Aaron Traffas

Automatic helicopter

MIT has developed an indoor helicopter that automatically navigates and maps the inside of buildings. It can fly through windows and double-back on itself when it reaches a dead-end. It’s quite worth watching.

Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Viddler video.

Illusions

Meeting the parents

Countdown to Star Trek

Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film As ‘Fun, Watchable’

My last.fm review from AuctioneerTech

I posted this article recently over on the other blog. I’ve recently become a fan – nay, a fanatic – of social music site Last.fm. It could be described as Internet radio, but with several twists that make it also a music recommendation engine. I started using the service several years ago, but only recently figured out how to truly integrate it into the day-to-day routine.

The service can be used a number of ways. At its most basic level, you can login to the site with a browser and simply play music from the website. You tell Last.fm an artist you like, and it generates a “station” that plays music similar to that artist.

Last.fm knows what’s similar not by someone making arbitrary associations but by the millions if not billions of plays from users who then rate the songs with either a love or a ban. When you click the love button, you tell Last.fm that the song it played is a match to your musical tasts. When you click the ban button, you tell it that you don’t like that song and not to play it again. Last.fm uses this preference information, in addition to the artist you picked at the beginning, to build an enormous database of music relationships.

Using Last.fm at this level is novel and entertaining, but I always found myself reverting back to playing music with the Amarok, Zune or, recently, iTunes music players because the sound quality was better for locally-stored music than that streamed over the Internet. A few weeks ago, I learned how to use Last.fm to scrobble music and everything changed.

Here’s the definition and explanation of scrobbling from the Last.fm website.

Scrobbling a song means that when you listen to it, the name of the song is sent to Last.fm and added to your music profile.

Once you’ve signed up and downloaded Last.fm, you can scrobble songs you listen to on your computer or iPod automatically. Start scrobbling yourself, and see what artists you really listen to the most. Songs you listen to will also appear on your Last.fm profile page for others to see.

Millions of songs are scrobbled every day. This data helps Last.fm to organise and recommend music to people; we use it to create personalised radio stations, and a lot more besides.

With the Last.fm program downloaded and installed, every song played on your iPod, iTunes or other supported music players is recorded on the Last.fm website. This data mining means that the user profile records all music played locally and adds it to the user’s Last.fm library to generate reports and charts, which can be embedded on websites or other social networks like the one at the top right of this post, showing the users preferences.

Last.fm is a music recommendation engine in that it learns what you like and then exposes you to other music that you should like, based on the algorithms and database of music relationships. The accuracy of the system is amazing.

Finally, Last.fm is a social network. What good is music if it can’t be shared? Like Facebook or MySpace, users can associate their profiles with other friends. Once you have a friend on Last.fm, you can actually stream his or her music library. Last.fm also ranks your musical compatibility with your friends on a graduated scale, so you can know how well you would get along with someone on a long car ride.

With Last.fm competitor Pandora releasing a new version of its iPod application within the last 24 hours, it seems like the game is afoot for Internet music. Last.fm wins with its scrobbling abilities, but there are services that will actually allow a user to scrobble Pandora songs to Last.fm. I say just use Last.fm.

If you’re a Last.fm user, add traffas as your friend. Here’s a link to the profile. www.last.fm/user/traffas

Are you a fan of Internet radio? Do you like Pandora more than Last.fm? Tell me about it in the comments.

New comments system

I’m finally installing the Disqus comments system on the site tonight, and it may be a a short while before the comments are processed and put back. Don’t worry, I didn’t delete anything.

I’m winding down after a long auction tonight and one hell of a past few months. Developer sprints are tough when you’re the only developer. We implemented a fairly complete overhaul of the way the Purple Wave bidding system handles auctions in order to accommodate some of the overstock auctions we’ve been doing recently. The work is finally winding down, and I sincerely hope to be more of a presence on the website.

Chris “G” Goering had one hell of a blog post, and I hope you take the time to read it. Mason and I are excited about the new year and what musical possibilities it may hold. Trevor Burgess is activated again after having been off the grid for the last few years. Look for an acoustic show with the two of us at Bobby T’s on V-day in a few weeks. Lucas Maddy moved to Wichita and will be playing with us as much as the schedule will allow.

I’ve been a blogging fool over at auctioneertech.com, and that’s where I’ve been doing most of my writing lately. My auction tech blog was recently featured in the January 2009 edition of the Auctioneer magazine. I also started a podcast where I discuss what’s new and exciting as well as interview auctioneers and industry experts about auctions and auction technology.

I’m getting ready to head to Wichita tomorrow to the Kansas Auctioneers Association convention. It should be a fun time. I’ll be doing a fair amount of tweeting during the experience. I’ve become a huge fan of Twitter. Sign up for an account at www.twitter.com and follow me at twitter.com/traffas. The real-time updates and picture postings from the phone is pretty impressive.

That’s it for tonight. Hopefully this post will go through before Ubuntu Studio 9.04 resets my DNS settings again.

Vote for science, vote for Barack Obama

Politics is my Olympics. It’s like a Super Bowl in which we can all participate. I don’t follow sports very well, but I look forward to the circus that happens in this country once every couple years. This year’s final act has been a roller coaster ride.

Today is a special day. It’s a day when those of us who follow politics finally get to read the last page of the chapter we’ve been reading nearly exclusively for more than the last two years. Today, each state selects from among a subset of a large number of candidates for President of the United States in this election year of 2008.

How does this information relate to auctions or technology? The next president will have the ability, if not a perceived mandate, to make what could be drastic changes from our economy to foreign relations to the environment to national defense to our military involvement around the world. All of these issues are important, but they’re outside the scope of this blog. Our presence on the world stage is tightly integrated with the technology industry. That industry is directly tied to science.

How many times has public perception changed during the course of the last few thousand years? How many empires have risen? How many forms of government have been devised? How many fluctuations have we seen in mores? How many republics have failed?

All of the answers to the above questions are influenced, at least in part, to the sum of the knowledge of the human race. As time moves forward, we know more about the world. This accumulated knowledge, with a few exceptions, certainly molds new political ideas. Knowledge pulled us, perhaps kicking and screaming, out of the dark ages when, as the general public became more well-informed, they threw off the fetters of abstract, dogmatic teachings in favor of an empirical reality that better matched what they observed. When the church said one thing, and people observed another, the domain of the church – the unexplained – grew smaller. As we learn more, our knowledge becomes the basis of new beliefs as these new beliefs replace the outdated, older beliefs. Note the difference between knowledge and beliefs.

While science can be wrong, it is self-correcting. Any time science is found to be incorrect, the hypothesis is modified and retested. Once a hypothesis has been tested and found by many different, unrelated scientists to hold true under all conditions, it becomes a theory.

Some politicians don’t understand what a theory is. A theory is the closest science can come to fact. A theory is really a collection of facts that describe a phenomenon. Many politicians preface the term evolution with theory of in an effort to discredit it. They don’t understand that they’re validating it in they eyes of anyone who understands the scientific method. It’s like talking about the theory of gravity or the theory of relativity as if they haven’t been found to hold true in our tests.

There are a host of concepts that modern day con artists are trying to propagate on us as a culture. Alternative medicines like homeopathy, reflexology, acupuncture and chiropracty are fine if their placebo effect cures your headache, but can be the most immediate and dangerous of the pseudosciences to us if we try to use them to cure real diseases. Creationists, and their cousins the intelligent design crowd, fall into the same lack-of-any-credible-scientific-evidence-whatsoever group as those who propagate The Secret, the concept that wishing really hard for something happy to happen can actually make it occur. The fun party tricks of the likes of Sylvia Brown and John Edward can actually become harmful to those who believe in them and, in my opinion, demand legislation to protect the gullible, first amendment be damned.

It’s important that we recognize and pay attention to the stances held by our politicians. From Kansan Sam Brownback’s fear of stem cells and evolution to Alaskan Governor Sara Palin’s doubt that global warming is man-made to Senator Barack Obama’s remark that the science is inconclusive regarding the alleged link between autism and vaccinations – all of which are destructive to the public well being – those who make up our government are many who have questionable if not deplorable stances on scientific issues.

We must hold our politicians to the highest standard, a standard above belief and pseudoscience, above mores and norms, above religion and superstition. We must hold our politicians to acknowledge and respect the domain of science and that of the peer-reviewed scientific community.

The most brilliant political mind who never ran for office was a guy named Aaron Sorkin. He said, “Decisions are made by those who show up.” Show up tomorrow. When you vote tomorrow, make sure that you think about science as you pull the lever.

New website

I’ve been posting more and more posts that are technology- or auction-related over last few months. In an effort to both not bore existing viewers of this page as well as provide a medium where I can focus more on auctions and technology, I launched auctioneertech.com where I can cover current technology and auction events and issues without mixing in with the alt-country, political and general entertainment focuses of this site.

Chrome Palin

Rush Limbaugh is a big, fat, ignorant bastard. I listen to him when I leave work during the day in my car and forget to grab my Zune. It’s better than more entertaining than music, and in the doldrums of the day between Morning Edition and All Things Considered, it’s about the only thing without a beat that comes in on my radio.

Today he was ranting about how the liberals (said, of course, with audible disdain) were trying to make political hay with Bristol Palin’s pregnancy. He said the ‘rest of America’ had already moved on.

First, let’s ignore how thie ‘rest of America’ is actually the liberals he dispises and focus on this simple concept: liberals care about Palin’s daughter in the same way they care about a lost puppy. They want to help it, feed it and give it a good home, unlike the Republicans who want simply to eat it.

Liberals don’t factor Palin’s daughter’s pregnancy into the political equation. It’s something that happens and, like the sex lives of political candidates, it won’t effect how Palin would govern. We liberals have plenty of hay to make over the issues and what kind of governor (used generically) she would be were she to hold a higher office than Governor. The political group with the most desire to make a big deal out of her daughter’s predicament is exclusively the right-wingers, who see it as an affront to their monotonous abstinence-only drone that continues to fail to produce real results. Perhaps she’s not as conservative as she was made out to be. Or, perhaps, and I think this more likely, she’s not as good at leading and demonstrating those conservative values as she was made out to be.

I spent a fair amount of time today immersing myself in Google’s Chrome. I watched the live announcement today and downloaded it within a few minutes of it being released to the public. Unlike the server shortages that plagued Apple with it’s last big product launch, Google’s offering was easily conveyed to the multiple computers on which I installed it.

Chrome has a new Javascript engine so it’s fast. Balls fast. Melt your face fast. It’s running on Webkit so it’s pretty. Kate Bosworth pretty. Kate Bosworth in 21 pretty. I tried to get it to run on Linux using WINE and, while I got it to load, it didn’t work well enough to render any pages without crashing. It puts Firefox to shame in the coolness category, and while it has a ways to catch up when it comes to community and available plugins, it’s still faster and sexier and what I’ll be using until Microsoft puts IE8 on the ground.

New shows section

We had a great show at Bobby T’s on Friday. Thanks so much to everyone who tuned in to the broadcast. Thanks to Ty and Rob, our friends from San Francisco, who called in with credit cards to buy us rounds of drinks from several states away.

Thus ends the three-day weekend of relaxation. Today was the best day by far. Erica ate with us this morning and when I dropped her off she ended up with both of my cell phones. There is an unexplainable sense of peace that accompanies the knowledge that nobody can contact you.

It’s weird having Erica here and Megan gone. My sisters are quite similar and yet quite different. I’m excited to get to know her as I got to know Megan.

I’m watching Chelsea Lately with Lucas and Diane and plugging away at finishing the new shows section of the website. My mother was in town all day Saturday and never contacted me because she thought I was in Omaha because that’s what my website said. We had booked a show there and when I Twittered regarding its cancellation I never got around to updating the convoluted event calendar that was nailed on top of Wordpress. That’s all fixed now, as the new shows section now includes all shows, both upcoming and past – all the way back to the first launch of the site when Trevor Burgess and I were playing at Fats.

I’m typing away on my Apple slim aluminum keyboard. It’s the one I poured nearly a full cup of coffee into a couple weeks ago. I dried it, wet it, dried it again and when it wouldn’t work I’d left it for dead. A week passed and I tried it one more time and it’s been working well ever since. I guess I bought a pair to have a spare. With all the damn computers around here, I guess it will get plenty of use.

I’m selling my Cloudbook at Thursday’s auction. I couldn’t ever get the wireless to work as well as I wanted, though it seems I’m not the only one. The graphics always seemed weak, though VIA just released an open source driver for it.

I’m currently rocking the ASUS EeePC 900. It’s quite possibly the finest piece of equipment on which I’ve ever laid my hands. I turned it on long enough to hit restart on the Knoppix distribution of Linux so that I could install Ubuntu. I had good luck with Ubuntu-eee as opposed to Eee-Ubuntu. Everything worked pretty much right away. I had to load a different kernel to get the microphone working so I could play with Skype with Diane.

I got Diane an Acer Aspire One as an early birthday present. It’s slightly bigger than my Eee, but the difference in the keyboard size is pretty huge. It also runs Windows XP, which is pretty much a must for her iPod Touch. It was also crazy-cheap, weighing in at $349 at Best Buy.

It seems like John McCain’s Eskimo running mate’s daughter is knocked up. How fun.