03.18.07
Posted in personal at 12:35 am by danvk
File under “feeling old”… I got a copy of TurboTax today and started filling out form after form after form. Some thoughts:
- The Instant Data Entry feature is cool. You fill out your employer and total wages, and TT downloads the rest of the information from its database. Google participated in this, but Rice did not.
- TT asked me if I qualified for the “Ottoman Turkish Empire settlements” deduction. Ottoman empire? How many people could qualify for this? Some sleuthing turned up the story.
I kept thinking about what a nightmare this software must be to write. Nothing about taxes generalizes cleanly. It must be a tangled mess of “if A and B then go to C”. It’s the epitome of wizard-style programming.
It reminds me of a cool Atari ROM visualization I saw a few months back. It shows the control flow in the code of various Atari games. The line that stood out to me at the time was “Pac-Man, most complicated of the bunch, what with all the AI for the ghosts.” No doubt true, but what struck me was that AI is used as a synonym for “if statement”.
So not only does TT need to have an if statement for Armenian descendants of Ottoman citizens who were insured by New York Life, it needs to have equally complicated logic for all fifty states and probably even some cities.
In short, I’m glad I work for Google and not Intuit.
Permalink
03.14.07
Posted in news, web at 12:04 am by danvk
Mad props to The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer for creating an online video archive. The archive contains most segments from February 2000 onwards. This includes some rather momentous events, like the September 11, 2001 broadcast. I was in French class when the planes hit the World Trade Center towers. A messenger came and told the teacher, but she decided the events weren’t significant enough to stop French class, or even to tell us what had happened! Ever since, I’ve wanted to watch the Today Show broadcast from that morning, to see the reactions right when it happened. NBC hasn’t opened their archives, but this is a step in the right direction.
The site has its problems. The streaming is a bit slow, and is only available in Real or Windows Media Player format. The “keyword search” is terrible. I suspect this will become yet another case where people will use Google in place of a site’s own search engine. It’s possible to view all the broadcasts for a specific date, but you’ll have to hack URLs to get at it. That September 11 URL I linked to above is
http://vvi.onstreammedia.com/cgi-bin/visearch?user=pbs-newshour
&template=template.html&squery=%2BVideoAsset:pbsnh091101
Just change the 091101 at the end to whatever date you like to view that day’s broadcasts. This is a pretty basic feature for a newscast video archive. It should have an interface. And the “Close Caption Transcript” popup reaches hitherto unexplored niches of Web UI weirdness.
The NewHour video archive is a wonderful resource. It has its UI problems. Its search is terrible. I wish it went back to 1975, when the NewsHour started. But this is a great start, and I’m sure more is yet to come. I hope other news shows take a cue from PBS and the NewsHour.
Permalink
03.12.07
Posted in music, reviews at 1:29 am by danvk
I recently noticed that a friend was intrigued by Hip Hop Is Dead, so I figured I should write a little about it. As the two readers of this blog know, I’m a big fan of Nas, or at least of Illmatic. And that’s a distinction that no small number of people make. Nas’s predicament reminds me a bit of Bob Dylan’s. No new album of Dylan’s will ever be called “his best ever”. It would be absurd. The highest praise his new albums can be given is “the best since Blood on the Tracks“. High praise, but I imagine that kind of prior success would weigh heavy on an artist. That being said, this is his best album since Illmatic.
Read the rest of this entry »
Permalink
02.27.07
Posted in wikipedia at 11:26 pm by danvk
Unbeknownst to most of its readers, Wikipedia has its own weekly newspaper, the Wikipedia Signpost. It covers stories in the press about Wikipedia, internal controversies, and technical changes to Wikipedia.
The Signpost was sorely lacking an RSS feed, so I’ve put one together at http://feeds.feedburner.com/WikipediaSignpost. The feed should get updated weekly with the Signpost, with only an hour or two delay from publication.
I set this up as a simple Ruby script, but in retrospect, had I been more ambitious, I would have used Plagger or Dapper.
Permalink
02.23.07
Posted in books, music, personal at 12:11 am by danvk
The Freshest Kids: A History of the B-Boy
Fun history of hip-hop and breakdancing in particular.
Modern C++ Design, by Andrei Alexandrescu
If ever you thought you understood C++…
Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, by Haruki Murakami
A much easier, faster read than The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, but I prefer my darkness alone in the bottom of a well rather than in a subterranean cavern with a plump 18 year-old who may or may not be a sex interest.
King: Man of Peace in a Time of War
A look at Martin Luther King’s principle of nonviolence in the context of the Vietnam War. The extended clip of King on the Michael Douglas show was fascinating. In the future, we’ll be seeing more and more legendary figures in down-to-earth contexts like this.
Malcolm X, Directed by Spike Lee
Malcolm X’s life forms a fascinating counterpoint to Dr. King’s, and this is one hell of a movie.
Permalink
« Previous Page — « Previous entries
Next entries » — Next Page »
