I’m a Hockey fan… but I’m also a nerd. The curious kind that likes to figure out how things work. One day last month while watching a Blackhawks game, we scored an important goal and while the United Center went crazy, my curiosity kicked in when I noticed all the details that goes into celebrating a goal at a Blackhawks game. I had to wonder… How does that work?!

I replayed the goal in slow motion and I was stunned at how quickly spotlights appeared on the goal scorer and the goal horn goes off followed shortly by “Chelsea Dagger”. Mix in scoreboard messages throughout the arena and a spinning red light… and you have a lot of moving parts!

Amazingly, all this happens with very few errors, (except of course for those crazy Canucks-Skip to about 13:40) and all in less then a second or so. Pretty amazing given the speed and unpredictability of Hockey. Compared to sports like Baseball, Football and Basketball… scoring is few and far between and can happen unexpectedly.

So, I contacted the Blackhawks… and long story short: I’m getting a behind the scenes tour of what goes into all the game day presentation at the United Center!

If you have any questions you would like asked, leave a comment and I’ll do what i can to get answers. My questions include things like… How big is the staff? How do they communicate? If its by radio, can anyone listen in if they find the frequency? Who decides that a goal is scored? Are the spotlights manually operated? How do they determine who scored? If it’s automated, who makes the software that tracks players on the ice and aims the spotlights? How is the music/organ/scoreboard videos orchestrated? What does it take to get a job working on game production? What sort of turnover is there? Do they also work Bulls games? What computers and networks are in use? And how secure are they?

I hope that this is the beginning of a series of blog posts or a new website that explores the technology behind things we take for granted. Yes, I’m a nerd… but I’m betting that there are many others like me out there!

So, Comcast showed a holiday commercial with a montage of clips from the year during tonights Blackhawks game. Many of the videos featured Sarah Kustok… one I hadn’t seen before.. it appeared to be Sarah skating and about to attempt some sort of jumping spin. I really wish comcast would upload clips to youtube or something, but they probably fight to get as much of their stuff taken off there instead, but that’s a post for another day.

Anyway, I went to Google her and this popped up…

Searching for Sarah Kustok on Google... dating?! really?!?

What a lame commentary on what lonely guys search for when they think nobody is looking. How long before she suffers the same fate as Erin Andrews? Especially with some of the comments I found while looking for her.

I have this minor pet peeve. Yes, I know that there’s no hope in educating the entire world… but I always feel the need to let people know when they say something about this being the end of a decade. Apparently, my efforts 10 years ago with the new millennium didn’t work.

For those that aren’t aware, this isn’t the first year of a new decade, but rather the last year of one.

Yes, I understand the practicality of referring to decades as the 80’s or the 90’s and it seems natural that it would be from 1980 to 1989. And yes, I am aware that our numbering system for years is purely arbitrary.

BUT, consider this: There is no year zero. None. Well, unless you’re an astronomer.

So, this means that the first year was obviously year 1. So, it follows that the first decade is then from the beginning of year 1 to the end of year 10. Obviously, the next decade starts from year 11 until the year 20. Likewise, the first century is from 1 to 100, then 101 to 200. And likewise for millennia  (and there isn’t anything larger then that… unless you go to ages, epochs, eras, or eons… but most of us won’t even be around to see the next century, so meh).

Yes.. this is nitpicking.. but i just wanted to point this out once and for all. And no… I’m not the only person to have noticed this. But still, whenever I hear someone say that… I need to point out that they are wrong!

Wow.. What a crazy day in the sports world. I was stunned twice while I was working on stuff with SportsCenter on in the background after catching the end of the Saints crushing of the Patriots.

First, did you see tonights Thrashers/Panters game!? (That’s Atlanta and Florida, NHL Hockey for the uninitiated) I’ve never seen anything like the brutal hit Keith Ballard put on Tomas Volkun, his own goalkeeper! Brutal. Clearly he was intending to take his frustrations out on the goal post and didn’t even realize his reach would connect with his goalie, square in the head. Early word is that Vokoun is going to be fine and its “just a laceration”.

And second, I don’t think I ever heard someone get publicly torn to shreds like Charlie Weis was today when Jack Swarbrick, the Notre Dame Athletic Director, held a press conference to announce that he was firing his football coach. At least that’s what I thought when I heard part of the press conference on ESPN.  I wasn’t paying attention and only heard one part:

“I’ve said often in recent days that I’ve never met anyone for whom there was a bigger gulf between perception and reality, and I think that is true of our departing coach.”

Wow… normally you would expect a nice polite “things just were not working out” or a “we have decided to explore other options” sort of things. But after reading the whole story… Perhaps he’s really talking about the media’s perception of how the decision was made with Notre Dame. Either way, I have to remember that insult, even if it was unintended!

So yeah, between those and a vague understanding of the Tiger Woods soap opera… I was entertained enough to write that out… Glad I could waste a few minutes of your time as well!

I really want to know how product recalls work. I want to know how much budget the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission gets every year to spend to “protect” us as consumers. And, if you can put a dollar on it, I’d love to know how much businesses have to spent to comply with needless regulations.

First off, let me say that we all agree that death is tragic, especially the accidental death of a child. But, the world isn’t perfect… horrible things will continue to happen no matter how carefully you live your life.

With that said, you may have heard of the recent product recall of 2.1 million cribs. I expected these to be the equivalent of bag of broken glass (Grr NBC for not allowing classic SNL clips to be on youtube, but that’s a different rant!), but come on. Let me point out some facts about these “death traps”.

• 2.1 Million of these items were sold.
• Only 4 deaths are linked to this crib.
• This Deadly Device was on the market for 17 and a half years before anyone noticed.
• The crib is only harmful when its improperly assembled by adults who don’t follow the clear warnings in the instructions!!

Many of these were used by multiple children within one household, and many were likely sold to other people, so there are MANY more then just 2.1 Million children who used these cribs. So, a conservative estimate with round numbers would be, 4 deaths in 2 Million uses over 17 years. That’s a 0.0002% failure rate with one death every 4.25 years.  Really?! Keep in mind that the chance of being struck by lightning is 0.000357%. So, you’re twice as likely to be struck by lightning then to die in one of these cribs. (Many assumptions in those calculations, but you get the point.)

I have no doubt that the people who are crusading to protect us innocent consumers think that they are doing nobel work, but really!? I mean come on. I’d love to be able to follow the money further to see where their salaries are paid and how they choose what products to go after. A “non-profit” organization was on Chicago’s news coverage of the story… I’d love to find out how much they receive in donations and how much of that goes to pay internal costs, like salaries.

Good to know that our government is busy trying to keep us safe. They even have a twitter account. I really feel sorry for the poor soul that has to do that for a living (and how much are they paid to do that?).

Since the announcement of ChromeOS 4 days ago, the Internet is buzzing with reactions. For example, TechCrunch has two recent articles, one positive and one negative.

The negative story hammers Chrome for not supporting Android apps. This isn’t surprising given the rumblings that Google prefers web apps over android apps. its hard to say where things will be in 3-5 years, but if WebKit does evolve to the point where it performs as well as native Android apps, then it makes sense to abandon Android apps, especially if Android doesn’t become the dominant platform. Assuming a split between the iPhone and Android (and perhaps WebOS or Windows Mobile, HA!) and a web app performs well on both (and supports all the native phone features), why bother writing apps for just one platform? If web apps can’t easily do what native apps can, Android functionality can always be added to Chrome OS at a later date, even by someone outside of Google, thanks to the wonders of Open Source. I can’t imagine it would be that hard to launch a Java Virtual Machine, with the Android Activity rendered to a panel in Chrome OS, I’m just not sure that it fits in with the goal of Chrome OS. And really, when are people going to stop freaking out about the stability or reliability of an Open Source project, just because anyone can change it or make their own derivative or find flaws in the program. (All of those are good things, btw.. given that proper controls are in place). Open Source is an advantage, not a liability.

Also, a big limitation of mobile phones is its lack of any real processing power. Up until when I finally rooted my G1 a few months ago, I was under the impression that the web browsing was slow on my device due to latency or bandwidth on T-Mobile’s 3G network. That is until I tethered my laptop and was able to get 600KB/s download speeds and web pages rendered with images almost immediately, while 10-15 second page load times are common. I have to presume it’s WebKit rendering the HTML that is slow with limited processor and memory. So, there’s a fundamental difference between mobile devices and actual computers. Perhaps they will converge over time, but there will need to be some breakthroughs in power consumption of more powerful processors.

What’s interesting in the positive story is all of the negative comments by people who just don’t get it. For even more fun, check out a negative post’s comments from July. Chrome OS is about FAR more then just a web browser. First, Chrome OS moves everything to the Cloud, for better or worse. Assuming we trust Google to not lose or snoop our data, I don’t have a problem with this as it’s benefits are far outweighed. Imagine losing your laptop and being able to sign in to another ChromeOS device (replacement, friend’s laptop, coffee shop, etc.) and instantly have access to all of your data. Of course, this assumes that Google is going to provide potentially hundreds of GBs of storage for your videos, photos and music. Perhaps their strategy is going to be to leverage YouTube and Picasa Web Albums.

Also, people are panicked over Chrome OS being “just” a browser. First off, they are acknowledging that this isn’t going to be targeted at Power Users (ie, most of TechCrunch’s audience) but rather at the vast majority of “regular users”. Google stated that they have a LONG list of use cases that they want to implement. Many of those cases are already satisfied by existing web apps for things like emails or calendars. Its not hard to conceive Chrome OS recognizing USB devices and accessing photos or videos on a camera or phone, and music on a MP3 Player or phone… and syncing those with the laptop and conversely up into the cloud to the appropriate services.

I think many people would be amazed at what some web apps are capable of now. Photoshop is often pointed to as a necessary app that people need on their computers. Really? If you are a graphic designer, then sure… but Chrome OS isn’t directed towards you, at least not for advanced graphic work. I really doubt that many people use Photoshop for more then cropping, rotating, watermarking, or minor corrections like red eye or color levels. A quick web search turned up several web apps that are up to those tasks, and a year from now they may have even more functionality.

And, for all the concerns about requiring an active Internet connection, remember that HTML5 includes offline storage and even without HTML5, projects like Gears (among others) provide for offline access. Gmail has had offline access for about a year now. Chrome OS devices will have plenty of storage to mirror your data that is in the cloud. There’s no reason that these web apps can’t be accessible as offline applications, syncing your data up to the cloud automatically when you next get an internet connection.

And finally, the biggest reason why I think Chrome OS is a big ball of awesome… It’s Linux. Yes, people railed on Google about it not really creating anything new. Its Chrome on Linux with some other glue. Saying that isn’t an OS is like saying that Ubuntu isn’t an OS since its based heavily on Debian. And, Chrome on Linux IS a new thing. Chrome started as a Windows App. That makes sense as there are MANY Windows users, so it is a brilliant move as it exposes those windows users to a superior browser and allows Google to work out its issues and add features. Its a great way for Google to get their foot in the metaphorical door. Some choices were made to make it easier to port to other platforms, like using Skia rather then GDI. Clearly google planned on Chrome running on more then windows.

So, yeah.. the Chromium project has been making great progress and Chrome has been usable on Linux for some time now. Yes, it makes me a little bit happy to see this as an opportunity for someone to hand Microsoft some stiff competition (since Apple priced themselves out of that role). But, the REAL thing to be excited about it the fact that if Chrome OS is even mildly successful, it means that there may finally be a critical mass of Linux users. So, finally there will be a real reason for hardware manufacturers to provide Linux support. Support has been pretty good from the likes of Intel, Nvidia and ATI/AMD for graphics drivers. But things that are clearly lacking are low level things like power management, suspend/resume, some wifi-drivers, etc. Having Google working with hardware manufacturers means that the rest of the Linux community will benefit greatly. Hopefully, the days of buying a laptop and hoping that all your hardware will be well supported will soon be gone for good!

It will definitely be an interesting year or so! I, for one, will be eagerly awaiting to see how this all plays out.

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This is a temporary post so that I can claim this blog on Technorati.

There is nothing to see here and this post will be removed soon.

This morning at 10am, Blackhawks playoff tickets went on sale! For those of you that don’t follow Hockey or the Blackhawks… This is a relatively big deal as the Blackhawks have not made the Stanley Cup Playoffs since 2002 (when they were man-handled by the Saint Louis Blues in 5 games). They haven’t actually WON a playoff series since 1996 when they swept the Calgary Flames, only to be eliminated by Colorado in the second round.

Yes, its been a long time (not as long as its been for the Cubs though!) and Blackhawk fans finally have something to get excited about again! 

The United Center doesn’t quite have the same roar I remember from the Chicago Stadium, but I can’t tell you how excited I am about the return of playoff hockey to the West Loop.

I didn’t get to actually look for tickets until about 10:30am and was afraid that I’d missed my opprotunity. Sadly, TicketMaster’s website blows chunks when it comes to purchasing tickets. I had to continually search for tickets while hoping for some good luck. First, you can’t really select a price range without severely limiting yourself to a small subset of seats, so you end up having to look for “best available” and it kept offering me 200 level club seats for $150 a pop. No thanks, i wanted the $50 cheap seats! Also, you can’t search for multiple games at once as it gives up your previous tickets! (i lost out on some decent seats thanks to that!)

Finally, I pulled the trigger on 3 games for Standing Room tickets. $67 for a pair to each game with that crazy TicketMaster fees ($5.75 a ticket PLUS a per-order conveniece fee!? You HAVE to be kidding me! why hasn’t someone run them out of business yet?!) really isn’t that bad! Those are for Game C of the first series (3rd home game) and Game A and B of the second series. Obviously tickets for the second series are worthless if we don’t survive the first round. The 3rd home game in the first series would be game 5 if we lose home ice, or game 6 if we keep home ice. So even that isn’t guarenteed.

If I could script out how the first round of the playoffs were to go, I’d take home ice and hope the series goes a full seven games. Somehow along the way while I was looking for best available tickets, ticketmaster offered me seats ON THE GLASS right behind the goal for Game D in the first round! Obviously, if we lose home ice, we won’t get a 4th home game, and that 4th game won’t be played unless the first 6 games are split. I quickly made the purchase ($390 tickets, ouch!) after I realized that I’ll either get all that cash back, or I’ll be able to witness a MONSTER event from great seats! Plus, those silly TicketMaster fees don’t seem as bad with expensive tickets!

Definately going to make the playoffs more interesting! I’ll have to start finding out who wants to join me for the games as they draw closer. If you’re interested in going… Let me know!

I recently came across an interesting book,
The Future of the Internet–And How to Stop It. (Yes, you can buy the book from Amazon, but the entire book is under a CC liscense and is available for download at the books website). It provides an interesting retrospective of how the Internet got to where it is, and what may happen to it in the future.

What’s really interesting is the point made in this really well written review:

In passing, I love the brutal critique by Gene Spaford of the $100 laptop. He likens its projected impact–exposing millions to the bright side while not fixing their poverty, water, and disease–to subsidizing pet rats for every household just prior to the Black Death plague. My friend Lee Felsenstein is an equally virulent opponent of the $100 laptop, for different reasons. Me personally, I think the cell phone (but not the iPhone) is the only way to educate 5 billion people fast and with day to day relevance to their needs.

Wow… I never really thought about it, but I think its completely accurate! The One Laptop Per Child initiative has a noble goal of providing inexpensive laptops to poor children around the world as well as ensuring internet connectivity. I can’t argue with the educational aspects of the projects and it certainly would provide much more opportunity to many that the world has ignored for far too long.

However, its always been presumed that those opportunities are strictly positive. They may be overwhelmingly positive, but I’ve never considered the negative effects, nor the things it will have little to no effect on.

The Internet is NOT a safe place. This is obvious but most people forget this. Also, when most people think of the dangers of the internet, they think of either an Internet stalker or identity theft, typically an unrealistic fear of intercepted e-commerce transactions. However, there are far more dangers that are often ignored both by those that are new to the internet (who typically aren’t aware of the dangers and are overly trusting) as well as by those that are quite experienced and are aware of at least some of the dangers (ie, they know what a Trojan is, and why they shouldn’t blindly run untrusted programs).

Whatever platform gets widely deployed will quickly endure a trial-by-fire in which it’s security is tested, for if there are any security holes which allow the laptop to be exploited to send spam or access their personal information, which is a time bomb waiting to happen. As much as I support open software, I’ll be the first to admit that it isn’t perfect and can be exploited. Microsoft certainly has a large target (and with saner software it might not be so easier to exploit), as will any other widely adopted software. As Zittrain says, “People rob banks because that’s where the money is”.

Does this mean that these projects should grind to a halt? Certainly not! However, I hope someone over there has thought long and hard about the security and privacy side of things. It isn’t listed in the Criticism section in OLPC’s Wikipedia page, but that either means it has been addressed sufficiently or it hasn’t yet occured to anyone to make any noise about it yet.

The other completly ignored aspect is how providing internet access won’t do a thing to help with other more important things. Sure, there’s a wealth of information available on the internet, and the education is valuable, but without clean water, medical supplies and political freedom to act on their new information, there really isn’t much one can do, other then realize just how bad they have it in comparison to the rest of the world.

Certainly some thing to think about.

Wow… I wasted many hours today due to Microsoft and general stupidity…

Here’s the situation.. we have a legacy Classic ASP site that we are moving to more scalable and stable environment… Since we want to have multiple web servers handling the load during peak hours (it runs just fine on one right now) and be able to perform new releases along with testing during off peak times while the website continues to run on one server. This also means that we can easily throw more webservers into the mix should that be necessary later.

The easy (and open-source and free) solution is to use Apache as a reverse proxy.  This also allows for some other neat tricks (mod_security, mod_deflate) without having to deal with Windows and IIS configuration.. or make any code changes for that matter.

The problem comes in with how Classic ASP deals with cookies. Deep in the bowels of ASP, Microsoft was benevolent enough to add in HTML encoding of your cookie’s name and value. This actually isn’t a horrible thing as it prevents some poorly written code from creating an exploitable bug (HTTP Header injection), but its a bit overzealous and there’s no way to alter its behavior. You’re simply stuck with it.

Of course, if you’re happily writing ASP code, it gets encoded and decoded for you so you never even know its going on.

ASP Code to set a cookie:

Response.Cookies(”SERVERID”) = “balancer.www2″

ASP Code to display that cookie:

Response.Write “Cookie: ” & Request.Cookies(”SERVERID”)

Outputs:

SERVERID: balancer.www2

The problem lies in what is actually being sent by IIS:

Set-Cookie: SERVERID=balancer%2Ewww2; path=/

%2E is simply an HTML Encoded period. I’ve never known a period within a string to cause a security issue… but it gets encoded anyway. Apache’s mod_proxy_balancer looks at that cookie and expects to find a period within it, using the part after the period to determine which server that person should get sent back to.

I spent a large part of the day thinking the issue was an Apache configuration issue, as even with debug logging on, it wasn’t outputing anything. Once I looked through the code for mod_proxy_balancer, i saw that it ignores the cookie unless there’s a period in the string, and clearly there wasn’t one in my string.

After spending about 5 minutes trying to find a way to disable or change that behavior within ASP (there isn’t any as far as I can tell), I quickly found a solution within Apache!

Since Apache 2.2.4, the mod_headers module provides a method to edit a header using a regular expression. I was already using mod_headers to pass along some values through Apache (like the external IP address, or if the request was over HTTPS), so simply adding one line to the Apache configuration file fixed the issue:

Header edit Set-Cookie balancer%2Ewww balancer.www

Now, apache watches the response headers for when we are setting a cookie,  and if it contains “balancer%2Ewww” it gets rewritten as “balancer.www” and sure enough both Apache and IIS are perfectly happy with the cookie and everything is working well.

If I didn’t have access to the source code, it would have taken me weeks of trial and error to determine what the issue was or it would have been given up on for simply being incompatible. If apache wasn’t as flexible as it is, i would have been stuck writing a patch to mod_proxy_balancer and recompiling my own apache rather then relying on the distro’s packages for updates.

This is exactly where the closed source commercial software (Microsoft) and, to a much lessor-extent, the walled-garden open-source approach (like Django) run into issues. As long as you are only using that vendor’s software in the way that the vendor envisioned you would be using it, you’re just fine. Its also why standards are a good thing.

Yet another example of why Mark Ramm was right when he wrote and talked about WSGI being the right way to write tools that properly interact with one another. I’m really convinced now that the TurboGears/Pylons approach is the proper way to build web applications.