Today I received a seemingly innocuous email from a complete stranger, regarding PHP. That did not strike me as odd at all because I am somewhat of an expert on the subject.

The message was a typical plea for help and it started off claiming to have seen me posting on the newsgroups and forums, which was possible but unlikely, as I haven't posted on the PHP newsgroup in months, so I was immediately suspicious of the email.

The sender claimed they had a couple questions and then asked me to answer them for them and that they would like to hire me to do more consulting if they liked my response.

I responded as I always do to such requests, with a link to rentacoder.com and I asked the sender to let me know what their username was so that we could begin a business relationship together. I figure that if I am going to be spending any time helping a stranger, I might as well get paid for it, or I will be the one choosing who and when to help!

The person or bot on the other end of the discussion responded with a strange comment that seemed unrelated. I quickly fired back that they need to do what was asked before I answered any of their questions and that I would not discuss business over email because it has proven to be less than fruitful (and it really has).

The person quickly fired back an angry response so I told them to piss off and that I knew their trick was to get free writing samples from me.

Amateurs!!! :-) I get paid if I have to write anything (except this journal)!!!

So beware of this trick and don't fall for it. If you don't know them, give them a challenge question.

FINISHED! WOOOO HOO!!!!! ;-)

NOTE: I don't normally support the use of all caps, unless it's in response to someone finishing all their holiday shopping.

According to Orgismo.com, JR East Japan will generate electricity in stations from people walking through ticket gates by installing piezo elements in the floors. They are currently testing the system in the offices in Shibuya Station. If successful, this seems to have the potential to generate quite a bit of electricity; perhaps nowhere near enough to run the trains, but enough to run the ticket machines, ticket gates, networking, and perhaps even the lights in JR stations.

According to Wikipedia, about 3.4 million people pass through Shinjuku Station everyday. That is only one stop on the very busy Yamanote Line, which also has Shibuya Station (2.4 million passengers per day), Tokyo Station, and several other busy stations. Over 12 million people live in the 23 wards of Tokyo, and over 30 million people live in the greater Tokyo area, the majority of whom commute into and out of Tokyo by train.

By installing these in the ticket gates, there is the potential to generate a lot of power from relatively few generators, and it doesn't just have to be at train stations. Anywhere a large number of people is funneled through a small space will do nicely: ticket queues and gates at stadiums, amusement parks, airports, etc.

Of course, one thing that I am curious about is the durability of these generators. For example, JR Shibuya Station has somewhere in the neigborhood of 30 ticket gates spread over 4 exits. 2.4 million people walking through 30 gates everyday probably means a lot of wear and tear. How long do these generators last? How much to they cost to maintain?

Still, it seems like a brilliant way to generate an alternative source of electricity and perhaps take a large part of the load off of main power.

(from the inside) RAC caught some bastard trying to buy an IMSI Catcher. How stupid could you be advertising you need something like that? Jeez I thought this idiot was stupid.

Can I just say... it's about time! Oh it's sooooo nice!!!

AJAX and CSS perform wonderfully. There are still lots of little bugs but I think when they are ironed out it will be a pretty amazing experience. I'm quite pleased that Slashdot is evolving and you can really get a sense of how it will be so much better in the future.

Sometimes it sucks, sometimes it's for the best. Not really sure but it's happening now. *sigh*

(any cute nerdy chicks in my fanlist? send pix hehe j/k)

New dupe notice:

I am afraid to comment on this duped Slashdot story due to Hindsight Bias.[1][2][3] (where each number is linked to the dupes available)

The new article stubs on the front page really work for me, but I'd like to see each new story remain a stub until enough 5-Insightful/Interesting/Informative comments become visible. In other words; everything starts sectional and earns the right to be on the front page based on quality -- not quantity (as others have suggested).

We should also have a new mod category: "Flag".

The Flag mod will indicate that an admin should read the comment because it's important. Typos, spelling, dupe notices etc can all fall under this category, and editors could re-thread the site to see these types of comments first. Reward moderators who correctly flag comments as a system notice with extra mod points. Keep the Flag comments collapsed for regular users, so the meat and potatoes comments all frequent higher.

Working on some new projects... a set of sales tools that might be picked up by a big corporation. Very cool stuff, yet no linkage yet. Does anyone know anything about interpersonal sales tools for retail? I've been studying up on it for this project, which I am in charge of, and it's fascinating me. PK is getting pretty damn spiffy when a n00b can go from being hired to appearing like an expert almost immediately... although there is a level of intelligence for using this kind of tool. Just working out UI issues now, and coming up with ideas.

From the customer perspective, what would you want to be able to do with a salesperson say for COMPUTER SALES, in order to make your sales experience better?

Anyway, hope all is well with you guys and let me know what's going on in your lives! ;-)

I had a little thread going about NLP. Last entry is here. Any additional comments anyone has are welcomed.

There is nothing much going on. Okay, there is lots going on right now in my private life, but I'm not sure I want to share it just yet. Maybe closer to New Years...

How are my friends on Slashdot? Any complaints?

Looks like I can comment again... but I posted something that might be considered funny, so you know I'll be banned again in short stead...

Truth be told, I wasn't sure I was allowed to post yet, so I simply hit submit, expecting the confounded comment-banned IP/Subdomain notice... but it went.

This is a letter I'm sending to the authors of the
relevant software:

Dear Devs,

No doubt you've heard of the controversial "rootkit" bundled with
many of Sony's CDs to prevent unauthorized copying. By now I hope
you've been informed that this rootkit contains and uses code from
your Free Software projects. (LAME, id3lib, mpglib, bladenc: see
http://hack.fi/~muzzy/sony-drm/) I write as a concerned member of
the digital community in hopes that you will seek punative damages
against Sony, to ensure that this never happens again.

Statutory damages for copyright infringements go as high as
$150,000 per copy. Given that there are at least 20 cds, selling
hundreds of thousands if not millions of units even a modest
settlement quickly adds up to the largest copyright infringement
lawsuit ever. You all stand to earn tremendous judgements; think
of all the Free Software you could write when independantly
wealthy. But more importantly, this is a chance for the common
person to fight back.

I would urge you not to settle however. For far too long,
mega-corporations have been allowed to buy and sell the law, run
amok, and generally ruin the lives of common people. Until now,
even the largest class action lawsuit could be written off as a
cost of doing business. If we are ever to correct bad behavior
we MUST apply real punishment. A judgement that bankrupted Sony
would be a wakeup call to every corporation in the world, and
I urge you to persue this for the sake of social justice
everywhere.

It's pretty ironic that Sony violated copyright in software
designed to prevent copyright infringement. I like irony, and I'd
also like to see the irony of the media industry being bit by the
very teeth they lobbied into the law in the first place. Thanks
for reading this, and good luck.

Whew, long topic on ID. While reading through it, I was reminded of a passage from an ecology book I once read. I paraphrased it from memory, I hope its relevance to ID is obvious:

Let me tell you a little story about long shots and averages and how not understanding the two lead to an incorrect hypothesis. Some time ago ecologists were interested with the rate that trees would repopulate a volcano after an eruption. They observed the trees, and figured out the average distance that a seed would fall from the tree, and from that they calculated an expected movement of the treeline.

However this was wrong, the trees repopulated much more quickly than expected. While the ecologists had figured out the averages correctly, they failed to realize that a small proportion of seeds would be carried much further than the average. The seeds that came from these trees would have a head start and some small portion of the next generation would be carried even further.

Do you see what I'm getting at here? Are you sure that in your calculations of expected rate of evolutionary change you're not making the same mistake these ecologists did?

My roommate and I have started a podcast called "GeekNights with Rym + Scott". He's Rym and I'm Scott. It's sort of a late night talk show for geeks. We cover all sorts of topics including, but not exclusively: anime, video games, technology, gaming, science and just about anything else geeks like us are interested in.

You can check us out at http://www.frontrowcrew.com/.
And you can subscribe to our podcast RSS feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/GeekNights.

We put out new episodes 4 nights a week, Monday through Thursday. I hope you try it out and possibly even enjoy it. We're still in the early stages and can use a little help, so any feedback at all will help us immensely.

Slashdot's automated comment/karma banning is stupid. My karma is EXCELLENT, but yet I can't comment because of, surprise surprise, my latest comment ban.

I'm sick of this shit. They should shut it off for users with Excellent karma. How many lines of code would that be??? Like ONE???

PUDGE!!!!