Crickets Chirping

My evil twin Craig recently interviewed Chet Clem, Editorial Manager for The Onion and one of the authors of Our Dumb World: Atlas Of The Planet Earth.

Q: Does Mauritania seriously still have slaves? How did the research on this get done? Bonus: Name one thing on Earth that’s more disturbing. Just one.

A: 98% of jokes in this atlas started out as fact. We went out to make fun of the entire earth, but along the way came across horrible, disturbing things that we tried to shine a light on through humor.

One more horrifying thing: that there’s a rap song out in the U.S. right now about catching your man cheating called “lemme smell yo dick,” and there are probably more people in America aware of that song than are aware of the nation of Mauritania, much less what goes on there.

That keeps me awake at night, its a really catchy tune.

For your enjoyment, here is the aforementioned ballad (it’s really not that catchy if you ask me):

Oh and apparently it’s also true that Slavery still exists in Mauritania.

I’m working on a personal project that requires me to take random samples from arrays in JavaScript. I’ll write about the bigger project in detail later, but for now here’s a piece that may be of use all by itself.

Context:

If you were to randomly increment integers in a JavaScript Array using plain ol’ Math.random() you might end up with something like this (blue=10000, green=1000, red=100 samples, respectively):

But what if you want to sample from a Normal distribution?

Then you might want to use some code I wrote.

Enjoy, send me bug reports, do whatever.

From the de Young museum in Golden Gate Park:

I can’t figure out how this emergency exit is supposed to open. There’s no handle, no button, no sign indicating what the user should do in order to open this exit. The minimalistic design has left no affordance for opening this emergency exit.


Perhaps it is a work of art

Indeed, a statement about life itself.

No one gets out alive.

I got a call today from my dog walker. She said Pixie had wandered off, which is odd because she always stays by the walker (attention hound, loooooves people). This was distressing because for a number of reasons.

• I know she’s not good around traffic, and San Francisco is well, full of it.
• She also has a tendency to smile at people she likes in a way that looks like she’s snarling. I’m constantly afraid she’ll get maced by a startled stranger that she ironically has taken quite a shine to.
• Her tags have my old Austin vet’s number on them, and he doesn’t know where I live any more.

I was really freaking out over what might happen to her, lost in such an unforgiving environment.

Then relief- about an hour after I got the first call, I got another call from my across-the-hall neighbor asking why my dog was in the hallway of our building. Freakout aborted.

But now I’m really curious about what happened. The dog walker was shocked when I told her the news because today they went to Buena Vista park, which is pretty far from my apartment. I suppose somebody who knows my dog may have seen her and “given her a lift” but if they knew that much about her they would also know my phone number and probably would have called.

I think my dog walked all the way from Buena Vista park back to my apartment all on her own.

That’s about 10 blocks (by the Manhattan Metric). She would have had to cross Divisadero (or Castro), Fell and Oak, which are all very busy streets. The dog walker drives her to the park, so she’s only walked it once and that was back in September so she hasn’t had any practice at walking home from there.

I have no idea how she got into the building either. The front door is locked, so she must have either been let in by another tenant or perhaps the building manger but that guy would have called because he loves to gripe to me about everything. Maybe she snuck in behind someone?

Anyways, that was a nice little afternoon Roller Coaster O’ Stress and Mystery.

Update: I got home this evening and took Pixie for a walk, and on the way back into the building a guy with a dalmatian who was entering at the same time asked if she was my dog. Turns out Pixie was waiting by the front door to the building when Todd (the guy with the dalmatian) came home. He let her in and he said she ran straight upstairs and sat in front of the door to my apartment. I thanked him repeatedly (for letting pixie in, or for solving the mystery of how she got in, I don’t know).

OpenID is not “Single Sign On” (as most people interpret the phrase) despite what wikipedia may say.

To illustrate: A friend of mine recently twittered, asking about using OpenID as a single-sign-on solution to a collection of non-profit websites he’s building:

OpenID evangelists: convince me it’s a no-brainer to create single sign on for my distributed non-profit. One requirement is free accounts

He’s looking for a way to allow his users to log in one site and then use many other sites without having to log in again. That’s what most people think of when you say “single sign on.”

With OpenID, “SSO” has become ambiguous (to me at least). It has taken on a new meaning, in addition to the old: SSO as “Single Action Sign On” vs. SSO as “Single Set of Credentials Sign-On”

In enterprise-y projects, “SSO” usually means that you can log into your expense tracking system and automagically you’re logged into the CRM system as well. This is the traditional use of “SSO” as “single-action sign on.”

In webapps, this trick is done through a variety of means, usually something like setting a cookie header with a shared domain name (cookie sent from a sub-domain, sets the cookie on the domain). Ex: HTTP response from expenses.mydomain.com sets an authentication cookie on mydomain.com, and now when I visit crm.mydomain.com, this auth cookie goes with the request and crm.mydomain.com knows I’m logged in.

Because your OpenID url may be anything, there is no shared domain through which authentication cookies may pass. Because of this, OpenID can’t help you log in to multiple sites with a single authentication request. OpenID is more like single-set-of-credentials-to-log-in. Just because I’m logged into LiveJournal does not mean that blogspot.com already knows I’m logged in. I still have to give my username (here, a URL for my OpenID, rather than a simple username like ‘banksean’). I may not have to enter my password again, but I do have to enter my ID. This isn’t exactly what most people think of when they hear “Single Sign On”

To recap:

• SSO (as commonly understood): I can log with my username and password at one site and access others without logging in again during a session (single-action-sign-on)
• OpenID: I can log in with my username (OpenID URL) and password at one site and only have to enter my username (no password) to access other sites (single-set-of-credentials-sign-on)

That’s a gross oversimplification (for example, you may choose to only allow the relying party to authenticate this one request and not future requests, in which case you’ll be asked to authenticate with your password again during the same session.)

I wonder how one could turn OpenID into a Single-Action Sign On protocol and how that would work.

Related: Yay! because OpenID support on Blogger has graduated from draft.

Notes on an ad I saw on the side of a muni bus this morning (See the original here):

The problem here with checkboxes is that the user is not required to select either of them. They could leave them both blank, or even check them both off (and what would that mean?). Given that the choices are mutually exclusive, radio buttons (or even a drop-down) would be more appropriate.

Random thoughts from Thanksgiving weekend (late, I know), in no particular order:

The Sutro Cliffhouse is hard to get into at the last minute but you can still get a table by the window if you’re really lucky (if that’s the case, then be thankful).

When the conversation lulls at family dinners, I like to throw out random situations like, “An orangutan wearing a gorilla suit climbs up a real tree with bag of fake leaves. and a stapler.” I don’t pose it as a question, or “what if” kind of thing. I just have a picture in my head and the only way to get it out is to put it into other people’s heads. Someone usually feels awkward enough to reset the conversation and keep it moving in another direction after that.

True love is when both people think they’re getting the better end of the deal. When I see a couple and I can’t figure out who is getting the better end of the deal, I am thankful.

Get to Muir Woods early if you want a parking space. Otherwise, fuck it. Go to Stinson Beach.

The gas in Bolinas is outrageously expensive, but it’s worth the drive just to see all the dirty hippies.

Arrested Development is quite possibly the greatest comedy TV show ever created.

Whole Foods mashed potatoes would be better if they made them thicker.

Rock Paper Shotgun reviews indie video game experiment Passage, which isn’t a game so much as a playable 5-minute metaphor for growing old, alone or otherwise. Early in the game, your character is given the opportunity to pair-up or go it alone:

But having her with you makes the journey more difficult. It’s harder to navigate this claustrophobic maze when there’s two of you. There are insurmountable obstacles you have to back away from, and take the long way around – burning time but seeing nothing new. If you went it alone, you could squeeze through smaller gaps, taking a more direct route that means you see more of this passage before you die. You can choose to avoid the woman, and never meet her. All that happens should you do so is you journey alone, and die alone. You may find treasures en route, but they mean nothing – they just glimmer for a second and fade. The woman would have been with you, always.

The game itself isn’t much fun to play, but I did find the progressive horizontal scaling interesting. The scenery to the left and right of your character gets more and more squished as it gets closer to the edge of the screen. As you move in either direction, the scenery becomes un-squished as you approach it. That’s a really bad description now that I read it back, but if you try it out you’ll see what I mean.

The author, Jason Rohrer, describes it better:

At the beginning of the game, you can see your entire life out in front of you, albeit in rather hazy form, but you can’t see anything that’s behind you, because you have no past to speak of. As you approach middle age, you can still see quite a bit out in front of you, but you can also see what you’ve left behind—a kind of store of memories that builds up. At its midpoint, life is really about both the future (what you’re going to do when you retire) and the past (telling stories about your youth). Toward the end of life, there really is no future left, so life is more about the past, and you can see a lifetime of memories behind you.