Todd's Blog

So many people do not pay attention to important issues like this.  They are more interested in which reality TV star did something bad.  Don't be one of those people.  Watch this brief video to understand how the Internet could be ruined by the idiots in charge of our government.

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future.

I was happy to see this morning that Lottery Post is now listed among the most popular IE9 add-ons in the official Microsoft IE9 Add-Ons Gallery:  http://www.ieaddons.com/en/popular/  (Counting down from the top, it is #18 right now.)

When you use IE9 with Lottery Post, you a couple of extra features:

• Search accelerator, which lets you highlight any text on the page and click the little accelerator button that appears next to the highlighted text, for instantly searching for the highlighted text anywhere on Lottery Post.  For example, if you're reading a news story about a winner who's won the lottery more than once, you can highlight the lottery winner's name with your mouse, click the accelerator button, and instantly search the entire site to find any other places that person's name is mentioned on Lottery Post (for example, in other news stories, forum posts, blog posts, etc.)  As another example, I clicked the word "anonymous" on a page, and was able to instantly locate all the various pages the word "anonymous" appeared on Lottery Post.
• Pinned icon support, which lets you drag the little LP icon that appears next to the address (URL) in IE9 to your Windows 7 task bar, and get a dedicated Lottery Post icon right next to your other task bar icons.  (That's called pinning a site.)  When you open Lottery Post by clicking the pinned site icon, you get a nice color-coordinated version of IE9, and an extra LP icon in the browser that brings you right back to the LP home page when you click it.

IE9 usage is still not as high as the number of people who continue to use IE8, but it's slowly getting there.  I continue to be baffled by people who refuse to update their computers with the latest version of IE, but I guess some of that is Microsoft's fault, for not automatically doing the updates.  I wish Microsoft would update IE the way Google automatically (and silently) updates Chrome.

As IE9 usage continues to increase, I will look to implement other features that take advantage of its abilities.  For example, I am able to do things like present a notification on the icon if/when private messages arrive, and some other neat tricks.

But it is nice to see Lottery Post getting some good attention already among IE9 users, based on our position in the popular IE9 add-ons gallery.

Last Edited: January 8, 2012, 10:09 am

Ever get the feeling that the open-minded voters for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame are welcoming to every genre, subgenre and hybrid of popular and vernacular music — except rock?

Part of the fun of having a hall of fame, of course, is debating over who should get in, but the rock hall keeps making such incredibly bad choices that it has even sucked the joy out of arguing. Just look at the list of inductees for 2012, announced last week: Guns N' Roses, the Beastie Boys, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Laura Nyro, Donovan, and the Small Faces/Faces.

Only Donovan deserves it. The rest of the acts on that list merely show just how incredibly insular and irrelevant the induction process has become.

Let's start with the Beastie Boys. They are unquestionably trailblazers. They just didn't blaze any of them in rock. Sure, they played with punk guitars, but at heart, the Beasties are a rap act, joining previous inductees Grandmaster Flash and Run-D.M.C. And rap music is emphatically not a subgenre of rock — whatever the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame says.

The hall has claimed reggae, funk and disco in the name of rock. Its appropriation of rap is a serious escalation in this ongoing mission creep, expanding the museum's definition of rock to include, basically, virtually every form of music that rose to popularity in the latter half of the 20th century. If the hall insists on inducting rap artists, shouldn't they admit, say, Public Enemy and L.L. Cool J before bringing in white rappers from wealthy families? Given the racially exploitative history of American pop music, it's the least they could do.

Of course, the real divide institutionalized in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame isn't the line between black and white. It's the one between red and blue. The great divide in Cleveland isn't racial, but cultural, with artists that appeal to a red-state audience getting shoved aside time and time again in favor of more blue-state-friendly acts. While the hall has been making a display of its musical ecumenism by extending its reach to embrace ever more remote cousins of rock, it has simultaneously revealed an equally strong prejudice against the mainstream rock of the American heartland, pejoratively dubbed "arena rock" because its representative acts fill sports arenas rather than the pages of Rolling Stone and Spin.

The hall's selective "open-mindedness" explains how ABBA, Neil Diamond, Madonna and Steely Dan can be rock hall members. But that big tent gets tiny when it comes to music that mainstream Red America loves — especially music that appeals to straight, white, working-class men. Journey isn't in the hall. Neither is Jethro Tull, Boston, Bon Jovi, the Cars, ELO, the Steve Miller Band or Stevie Ray Vaughn. Nor is Kansas. Or Styx. Or Ted Nugent. Get the picture?

In their stead, the bookish, urbanite hall voters have filled the place with bookish, urbanite musicians. Especially weepy singer-songwriters. Leonard Cohen and Jackson Browne, for example, are members. As is James Taylor, enshrined back in 2000. The Hall of Fame nominating committee could be a Rolling Stone staff party. Only Kurt Loder is missing, having left several years back, apparently being cursed with integrity. Those left behind — including critics Dave Marsh, David Fricke, Jon Landau and Anthony DeCurtis — have evidenced precisely the same, incongruous mix of cooler-than-thou pomposity with social-climbing apologetics for bubble gum pop that has defined Jann Wenner's once-great magazine. They and like-minded voters comprise the high court of rock snobs, a star chamber of blue state, bluenose elitism.

The elitism of hall voters is especially conspicuous in its bias against heavy metal. One reason that Guns N' Roses doesn't deserve induction yet is because the hall keeps excluding so many of the metal bands that came before and paved the way. Iron Maiden, Deep Purple, Judas Priest. Def Leppard, Motley Crue, and Motorhead — not one has been elected to the hall.

Rush, the band every critic loves to hate, was snubbed again this year — a streak that's now nearing Ron Santo/Susan Lucci-like levels of absurdity. Nearly 40 years after the Canadian power trio released their first album, the classic rock radio staple is still recording new music, still touring — with all the original members — and still packing huge venues around the world. Rush has 14 platinum albums — 14!

Only three bands in rock history have more platinum albums than Rush: the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Kiss. Obviously, the first two are in the hall. The third, brace yourselves, is not. Let that sink in. Kiss is not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. This is a band, keep in mind, that has sold 100 million records — and whose biggest single celebrates the phrase "rock and roll" in its title.

There is no more egregious example of hall voters' arrogance and pedantry than this year's selection of Laura Nyro. To choose this talented but obscure singer-songwriter is the very definition of cultural elitism, one thrown into sharper relief by the fact that Joan Jett and Heart were also on the ballot this year, but voters passed on both in favor of Nyro. Electing Nyro is a gesture of withering arrogance and disdain, one meant to instruct the rock audience on what music it "should" listen to, instead of the stuff people actually like.

As with most of their more inexplicable selections, the hall rationalized the Nyro choice by describing her as a huge influence on other artists. That would make great sense if the museum were called the Rock and Roll Hall of Most Influential People. Since, however, it's a hall of fame, it seems like being at least marginally famous would be one prerequisite for getting in.

Come to think of it, maybe a name change is just the thing. The museum could rebrand the place, changing the name to something like the Pop Music Hall of Fame or the Museum of Youth Culture. Why not? There's nothing wrong with blue-state snobs wanting to to enshrine the makers of folk, disco, reggae and now rap music. There's nothing wrong with honoring Madonna's dance pop or Neil Diamond's Tin Pan Alley showmanship. Just please, please stop calling it rock 'n' roll.

Source: Washington Times

(The phony phone caller is Kevin Nealon.)

Last Edited: December 10, 2011, 12:20 pm

The technology industry has lost a true creative genius and a fierce competitor.  A sad day.

www.apple.com

I am watching a live stream of the keynote for Microsoft's BUILD conference, and they are demo'ing everything about Windows 8.

Holy mackerel, Windows 8 is going to revolutionize computers.

Everything is touchscreen, every piece of software written today will be compatible, and Windows is going to run on everything from tablets to powerhouse PCs.  And all the software looks and works the same on every type of computer.

Microsoft is my best friend again. 

Here is a fantastic article describing some historical perspective on random number generation, and how it has morphed into Intel's latest digital random number generator, which soon will be embedded within Intel microprocessors.

The new process generates random numbers at the rate of 3 gigabits per second!

There will no longer be a need for analog random number generators, such as radiactive decay and the random movement of lava lamps.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/behind-intels-new-randomnumber-generator/0

About 20 minutes ago, the world around me sprang to life again, with real working light bulbs and appliances and air conditioners.  After being without power for two days, one feels a leap of joy when suddenly your world is re-energized.

I still don't have my primary Internet connection, but getting power is a darn good start.  It's been a pretty tough couple of days keeping everything on the site working smoothly without power or a real Internet connection. 

Thank God I invested in a generator this year.  Despite the noise level and incredible annoyance of dealing with a maze of extension cords of every variety, I must say that the new generator saved the day.

I have finally found a browser that can successfully generate and load the full set of 6/49 combinations using Lottery Post's Lottery Combinations Generator!

This is no small feat, as the browser — using just some clever JavaScript code — needs to generate almost 14 million combinations, and load all those combinations into memory at one time, so that they can be displayed on the page.

For every other browser I've tested, the best they can do is generate the combos, but when it comes to loading them all onto a page, the browser page eventually runs out of memory and gives up.

What a nice surprise to see that not only can Opera finish the whole task, but it did so in tremendously good time.

Here is the summary after it finished:

Finished!
Calculation time: 20.906 seconds
Load time: 34.335 seconds
Total processing time: 55.241 seconds
Numbers in set: 6
Minimum number: 1
Maximum number: 49
Sample frequency: 1
Display type: Non-scrolling
Total combinations: 13,983,816

Under one minute! WOW!

And I didn't run this on a super-fast computer — I used a 3-year-old laptop.  That's pretty incredible, considering many stand-alone programs written in a fast, compiled language would take much longer.

So then it was time to test getting those combinations from the browser into another program.  For my test, getting them into my favorite text editor (Notepad++) would do the trick.

I clicked the Select All button to select all the text, and then waited.  22 seconds later, all the combinations were highlight.  (It is important to click the button one time, and then sit back and do nothing until the browser responds.  Since it is using so much memory, it can take a while, and if you click again while the browser is "thinking", it may cancel the Select All.)

So then I pressed Ctrl+C to copy, and the browser came back to life about 25 seconds later.  The problem was that when I went into my text editor, there was nothing to paste. So copy failed.

I tried it a number of different ways, but nothing worked.  My instinct is that Windows does not let me copy that much text to the Clipboard, and so Windows is not allowing it.

But not to be deterred, I figured out another way!

I figured if I could just save the page contents as a file, I could open the file in my text editor.  So I clicked the "Opera" menu in the upper-left corner (much like the Google Chrome "wrench" button or the "Firefox" button in that browser), then selected the Page menu, and then (after about 20 seconds waiting for the Page menu to display), clicked Save As...

One of the options under Save As is to save the page as a Text file.  Perfect!

So I saved the page contents in a text file to my Desktop, then opened it in Notepad++.  Then, I just had to delete the "junk" text before and after the combinations, and there I had it — a text file with all 14 million 6/49 combinations, and which I could generate next time within about 2 minutes using Opera.

Browsers are coming along so quickly these days, becoming real workhorses capable of incredible things.  I am so happy to see that a browser — Opera 11.5 — has become the first to accomplish the milestone task of generating the full 6/49 combination set and getting the combos into a text file.

If you want to download Opera, it is available for free at: http://www.opera.com/ 

By the way, Opera is all-around extremely fast, and Lottery Post works very well in it.  You might see a small glitch here or there, but certainly no show-stoppers.

(News story link is below.  First-up is my commentary.)

This is a fabulous idea!  There's no reason it should have required a regulator to force them, it just makes sense.  All the network infrastructure is in place, and it costs very little at this point to deliver basic broadband Internet access to a house.

So now low-income households will have a means to get on the Internet too.  These days it is really impossible (OK, improbable) to use the Internet using a dial-up connection, and the Internet has become an essential tool for everyone.

Imagine being a school-age kid in a household that cannot afford Internet access because it costs $50, $75, or $100 per month.  Teachers assign homework and projects these days assuming that everyone has Internet access at home.  That kid who doesn't have it is incredibly disadvantaged vs. the rest of the class.  Even if they can go to a public library, we all know that presents a number of huge obstacles.

Now, lest you all think I have flipped my lid and gone soft, I assure you I have not.  This just makes sense.  Nobody loses anything -- in fact, the cable company will make money from it.  And the low-income households will definitely be helped.

This would be a lot different if the president suddenly ordered that the government borrow $500 billion to install Internet access for every town in America because low-income households don't have Internet access.  Don't laugh, he's proposed crap like that.  Instead, this is a win-win that directs the help at the people who demonstrably need it, without imposing new taxes or borrowing more money (God help us).

Comcast is currently in 39 states, so this will help a lot of people.  I hope other cable companies follow suit!

News story link:

Comcast rolls out $10 web access for low income households

Last Edited: August 8, 2011, 4:23 pm

I have been tapping my toe waiting for Google to release version 13 of Chrome, and today they finally did.  As always, you can quickly upgrade by clicking "About Google Chrome" in the "wrench" menu.

Version 12 of Chrome had a nasty bug that forced the browser to NOT scroll down automatically on several of Lottery Post's pages.  (Like when you clicked the green arrow next to a post on the Home page.)

Version 13 thankfully fixes that problem, and the auto scrolling works again.

Whew!

Just amazing, I wish it was happening on my side of the world right now [June 15, 2011, 4:08 pm EDT].

If you check the top of any page at Lottery Post, you'll notice a +1 icon appears next to "Recommend Lottery Post", just under the blue menu bar.

That's Google's new "+1" system, that is used to recommend valuable Web sites to others.  I have included Google's introductory video below if you want to learn more about it.

Please help out Lottery Post by taking a few moments to give it a click.  If you're not already logged into your Google account, it will ask you to login.

While you're at it, if you're a Facebook user, please give the Like button a click too.

None of this will cost you a dime, but it means a lot to Lottery Post.

Thank you for supporting Lottery Post with a few clicks and a few minutes of your time!!