Superbowl Upset?

The Giants and Patriots played each other 5 weeks before they met in the superbowl. The game was very competitive, with the Pats winning by just 3 points. Given these facts, can someone explain to me:

1. why the entire sports journalism world is calling this an upset; and even more ridiculously
2. why there is even debate on where this sits as one of the greatest upsets of all time?

I guess the answer is that logic, and prior football knowledge is secondary to outcomes that simply disagree with the media-induced frenzy that is the superbowl hype-machine.

Shameless Journalism

This morning's top "news" story on CNN:

Chevrolet Malibu wins Car of the Year

General Motors' Chevrolet Malibu mid-size sedan, radically redesigned for the 2008 model year, won the North American Car of the Year Award today at the first media preview day for the Detroit Auto Show.

This is not news, but free advertising for General Motors. Just more signs that corporations, one way or another, are deeply connected to the media and are being used to manipulated the public. And if you think that being the "car of the year" is generally interesting news to people, I might agree if this was really the story. But if you look carefully, it is qualified as the "North American Car of the Year", which implies it really is not the car of the year since they've excluded all the imports that typically win the real car of the year awards. Maybe CNN is just trying to show their patriotic side?

Goose Gossage and Hall of Fame

From cbssportsline.com this evening:

"It's insane it took nine years on the ballot for Goose Gossage to get elected to Cooperstown, but thankfully voters come to their senses."

Kind of funny to see a sportswriter say that what sportswriters do is "insane" (it is sportswriters that determine who gets in the hall of fame after all). Anyone paying attention knowns that (almost all) sportswriters are definitely not journalists, and are more typically not any smarter or thoughtful than a random person off the street. So when a sports media outlet publishes a headline that effectively admits that sportswriters, as a group, are behaving with no rhyme or reason (or possibly with deliberate capriciousness), that's something I find refreshing.

Experts miss target on storm numbers

Every year, about June-time, you here the media outlets regurgitating some press release put out by some government/academic body (usually the NOAA) about the upcoming hurricane season. It's typically got some eye-grabbing headlines predicting something close to Armageddon. Once you've lived past the age of about 25, and if you've been paying attention, the question starts to creep into your mind as to how accurate have these people been over the years, especially since you have yet to see Armageddon despite 25+ years of expecting it.

So each year, you see the same story in the media (which is what passes for news) and start to think that responsible journalism would require publishing the record of the people making the predictions. Yet all that is ever included in these articles are the fear-mongering predictions, nothing about the past accuracy of these agencies making the predictions, which seems like the most logical thing that should be included.

So it was quite the surprise for me to see the CNN article that appeared today that seemed to actually revisit the predictions, especially because they were stating just how wrong they had been: not even in the ballpark. I've been paying attention to this for many years, and this is the first instance where I have seen any main-stream media outlet make any attempt to revisit the predictions, so it was a pleasant surprise.

I suspect that, come June, CNN will still run the same annual article on the NOAA press-release. I'd like to hope they mention just how wildly wrong they were in 2007 when they report their 2008 predictions, but my experience tells me not to get my hopes up.

CNN Atrocities

I have, and I will continue to rant about CNN's treatment of news and/or journalism. I read the CNN home page mainly to ensure I do not miss 'mainstream media', since I tend to be forced to interact with people whose entire view of the world is derived from such sources.

Still, even in this context, the ineptitude of this "news source" drives me to a semi-uncontrollable need to rant about its coverage. Therefore, if you think I should stop reading CNN's headlines if I don't like them, you should understand that I really have no choice: society is forcing me to stay "informed".

My favorite "CNN Atrocity":


One morning, maybe 9 or 10am EST a few month ago, in the top stories list of headlines was something very close to the effect:

Ford recalls 500,000 vehicles

Interesting. A bit of a black eye for Ford I thought. An hour later, in the same position in their "top headlines", I see the two part headline to the effect:

Ford offers big rebates | Recall

Are you kidding me? Ford offering rebates is a "top story"? That's a commercial, not a news story. Yet CNN decided that this is more important that 1/2 millions vehicles being recalled, or in reality, used this as a sorry excuse to bury the recall story.

Is there anyone out there that doesn't think that someone at Ford called someone at CNN to get this headlines changed? If so, please refrain from contacting me: you clearly need more experience in the world before having an opinion on such matters.

I even suspect that someone at CNN thought they were maintaining some form of journalistic integrity by still including the link to the recall story in the second part of that line. All the while, someone at Ford is smiling with how clever they were in turning a negative news article into a free advertisement platform.

Your computer may be part of criminal network

The title of this post is the same as the CNN title of what appears to be the 6th most important thing happening in the world (or maybe just the US) at 10pm EST tonight. Essentially, they took a non-news story and cleverly crafted it to the most inflammatory, eye-catching headline they could.

The fact that millions of personal computers serve as a bots in these spam bot networks is a known fact and this situation has existed for many, many years. This is not news to anyone that knows of such things, and is very, very late news for anyone that does not. Still, because someone, somewhere, issued a press release that was news to the generally technically-naive CNN reporter(s)/editor(s), this was clearly something they needed to report as "breaking news". Then someone at CNN decides to do it in a way that would have the highest emotional impact among people that were just as naive about such things (since all great journalism tries to cater to the lowest common denominator). If I were the unscrupulous editor-in-charge, I would have boiled down the headline to say:

"Your computer is a criminal!"

Maybe this might be a little too obvious that we were depending on the shock factor to lure readers in, so maybe the editors made the right choice in their toned-down headline. Then again, just removing the exclamation point might be enough to turn that 'National Enquirer' headline, into being CNN-worthy.

Just another example of how rare good journalism is in this day and age. It seems two types of people dominate in today's media: the naive lower-level journalists and the corrupt editors that are in someone's pocket. That's a very, very bad combination.

The Making of Sparky II - Preparing the Brain

See Part I if you want to read the preceding article. Lots of progress made recently, and the picture shows the current look of Sparky.

Though the Roomba has an on-board processor, to use as the main 'brain' for a roomba-based autonomous robot requires a lot of contortions. The iRobot folks provide a nice API, and underlying control algorithms that run on this processor, but do not provide any direct way to download arbitrary software to it. The best way to use the roomba is to allow its processor to do the low-level motor/sensor control, and add a 'brain' to it.

Even a small form-factor computer is too much weight for the roomba, and often too much of a power hog. The best thing to use is a device made for low-power, small form-factor, embedded situations. It turns out that a typical Linksys wireless AP/router is an ideal device to use for this. It can be made to run GNU/Linux, has built in wired and wireless ethernet, a built in switch, and through the SDK of the OpenWRT project, a semi-easy way to develop custom code.

The Linksys WRTSL54GS model also has a USB hub, and extra flash memory, which makes it a little more expensive than the generic WRT54G routers, but worth it for this application.

Installing GNU/Linux on the Linksys routers is pretty simple and safe IF you do not get too adventurous. You download the image from OpenWRT, go to ther Linksys admin page on the routers web pages, choose to install new firmware, and that's it.

The pitfalls to avoid that resulted in two 'bricked' routers for me:

• even when the software reports that the firmware is upgraded and ready, do not believe it: don't reboot the thing or otherwise look the wrong way at it if it still has flashing lights;
• do not use the 2.6 Linux kernel;
• avoid building your own kernel/image unless you absolutely need it.

I am not sure exactly which ones of these was the cause of my failures, but by avoiding these, you can save yourself some money. Keep in mind, every one of these I did successfully more than one time before I hosed up the router, so these are things that can safely be done, but something in this space of things also caused the problems.

There are a number of ways to salvage a 'bricked' router. I tried them all, multiple times, with no success (including some very tricky soldering for the last-resort JTAG method).

My final call was to use the newer Kamikaze openwrt build, but with the 2.4 kernel. That runs fine and has the right module for operation of the webcam that will serve as the robot's eye(s).
Instead of trying to make a custom image, I just use the SDK to cross-compile any software that is not already available that I need.