Author: davidg

The tension between help and usefulness (Apple Watch)

I have an Apple Watch, and it offers to help me to do things for better health. Wow is this thing being annoying – but I really like the idea of it’s help.

This last two weeks, I’ve been programming at work. I’m not a great programmer, and sometimes have to ponder stuff to figure out what I’m going to do next.

Just about the time (every time) I’m getting “in the zone” (so-to-speak), my Apple Watch pings at me, that it’s time to stand up and walk around. And drop out of “the zone”.

It’s a little weird, often when is pings at me, my physiological condition is that I’m a little light-headed. I don’t know if the Apple Watch actually has a monitor that can tell that. My suspicion is that there is just a timer going, and someone dreamt up the idea that the watch should insert itself into my consciousness once in a while, so I think of the box and recognize it’s value.

Problem is, it inserts itself into my consciousness as inopportune times (almost always), and I immediately react with “Fucking Apple Watch!”

Yet, I go talk a short walk, because I think the underlying idea is a good one.

I think it’s being helpful; but by interrupting my thinking time, it becomes anti-useful.

Google's business, and how it makes me not want their products

So, I bought a new television, and it has a YouTube app built in. But being an app, it doesn’t have the same sort of metadata / overhead that my web browser on my PC has. All the overhead your web browser has, does of course make your browsing session completely identifiable. Even me, with my privacy protection browser plugins, and cookie cleaners, and ad-blocking plugins knows to assume that I’m completely identifiable.

Back in the day, Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems said “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.” People weren’t happy with this attitude, but, it’s an honest assessment of the state of the Internet.

95% (or more) of Google’s revenue is from their customers who pay for a chance to sell you something you don’t need. The chance of the sale increases if the pitch is targeted to you. The amount of sales for Google increases if they have more customers. So the more Google mines your personal data, the more possibilities they have that a nugget will match that potential customer.

It’s really just the old saying, “if you aren’t paying for the service, you are the product, and someone else is the customer”.

Now I have this device that connects to YouTube, and Google has never seen this device before. It has no history, it’s cookie is freshly baked but as bland as possible. Google has zero information about this new ad target. For one brief shining moment, the amount of leverage Google had on this target was super low. All they could really tell was which ISP it came from, and the whatever machine model information was sent in the HTTP User Agent field.

Apparently, YouTube / Google thinks Saturday Night Live is something a generic someone would want to watch. Personally, I don’t think SNL has been funny for a decade or two; but I was spoiled by the 1970’s SNL.

Of course, there were sports. And the Daily Awww (which is probably a good choice). And even some movie trailers (I think).

However, I was watching a YouTube video on my PC, and at the end of the day, I wanted to finish it on the TV. So I searched for the author’s name, to find all the videos about. Yes, I finished the video.

OH. MY. FREAKING. GOD.

Now, Google YouTube cannot find anything not related to this author. It is as if my entire world must be completely obsessed with this author; because, hey, a lot of people are talking about (*), and that’s all they know.

I seriously don’t want to use YouTube on the TV any more, because this tracking / focus on leveraging what they do know is extreme. It is ridiculous.

Anyway, if your business behavior makes people uncomfortable, you might want to examine if you are doing business right.

Favorite podcasts

Podcasting is the “new thing” these last two years (although it’s been around for a decade, recently it became popular).

There are more. 😉

But, these are the one’s I’m going to listen too first, if I have enough time in the week to do so.

Stock market ideas: Surveillance technology

An idea I like, is the personal body cams that law enforcement is adopting. I have some personal friends in law enforcement who have expressed dislike of them, as liability engines. But a link to a video that one of them provided showed me, non- law enforcement, that officers put up with an amazing amount of abuse, and still can be polite, restrained, professional, and tolerant. So I think it’s a win-win: the officer can prove honest behavior, and, the member of the public knows that their bad behavior is on the record.

So one of the companies I like is the former Taser, now known as AXON Enterprise – stock ticker AAXN.

I don’t yet own this stock. It’s currently at $43, although two weeks ago it was down to $40.

But I do think they are in a growth market. Many (if not 99%) of law enforcement agencies already have a relationship with AXON / Taser, with the pistols that apply non-lethal force. Although bigger law enforcement agencies have already bought body cams, I don’t think that penetration within the smaller markets is anywhere near complete. I think that 65% of of law enforcement is still in the adoption phase.

I previously had done well with Ambarella – stock ticker AMBA – getting in around $30 and selling at $70. Ambarella was more of a technology play, being a company that makes CCD sensors for GoPro cameras, and other cameras. My point is that there can be growth stocks in these areas. I don’t think AXON is going to sell as many body cams as GoPro sold their cameras; but, they will probably a decent percentage of them, still.

Semiconductor technology

I have four stocks in this category; three I’m pretty happy with, one is a “meh”.

Intel is my current favorite, ticker symbol INTC. One of the pieces of advice I had gotten was “find the clear leader in an industry, buy that, and hold on”. Intel seems to me, to clearly be the leader in semiconductor fabrication technology. I bought it at $24 per share, and it is currently at $47.

I do like that Intel pays a dividend.

Another thing that I liked about Intel is that they had a partnership with Micron, on a type of memory they named “Optane”. I know that everything in computer technology is about the pipeline of storage into the registers of the CPU. If we could make the CPU have enough storage, and, we wouldn’t need external storage, and everything would be going at the full speed of the CPU.

But that isn’t physically possible, if only because once in a while, the power goes out. CPUs use Dynamic RAM (it is the registers the CPU manipulates, and on-board memory called L1 cache). Dynamic RAM is dynamically refreshed with electrical power. When the power drains out, so does the data. Some sort of storage is needed, that doesn’t lose it’s data when the power is off. Since the 1950’s, the “storage” has been external to the CPU, and is orders of magnitude slower than the CPU itself.

I think the Optane idea could (potentially) flip computing on it’s head: the memory becomes so fast, that the pipeline of storage into the registers (and back), can be made direct. Or put another way, the CPU could run at the speed of memory – which is the storage. What if the external storage was the same speed (not orders of magnitude slower) as the CPU? What if the RAM was the disk? What if every register retrieve and store were permanent?*

Now really, even Optane memory does not run at the 2.x or 3.5 GHz of a CPU. Most Dynamic RAM access is in the 1.2 GHz range. So most modern computers spend a lot of hardware design on fetching data from the comparatively slow RAM, keeping as much of it on the CPU chip as possible, and then dealing with cache misses, and branch prediction misses, and all sorts of work to keep things in sync when the whole scheme isn’t perfect.

But what if 1.2 GHz was fast enough? Could it be fast enough, if there was no difference between RAM and storage? If the RAM addresses were the storage addresses?

Optane memory is essentially the next wave of solid state disk; and has capacities of same. How does the game change, when your 2 Terabyte Optane storage means that really, you have 2 TB of RAM? In six years, it will be 16 TB of RAM; eight years = 32 TB, ten years = 64 (if not 128) TB of RAM.

I expect that ten years from now, the Optane memory will have CPU electronics on the Optane chips, and the computing will be done on the memory chips. It’s a lot of work to ship bits off chip to a CPU, have the CPU alter them, and then ship those bits back, across the backplane, to end up back on the storage chips. It’s time consuming, too.

This is what I mean by turning computing on it’s head.

Anyway, it’s probably obvious that I’m a fan, so I like both Intel and Micron Technology – ticker symbol MU. I bought MU at about the same price as it is today. However, six months ago, it was double what it is today. I should have sold 1/2 my position then, and made a note somewhere that what was left is now free money.

*Not “forever” permanent, but from the point of view that “if the power goes out, we don’t care, because the data has already been written to storage”.

Cancer immunotherapy / Biotechnology

I currently have two stocks in these categories; one is doing well, and the other, very poorly.

The poor one is Advaxis ticker symbol ADXS. I bought ADXS at $4.82, and today it is at $0.22. That’s right: I’ve lost 95%.

Sigh.

So, having lost so much, is there really much of a reason to liquidate at such a loss? The original idea was that Advaxis had, through research, found some evidence they could use the immune system to fight certain cancers. I don’t think the company is just going to give up. Immunotherapy is working for other cancers. But the problem is that the company could run out of cash before they have a product they can market. But if they keep plugging away, they might finally be able to publish that breakthrough. And then, they should be able to get a good price for their technology.

My other stock is CRISPR Therapeutics AG – ticker symbol CRSP. I bought CRISPR Therapeutics at $20 per share, and today it is at $31.

At one point, six months ago, it was at $70 per share. I should have sold 30% of my shares, and been on a free ride since then. 😉

But really, I still think the technology is good. So I’m not going to lament not-having-cashed-in. Long term, I think I’ll be happy that I still have all my shares.

One of the things though, with this blog, is that if I do get to point of cashing out the purchase price of a stock, I can record that here. In the past, I had cashed out the purchase price of a stock, but then later sold everything when it continued to drop (in the short term). I couldn’t tell, from the view of my holdings that my stock broker gives me, that I was already riding on free money. So I sold. And then the price jumped way up, more than 8x what I bought in for.

Stock market investing ideas

I figure that since this is a place I can record longer term ideas, and, that ideas I have regarding stock market investing don’t really have a good home, I can put them here.

Now really, I’m a fan of putting my notes about data near the data. So what I would really like, is inside my stock market portfolio management web page, that the vendor provide me with a small text field that I can update with a short note. But I don’t have that, so elsewhere, the information will have to reside.

On to the ideas:

  • 5G cellular towers
  • Neodymium miners (or processors)
  • Cancer immunotherapy / Biotechnology
  • Semiconductor technology
  • Surveillance technology

5G cellular

I think this technology has a huge growth potential. One of the trade-offs though, is that higher frequencies are required for higher bandwidth. Higher frequencies emit more power; but, electromagnetic power drops off with the cube of the distance (I think – it could be that the power drops off with the square of the distance). The upshot is that if the two antennas (sender and receiver) are going to be heard at the higher frequencies, they will need to be located closer together in physical space. So today, “good coverage” has one tower around three miles from the next tower (4G cellular).

With 5G cellular, the distance between towers will be 250 meters / 820 feet / .15 miles. The growth in towers (“base stations”) is going to go exponential (at least during the startup phase).

Perhaps it would be smarter to buy stock in the companies that make the transceivers (chips or whole power+chips+antenna). Problem is, I don’t know who these companies are.

But I like the idea of rent; that American Tower can make the initial investments, and the recoup their cost over the next nnn years. When I first heard of AMT, it was around $140 per share; today it’s at $168.

Ticketmaster is a bane to artists

Three of my friends and I wanted to go to a concert in March of 2019.  Several of the artists are favorites.  The least expensive seats were $31 per seat.

Ticketmaster wants a $30 surcharge, plus two other surcharges, for a total of $36 in surcharges.

For some strange reason, the four of us are not going to the concert.

But we customers don’t really have the power here; it’s the artists who need to boycott the locations that have onerous contracts with Ticketmaster.

Bitnami WordPress automatic start of services

First off, KVM and QEMU are wonders of technology, and I’m thankful for those projects and their magic.

Background is that I made a default install of OpenSUSE 42.3.  I also tried OpenSUSE 15 (which is newer than 42.3, but whatever).

OpenSUSE 15 really did not like the Bitnami invocation of MySQL; but, it could be that I tried the initial install as a LAMP server, running at level 3.  With OpenSUSE 42.3, I tried an initial install as a KDE Desktop running at level 5, plus the LAMP server pattern.  That had worked in the past, so I wasn’t going to fight “well, at least this works”.

I did get the Bitnami stack installed and running.  I even got the default URL changed from “/wordpress/” to just “/”

Next step to accomplish, so I have a nice snapshot to revert to, is for the Bitnami stack to automatically start.  For whatever reason, searching for this information never easily comes up with results.  So I’m writing it down here.

cp installdir/ctlscript.sh /etc/init.d/bitnami-APPNAME

Edit the file /etc/init.d/bitnami-whatever-you-named-it

Add this near the top:

#
# chkconfig: 2345 80 30
# description: Bitnami services

And run this:

chkconfig --add bitnami-whatever-you-named-it

Test with an init 6, and if you can get to your web site without having to start MySQL and Apache with the ctlscript.sh, then you’re good.

Take that snapshot!

How long does a web site last?

I participated in an early social network of sorts, Slashdot.org, way back when.  I think I signed up in about 2002.  A bunch of people on there became friends.  Some of us have even met IRL (In Real Life).  One of those people went by the handle “kitten”, although I never met him IRL.

Kitten died in early 2010.

But, he had a website of his own, and I liked it primarily because of it’s domain name.  A favorite band of mine had a song named mirrorshades. That kitten had the domain name mirroshades.org piqued my interest.  I wonder if he was a fan of the same band?

There wasn’t much there on the web site, but still, it was cool that someone I interacted with had his own web site.  This wasn’t just a MySpace page, this was a full blown register-a-domain-name, get-a-server, set-up-apache, write-HTML web site of his own.  Looks like the first capture of it by the Internet Wayback machine was 2007.  For whatever reason, whois is coming up empty on the domain registration record.

2007 isn’t terribly early for real, personal, web sites.  Many people tried it with running a machine in their own home, and using a Dynamic DNS service, so that even if their ISP changes their IP address, the domain name still resolves back to that web server running in the basement.  The other way to go, was that hosting services were coming on the scene around that period of time.  Perhaps kitten bought and paid for a Rackspace plan?

What happens when the web site owner dies?

Yes, it’s a little morbid.  But we are all going to die someday.  Pretending it won’t happen in willful ignorance.

Back to the point: if it’s a web server in a basement, someone is going to power it off, at some time.  Right?  Or a power outage happens (yes, there are ways around this).  Maybe mom and dad got it, and it’s still going.  But even then, they are going to die.

Kitten knew he was dying – perhaps he asked a friend to keep it running for him?  Just how long does dedication to a dead friend last?  People change, and move on in their life.  That can be a crucially good thing; so at what point does keeping this web site (that does nothing, really) still make sense?

Or, perhaps, a cloud provider was paid to keep it running?  Every minute of every day, the expiration of the contract looms ever closer.  Either way, the DNS registration eventually runs out.*

Anyway, I’ve had a tab in my list of pages I visit every day: http://mirrorshades.org/wc/index.shtml

Sunday, November 4, I got 404 Not Found

For what it is worth, since shortly after February 14, 2010, the page looked like this (kitten’s obituary announcement): https://web.archive.org/web/20170318170358/http://mirrorshades.org/wc/index.shtml

For eight years and ten months, that web server has been serving up that page.  The image at the top would rotate out per visit.  The one of the young woman, bare shouldered, was quite cool.

And this could be a temporary glitch.  Tomorrow, I might open that page, and it will resolve again.  If so, I’ll update this post.

*Domain not found is a different error than The requested URL /wc/index.shtml was not found on this server.