Jutta Degener - Comments + Likes

Jess Lee posted a link

Spamalytics: Berkeley/UCSD researchers hack Storm spam network and find that 1 in 12.5M spam emails get a response

November 10 at 9:57 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

Tudor Bosman, Jutta Degener, Chris Prince and 5 other people liked this

"The team gained control of almost 76,000 hijacked machines and ran what they say was the first large-scale quantitative study of spam conversion...After 26 days, and almost 350 million e-mail messages, only 28 sales resulted — a conversion rate of well under 0.00001%. Of these, all but one were for male-enhancement products and the average purchase price was close to $100. Taken together, these conversions would have resulted in revenues of $2,731.88." - Jess Lee via Bookmarklet

3 more comments

The original sale is only confirmation. Those 28 people are worth their weight in gold. - torque

Is that... legal? - ⓞnor

I think the Storm network is also illegal, since it takes over people's computers in order to run a bot network. But I guess that doesn't make the research any less illegal. - Jess Lee

I went to school with Stefan Savage, the guy credited with leading this project. I am *consistently* impressed with his work. Check out some of his previous work - for example, the TCP hacks are really cool. - Chris Prince

See section 4.5 for the ethics background. "... we strictly reduce harm. First, our instrumented proxy bots do not create any new harm. [..] Second, our proxies are passive actors and do not themselves engage in any behavior that is intrinsically objectionable; [....] Finally, where we do modify C&C messages in transit, these actions themselves strictly reduce harm." - Jutta Degener

Kevin Fox posted a link

Election maps

November 5 at 1:16 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

Chieze Okoye, Jutta Degener, Jeff Herman and 26 other people liked this

Wow these guys are fast! Voter- and EV-scaled maps of last night's presidential election. [hat tip to Stephen Mack!] - Kevin Fox via Bookmarklet

8 more comments

I like the Onion's: http://www.theonion.com/conten... - Casey Muller

The first map looks like a phoenix to me. - Rachel Lea Fox

…or a pigeon slaughtered mid-flight, inappropriately. - John Lam

Again supporting the theory that proximity to oceans and/or large population centers breeds democratic party members. - Bill Strathearn

I <3 Mark Newman. - Clare Dibble

I second Clare. In addition to making cool maps, he plays some mean piano - http://thejcats.com - Robert Felty

@Bill - I think this makes sense. The democratic platform tends to favor public projects like education and mass transit, which make more sense in densely populated areas. - Robert Felty

education makes less sense in the country? - j1m

also, health care, another unnecessary item in rural areas. - ⓞnor

Public transportation makes less sense in rural areas. I should have come up with some better examples. A few others: sewer systems, curb-side recycling. Fortunately though, we have different levels of government, which helps eliminate some of these problems. - Robert Felty

ⓞnor posted a link

Daily Kos: State of the Nation

November 4 at 7:54 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

Neil, Jutta Degener, Michael Leggett and 8 other people liked this

(just for the picture) - ⓞnor via Bookmarklet

Direct link to img: http://i163.photobucket.com/al... - Michael Leggett

joshua schachter bookmarked a page on delicious

Gear's heart

October 30 at 11:00 am - Link

ani625 and Jutta Degener liked this

a heart made of gears - joshua schachter

Philipp Lenssen posted a link

"PIE MENUS - Why pie menus should be in every user interface"

October 28 at 10:35 am - Link

Eugene, Peter Fedin, Pete Barry and 2 other people liked this

(via http://www.reddit.com/r/progra...) - Philipp Lenssen

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I'm not convinced this is actually much better. At first I thought "THIS IS GREAT!" and then I realised it's probably got just as many issues as regular dropdowns... - Tony Ruscoe

What are some of the issues you're seeing? (Besides recognizability, I guess, as it's more rarely used than vertical drop downs.) - Philipp Lenssen

this maybe great, but certianly not better.. pie menu is a whole new UI learning curve. bascially people think in up/down/right/let. Where as w/the pie there is that plus the slanted axis between the 4 vertices's.. - Peter Dawson

For some applications, it would be better. But to say they should be in every user interface is a bit OTT. Anyway... (1) you can't have as much text in each menu item as you can in a dropdown menu item. (2) If you click near the top (or the edge) of the screen, the menu is still cut off (in their demo); if implemented properly, it would probably reposition itself, meaning your mouse was no longer in the center anyway. (3) The more options you have, the harder it would be to select something. And you can't really make them scroll like you can drop downs. - Tony Ruscoe

I first experienced a pie menu UI in the MMO, Star Wars Galaxies. It definitely is an improvement. - tagami

Curse of Monkey Island had a "verb coin": http://i20.photobucket.com/alb... - Philipp Lenssen

Philipp: one issue I see is that I find it easier to move my mouse up or down than arbitrarily at an angle. I also find it annoying that the target near the center of menu is by definition very narrow compared to the target farther away from the middle. While the argument is that you don't need to move your mouse as far, etc, I am not sure that would be true in practice - you have to move your mouse pretty far to get to a large enough part of the menu where hand-wavering won't select an incorrect item. - Bret Taylor

Everyone here wants some pie. We want to grow the pie, and then get a piece of the pie. I want pie! - Jim Norris

I love it. It should be used in more interfaces. I guess it's just that I love Pie! - Pete Barry

I loved pie menus until I actually used them (Neverwinter Nights, Second Life, and some experimental UIs). :-( - Amit Patel

Text doesn't fit into wedges, and seeing only 8 items per menu level is unpleasant. It's nice to see all your options laid out, and a 8-way-branching fractal tree is often not a natural way to organize things. - ⓞnor

Pie menus are okay in very limited circumstances including highly repetitive tasks with expert operators and where the contents of the pie menus is consistent (otherwise the physical memory of the gesture is useless). - Kevin Fox

The changing number of items isn't an issue if their position stays the same, i.e. items become deactivated rather than vanishing completely. I think the aesthetic problems are outweighed by ease of use (-> Fitts) and the ability to mouse ahead. It would be nice to see research on item positioning that takes human wrist anatomy into account. - Jutta Degener

Jutta Degener posted a link

Justin's Puzzles

October 26 at 11:48 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

I particularly like the Metapic puzzles. I think. I don't know yet. Let me stare at it for a little while longer... - Jutta Degener via Bookmarklet

Nelson Minar bookmarked a page on delicious

zip file quine

October 22 at 8:47 am - Link

Goran Zec liked this

A zip file that contains itself - Nelson Minar

...and extra payload! I think my brain just melted. - Jutta Degener

Possible explanation, of sorts, from http://www.reddit.com/r/progra...: "It is a bit more complicated than that. The compressed data cannot reference anything outside it. Not in a way that is compatible between unzip programs at least. So, the first thing that is done in the compressed version of droste.zip is repeating the first half of the archive (everything up to droste.zip), followed by an instruction to repeat that. A similar trick will have to be performed for the data that follows droste.zip in the archive. The trick is of course to do all of that in such a way that it will work out. A few bytes will likely be parsed both as part of the ZIP headers and as part of the compressed data stream of droste.zip. As a final step, the CRC of droste.zip ends up somewhere in droste.zip itself because the ZIP file uses it to verify the data. That will require some tuning to get right." - ⓞnor

Oh, I see. (So that's how zip works!) Nifty. - Jutta Degener

Jutta Degener published a photo on Flickr

San Rafael Rock Quarry

October 19 at 7:33 pm - Link

Amit Patel and Gary Burd liked this

I'm not going to bother asking where I am... - Jutta Degener

Okay, you are officially super elite. Do you have more pictures? - ⓞnor

For your next trick, you'll need to stow away on a car freighter. - ⓞnor

Jutta ftw - j1m

joshua schachter bookmarked a page on delicious

MAGHOUND - A magazine membership service featuring hundreds of magazines from major publishers

October 17 at 3:48 pm - Link

like netflix for magazines? - joshua schachter

Nothing like netflix for magazines! Just bulk subscriptions, that's it. No reuse, no returns with replacements. And, ick, lumped into one category with "Nature" and "Science" is ... "Spirituality". Yeah, because when I'm done with my copy of "Air & Space", what I tend to turn to next is "Angels on Earth bimonthly".... - Jutta Degener

joshua schachter bookmarked a page on delicious

Lighthead - Caffeine

October 15 at 10:53 pm - Link

Atul Arora, Jutta Degener, Adewale Oshineye and Adam Kazwell liked this

Caffeine is a tiny program that puts an icon in the right side of your menu bar. Click it to prevent your Mac from automatically going to sleep, dimming the screen or starting screen savers. Click it again to go back. - joshua schachter

Awwwww. - Jutta Degener

joshua schachter bookmarked a page on delicious

Announcing the New York Times Campaign Finance API - Open - Code - New York Times Blog

October 14 at 10:42 pm - Link

Wally Punsapy and Jutta Degener liked this

ⓞnor posted a message

“Where are we?”

October 12 at 12:30 pm - via mail2ff - Link

torque, Jutta Degener and Gary Burd liked this

<a href="http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=..." attribute="value">are we here?</a> - Ian Tindale

Eukor specializes in transporting vehicles. Impressive? http://maps.google.com/maps?hl... - torque

How come your camera is wrapped in a layer of blue saran wrap? - j1m

It lets me disguise a cloudy day like today as if it were nice and sunny. - ⓞnor

Chris Roat shared an item on Google Reader

Wordy, puzzle-y flash fun

October 10 at 9:30 am - Link

Jutta Degener, Olivier Tharan, seth and ⓞnor liked this

torque posted a message

“Where am I?”

October 10 at 12:08 am - Link

Ricardo Cabral, Lu Tao, Michael Fidler and 7 other people liked this

Clue: these two photos are related. - torque

31 more comments

I want to say somewhere in southern Utah, but then I thought the copper mine there was bigger (it's viewable from space.) - Gina K

Not Utah... - torque

if the photos are related, the pic on the left has to be a silicon mine, but I don't know where those are. - Clare Dibble

Washington State? - J. Abdul-Qahhar

Spain? http://www.treehugger.com/file... - Keith Pelczarski

Fun guess Keith. Click on the second photo for a larger image: a significant impact on green-ness of the other sort... - torque

DisneyLand parking lot?! ha, ha! - Susan Beebe

Ha! I should have embiggened that photo before assuming that it was a bunch of PVs. Something considerably less clean & green, eh? ;-) - Keith Pelczarski

Is the second picture in a country colored blue on this map: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I... - Gary Burd

The stop lines in the intersections indicate that they drive on the right. I'm guessing it's somewhere in the US. This is not an ordinary self-park lot, the cars are parked in. I would guess it's near an automobile factory or maybe a shipping port. I don't know what either of them have to do with that open pit mine exactly. - ⓞnor

Wellington? - J. Abdul-Qahhar

The trucks outside of the parking lot look like they are driving on the left, but the stop lines are more convincing that it's drive on the right. - Gary Burd

Are these cars covered in snow, or do they have funny paint jobs? - ⓞnor

Unless there is a major change in climate, the cars are unlikely to ever be covered in snow. - torque

It does snow in Los Angeles occasionally. 0.3 inches in 1954, for example. But right, it's not snow. Camera artifact? My imagination? Unusual paint job associated with a large special purpose fleet of vehicles? White powder blown from an open pit gypsum mine or a concrete plant? Something else? - ⓞnor

I think that the white on the cars is that protective film they put on new cars, which would make sense with the way that the cars are parked four or more deep. - Keith Pelczarski

I have seen cars piled up like that in the Port of Long Beach, but not sure I saw a mine nearby. And, yes, the white is likely the plastic wrap they wear for shipping. - Christopher Sacca

I hunted around Long Beach for the car terminal. I could only find terminals with diagonal parking. Torque's recent pictures came from Long Beach, so I am not ready to rule out Long Beach. - Gary Burd

The Port of Tacoma terminals are not diagonal parking: http://maps.google.com/maps?cl... - Gary Burd

And we think the first one is some kind of flat mine? I wonder just how close together the 2 photos are. - j1m

The Port of Long Beach's web site has a little map of the port by cargo type. As you say, their car storage areas don't look quite like this, though I don't know what you mean by "on the diagonal". Like you, I wandered fruitlessly around Long Beach for a while. I also checked out other major West Coast ports... - ⓞnor

However, the white covering is consistently present, so that did seem to confirm "shipping port" to me. I did learn words like "break-bulk cargo" and "ro-ro vessel", so this hasn't been a completely useless chase. :) And yes, I still don't know how I would connect that mine (or quarry, or whatever) to the cars. - ⓞnor

@j1m - about 15 mi by car - torque

The pit is at 37°59'14.05"N, 122°27'4.15"W. (However, Google Earth terrain seems to think that it is a mountain.) - Jutta Degener

Cool! How did you find that? The pit is apparently the San Rafael Quarry, which "supplies rock and pavement products for construction projects all over the Bay", which I suppose means it is in fact a "silicon mine" (ha ha) and seems unlikely to be related to the cars in any way more clever than physical proximity. Would the cars be at the Port of Oakland? (But I looked there, and I think that would take more than 15 minutes by car.) Another Bay Area shipping terminal, maybe? - ⓞnor

Cars: 37°54'22.30"N, 122°22'10.70"W. We drove past them on our way to the Richmond Shipyard a few times - these endless parking lots make for a very surreal landscape that isn't easy to forget. "Wow, that's a lot of cars" you say to yourself--and then you drive for a while, and look again, and you're *still* going past cars. - Jutta Degener

I s'pose it's possible the car lot is reclaimed land made at least partially with fill from the quarry. - ⓞnor

More generally, the quarry provides not silicon but "aggregate" that is used to pave parking lots and roads that those cars will populate. (In fact, the Wikipedia entry on "Construction aggregate" has a picture of that very mine.) - Jutta Degener

@ⓞnor - when I said "on the diagonal", I meant diagonal parking where the cars are not at a 90 degree angle to the road. - Gary Burd

Jutta++ for finding both. That was tough. - j1m

Torque did you take these pictures from an airplane? - Shakeel Mahate

Whoa... good work folks. Indeed the pictures were taken from an airplane - a few minutes apart. Both these were stunning in real life -- principally because of scale. - torque

I'm guessing these were taken from a Cessna? - Gabe

joshua schachter bookmarked a page on delicious

Types of Skills Everyone Should Know – Video – Top 100 Important Skills - Popular Mechanics

October 6 at 8:00 pm - Link

Well-informed meat, Andy Davies, Michael Bravo and 6 other people liked this

the manly arts - joshua schachter

Certainly useful list for more than few people. - Daniel Schildt

For an engineering magazine in 2008, targeting these instructions at only males strikes me as surprisingly sexist. I don't read PM - is this its normal tone? - Jutta Degener

Reminds me of: "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. " - Robert A. Heinlein - Stuart Woodward

Gary Burd posted a message

“Where am I?”

October 5 at 8:08 pm - Link

Canada's Web Shop, Jutta Degener, DeWitt Clinton and 2 other people liked this

statue of liberty! - David Vasileff

3 more comments

David beat me by 5 seconds... a vote for Statue of Liberty as well. Great photo! - torque

Statue of Liberty is correct. The camera is pointed up. - Gary Burd

Ahh. (Totally wrong guess deleted out of embarrassment.) - ⓞnor

Oh. My guess was that you were riding a hadron at 99.999999% the speed of light under the Alps. Whee! - DeWitt Clinton

Black Mesa? - Steve Lacey

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Tetris Tiles

October 3 at 4:39 pm - Link

Edward Vielmetti and Jutta Degener liked this

zomg tetris bathroom tiles - joshua schachter

Jim Norris posted a link

FiveThirtyEight.com: Electoral Projections Done Right: Intrade Betting is Suspicious

September 24 at 11:55 am - via Bookmarklet - Link

Michael Nielsen, Eugene, Karl Rosaen and 7 other people liked this

that's just plain weird. - MikeAmundsen

4 more comments

Those sudden spikes are a really inefficient way to trade -- somebody is losing a ton of money every time they do that, just because they can't be bothered to make many small trades instead of a few big trades. - ⓞnor

I was wondering why intrade pricing was so off compared to the other markets. @nor if their goal is to manipulate the price over the short term, then large amounts are the way to go. They *want* the price to be impacted. - Sanjeev Singh

"This is the exact mirror image of the Obama trading" - no, actually, it isn't. Clinton trading has three drops in the marked period; Obama trading has two. Obama peaks at Sep 23 5:54 PMPDT at 50.5/2000; Clinton has 1600 shares traded spread out between 5:17 and 5:32. Yeah, you can talk this into something, but ... - Jutta Degener

Yeah, by "exact mirror image" he seems to mean "vaguely similar pattern of two or three large orders placed during a day". The times aren't lined up or anything super obvious like that. Sanjeev, yes, possibly it's optimized for manipulation, though I'm not convinced of that. - ⓞnor

It doesn't help that the time periods in the two graphics aren't aligned, and cropped to suggest a periodicity that isn't there in the larger frame... The other thing is - 100$ intrade = 10$ US; so the trade volume is smaller and grainier than what y'all probably think it is, and, yes, very much subject to manipulation by the malicious or stupid. Still, valuing Dem win so much more than Obama win *is* weird; I figured overestimated likelyhood of catastrophic events, but don't really have a good explanation. - Jutta Degener

Hmm... http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmsp... - Jim Norris

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possible ligatures for "wtf" and "lol"

September 22 at 7:49 pm - Link

ani625 and Jutta Degener liked this

Atul Arora posted a link

Op-Ed Columnist - Seeking a President Who Gives Goose Bumps? So’s Obama. - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

September 20 at 11:53 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

Tudor Bosman, Jutta Degener, Sean McBride and 2 other people liked this

"Four weeks ago you had the best week of your campaign, followed — granted, inexplicably — by the worst week of your campaign. And you’re still in a statistical dead heat. You’re a 47-year-old black man with a foreign-sounding name who went to Harvard and thinks devotion to your country and lapel pins aren’t the same thing and you’re in a statistical tie with a war hero and a Cinemax heroine. To these aged eyes, Senator, that’s what progress looks like. You guys got four debates. Get out of my house and go back to work." - ⓞnor

"Plus, if you had a black daughter — OBAMA I have two. BARTLET — who was 17 and pregnant and unmarried and the father was a teenager hoping to launch a rap career with “Thug Life” inked across his chest, you’d come in fifth behind Bob Barr, Ralph Nader and a ficus." - Paul Buchheit

I almost hate when something this acerbic resonates so deeply with me. It is a wonderful piece. - Christopher Sacca

j1m posted a link

Office Culture: Anti-Theft Lunch Bag Deters Sandwich Thieves

September 16 at 3:52 am - via Bookmarklet - Link

David Chu, Tanath, David Th and 23 other people liked this

although it could backfire and make you not want to eat it just the same - Josh Haley

or make you eat something you don't want to... - Paul Haahr

when I was younger this was much simpler. you'd just lick all of your french fries while everyone was looking. - Keith Coleman

Jim Norris posted a link

Vertical stripes don't help you to look slimmer after all... they make you appear fatter, scientists told

September 14 at 1:17 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

jeshy, Jess Lee, Anne Bouey and 3 other people liked this

They only used drawings, not photos or live models? - ⓞnor

The difference between the horizontal and vertical layout in the picture goes far beyond stripe direction (shading in horizontal, none in vertical) - random or systemic error? $@!# gullible journalists. - Jutta Degener

I think the main reason the vertical stripe drawing (in the article, not one of the above pics) looks thinner is because of the gradient effect that causes there to be a big white vertical stripe down the center of the drawing. - Jess Lee

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tikitag

September 8 at 5:15 pm - Link

rfid toys - joshua schachter

CueCat II ? - Jutta Degener

Jutta Degener posted a link

AdLab Riddle: Says Who? - Advertising Lab: future of advertising and advertising technology