Most people have heard about the issue with Amazon labeling books with GLBT themes as “adult”, and thus no longer displaying them in search results or sales rankings. Last night when I did a search for “homosexuality”, the only results I got were anti-gay propaganda; “A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality” is the #1 result. There are three theories about what happened: it was a “hack”, a glitch, or a policy decision.

I contacted Amazon via their web form:

I am extremely disappointed to read that you have labeled all literature with homosexual themes as “adult”, thereby making it unsearchable. I have been a customer of your company for 10 years and have spent many thousands of dollars at your store. If this is truly a corporate decision and not a glitch, and if it is not rectified, I will no longer be doing business with your company.

And today received the following response:

This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.

It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles - in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon’s main product search.

Many books have now been fixed and we’re in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future.

Thanks for contacting us. We hope to see you again soon.

I hope they’re telling the truth. Thus far the search results look the same as they did last night.

I’ve learned an important lesson the hard way this year: addressing a problem too generically is setting yourself up for failure.

I don’t consider myself a programmer, but given who my husband is, I’ve been steeped in agile philosophies for nearly a decade, and most definitely consider myself a proponent of such ideas. I can see how they can be applied to almost any aspect of life, but I was really looking forward to giving them a whirl when I took a contract earlier this year that I’d decided to solve using JavaScript. The script ended up being a lot more work than I’d expected, and while it worked perfectly, the amount of DOM interaction it required made it entirely too sluggish to be practically useful. In the end I had some ideas about how to speed it up, but since I’d been working on a fixed price (something Johannes had thoroughly castigated me for) I figured it was best just to deliver it how it was.

Why did the script end up being so much work? I’d been hired to do a specific job–to adapt tables in a web application to fit the size of the viewport, with the table header remaining fixed while the table contents scrolled if the table was too large to fit within the viewport. In order to do that, I’d set the scipt up to gather information about the original table, process it, then write the new, adapted table into the document.

The stupid decision on my part was the first part of that equation: gathering information about the original table from the document. Stupid because, in an earlier contract, I’d been the one who styled the original table in the first place! Without even having thought about it, I’d defined the problem too generally. My job had not been to create a solution to turn a standard table into a fluid one. My job had been to turn those specific tables into fluid tables. If I’d been clear-sighted enough to solve that problem in the first place, the script would have taken a lot less time and have (hopefully) been fast enough to be usable.

The problems we’re given are specified by the existential quantifier (∃), not the universal quantifier (∀). Theoretical and practical aspects of falsifiability are addressed in computer science classes and tied to real-world examples, right? From talking to Johannes I’ve learned that defining the problem too generally is frequently a problem for developers, however. I think people somehow feel it’s cheating to solve a problem only for specific circumstances. In reality, it’s the only thing that’s possible. We can save a lot of time, energy, frustration, and cash if we keep that in mind.

I submitted some pics of Ada to the lol Builder on the Cheezburger network. Some of the results were really clever—this one actually got chosen to appear on their site. I’ll post more of the results here over time.

Gulesider has a “skråfoto” option for its maps. I’ve used this several times to not just find out where I’m going, but to see a picture of a place so I know what I’m looking for.

I particularly like this picture of the building we live in:

You can even see the tram going by. This kind of photo gives a lot better sense of a place than your typical top-down satellite photo.

Apparently internet access in Norway is being filtered:

No, I wasn’t surfing for kiddie porn; here are the Google results showing the link I clicked:

What happens when you click on that link?

It turns out that it’s NextGenTel, my ISP, that’s doing the filtering:

Here is the traceroute result from the US:

I’ve linked several screenshots that tell the whole story on Flickr.

The Electronics industry has selected Blue-Ray DVD players as Christmas Present of the Year, yet 60% of Norwegian women don’t know what what Blue-Ray is. Honestly, I didn’t, either, not precisely, until I read this article, but only because I’ve totally stopped paying attention to any news about physical storage media (well, except for Micro SDHC cards and hard drives). I didn’t pay any attention to the whole business of analogue TV signals no longer being sent, either. Those kinds of issues are no longer relevant to the way we consume media.

We still have a DVD player and the cable that comes with our rent, but neither are connected to the TV, and they haven’t been for a couple of years. Everything we watch now, we watch from our computers, either directly on the screen or connected to the TV, and our screens are big enough that we don’t usually even bother to connect a computer to the TV anymore. We haven’t had a CD player connected to a stereo system for a long time, either. If we can’t get our music, games, movies, or TV programs online (always legally where possible), we don’t bother to get it anymore.

Even five years ago, which is about when we got the DVD player, I would never have imagined that we’d be moving in this direction. Johannes and I are not quite early adopters, either, so I know we’re not the only ones who consume media in this way. We are, however, smack in the middle of the target demographic for media and electronics. Media producers really need to get their business sorted out to account for these changing patterns.

I installed the Accelero S1 Rev. 2 with the turbo module on my 4870 today and am astounded at the difference in temperature. With the stock cooler I was idling around 70° and getting as hot as 99° at load (yeow!). This cooler has nearly halved my temps. I’m now idling at 41°, and haven’t hit more than 54° at load.

I also installed two Spinpoint F1 1TB disks, one for backup and one for files. I’ve never suffered data loss, but I’ve been increasingly concerned that my luck is too good to last. It was time to get a new disk, anyway, because my 400GB drive was full. I’m donating it to Elias–we’re working on setting up a nice gaming computer for him this weekend.

Also, I’ve added a new category, “Tech”, since I’ve been posting so much about my little project here. I’ve finally got some pics available:

And a video of the drive: