More Money for Health Now!
Posted 3:07 AM

Radiologists still say women should be doing lots of mammograms. Other research shows that frequent mammograms either cause cancer or cause over-treatment of benign tumors.

That's why we need to spend a LOT more money on healthcare for ALL americans NOW.

So we can get those people more MONEY. Because that's what's been stopping them from making good decisions.

They just don't have the cash.

In the United States, approximately 600,000 hysterectomies are performed each year. Think of all the millions of women without healthcare still walking around with their uteri! And that's according to the government ... I imagine the real number would be lower considering how these things are probably over-reported.

Thank goodness we're about to authorize an extra 800 billion dollars for these people.
[View/Post Comments] [Digg] [Del.icio.us] [Stumble]

Google 2009 is between 22 and 28 times larger than 2006
Posted 4:40 PM

Based on an informal word count analysis that I was doing for other reasons, Google's English web index is from 22 to 28 times larger in 2009 than it was in 2006. That's some big growth for 3 years.
[View/Post Comments] [Digg] [Del.icio.us] [Stumble]

Economic Recovery is Here at Last!
Posted 11:29 AM

The CEO of NuCor Steel was on Squawk Box this morning. He said actual unemployment is 13-15% if you calculate it the way they did prior to the 80s when they changed it for obvious political reasons. The radio guy that tells you employment lags behind economic recovery hasn't looked at a graph. There is little-to-no statistical correlation between the stock marketand employment because a) public companies employ a fraction of people and b) public companies and private company employment aren't correlated. Experts have no idea what's going to happen. Our prior experience does not apply to the current situation. Have a nice day.
[View/Post Comments] [Digg] [Del.icio.us] [Stumble]

Try SMX, a true 5GL
Posted 10:33 PM

I keep trying to like PHP, but, honestly, it's completely awful. Please, world, try SMX for some website stuff.

If you need a huge community, or a facebook api ... use the %perl module.

After about a week of using it, you won't look back. Built-in image creation support, sqlite support, odbc, all the good stuff you need for decent interactive websites.

I just debugged an old blog program I wrote. In only 779 lines... it's way better than Blogger, IMO. Support for templates, multipart blogs, image uploading, multi-user, RSS, everything... in a terse 779 line program. I bet Blogger's like 100K lines or something.

Labels: programming

[View/Post Comments] [Digg] [Del.icio.us] [Stumble]

Postgres Replication
Posted 6:32 AM

There's a lot of talk about the lack of built-in replication for postgres. I have been using the "pg_comparator" method for slave updates.

This is essentially similar to an "rsync" for database tables. It works extremely well and has a low configuration overhead. You can use it to scale a single table out to dozens of servers, even choosing which fields to replicate.

It's also easy to install, configure and maintain - even code for.

Personally, I like it better than the builtin solution that they are discussing on postgres's lists. I wish a diff-patch shipping solution was in the running. For a lot of us, that's exactly what we need.

Labels: programming

[View/Post Comments] [Digg] [Del.icio.us] [Stumble]

AT&T Scared By Google
Posted 3:36 AM

Google has shown itself to be a competent player in many areas, but not every. Picassa is still a pretty lousy web album, and who hosts web sites at Google? But in some arenas, Google shines, and Google Voice is proving to be one of them.

About Google Voice:

I've been using Google Voice to manage phone routing for a couple weeks now. It is an efficient, high quality and non-nonsense service - exactly what you'd expect from a company who has refused to fill their home page with more than a little - very useful - text box. I use Google's service to route calls for my small business's 800 number to a half-dozen cell phones and land lines where customer service reps answer them.

Google's transcription service, though useful, is oddly worse than PhoneTag's ... the company they bought. But it is far better than having to listen to every message. An operator can quickly delete dozens of hangups, no-message calls and wrong numbers in a few seconds, rather than listening to every one.

The FCC, Google and Traffic Pumping:

Google has run into some small hiccup with the FCC because it identified that some rural phone companies were "traffic pumping". The FCC allows some rural companies to charge *inbound* callers an "access fee". That means you pay to call numbers in those locations. Small rural phone companies were quick to exploit this ruling, giving a kickback to "free sex lines" and "free teleconferencing services" that set up shop there. Callers are rarely informed that they they are secretly paying up to 25 cents a minute for these services.

Google Voice blocked these numbers since some companies were buying Google voice accounts and routing calls to sex lines to make money and milk Google for profits. The FCC is probably going to let them do it, and it might open up some room for litigation to get rid of these people who are abusing and ultimately harming rural phone systems.

The FCC has really screwed up even allowing this to happen. Google's action has called attention to a little known area where all the kickbacks and bribes are likely not something that the well-heeled boys at the FCC really want investigated.

AT&T's Response & Weakness:

You would think the big phone companies would line up behind Google and demand action on this area which costs them money and does them no good. But AT&T's response was to go on the attack and blame Google for not routing calls to a convent and an ambulance service. (Who would use Google voice to route calls to an ambulance service rather than calling the direct number? And exactly what kind of convent receives hundreds of calls per hour? Dial-a-prayer?).

This is an enormous blunder on AT&T's part. It has revealed, at least to me, that AT&T is either afraid of Google or afraid of someone looking into the FCC's rural access fees. Either way, it's revealing weakness, and my dollar's on AT&T stock price reflecting that weakness in the years to come.

[View/Post Comments] [Digg] [Del.icio.us] [Stumble]

Yay! It was an easy one, but I'm still happy
Posted 7:09 PM

I won an "enigma puzzle" at New Scientist. Wrote a perl program to show how I solved it too. Click for source code.
[View/Post Comments] [Digg] [Del.icio.us] [Stumble]