KJE Systems

There is a lot of interesting talk these days surrounding the New York Times’ intention of setting up a paywall, which has me paying attention to how the old-school thinking of the print media is (or isn’t) changing as the web moves on without them. As I was reading my morning news today, I noticed a little box with aerospace related stories on the side of the page. Hey! I work in aerospace, how neat. Wait a minute, there’s this little LinkedIn logo there too, neat… and disturbing, I’m guessing this is connected somehow.

LinkedIn Driven Content

So after a little more reading, I dug into the part of the privacy policy that deals with this implementation.

NYTimes.com has an arrangement with LinkedIn, a third party, in which we may use LinkedIn profile information to provide LinkedIn users with customized advertising and a short list of customized headlines when they read Business or Technology articles on NYTimes.com. By way of example, a LinkedIn user on NYTimes.com might see a box highlighting headlines about the energy business if the industry selected in his or her LinkedIn profile is “Energy sector”. This is facilitated by sharing a cookie that contains non-personally identifiable information such as Industry and Job Function from that user�s LinkedIn profile and matching that with relevant headlines.
We do not share any personally identifiable information with LinkedIn.

So it’s a shared cookie, and my LinkedIn data is not supposed to be sent from LinkedIn to the NYT.

Although this is nothing new, it’s the first time I’ve seen it. �I think it’s an interesting use of my personal information to serve me content, and ads, that will interest me, while still not sharing my personal information across sites without my consent. As long as my data stays in one place, if this will help the NYT to pay the bills so I can keep reading for free, then I’m cool with that.

I’ve signed up at beyond the whiteboard a CrossFit workout log website today. The main draw for me to this site is the graphing capabilities that they seem to have. I’ve only entered one workout so far, but I’m going to try to go back as far as possible for the data that I have written down and I’ll see how well the visualization of my fittening goes.

The site is in beta, which was evident when I tried to sign up. I got a Rails application error about the app not starting up the first time I tried to register. I fixed that by doing it over again and everything worked fine the second time.

One of the systems they seem to be using is Fusion Charts to produce their graphs. As I pick up more and more on data visualization, I’m very interested to learn of these new tools.

I spend a lot of time in my kitchen, cooking up some hopefully tasty creations. With our recent move, our kitchen was upgraded considerably. In the apartment, I could hear the TV and even watch it, albeit at a viewing angle approaching 180 degrees. In our new place, the TV in the living room isn’t visible from the kitchen, and I was getting lonely and bored cooking while the TV was on in the other room.

Our recent subscription to Rogers’ Digital VIP pack includes a SD digital box that we weren’t going to use in the living room. So we, and by ‘we’ I mean ‘I’, decided to buy a small TV and mount it on a wall in the kitchen. The only problem is that if you look closely at this picture, there is no cable outlet in the kitchen. There is, however, a Cat5 drop here, running from the ground floor.

Moving down to the ground floor, we find the utility room that houses our washer & dryer, furnace, and hot water tank. This is also the room where the cable and phone lines come in from the outside, so our cable modem and wireless router live here too. It’s a big mess right now, but clean-up is on the low-priority to-do list, and I’m not too keen on spending too much on making this room pretty, especially since we are renting.

After some research, and a failed attempt at just soldering the RCA wires to the Cat5 twisted pairs (Yes, I knew there is an impedance mismatch, I just wanted to see for myself), I went to Home Depot and they had what I was looking for:

• Leviton 40735-RYW QuickPort RCA 110-Type, Yellow Barrel, Color White
• Leviton 40735-RRW QuickPort RCA 110-Type, Red Barrel, Color White
• Leviton 40735-RWW QuickPort RCA 110-Type, White Barrel, Color White

What these do is let you use one twisted pair to send one of the three RCA signals, yellow for video, red and white for audio, over one twisted pair of Cat5 cable. There are 4 twisted pairs in one Cat5 cable, so you can use 3 for the RCA signals and have one to spare, which you can run a telephone over if you wish. They were about $5 each, and I needed 6, 3 for each end. Perfect for my situation!

The 40735-R*W units come with everything you need to get them attached to your Cat5, so other than something to strip the twisted pair wires inside the Cat5 cable, you don’t need anything special to get this working.

So in the basement, we have the cable box, RCA wires, and the QuickPort connectors:

There were 3 Cat5 wires there, going to the master bedroom, the guest bedroom, and the kitchen. To figure out which one to use, I guessed. Got it right the first time. =)

So on we move to the kitchen. It’s the same process, plug some Cat5 into the wall socket, slice off one end and put on some more of my favourite new connectors:

I picked up a 19″ LCD TV, a Sharp LC-19SB24U. It has a really thin bezel, which makes it look quite sleek in the kitchen. To mount it to the wall, I picked up a mount (00K79.21) at the Lee Valley showroom / warehouse here in Ottawa. I found out that Lee Valley has some great prices on these from my favourite home-theatre forum: Digital Home Canada.

I decided to put it on the wall where you see it so that I can put it out of the way when I don’t want the LCD close the kitchen work area. Here it is mounted to the wall:

So it all worked out pretty well. Here are some shots with the TV in the cooking position and in the safe at home position:

So at this point in time there are a couple of things left to do here, clean up the wires, and implement some sort of IR transmission system so I don’t have to walk down to the laundry room every time I want to change channels!

The last picture I have is of the wire management package that I picked up at Home Depot. I just need to pick up a white Cat5 cable to run from the wall up to the back of the TV:

So, it’s been a fun project… and now I can watch Sportscentre in the morning making breakfast and the Habs while making dinner =). If you have any comments, let me know at ken@kje.ca.

From a link that was in the paper mentioned in the previous post, I started to read about RIOT, the MLB simulator at Berkeley. Here is an excerpt from their page:

Calculating the clinching and elimination numbers for the RIOT baseball standings involves systematically searching for scenarios in which particular teams finish with or without gaining playoff berths. For example, we determined that San Francisco was eliminated from first place in the National League West on September 8th by proving that no feasible scenario exists in which the Giants win the division. The problem of determining whether a team can advance to playoffs given the current league standings and schedule of remaining games can be solved by a single maximum flow calculation (see Hoffman and Rivlin [1] and Schwartz [2]). By introducing additional constraints, we extend this maximum flow formulation to derive integer linear programming problems which find the minimum number of games a given team must win to clinch a playoff spot or avoid elimination from post season play. Robinson [3] takes a similar approach to finding a scenario which maximizes a given team’s lead in the final standings. Interested readers should also consult Gusfield and Martel [4], who show how to find the minimum number of games a team must win to avoid elimination from first place by solving a parametric minimum cut problem.

Very neat. Click here to download their paper.

If you google for nhl playoff simulator my NHL Eastern Conference Playoff Race Simulator comes in at #3 in the search results. While I was checking my Google ranking, I found a paper written by some professors from the University of Alberta where they used some simple Monte Carlo simulations in Excel to simulate the end of the 2004 NHL regular season, and then the playoffs. If you are of the less math-inclined persuasion, skim sections 2 and 3, but be sure to read at least section 4. Here is a reference to the paper:

Ingolfsson A. (2004), “Simulating NHL Games to Motivate Student Interest in OR/MS,” INFORMS Transactions on Education, Vol. 5, No 1, http://ite.pubs.informs.org/Vol5No1/Ingolfsson/