Japan Is Shinto

I don’t remember exactly how old I was when I first saw it. But I know it was in my teens, and I remember initially being a little freaked out by the experience. You would probably have the same reaction if suddenly you saw a slowly rotating crescent-shaped object covered with flashing geometric shapes floating in front of you. But I quickly noticed that it moved when I moved my eyes around the room, and was still visible when I shut my eyes. So okay, it isn’t really there. It was obviously in my head.

This thing would appear randomly, maybe three or four times a year and would last at most 30 minutes. For a long time, I attributed it to an eye problem after being told by an opthamologist that I had some minor optic nerve damage that accounted for a small blind spot in my left eye. That seemed reasonable, and later when I was diagnosed with high blood pressure, I figured that might have something to do with it as well. Indeed, after I started taking blood pressure medication, it seemed to be much more rare.

Then back in 2008 I was flipping through an issue of Scientific American and came across a picture. In fact, it was this picture:

And there it was! It was an artist’s depiction of the same thing I had been seeing for years. Seeing this picture, I immediately read the article and learned what this thing was. It’s part of the “aura” that some people who suffer from migraines see, usually prior to having a really bad headache. The artist suffered from migraines and used his skill to paint what he saw.

Not everyone who experiences this “aura” sees the same thing. It can affect other senses and there is a fascinating list of symptoms on Wikipedia. Some of these must be pretty frightening if you don’t know what is happening.

I haven’t seen this thing for a few years now and had largely forgotten about it. Then today, I went with a coworker to lunch and… there it was again! And I’m sure my coworker thought I was nuts when I pointed to what I was seeing and said that it had come back but he wouldn’t be able to see it because it wasn’t real. Yeah, that does sound a bit insane.

Here are a couple interesting articles I found on the subject:

• It’s Just A Migraine – A Note About That CBS Reporter
• Patterns – Perspectives on a Headache

One of the stranger things that happened to me during my trip to Orlando was discovering that at various points in time I was really in Anaheim.  Well, at least my phone thought so.  When I was at InfoComm 2011, I noticed that my phone thought I was hopping between Orlando, Anaheim, and a few random other places across the country.  I was reasonably sure this wasn’t happening as the friction against the atmosphere would likely have left me a smoldering pile of ash.  So what was going on?  Well, this:

What happens when you fill a convention center with 900 companies, many with products or services that use WiFi?  You get WiFi base stations everywhere.  The Android app I used (WiFi Analyzer) did at one time record a total of 30 WiFi base stations in my immediate area.  And there were probably many more than that.

What this has to do with geolocation services is that most smart-phones use at least three different methods to determine where they (and presumably, you) are physically located.  The most obvious one is to use geolocation data from the cell tower you’re connected to.  That’s relatively coarse and in most cases just puts you somewhere within a radius of the cell tower.  The second most obvious one is to use GPS positioning.  That is usually within 100 feet of your actual location, and is often much better.

But what if you’re in a convention center with a metal roof that is blocking GPS signals?  Then your phone may use WiFi.  Or more accurately, it may use a database that takes the MAC address of the WiFi base station and relates that to latitude and longitude.  Google has such a database, created by their fleet of Street View cars that drive around and capture WiFi information.  Trouble is that database is largely static.  And so if someone was to take a WiFi base station from somewhere (say an engineering lab at Extron Electronics) and move it to a trade show, then anyone within proximity (I was about 50 feet away from the Extron booth) would be incorrectly tagged at the location held in the database.

It didn’t take long to figure out what was going on.  I used Google Latitude to view my position, and pretty much every time it stated I was somewhere I wasn’t, it was placing me outside buildings of companies that were at the trade show.  A couple times it put me in residential areas, which I assume was because someone connected with those companies had set up a WiFi base station at home and Google’s Street View cars happened to be there.

You can understand why the software in smart-phones would prioritize WiFi-based geolocation over cell tower data.  WiFi signals are considerably weaker, and so if you’re within range, that is presumably a finer-grained indication of where you are.  The problem is prioritizing WiFi-based geolocation all the time.  What should happen is that each location method is queried and if one is wildly off from the others, the location is determined from the next-best one.  So since Anaheim is roughly 2500 miles away from the cell tower I was connected to in Orlando, it should note that Anaheim is not in the radius of the cell tower’s signals, and disregard it.  What’s more is that the system might want to flag that particular WiFi base station’s MAC address as being less reliable for geolocation because it (apparently) moves.

The same basic thing happened to me here in Rochester.  Most every Wednesday, Phil and I go to the Dac Hoa restaurant.  And often, Phil puts his cell phone in mobile WiFi hotspot mode so he can use an iPad and so I can connect to the Internet through his hotspot with my phone.  But recently we went to Jay’s Diner for dinner, roughly four miles away, and I found my phone thought I was located back at the Dac Hoa.  Again, because I was connected to Phil’s mobile hotspot, and that hotspot was geolocated in the past to be at the Dac Hoa.

Why any of this matters is that increasingly people are using services like Google Latitude to know where family and friends are located.  And usually, it works great.  But when WiFi-based geolocation is used, it can report incorrect locations.  When it’s wildly off (like when it claimed I was 2500 miles away), it’s an obvious glitch and people disregard it.  But when the location isn’t as wildly off (like when it claimed I was four miles away), it’s not always obvious if it’s correct or not, and people shouldn’t make conclusions.

Ideally, the smart-phones will get smarter and not always prioritize WiFi-based geolocation when other location services contradict it.  Until then, I’ll be… somewhere.

A bit over a month after New York passed legislation to recognize same-sex marriages, Phil and I went to Brighton’s Town Clerk office, filled out a form, paid $40, and now we’re… almost married.  We next need to have an officiant and witness go through some (hopefully) short civil ceremony, sign the form, and then we’re really married. 

Well, at least in New York.  Thanks to DOMA, our marriage isn’t recognized at the federal level, which leads to a variety of issues.  But at least this is a start, and time is on our side.  You see, as people who stupidly conflate civil and religious notions of marriage get old and die off, they are replaced by young people who don’t give a shit about such trivia.  So to those who think same-sex marriage is part of a Culture War^TM downward slide, I have two words for you:  “Tick Tock.”

Both Phil and I have told various people we’re getting married, and the response is usually some form of “congratulations!”  And while that seems like a common and appropriate thing to say to someone who is starting a new life as someone’s spouse, Phil and I have been a couple for 24 years.  The fact that our union wasn’t legally recognized didn’t mean we didn’t act as if we were married.  We pass the marriage Duck Test.  So it’s not like being married is going to materially change our relationship, since we’ve functionally been each other’s husband all that time.

A standard civil ceremony with the usual present-tense declaration of commitment doesn’t seem to make much sense.  It seems ridiculous to take a vow to “love, honor, and cherish” (or whatever vows are trendy these days) when we’ve got 24 years of history behind us.  Speaking for both of us, that history includes both the times when we’ve lived up to the private commitment we exchanged back in 1987, and times when we’ve fallen short.  What’s past is prologue, and I can say with 100% certainty that post-marriage, Phil and I are likely to follow the same well-established patterns we’ve had for years.

If we must have a ceremony that amounts to anything more than 30 seconds, I think I want to write our own vows. I’d go for a slightly snarky, ironic, and past-tense set of vows.  Something of the form like, “did you Phillip, take John as your husband, back in 1987, without any clue that he would <a>, a decade before you learned <b>, and unaware he would <c> at least twice?” “And did you John, take Phillip as your husband, 24 years ago, long before you found out about <d>, years before <e> would be evident, and despite what eventually happened with <f>?”

I did, I do, and I will continue to do so.

Over on Facebook, Nick Francesco asked if the Google+ app uses encryption.  The concern seemed to be that someone could snoop your WiFi connection (like in an open public hotspot) and get private information.  That seems much more likely at the router rather than over the air, but regardless of the mechanism, it’s a valid concern.

So in a moment of procrastination, I decided to look into this.  And as I reported back to Nick, I believe the Android Google+ App does indeed use encryption (I haven’t tried the iOS app yet, but will try in the future).  What I didn’t do is detail the procedure I used to make this claim.  It’s nothing special or exotic, but here’s what I did:

At work, we have a Linux-based router at the WAN/LAN boundary.  I connected my Android phone to a wireless access point, and determined my phone’s IP address.  Then, I used tcpdump on the LAN side to spit out all traffic going to my phone’s IP address.  For our system’s configuration, that command was…

tcpdump -s 0 -X -i xxx net yyy

…replacing xxx with the Ethernet interface and yyy with the phone’s IP address.

Finally, I launched the Google+ app and watched the traffic fly.  And it’s exactly what you would expect— a DNS resolution of “m.google.com” to find out where to connect, followed by SSL-encrypted traffic on port 443.  So the Android Google+ app is safe.  Or at least however safe SSL encryption is.

After this, I was interested to see what other apps on my phone were communicating without encryption.  A fun way to see this is a slight variation on the above command line:

tcpdump -s 0 -w - -i xxx net yyy | strings

This just streams out the packets to stdout, and uses the strings filter to only show the printable characters.  Do that, and you’ll see all kinds of interesting data fly by.

I’m going to be attending the InfoComm 2011 trade show for my company.  Part of the time, I’ll be at our booth, answering questions about our products.  And the rest of the time, I’ll be roaming the show floor, looking at competitor’s offerings, checking out new technologies, and unleashing my bullshit detector.

My bullshit detector has worked flawlessly for years on inflated technical claims and idiotic marketing fluff.  And recently, it was upgraded to spot fake buzz generated from manipulation of social media networks.  It can identify an incomplete technology or meaningless corporate partnership before the second paragraph of the press release— long before the words “synergistic” and “strategic” are used.  But the sensor has always operated from a safe distance; it’s never had to deal with a full on face-to-face bullshit singularity before.  It’s quite possible that the sheer intensity of bullshit may make me just start uncontrollably giggling at the source.  That’s not terribly professional, so I’ll probably keep a thumbtack in my shoe to step on when things get too much.

Despite my usual cynicism, I’m actually looking forward to going to the show.  Most of that is getting to represent my company and the products we make.  Some of it is to see where the industry as a whole is heading, and helping to advise my company on the course to take.  And the rest is to finally meet some of the people I’ve remotely worked with over the years who were just messages in email or a voice on a phone.  

Phil and I sometimes go to the Pittsford Seafood Market, usually for the Fish Fry Special.  In terms of food quality and taste, it’s not the best we’ve ever had, but it’s not the worst either.  In terms of service… well, that’s another story.  In fact, it’s this one:

The Fish Fry Special is few chunks of battered and deep-fried unspecified white fish, your choice of cole slaw or macaroni salad, and fries.  It comes to you artfully presented with ketchup packets and tartar sauce tubs, all placed within a standard three-well plastic container.  Bon appetit!  Yes, it’s exactly the same thing you can get dozens of other places in the city.  The difference?  You’re here and not there.

I don’t like their fries.  Their onion rings are better.  So what I want is their Fish Fry Special with onion rings instead.  Nope.  Can’t do it.  It’s impossible.  The very concept is insane.  A Fish Fry Special without fries but with onion rings?  Wouldn’t that cause a rip in the fabric of space and time?

I’m told the reason is that onion rings are more expensive than fries.  Okay, I can understand that.  I’m not unreasonable.  I’m not trying to rip them off.  I’m not trying to steal money from them so they go homeless and their children starve.  So I offer what I think is a fair solution— charge me extra for the onion rings.  Just take the difference and tack that on the bill.  Nope.  Can’t do it.  It’s impossible.  That kind of math requires advanced Calculus and the batteries in their TI-89 just died.

Usually at this point, Phil interjects and says that what I really want is a Fish Fry Special with a separate order of onion rings.  Thanks Phil for being helpful, but no, you’re wrong too.  I don’t want the goddamn fries.  I won’t eat them.  They will go to waste.  Just please, give me what I want!  I don’t care how you do it!  Just make it happen!

The last time we were there, the woman taking my order thought she had a solution.  She separately weighed fish and onion rings, put them in the same three-well plastic container, and wrote the individual prices of each on the outside.  Missing was my macaroni salad.  Apparently, the inclusion of the macaroni salad would have been too close to the Fish Fry Special, and that would cause the floor to crack open with a thousand demons springing forth.

So here is how it is going to work the next time Phil and I go there.  I’m not going to say the words “Fish Fry Special” at all.  I’m going to order each item a la carte.  I’ll order fish.  I’ll order onion rings.  I’ll order macaroni salad.  And I’ll kindly suggest to them that instead of separate packages for each, they could use one of those handy three-welled plastic containers.  And I swear, if one of them says to me, “oh, like a Fish Fry Special but with onion rings,” Phil better hold me back because someone is going to die.