NOTE: Minor edit for updated text & additional links as of 2006-11-13 1300hrs MST

I was pointed towards a misleading (if not out right lie) video by Mr McIntee on YouTube by Pudge last week. I commented, others did as well. Comments were .... deleted? Pudge has since created an interesting video response, though not on the initial video's page because the author has banned & deleted all opposing views, mine included. Not too receptive of technical comments regarding video & photography now are we...

I did some surfing to see how widely viewed this video is. Looks like lots of people are getting bent out of shape on BOTH sides. I found (via Technorati) another LJ'er commenting on the horrible deception of the White House so I finally figured I needed to add my own voice to the hurricane of the internet. Probably going to get drowned out / shouted down. Oh well, fun times. Don't bother going to the other LJ link because it is just the same ranting as other places and my comment is roughly the same as below....

The common rants focus along a few easy to pick apart lines: 1) (argument FOR manipulation claims) shifting the video up & adding black on the bottom. 2) (argument AGAINST manipulation claims ... a false argument I might add) video was 16:9 and has been added to the top of a 4:3 picture leaving black on the bottom 3) cut out scenes where banner was visible (the ONLY likely event of the three).

One job I have is as a video editor (though not a successfully full time self employed one), and as such I can tell you that the portion of the screen missing is called a lower third which is used to display studio logos, news tickers, news story sub-titles, captions, etc. It is missing from all the videos for that month on the white house site. Probable reasons are 1) copy right restrictions on the CNN logo, 2) not wanting to publish the CNN logo, 3) Evil Intent??? etc. The video is not in 16:9 ratio (as I have read else where) because no other video for that month is in 16:9. More recent videos are filmed in 16:9 most likely due to the impending broadcast standards switch due in the not too distant future. This can be confirmed by viewing any news releases in the past month or more. These videos are in 16:9 and do not have a black lower third, probably because of a newer copyright agreement between the government and CNN or whatever source was used.

The banner is visible in other still photos of the event but the still photos are taken from a lower angle, a wider field of view, or centered with the presenter's head at the center of the image or below to specifically include the banner. Video footage is not filmed from this angle for a live presenter for several reasons. News conferences are usually filmed from a direct front level perspective to the presenter. This means that the camera is at eye level to the speaker and points directly to the face of the presenter so that the presenter is effectively talking directly into the camera, and hence the audience. Also the subject is never filmed with their head (eye level) in the center of the footage. This leaves a lot of empty space above a presenter which is wasted. Just look at any news footage or any photographer's portrait work.

The proper camera angle centers at about shoulder / chest height so that the chin rests just above the center line of the footage and the rib cage or sternum (if shooting a close up) or the bottom of the podium / lectern seal (if shooting a wider shot) rests on the bottom. This effectively provides a "bust" view (to borrow from sculptors) for the presenter.

Here is a still photo that presents just such an image. The face is in the upper third, the chest is mid line, and the podium (if it were shot from front & center) would be the lower 1/2 to 1/3. Notable in this photo is that this image is taken from a 30 degree side angle allowing for creative use of the background, but also notice that the photographer mostly kept the subject's bust view. In this recent video notice that it IS in 16:9 and that the same presentation proportions are kept. The face of the presenter is above the middle, and the bottom extends down to the seal on the podium. And again the camera angle is eye level from directly in front of the presenter.

If the video had been shifted then that means the original footage was shot with the presenter's face in the center to lower than center of the screen. This has the effect of making the presenter look like a midget at worst, or standing behind a massive podium at best. I can assure you that any organization concerned about the image of a presenter will have arranged for smaller podiums to avoid just such an appearance. If they did not make such arrangements, that news clip would not be used on a publicly available web site due to the unfavorable perspective. The same perspective can be accomplished by moving closer to the presenter and slightly lower. This low angle shot would emphasize the podium, which would obscure the presenter up to about the neck, and would have the same effect of shrinking the presenter relative to the podium.

All this does not mean that the White House did NOT edit the film to remove scenes where the banner is visible. To check for editing / cutting scenes, read the transcript and listen to the audio or play the video and see if they match. If so, there was no editing. If they do not match, then they did edit the footage.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have not performed this last step, so i leave it as an exercise to the reader. Also, and in contrast to the initial video by Mr McIntee, I will not delete comments in opposition to mine. However, if real names / contact info for ANYONE are used I will delete the entire thing for privacy concerns of even Mr McIntee, or anyone else involved.

Jason

I thought I would point out an interesting article brought to my attention by another slashdotter regarding a landscaping business that chose not to bid for the business of a gay couple. "I need to tell you that we cannot meet with you because we choose not to work for homosexuals."

Now seeing as I am a very libertarian kind of guy, this doesn't strike me as being wrong. Just the opposite. I would have no problems what so ever if a gay business owner told me they could not submit a bid for my landscaping because my values conflicted with theirs. No problem-o-reeno. America is still a somewhat free market and I have a choice for who gets my money. As a private person and as a small business owner / operator I feel that NO ONE should tell me who I have to do business with. My choice, my loss of profit.

If your business is strong enough to turn away customers for these sort of reasons then you are fortunate to have such a strong business. I personally would not produce a wedding video for a gay couple (ok that would just be weird). And I am in DIRE need of business so this would be a big set back for my business. But as a business owner (and as any person, company, etc) I SHOULD have the right to choose with my Franklin's or lack there of.

The offended / rejected gay couple sent an email to 200 of their friends (hell, I don't have 200 friends with email let alone 200 friends!). The gay couple naturally blame the problem on the ignorance of the business owners. Because obviously anyone that doesn't fully support or contribute to GLAD is ignorant. "I'm still shocked by the ignorance that exists in today's society," Lackey said in his e-mail. " Because GLAD has the secret knowledge and those ig-nant (to borrow from Chris Rock) Christians are too stupid to know any better.

The expected result of the news article is rage, threats of murder, rape, etc against...... but wait. Was it the potential customers that were being threatened for their alternative life style and "God Hating Homosexual Perverted Lifestyle"? Not this time. This time, the boogie men were the gay activists and it was the Christian business owner, under no obligation to work for anyone, that had his family threatened with DEATH & the RAPE of his children for his decision by homosexual activists from all over the world, thanks to the intar-web.

How did the bigoted ignorant Christian's react? Spewing threats of returning violence towards the gay couple? Well close, if by close you mean not close. "It was just our intent to uphold our rights as small business owners to choose our clientele," she said. "All the hate, the threats of sodomizing my children, the threats of me being murdered, came out because of a very businesslike straightforward e-mail I sent. The crowd of tolerance and diversity is not so tolerant." Yep. Real mean of them to do that. Repressing poor gay folk. To be fair, some on the message board for the business did say the gay folk will be going to hell. Oh no. If you don't believe in hell then that is about as mean as saying that you won't get a visit from the tooth fairy. If you don't believe it exists then there isn't anything threatening about it.

This is yet another example of how the aim of many (notice I didn't say all) homosexual activists is NOT for acceptance like lets-go-out-for-lunch-and-talk-about-gay-pride type, or even passive tolerance of the roll-your-eyes-but-ignore-it-and-get-on-with-your-life type, but is instead the browbeating YOU WILL ALLOW US TO DO WHAT WE WANT AND YOU WILL FULLY SUPPORT EVERYTHING WE SAY type.

So true that the crowd of tolerance and diversity is not so tolerant.

jason

Thanks to another slashdotter for the tip to the latest EjectEjectEject essay regarding common comments and their uncommon facts (overlooked most of the time). A long read but packed full of information and some point by point take downs. Don't read if you hate a certain President, because you may come away with facts and information which contradicts your world view. Oh know, you many learn something.

jason

EDIT: 2006-11-07-0915hrs MST - Submitted to Games section but rejected.

I recently visited a friends house with my laptop and a 72 disc CD case full of my entire PC gaming collection for the past 10 years, freshly consolidated from smaller cases. Of course, this case was left on the car roof while packing up for the return trip and promptly lost on the drive back. I lost every PC game I have owned in the past 10 years (except C&C Red Alert and Sim City 3K). Aside from being a great example of what not to do, this has erased my ability to revisit my past, as I frequently would re-install favorites and play through them, with friends where applicable. This led me to think of the memories I have now lost the ability to relive. What games would other readers loose if their tabletop sets, D&D manuals, console discs, etc were lost in a similarly brain dead event? Or even worse, what associated memories would dull with time? Should these memories even matter that much?

Do I now have a great excuse to visit the bargain bins and get new unscratched discs? Or have I just regained several house a week in possible productivity, sleep, or spousal relationship building? Is that such a bad thing?

I wish I were kidding about the title of this journal, but it is true. I went over to a friends house and took my mobile desktop replacement boat anchor of a laptop and a CD case freshly re-organized from the remains of other cases. Said CD case contained EVERY SINGLE GAME CD I own. Yes that means legit games. And thanks to copy protection on some, I will not be able to play the images I do have (I only have 1 or two images /copies any way).

When leaving said friends house the CD case and jacket were placed on the roof as I fiddled with keys while holding a laptop, some cookware, and some other misc stuff. The jacket made it back into the car, but alas.... the cd case was black and the car parked in a near black hole of illumination. So upon returning home I noticed its lack of being on the back seat of the car and promptly knew what had happened, as well as the outcome.

I suppose I would rather have lost the CD case than dropped the laptop. But what a costly mistake. I called said friend, who went on a walk through the streets all the way to a main road and did not see anything. I suspect that the case remained on the roof until after that point as there are no big dips / bumps and we were driving slow (having just carved a pumpkin and wanting to preserve the delicate sculpture). I even drove back across town and ran the street up and down a few times with a flashlight (now it is 3am) looking for the little black case. Since that part of town has pedestrian traffic, the case was probably scooped up by someone walking (or driving) and mistaken for a gold mine in audio CDs. I mean, only nerds have huge collections of PC games that needs 72 cd cases to transport. :-)

So every single game... ever. Wow. All the way back to the Silent Hunter and the Star Craft battle chest. Gone are Starsiege: Tribes, Tribes 2, Balder's Gate, Unreal, Unreal Tournament, MS Combat Flight Sim, Star Wars Rogue Squadron, Thief, Prince of Persia, Deus Ex, Deus Ex: Invisible War, MDK (man was that fun if not an insanely hard game), the 90's Axis & Allies, Rainbow Six, and many more.

The survivors include my console games for the Cube & SNES because they aren't as portable and weren't planed to be involved in the evening's festivities (thankfully because they represent the bulk of my recent gaming where as the PC has been almost entirely work related for the past year or so).

I even lost the burned CD with all my Tribes 1 files (loads of mods, script settings, EVERYTHING relating to that game and if you knew me you would know that was about 3 years of my gaming life and more of the rest of my life than is healthy). That CD case also held a few dozen discs for some Linux dists that I wanted to try on my wife's computer (Suse and Ubuntu being top competitors).

The survivors include the Red Alert collector set (won't work on any PC after WinME) and Sim City 3000 (was in the laptop case and not in the cd case).

So how much did I lose? What is my monetary loss. Hard to say. The retail replacement cost (if purchased when they came out) is above $800 easily.... but the current replacement cost might only be a few hundred. I think the real cost is in memories. Shut up I know that is cheesy. But I have few photo albums from college, partly due to a HD crash 2 years ago that deleted 3yrs of my lifes records. So I remember what happened by the game discs in my folders.

I remember playing Tribes with 4 friends using a converted / usurped computer lab's network (it is good to have friends that work for ITS). I remember playing Starcraft with a roommate and his brother on the other side of the state.

But then again..... I am married and forming a new life and honestly.... games sucked much of my productivity for several years which is why I lack a degree and have carpel tunnel symptoms.

So is it a bad thing? I don't know. I will miss the Empire Earth II CDs given to me by my brother in law. I didn't get past the Korean civilization and really wanted to progress further.

So what would you lose if all your games disappeared including computer, console, board games, table tops, RPG books, CCGs etc. Everything. Gone.

Got a link to this from my dad. Very well produced, shot, acted, edited, etc short film spoofing the old ad campaign. Well worth a few minutes.

jason

You should check out some of these. Of course these appear to be people willing to put 4 months worth of spare time into sewing / constructing a full costume. Unless you are the lady dressed up as mystique, then you put 4 months into going to the gym every day so you look smoking hot and then 1 day into a latex mold and body paint. I especially liked the Ring Raith and the 16th Centrury couple.

This entry swiped from another LJ.

Jason

(NOTE: Updated with more sarcasm 2006-11-03-1045hrs)
Today's doctor's visit cost $758. Another $173 for the Doctor's time, $457 for the future lab work (blood draw and lab tests), and $128 for the percutaneous poke test (of doom).

The preliminary results of the percutaneous poke test are only indicators of very bad allergies and not mild allergies. Mild allergies might not show up on the poke test, but would show up on either of the in depth test batteries (more on them later).

The poke test involves plastic fork looking devices. Think of a normal plastic fork, or spork if you will, but think of it as an evil spork and then think about it dipped in poison. Multi-colored poison (of doom). Each fork has 8 of what I like to call "annoying pokers" arranged in two long rows. Each poker is a ~2mm x 2mm extruded plastic piece (like a pencil) with 8 needle sharp plastic points arranged around the square end.

The tech / nurse takes each evil spork out of its sheath (skull & crossbones optional but advised for any evil medical apparatus) which has each annoying poker pre-soaked in different vile substances or allergens known to cause adverse reactions in upper twenties java programmers (mold, dust mites, cats, grasses, household chores, writing documentation, etc) and then the fork gets pressed against the skin. It doesn't really hurt. It just kind of pricks you. Then you wait.

Five minutes, nothing. But between 5-10 minutes my skin boiled up like massive mosquito bites under about 1/2 of the 16 pokers. Oh Fun. The nurse takes a plastic device that looks like a protractor and measures the diameter of each boil (itching relative to its size I assure you) and takes notes with remarks like "spot #B2 must itch like hell" and "spot #A2 - Ragweed? What is that? Some sort of plant or lettus thing? That reminds me, I wonder what's for dinner?" She checks (the spots not her dinner) again at 15 minutes and notes the spread of the killer lumps (of doom).

So that is a percutaneous poke test in a nutshell. By this afternoon the welts have pretty much disappeared, but little red poked parts are still visible.

According to the medical tech (nurse, LPN, torture artist, whatever they like to call themselves) I have allergies in the top 30% of worst cases she has seen. Joy. The dime sized welts developed over 15 minutes with the poke test say that I have very sensitive allergies to the following types of substances in decreasing order of sensitivity (but all are in the very sensitive category):

Johnson Grass
Grass Mix
Fall Pollen Mix
cats
ragweed
dust mites
oak pollen
cedar pollen
dogs
manual labor & cleaning toilets (ok, possibly not that. But my wife will roll her eyes when she reads that part and I love doing that to her :-P )

Blood for food allergy tests was also drawn using fancy vacuum sealed tubes. Just poke the skin with a needle, poke the other end of the needle through the rubber seal, and WOOOOSH out goes your blood. Modern technology. Hence the insanely expensive $457 lab fee. Speaking of blood draws, this was my first blood draw ever. Yeah, I'm a stingy 'ol cook when it comes to my precious bodily fluids. What can I say, I grow attached to those 'lil platelets and T-cells and just haven't wanted to give them up. Besides, I always guessed that my blood contains caffeine levels known by the state of California to be dangerous to young children, the elderly, and small animals (why would they need my blood any way).

After the lab fee, you sit with the RN-LPNN....N (whatever) to decide which treatment plan to go with and discuss environmental mediation steps (kill the cat, your neighbor's cats, stop huffing the front lawn, rip out the carpet, live in a plastic bubble, etc). Treatment supposedly actually treats the body's immune system problem for good.

Treatment is a 2-3 YEAR process where antigens are introduced along with the chemicals needed to stimulate the body's normal fighting mechanism. The doses increase until the body is fighting the antigens on its own, and then the treatments are maintained till being phased out. There are two treatment options and the desired option determines which in depth test is performed. After looking at the prices below, you may think as I have that I may be on to something with that free cat reduction policy.

Option #1 is a daily liquid drop. That associated test costs $200-300 and the drops cost about $80 / month. This test & treatment is usually NOT covered by insurance (according to the nurse) but cost less in the long run.

Option #2's test & associated treatment is a weekly shot ($35) taken from vials that are mixed to specific amounts determined by the body's reactions. These vials are mixed every 5-7 weeks and cost $135 to mix (in addition to the weekly $35 shot). The associated test for this treatment costs $800-$1,200 is is usually covered by insurance (though High Deductible Health Plans - HDHPs - do not usually cover anything until the deductible is met).

So when combined with last weeks $170 doctor visit plus $160 in prescriptions, I have racked up $1088 in bills and I have one more visit for sure (get the food allergy results back and go over environmental causes) in two weeks.

Looking at the two options, lets run the numbers. Option #1 might cost up to $2880 to treat and another $300 to test. Combined with the every 3 month checkup by the doctor (another $170 / visit) that hits $5220 over 3 fiscal years. With that cost and 3 years deductibles ($2K / yr) I will not likely hit any years deductible except this years (for the testing and office visit thus far).

Option #2, the shots, will cost $1200 to test and up to $6276 to treat totaling $8316 over 3 years with the same doctor visits thrown in. This touches 3 calendar years and may hit the deductible for each year.

Now factor in the $80 / month for a HDHP + HSA account totaling $2880 in premiums each month for three years. So my options are at a _minimum_ either (including current office visits) $6478 (drops) or $9574 (shots). This does assume that I stick with my current HDHP instead of switching to a lower deductible plan. I know one has a $1k deductible but costs $120 / month. But that plan covers a LOT more and may be worth it. Of course having just had a diagnosis for allergy problems, I would probably not be given as cheap a plan (being a higher risk with assured health claims against the plan).

Treatment is, of course, still optional. I can just work to eliminate the causes with environmental mediation and not go through either treatment. I can replace all the carpet in the house with good laminate floating floors in the high traffic areas and carpet in the bedrooms for less than the price of any treatment option. Then consider the $200 for a short stock .22 threaded barrel rifle (threaded for a suppresor for the Free Neighborhood Cat Reduction Plan) and another $200 for the Federal SOT license (for the silencer). Toss in a full coat of paint for the house and treatment still costs more. But then again, treatment is supposed to be just that.... treatment. Finished and complete, not just masking the symptoms. But the other plan gets me a kick ass gun with a Federal Class 3 license and a silencer. Hummmmm tough choice.

Given the choice, which would you choose? Bonus points if your choice can involve both treatment, the gun, AND some ice cream on Fridays.

For the past week, my group at work has been given the assignment to find a wiki for use as our project development / tracking platform. The following are requirements:

• Have some sort of Glossary
• Some means to store Use Cases, comments on use cases, etc
• Task tracking
• multiple projects
• charts of various sorts
• open issues / questions

I have found a few strong contenders, XWiki.org and TWiki.org. I currently am leaning towards one, but I won't say which. Does any one use a wiki or wiki-ish application for project development / customer interation / etc? If so what adn why does you use that specific wiki?

jason

In case you haven't heard any of the political mud being slung around, I bring you the following. This isn't political mud, but just plain funny Comedy Central-ish remarks. I suppose it could be photoshopped, hard to say. Brought to you by this guy.

http://i61.photobucket.com/albums/h53/frylock1976/irak.jpg

Just look at any news site to see the back story of this item.

A required reading regarding this topic does not come to you from any media outlet. Instead, read up on Red Warrior who looked at the government statistics and gives it to you straight. The gist of it is that the military forces, both enlisted and officers are _more_ educated than the average American. Soooooo yeah. That even counts for race, gender, etc so no trying to tilt stats by comparing disparate groups (like citizens over 44 compared to enlisted under 20, etc).

jason

Other slashdot'ers have been bitten by their journals affecting their personal or work lives. I haven't, but that isn't to say that it cannot happen. An extenuating circumstance for me is that my position at work provides access to potentially useful information. Useful for possibly the wrong people.

So I was wondering what the general feeling is about nuking journals? Doe you do it? Would you get pissed if someone did? Would you care if _I_ did? Should I care that you care? If everything I have journaled on /. just disappeared, would that be a bad thing? Can retaining too long of an online history be a dangerous liability? If not to me, then what about my wife or kids? Am I being paranoid? You get the picture.

Along that vein, are there any good scripts out there to harvest my online presence and preserve it personally, before a execute "The Great Nuke"?

Jason

Today and tomorrow will be the highest traffic load for the National Sex Offender Registry, and for each state's portal to that registry, though more than likely the state's will have greater traffic.

Currently we are sitting at 10 hits a second for ours. Top shows the CPU at .1 on not even remotely beefy server. Response time is .4sec. We could hit 100 hits a second and not rise above our 2 simultaneous DB connections.

The National SOR on the other hand recently complained about automated scripts bringing down their system. Why? Because they run windows and have a horribly coded app. We run a Java app on Tomcat on Suse with Oracle behind the scenes. In fact, we could hit 1000 hits a second with out changing our hardware! How? Because my group friggin rocks with well designed queries that don't beat the hell out of the DB and make wise use of each connection.

You may recall that the Nation DB was crawled by a hacker trying to find perps on the prowl again, with some success, but mostly with just interesting results. As a result they have a captcha solution installed to prevent automation and digging the results. Why?

If we had that large of a demand for more data, we would be happy! People should be using this data to look for 2/3 of registered sex offenders (the rest aren't even on the list because they fled / didn't register). It is hard enough for the few paid LEOs to track these perps, let alone the ones that are mean enough to not register.

We would publish a friggin API, and host that on another system / network so that if it went down, fine.... the web version would still be up. And even then, it would take a lot of hits to take down a properly designed API for this DB.

So back to the inevitable Trick-Or-Treating.... Anyone else shutting off the lights and hiding in the shrubs with a sprayer hose of cold water waiting to counter the pricks that want to dish out tricks instead of have fun? Or is that just me? Funny, I never wanted to go to complete strangers houses and willingly let them put me in a position of disadvantage by begging for whatever shit they wanted to give me, let alone the chances that the shit they did give me was doctored, altered, spiked, etc.

But then again, I grew up practically Jewish so the idea of celebrating / mimicking (basically a little bit of light worshipping) the devil and his minions and his influence sounds like a bad idea no matter how you dress it.

jason

I have been to the doctor's office only a few times in my life. Once yesterday, once earlier this year, and once back about 8 years ago, and then again some time when I was 14 (I think).

But this time was different. Why? Because I got to pay for it. You see, previously, I had insurance through either a government employer (like when I was a cop) or when my dad worked for a Big Company. This time it was just me... me and my extremely high deductible HSA plan, thanks to the IRS (PDF). Now I am not mad at the IRS, I am actually thanking them, I think.

Before having a state job I worked as a contractor for several years, and that means benefits like health care are FRIGGIN expensive, but they (meaning the contracting company) can shaft you because you can be fired at any time and they have no incentive to actually invest in you as an employee. So they charge $180 / month for a high deductible plan that covers hardly anything. And don't even think about getting their plans with a family ($300-500/month).

So back then, and being a single and fit guy, I did the sensible thing, I bought a HDHP, a high deductible health plan with a $2K deductible PPO for $110 / month with barely anything covered, just in case. It turns out that these plans don't even cover accidents (broken legs, etc). They only cover health related issues (cancer, asthma, or other diseases). And nothing preventative is even mentioned as possibly covered (until you meet your $2K deductible).

Back to the recent experience. ~2 months ago I got married, and we were both self employed (aka self-UNEMPLOYED). Getting your own health care is more expensive than buying the engagement ring (not that I have anything against rings). The only tangible benefit is the $75 / month premium.

Think that is low? It is. But consider that to step up to a non-HSA account with decent coverage ($1K deduct) might cost a perfectly healthy male age 28-30 about $130 / month. The difference over a year in premiums alone between the HSA account (900) and normal plan (1560) is $660, meaning that to switch to a higher plan will cost almost as much as another health plan coverage. And that is just in premium.

So here is where the HSA comes in handy. If you expect that you might spend about $1000 / yr in qualified expenses (glasses, dentist visits, etc) then you get the HDHP and put that $1000 into a HSA account, TAX FREE. So at the end of the year you fill out IRS form 8889 which is where you tell them how much you put into that HSA then that much is subtracted from taxable income. Not bad.

Except you still have to friggin HAVE the money in order to put it aside in the first place.

Enough rambling about the IRS code. I have allergies. Bad ones in fact. My recent move into a house with my wife confirmed it because my eyes swelled up for weeks. Yes weeks. Off an on they would get better then worse. This weekend, while away from home for 3 days, my eyes got better significantly. So it is official.... something in my house is trying to kill me.

I got an appointment with an allergist and she said "yep.... you got some bad infections in your eyes because the allergic reaction ran unchecked." Bummer. It could be dust mites, pet dander, or may be something else. My wife and I eliminated all smelly things that she wears, literally. They are all out in the garage in a bag. Once my allergy testing happens next week we may know if one of them was the culprit.

So here is where the rambling about HSAs and allergies intersect. The Dr office visit is not covered (naturally) with any co-pay so I get to pay the full amount ($170 cah-ching!). Then the 3 meds I am on cost $160 (cha-ching-ing-ing) and I go back next week for an actual allergy test (any time lab work is involved I assume the price will hit ~$200).

This isn't soo much of a post where I am soliciting input as it is a post where I am complaining about lacking money. :-) Kidding aside, has anyone else had some bad allergy problems and gone through the allergist testing stuff? What can I expect?

jason

I happened to notice a new process running on my system when I recently inspected the task manager (WinXP SP2). I generally subscribe to the "kill em all" theory when it comes to loads of idle processes running on my system. So I did a quick little search for the bugger. Google turns up a few hits. Symantec even is supposed to have the removal tool.

This seems to be relatively new and my Avast did not catch it (or it did and my wife was using the system at the time and ignored it). I immediately stopped the process (naturally) and fired up Avast and Ad-Aware.... oops... can't find Ad-Aware. Re-download newer version and it uninstalls the previous version for me.

So no both of these packages are banging the heck out of my hard drive with full searches underway. So what do I do in the mean time? I run Zone alarm in the most paranoid configuration possible in parallel with Avast. How did this get in? Most of my downloads recently have been OSS / SourceForge related (WinCVS, CVSNT, Tortoise CVS, TortoiseSVN, SVN, Subcommander). I know I haven't visited any questionable sites, but it is still there.

So my question to the /. public is.... do you have it? Is it bad? Did I screw up somewhere? Did some of the above software packages get infected?

jason

Ok, so the title is misleading. Apparently there are many people nation wide with my first / last name that are registered sex offenders. This odd train of thought has been brought to you by the Slashdot front page article regarding a hacker that wrote a 1,000 line Perl script to sift through MySpace harvest user information, and cross reference that information with info from the National Sex offender registry. In fact, I'll just copy / paste the Slashdot front page article because it covers the info pretty well.

"Wired News editor and former hacker Kevin Poulsen wrote a 1,000-line Perl script that checked MySpace for registered sex offenders. Sifting through the results, he manually confirmed over 700 offenders, including a serial child molester in New York actively trying to hook up with underage boys on the site, and who has now been arrested as a result. MySpace told Congress last June that it didn't have this capability." Wired News says they will publish Poulsen's code under an open-source license later this week.

Now this gets my newly trained programmer mind to working..... how hard would it be to harvest the registered sex offender information like the author of the article and then write a Google Maps API to lay their locations over the google map? The Google Maps API specifically lists that There are some uses of the API that we just don't want to see. For instance... the API should not be used to identify private information about private individuals. Now this information is not in fact private, but is published by state law (and here for juveniles.) So how would this publicly published information be viewed by google?

Apparently this information is already available on a for-pay basis via the National Alert Registry. But what about a dynamic registry overlay for google maps that is available to the public for free? This information already does not violate any laws, seeing as its availability has been mandated by laws, so the only possible point of concern would be the google Terms of Service to their API.

In any case, it would be an interesting experiment. I have the java experience now, but that may not be the best code base for this sort of a project. Perl or PHP might be better, especially given that my company's hosting plan has easier access to mod_perl than for java byte code. Any way.... this might just be a pipe dream, but it would be a heck of a fancy tool to have available.

Just imagine.... you type in your address to my page and it displays Google's map with dots for each registered offender. You mouse over a random one near you and a pop up bubble displays a picture of one Don Carlos Anderson a violent registered sex offender convicted in Los Angeles County CA on 3 separate occasions of 4 sexual crimes (Rape by force or fear, oral copulation, sodomy in local det facility, rape in concert w/force). Clicking on the link would lead you to the pertinent state's sex offender registry page for that individual, complete with a warning to the effect of "don't use this info to commit a crime because that too is a crime."

Or even better, a LEO/P&P (Law Enforcement Officer / Probation & Parole officer) can enter a zip code in the search and up comes a nice google map with little dots for all the registered sex offenders. The dots can be yellow for single offense non-violent, orange for non-violent multiple offense, and red for single or multiple violent offenses. Now they probably already have that information, but this can be a handy tool for officers working sting operations or planing stakeouts. New registrations can be highlighted or flagged as updated and old registrations can be flagged as possibly delinquent (I think most state laws, if not the federal law, mandates a yearly renewal) for follow up. It is a big deal for a registered offender to be delinquent in their registration (or at least it should be if it isn't).

I may be in a unique position because I was a cop and am now part of the team the wrote our state's sex offender registry software, but I can't be the only person interested in this sort of a program, right?

jason