the Navy during the Korean conflict and his headstone (rightly so) proudly had his military plaque on the obverse side of his headstone marker. On his headstone he made reference to a lost brother, Leroy. Leroy was 1 month old when he died. Looking at the records of the family, Chester Race had twin boys, Charles and Leroy. Leroy didn’t survive. Chester went on to have many more children including Clinton. The kicker was, I didn’t know any of this and worse, I couldn’t prove any of it. The only real thing I had to go on was that I had a gaggle of Races all buried together, like arm-spans together. Clinton was feet from Fernando, and there was another grave for Mark Race right next to Clinton.

So I had Clinton and Mark and no way to link them, nor any way to link them to Fernando. I know that Fernando is related to me, and I suspected that Mark was Clinton’s son, but linking Clinton to anyone else? Nope. Fernando had a lot of kids, but never a Clinton. So I did some research. Ancestry.com wasn’t very useful as Clinton didn’t apparently show up on many public records, like censuses or anything like that. For hours Clinton was a lost lamb. I knew in my heart that Clinton was related to me, why would anyone with the same surname elect to be buried next to another person with the same surname? To punish future lookey-loos like me? Nah! It was a mystery. That’s a central carrot to this genealogical obsession. You know you’ve got kin but you can’t connect them up, until…

Thanks to the Fulton Historical Society, they placed a newspaper scan article on the Internet from 1964 which was an obit for Chester Race. Chester was the missing key. Fernando was Chester’s father, and brother to Charles – my maternal grandfathers father. So I was related to Chester. In Ancestry.com all I knew of Chester was that he had one girl child and that was it. Turns out I was wrong. Chester had Clinton as well! And Chester had his own Charles and with him came Leroy. That halcyon moment was so sweet and reverberated for hours. I linked Clinton Race with Chester, with Fernando, and with Charles and then Allen, to my mother and then to me. The cousin relationship is thick, but it exists! Right after that the rest of it fell into place. Clinton had two boys, Mark and Timothy. Mark was buried right next to his father. The obvious next step was to look at Mark. He was alive up until 2010, he died in an accident. Mark had two children, Rebecca and Brian.

Hungry for more discovery I started to concentrate on Mark, Timothy, Brian, and Rebecca. I know that Rebecca moved to Florida and maybe got married, so we hope a happily ever after for her, and Brian (thanks to the apple-not-falling-far-from-the-tree when it comes to looks) has some fame with him. Brian Race works for Sea Shepherd. It was a weird feeling, looking at a picture of a man who is definitely related to me, doing work I find incredibly impressive and courageous. Now, how related is he? Not really at all. We really share Fernando and that’s many generations and cousin-bridges. Is there any point to knowing about Brian Race? Probably not. But in the same way that I can claim some ancestral link to A.G. Spalding (of the baseball-and-catchers-mitts Spalding company) I can also claim a connection to Solomon Spalding, which if you are a Mormon should be a name you recognize and hiss at, like throwing holy water on a vampire. If you don’t get it, do a Google search for Solomon Spalding and Joseph Smith. It’ll be a good read, I promise. So, back to the Races – Fernando, Chester, Clinton, Mark, and then Brian. Five generations of people that connect to me.

Mark’s children, as well as Timothy (if he still draws breath) and any of the other Races, if you somehow happen to read this blog post and I am right (or even if I’m not!) about Clinton, I encourage you with all my heart to please make contact with us. I would really love to share our family tree with you and maybe help you get to know your greats and get to know them and appreciate their lives through the scraggly bits and pieces that we have collected. I don’t want to personally interfere with anyones lives, so I am going to put this message in a bottle and hurl it into the great abyss. Leave a comment or write me an email at bluedepth(at)gmail(dot)com. I’m all over, Facebook, Twitter, and WordPress. If not, no biggie.

He Who Integrates, Wins!

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Google has done it. They have released Google Chrome for iOS and updated Google Chrome for Mac OSX. I have downloaded Chrome onto my iPhone, which of course pushed an identical copy onto my iPad. Then I started Google Chrome on my Macbook and updated that as well, to revision 20.

Google Chrome is faster than Safari when browsing my SupportPress site, that’s a really neat feeling to see it zoom along. So, did I switch? Yes. All my devices synchronized for tabs and bookmarks and passwords? You bet your sweet bippy! I’m a capricious user, Firefox often times pisses me off, Safari sometimes does, and even Chrome pisses me off from time to time. But I’m willing to take my lumps if I can have a synchronized centralized clouded infrastructure tying all my devices together. Safari isn’t it, but Google may win because their technology wins.

So far, Google Chrome on iOS and Google Chrome on my MacBook Pro may win my personal and professional recommendation. But if you are using browsers of your choice, don’t switch yet. These Google technologies are still a little raw, especially on iOS. Only time will tell, like most things.

Jindal Says He Won’t Implement Obamacare – ABC News

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Jindal Says He Won’t Implement Obamacare – ABC News.

The Governor of Louisiana has effectively declared that he is going to defy the Union!

That’s fine. Louisiana has really just declared their full intent to be considered in rebellion against the Union and this amounts to secession. The last time we saw this particular bluster it was 1861 and South Carolina.

So all that is old is new again. If Jindal is serious, he is going to take his state into open rebellion and this will initiate the Second Great American Civil War. This is such an outrage! To throw away the Union because you don’t want your poorest citizens to have health insurance coverage! It boggles the mind!

So, what is to be done? If Louisiana is in open rebellion it is time to establish a new border for the remaining states, establish trade tariffs, discontinue all federal services to the rebellious state of Louisiana, place barricades on their Interstates, militarize the border and eventually occupy the state, depose it’s state government and force it to submit to the will of the Union.

The last time states were in open rebellion the North burned Richmond Virginia to the ground to simply prove a point.

So, Governor Jindal, are you sure you want to do this? Are you sure you want to take your entire state down this path? Your political bluster HAS CONSEQUENCES Governor!

My advice to you and the people of Louisiana, tread very carefully. Very carefully. You are being watched and evaluated.

Texas Cattle Die-Off Linked to Grass – USDA checking for mutations in grass that produced cyanide gas

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Texas Cattle Die-Off Linked to Grass – USDA checking for mutations in grass that produced cyanide gas.

So, GM-modified Bermuda grass eventually develops toxic properties? I can’t wait to see how the people who engineered this grass can spin this as a feature instead of a liability. I can’t help but notice the millions of years where cows ate grass without dying of cyanide gas exposure.

It’s almost as if GM modified grains are dangerous. Unthinkable! 🙂

Losing Social Context

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I’m an avid user of social networking, picking up stories from Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus. These services all have certain ways to mark some sort of favorite status, liking, favorite’ing a tweet, +1’ing a G+ entry, that sort of thing. On its own it’s effective for those services however I’ve found that it just really isn’t enough for me.

To bridge the gap, between seeing something that piques my interest and remembering it for later used to be served by browser bookmarks, but these are inconvenient because they languish on only one machine and can’t be accessible on every device that I own. I was for a time a user of Delicious, but since it was bought out by Yahoo and then imperiled by Yahoo in a mystery state somewhere between being alive and dead I’ve given up on that as well. Another bookmarking service that I use is Marco Arment’s Instapaper which satisfies a lot of the needs that I have – it works on every device I use and it’s ubiquitous enough to become the tool of choice for me when it comes to a bookmarking service.

There is a problem with Instapaper however. It comes down to context. When I’m on Twitter I see a link from @gadgetfreaks, for example, and I send the link to Instapaper so I can read it later. I prefer the information flow from Twitter to be regular and smooth, dancing from item to item I never really stop to actually browse any of the links presented to me on Twitter unless they are in my “core” group of people who I follow on Twitter. On Twitter it’s really a quick browse with small dwells to retweet, send links to Instapaper, or very rarely browse right from Twitter off a link shared by someone I follow. So, after a while of browsing the stream from Twitter my Instapaper queue becomes weighty and I then use the Instapaper site, the Instapaper app, or “ReadNow” app on my MacBook to go back to the links that I’ve sent to Instapaper to read later, or, read now.

While I’m browsing my Instapaper queue I then run into a crisis, sometimes, and this crisis is one of context. I have an entry in my Instapaper but I have no idea what it is in reference to and there isn’t any convenient way that I can think of to chew backwards through the Twitter stream to rescue the flavor text that was near the link to rescue some semblance of a context. So these links in my Instapaper, without context, are on at least some small way at least browsable, but without the surrounding context the links are more chaff than wheat. So I browse the links, I don’t get why I saved it, and then just dump the link out of Instapaper.

Is it a problem? No, not in any appreciable way. But it would be an interesting expansion on the Instapaper design to have the functionality that sends the link to Instapaper also grab the nearby text from Twitter and have a foldaway area  where you can unpack the context and regain it, so the article you saved in Instapaper makes sense.

10-year-long video game creates hellish nightmare world – CNN.com

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10-year-long video game creates hellish nightmare world – CNN.com.

As I was reading I couldn’t help but notice that this world is without hope. So this is what happens when nobody is allowed to think beyond the simulation!?! This is AWESOME. Three super-city states trapped in eternal war. It’s like 1984 in a computer.

At some point when nuclear weapons aren’t enough to toss in humanities collective towel, I suppose you’d have to switch to an effective agent for genocide. Perhaps an aerosolized super-durable Marburg virus. One sneeze that ended it all. Hemorragic Fever so pronounced that it makes peoples heads explode from the mismatched blood pressure.

Seems a blessing after reading what the state of the world would be in that simulation. I wonder if this keeps Sid Meier up at night wondering…