Month: June 2015

A Windows Security Alert, Courtesy of Samsung

I’ve gotten used to a whole lot of silly vendor tricks over the years. Just about every vendor I’ve worked with has done something completely idiotic, just to cause the other guy woe. The user always ends up hurt. Readers of Administering Windows Server 2008 Server Core, Microsoft Windows Command Line Administration Instant Reference, and Windows 8 for Dummies Quick Reference need to be aware that according to a ComputerWorld article, Samsung has turned off Windows Update. The worrisome part of all this is that there is apparently an executable to turn the support off, but not another executable to turn support back on. Sites, such as engadget, are recommending you perform a clean install of Windows on your computer to get rid of the problem.

The whole issue seems to revolve around Samsung being worried that Microsoft’s updates will interfere with Samsung’s updates of its software. The result could be that the system won’t work. Phrases, such as “could be” and “might not”, always bother me. Samsung must not have tested the problem fully or they would have had a more positive and straightforward comment to make when asked about the problem. The point is that the user loses. Advice such as telling users they must reinstall Windows from scratch to get rid of the problem sounds just dandy until you figure out that most users can’t perform this task, so they’ll be out extra money getting someone else to do the job or we’ll all face the issues that happen when updates don’t occur. It’s not as if the Internet really requires yet more zombies (computers under hacker control)—we have no lack of them now.

A similar problem occurred not long ago when Lenovo thought it would be a good idea to pre-install the Superfish adware on the computers it put out. Most computer vendors add bloatware to their systems, which really does make it a good idea to perform a clean install when you buy a new system, but purposely adding adware seems a bit deranged to me. Lenovo later apologized and fixed the problem, but the point is that they made the mistake in the first place.

Some of my readers have asked why so many of my books include installation instructions or at least pointers to the installation instructions. The answer is that vendors keep doing things that make me shake my head and wonder just what they were thinking about. When you buy a new system from someone, perform a clean install of the operating system to get rid of the bloatware or have someone else do it for you. If you choose to keep the pre-installed operating system in place, make sure you research any oddities of the installation (such as turning off Windows Update). Otherwise, you might end up with a situation where Windows Update simply doesn’t do the job because someone told it not to. Let me know your thoughts on pre-installed software, bloatware, and vendors who seem completely clueless at [email protected].

Story Update!

According to a ComputerWorld article, Samsung will end the practice of disabling Windows Update. Of course, one has to wonder why they did it in the first place. If you have one of the systems that disabled Windows Update, a patch will restore the system to perform the required updates.

 

Introducing the Baby Bunnies!

A number of people have asked me about how the rabbits are doing. It seems the chickens have been monopolizing the blog (and they have). About 30 days ago, Spartacus, my buck, made his rounds to the various cages with nest boxes. However, there wasn’t too much to report until Wednesday. Moonbeam, one of the does, had started pulling out her hair to make a nest. She had also gotten quite pudgy. On Wednesday she started having her babies. Now, she’s back to being a much thinner rabbit. (Because she’s feeding babies, I’ll give her nearly twice the normal amount of food and I’ll ensure her water dish is completely full.)

Moonbeam is a Rex and California Giant hybrid who just had a litter of eight kits.
Moonbeam and Her Special Treat

A friend had given me some strawberries and a few of them were getting a bit on the mushy side. So, all three of the new or expecting does received a special surprise with their food this morning. Moonbeam never eats her meal before I close the cage, so she’s just eying me right now.

Moonbeam is the best mom out of all the rabbits. She goes out of her way to keep her babies (kits) happy. To start out, she completely fills the nest box with her hair. Imagine having to pull out the amount of hair shown here.

Moonbeam uses her own hair to keep her babies warm after they're born.
Moonbeam Completely Fills the Nest Box with Hair

I’m always careful opening the top of the nest box. It’s important not to upset the mom. She could possibly choose to abandon her babies, so I open the lid carefully and then wait to see if she pokes her head in to watch me. Moonbeam trusts me, so she calmly sat outside the nest box and ate breakfast. She still watched me, but she wasn’t anxious about it. This view of the hair gives you an idea of just how much she pulled out (I shot her good side for the photograph).

Moonbeam made herself nearly bald in an attempt to provide enough hair for her kits.
Moonbeam Provides a Lot of Hair to Keep the Kits Warm

I never touch the hair or the kits. A number of texts that I’ve read say it’s permissible, but I’ve had does reject their babies because of the human scent on them, so I choose not to take the risk. I carefully moved the hair aside to count eight pudgy babies. The babies are born blind and hairless. They’re actually quite small at this point. It’s important to remove the hair just long enough to count (and take a picture in this case). Otherwise, the babies could get a chill.

This picture shows three of the kits, complete with the head of one of them.
Three of the Kits

You can only see three of the kits in this picture. There is so much hair that I can only move a small part of it at a time. I definitely don’t want to force poor Moonbeam to pull out any more. Notice that you can clearly see the head (with ears) of one of the kits. This one will likely be completely white. The other two kits have blotches that indicate they have black spots like their dad.

Moonbeam actually required 32 days to have her babies. The average time is about 30 days. That’s part of the reason that these kits are a bit bigger than normal. The kits will probably stay in the nest box for the first 30 days or so of their lives. It just depends on how fast they grow. During that time, Moonbeam will feed them each day. Let me know your thoughts about raising rabbits at [email protected].

 

Contemplating the Issue of Bias in Data Science

When Luca and I wrote Python for Data Science for Dummies we tried to address a range of topics that aren’t well covered in other places. Imagine my surprise when I saw a perfect article to illustrate one of these topics in ComputerWorld this week, Maybe robots, A.I. and algorithms aren’t as smart as we think. With the use of AI and data science growing exponentially due to the fact it can help improve a company’s marketing tenfold, you might think that computers can think. They can’t. You can learn about the role data science has in marketing here but for now, I think it’s important to reiterate the fact that computers can emulate or simulate the thinking process, but they don’t actually think. A computer is a machine designed to perform math quite quickly. If we want thinking computers, then we need a different kind of a machine. It’s the reason I wrote the Computers with Common Sense? post not too long ago. The sort of computer that could potentially think is a neural network and I discuss them in the Considering the Future of Processing Power post. (Even Intel’s latest 18 core processor, which is designed for machine learning and analytics isn’t a neural network-it simply performs the tasks that processors do now more quickly.)

However, the situation is worse than you might think, which is the reason for mentioning the ComputerWorld article. A problem occurs when the computer scientists and data scientists working together to create algorithms that make it appear that computers can think forget that they really can’t do any such thing. Luca and I discuss the effects of bias in Chapter 18 of our book. The chapter might have seemed academic at one time-something of interest, but potentially not all that useful. Today that chapter has taken on added significance. Read the ComputerWorld article and you find that Flickr recently released a new image recognition technology. The effects of not considering the role of bias in interpreting data and in the use of algorithms has has horrible results. The Guardian goes into even more details, describing how the program has tagged black people as apes and animals. Obviously, no one wanted that particular result, but forgetting that computers can’t think has caused precisely that unwanted result.

AI is an older technology that isn’t well understood because we don’t really understand our own thinking processes. It isn’t possible to create a complete and useful model of something until you understand what it is that you’re modeling and we don’t truly understand intelligence. Therefore, it’s hardly surprising that AI has taken so long to complete even the smallest baby steps. Data science is a newer technology that seeks to help people see patterns in huge data sets-to understand the data better and to create knowledge where none existed before. Neither technology is truly designed for stand-alone purposes yet. While I find Siri an interesting experiment, it’s just that, an experiment.

The Flickr application tries to take the human out of the loop and you see the result. Technology is designed to help mankind achieve more by easing the mundane tasks performed to accomplish specific goals. When you take the person out of the loop, what you have is a computer that is only playing around at thinking from a mathematical perspective-nothing more. It’s my hope that the Flickr incident will finally cause people to start thinking about computers, algorithms, and data as the tools that they truly are-tools designed to help people excel in new ways. Let me know your thoughts about AI and data science at [email protected].

 

A Chick Update (Part 10)

Sometimes chick behaviors can be a little more than interesting. Of course, you saw a few of those behaviors in the previous post, A Chick Update (Part 9).

This week was special in many ways. One of the Buff Orpington chicks has taken it into her head that she needs to sit on eggs. However, the egg she wants to sit on is the super jumbo sized eggs laid by the Buff Orpington hen. The super jumbo eggs are so large they actually peg my egg scale. My customers love them, but I have yet to figure out what this chick is thinking about because she’s truly not large enough to sit on anything quite that large—at least not comfortably. I had a good chuckle the first time I saw her doing it and must admit that the laughs haven’t ended. Well, if it helps her become a better hen, then more power to her. None of the other chicks has shown the slightest inclination to lay on any of the eggs laid by the hens.

The chicks can be even messier than the hens and the hens won’t lay eggs in a nest box fouled beyond a certain level. With that in mind, I’ve been replacing the hay in the nest boxes every week or week and a half.  I’ve also been scraping accumulate fecal matter off the horizontal surfaces each day. This past week  I decided that the coop needed a lot more than a touch-up. Unfortunately, that meant locking the hens out in the run while I did the cleaning. Chaos ensued while the hens staked out various territories and decided it might be fun to chase the chicks around for a while.

Even the best fun wears out after a while though and the hens soon decided that they absolutely must get into the coop at this particular moment. At first the pecking at the run door was light and somewhat sporadic. It soon grew much louder and more spirited. Eventually, the hens decided that the hen pecking at the door at that particular moment (only one can fit in front of the door) wasn’t doing a very good job. So they took turns knocking each other off the ramp, with a new hen pecking frantically at the door. All this happened in about 45 minutes mind you, so I really wasn’t taking very long to clean the coop, but you could never have convinced the hens of it.

When the coop was finally cleaned, the hens came strutting in—fuming. They gave me a piece of their mind. A few jumped in the nest boxes and began to pick at the new hay. Violet chose to provide me with the full onslaught of her upset by screaming at me (in chicken no less). Rose decided to peck my boots. Let’s say that the hens were definitely not impressed with my cleaning job—it fell well below par.

At this point, the chicks began to look inside the run door, but they seemed most determined not to come in. They seemed confused, “Is this the right place?” After a few seconds one of the chicks screamed and ran back down the ramp, followed by the others. They refused to go into the coop until it was time to put them up for the night.

Chickens are suspicious of everything. It’s a natural behavior that keeps them alive in the wild because everyone loves a good chicken dinner. However, in the coop, the behavior often leaves me belly laughing. If you get chickens for no other purpose than to get a good laugh, you really could do worse. Let me know your thoughts about all things chicken at [email protected].

 

What Net Neutrality Means to You

I’ve written about Net Neutrality before in the Understanding the Effects of Net Neutrality on Web Programmers post. The post described how Net Neutrality affects developers in particular and made a passing reference to its effect on other users as well. The issues haven’t really changed. Enforcing Net Neutrality could mean free and equal access to the Internet by everyone who needs to use it, but nothing I’ve seen so far really defines what the government means by free or equal. I have concerns that some high priority needs, such as medical or real time communications, will suffer under Net Neutrality. However, the longer I think about the issue, the more I come to realize that some form of Net Neutrality is essential to the health of the Internet as we know it now. In addition, most medical posts I’ve read favor Net Neutrality as being essentially good for patient access to healthcare needs.

A number of things have happened since that post. The most notable is that Net Neutrality has become an issue of Democrats versus Republicans, rather than an honest effort to provide the sort of service that everyone wants. As I predicted, the whole matter ended up in the courts where an appeals court has decided to allow the FCC to implement the Net Neutrality rules. To counteract the court decision, House Republicans have added riders to a must pass bill to fund the government that affects the FCC’s ability to enforce Net Neutrality rules. Apparently, the cable companies have called in the favors they provided politicians in the form of campaign contributions. The Republicans are taking this action despite evidence that most people support Net Neutrality regardless of political identity.

The whole Net Neutrality issue has taken a new direction—one that is becoming all too familiar to Americans. One side, the Democrats in this case, choose to champion an issue and the other side, the Republicans in this case, decide against it. Our legislators seem determined to waste time and energy fighting with each other, rather than accomplish anything resembling real work. In the middle of it all are companies offering money—paying legislators to do their bidding. In this case, the people are on the losing side of the equation. Everything I’ve read tells me that this is a situation where the government really doesn’t care what the people want—it’s all about the money.

Of course, there is a group of people who are caught in the middle of all this—application developers. Actually, anyone responsible for ensuring content moves on the Internet is caught in this current decision to do anything but act responsibly on the part of the government. It isn’t possible to create applications that perform well when you don’t know how the communications used to transfer the data will work. Until the government gets its act together, developers and other IT professionals will simply have to take their best guess as to how to make applications perform well and that hurts everyone. Let me know your thoughts about Net Neutrality and the developer at [email protected].

 

A Chick Update (Part 9)

The chicks are continuing to grow. They’re definitely working their way into coop life. Of course, the hens will continue to intimidate them until they’re full sized, but it all comes down to keeping the pecking order straight. As the new chicks become larger and more capable, some of them will work their way up the social ladder and eventually become leaders in the coop. It’s fascinating to watch them grow and change. They still peep like young chicks, which is one of the reasons I think the hens don’t actually spend a lot of time harassing them. Nature provides cues that younger animals need special care. It’s most definitely that way with hens. I imagine there will be some additional confrontation in the coop when the chicks become full-fledged pullets. In the meantime, the hens do continue to teach their charges the appropriate behavior of chickens.

At a certain point in their development, chicks will start to manifest more hen-like behaviors. This week I noticed that the chicks are now starting to hang out with each other outside. They’ll simply roost together during the daylight hours and watch that silly man working in the heat of the day in the garden. I actually do find them staring at me. I tried to get a good picture of the roosting behavior, but every time I started getting close enough, they’d jump down because they just knew I was going to feed them.

As they grow older, the chicks start chumming around on the roost.
Chicks Viewing the World from a Roosting Spot

Sometimes the chicks will sit out there for hours just watching the world pass by. They murmur at each other and I often wonder what they’re saying. If you listen long enough, you do find that chickens most definitely have a vocabulary.

There was a change in the chick lineup this week and it probably happens in most coops at some point. One of the Barred Plymouth Rock chicks never really got along with the others. It would try to attack the older hens and it didn’t pal around with the other chicks. I could never get it to sit in my hand. Let’s just say that it wasn’t very social. I had planned on spending time with it improving its social skills. Unfortunately, the chick had other ideas. It ran between my legs to get out of the coop this week. Nothing would convince it to come back inside and every attempt to catch it was unsuccessful. This meant that the chick would spend the night outdoors. Someone had a chicken dinner that night—I never saw the chick again. Interestingly enough, I didn’t get any eggs the next day. The chickens seemed to realize that someone was missing.

People fail to understand that chickens, like every other animal, have personalities. Those traits define how the chicken acts within the flock. For example, I’ve had to get rid of some chickens in the past because they started eating eggs (see Feeding for Healthy Chickens for details). You can modify some behaviors, but not others. An antisocial hen will cause constant problems in the flock and that’s what was happening with this Barred Rock. After she left, the coop suddenly quieted down. Because of their personality traits, you need to treat the chickens in the flock differently. Some chickens really do want to be held, others petted, others talked to, and some just want to be left alone. Knowing your hens makes a huge difference in providing appropriate care.

The chicks are also making progress in their management training. At the end of the day I can now put their final bit of food in the coop. Going into the run, I can clap my hands and they run inside to enjoy their meal—at which point, I close the run door. Eventually, they’ll start to come when I cluck at them. It takes time to train the hens, but the older hens do come when I call them. Let me know your thoughts about all things chicken at [email protected].

 

Star Trek, One Step Closer

I’ve written a number of posts about 3D printing because it has so much potential for creating a new kind of world where things aren’t such as concern any longer. If all you really need are some raw materials to print out anything you need, the overstocking of stuff really isn’t a concern any longer. You will have only those items you need because spares of anything aren’t a problem. That’s how things were on Star Trek. People seemed less inclined to hoard anything because there simply wasn’t a reason to do so. That’s why a recent ComputerWorld article, How astronauts 3D printed a wrench they needed in space, grabbed my attention.

The article points out another use for 3D printing, which is fine, but there are a lot of articles about 3D printing now so that’s not really the focal point. The focal point for me is that the printing process met a practical need in an environment where the need couldn’t be met in any other way. The kicker is that the astronaut in question really wanted a ratchet to go with the wrench and they were able to send him one! In reality, the printer received the plans for the ratchet and simply printed it out like any other part.

The essence of the article is about printing things in space that the astronauts need to accomplish useful tasks. At one time, not long ago, if an astronaut didn’t take something along, it wasn’t available. However, read the story in more detail and you find out that the setup recycles the old plastic devices. This means that an astronaut can create a wrench when needed, discard it, and use the same plastic to create something else. That’s the principle behind the replicator in Star Trek. Old things were remade into new things. So what we’re seeing is science fiction becoming science fact right before our eyes.

The future holds the promise of allowing people to perform tasks in a creative way without having to worry nearly as much about resources. The use of 3D printing will eventually make it possible to create anything needed anywhere. Just how long it takes us to move to the next step will be interesting. There is still a lot of low hanging fruit to pick on the technology tree, but eventually we’ll need to conquer the harder issues of being able to produce complex items at the atomic level. That step should prove interesting indeed. Let me know your thoughts about 3D printing at [email protected].

 

A Chick Update (Part 8)

A lot has happened with the chicks since last week’s A Chick Update (Part 7) report. Of course, they continue to grow. They’re also arguing a bit more, but that’s the way of siblings everywhere. Sometimes the arguments are quite funny though. One chick tried to get what it thought was a worm or another goodie from another chick, only to discover the goodie was just a piece of straw. She then blamed the other chick for misleading her (or that seems to have been the point of the second peck). I sometimes watch them for a while just to see what they’ll do next. It’s difficult, at times, to figure out what they’re doing. Of course, I’m sure they think the same thing of me.

This week was the first week the chicks were able to go out of the coop and into the run. Things went pretty much as I thought they would. At first the chicks hid in the corner furthest away from the door leading to the run, but they warmed up to the idea of being outside quite quickly. It wasn’t very long and they were outside running about, sometimes chasing each other from one end of the run to the other. Mostly they tried to emulate the hens though and pecked at the dirt appreciatively.

 

The eight chicks are now old enough to go into the run outside the coop.
Chicks Having Fun in the Run

What I didn’t realize is that the chicks soon discovered one of the hen tunnels. Yes, I thought I was pretty smart filling in all those tunnels and waiting until it had rained a few times to ensure that the dirt would be packed down, but the chicks had an entirely different idea. It wasn’t long before they opened the tunnel enough to get out from the run. The hens were too large to fit, so they squawked as the chicks enjoyed their freedom. Only, the freedom wasn’t quite so welcome after a while and the chicks started to scream quite loudly. It seems they couldn’t figure out how to get back into the run.

Upon hearing all the turmoil, I decide to check things out. What I saw were the six hens, who should have been able to fly out of the run and enjoy a walk wherever they wanted, stuck inside the run because they had become too fat to fly that high. Outside the run were the chicks, running about madly, trying to find a way back into the run. Yes, it was the old story of the grass being greener on the other side of the fence with me stuck trying to figure out a workable solution.

I waited for the chicks to calm down. I knew that if I approached them at the time I discovered the breakout, they’d simply run in some other direction. Three of the chicks just let me pick them up when I carefully approached them. Not surprisingly, it was the Buff Orpingtons who made the gesture.  I carefully opened the coop door and called to the remaining chicks. Two of the Americaunas just walked inside, looking quite pleased with themselves. This left three chicks outside.

At this point, I broke out the fishing net. I hope my neighbors weren’t watching (and if they were, they got a really good laugh). Imagine a guy running around chasing chicks in the high grass and woods with fishing net in hand trying to catch the chicks underneath. The ground is completely uneven, there are hidden holes, and the chicks have a tendency to disappear under leaves at the worst possible moment. It took fully an hour to catch the two Barred Plymouth Rocks (a most obstinate bird) and the remaining Americauna.

The next morning I spent additional time making sure the tunnel was quite sealed. This time the chicks stayed inside the run. I’ve been out there first thing every morning since looking for additional avenues of escape because the chicks certainly are trying hard to find one. Let me know your thoughts about all things chicken at [email protected].

 

Computers with Common Sense?

The whole idea behind products, such as Siri, is to give computers a friendlier face. Much like the computer on the Enterprise in Star Trek, you converse with the machine and get intelligent answers back much of the time. The problem is that computers don’t currently have common sense. A computer really doesn’t understand anything anyone says to it. What you’re seeing is incredibly complex and clever programming. The understanding is in the math behind the programming. Computers truly are machines that perform math-related tasks with extreme speed and perfection.

It was with great interest that I recently read an article on the Guardian, Google a step closer to developing machines with human-like intelligence. The opening statement is misleading and meant to bedazzle the audience, but then the article gets into the actual process behind computers that could emulate common sense well enough that we’d anthropomorphize them even more than we do now. If the efforts of Professor Geoff Hinton and others are successful, computers could potentially pass the Turing Test in a big way. In short, it would become hard to tell a computer apart from a human. We very well could treat them as friends sometime in the future (some people are almost there now).

Articles often allude to scientific principles, but don’t really explain them. The principle at play in this case is the use of sentiment analysis based on words and word n-grams. You can build a sentiment analysis by using machine learning and multiclass predictors. Fortunately, you don’t have to drive yourself nuts trying to understand the basis for the code you find online. Luca and I wrote Python for Data Science for Dummies to make it easier to understand the science behind the magic that modern applications seemingly ply. Let me know your thoughts about the future of computers with common sense at [email protected].