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Yesterday, I got the opportunity to play the game: Ladder Golf (also known by a number of other names). I had seen this on-campus before; I remember seeing people playing it across the street from the IU campus the first fall I got there. I quite enjoyed the game, and much debate was spurred about what the “official distance” should be between the ladders. We started at around 30 feet, but then the “official rules” suggested it should only be 15 feet.

Upon shorting the distance, we found ourselves more capable of directing our throws. We had much higher scoring rounds and many exciting attacks of other bolas. Much fun was had. However, our world came tumbling down when the following occurred “half removal” occurred:

Both of the bolas shown were originally hanging from the 2nd tier, but a 3rd bola knocked the one loose and there it remained dangling from the other bola. We came up with arguments for it to be scored anywhere from 0 to 1, to 2 points. All hinging on what the definition of “hanging from the Nth rung” meant and the hypothetical “if it fell it would’ve been hanging..”

Any experts out there?

I guess it was about a year ago that I got a new digital camera (a Canon S5IS). Probably before I even had the thing in my hands, I learned of the CHDK hack to add features to the camera’s interface. Unfortunately, the S5IS was brand-spanking-new at the time and was unsupported.

The only way to add support is to get a copy of the firmware off the camera.. based on some info out on the web I built a “firmware flasher” (a small program the camera will run that will flash the bits of the firmware on one of the LEDs — the AF assist beam, in my case). I think salvaged an IR photodiode from a remote control receiver (wrong specturm, but it still works well enough to detect the green LED). I then attached that to my soundcard’s mic input to record the signal being blinked. The blinking took about 12 hours (!!) to do because any faster and I was having problems decoding the output. Finally, a raw PCM audio to HEX file converter yielded me with a firmware.

I then set off to repeat the hacks of others against my firmware to discover it was an entirely different OS on the new Canon cameras. Off-and-on I spent some time hacking it, but I never really had enough time to really get anything done with it. Thankfully, someone else was working on the same problem simultaneously on a different version of the firmware. Nevertheless, recently that person completed their hack, and someone ported it to my firmware quickly.

The number of features added is pretty mind-boggling, but perhaps the most useful stuff is the large amount of extra information available on the viewfinder (including a blended RGB histogram and zebra-stripping of over/under-exposed regions), the ability to capture in RAW, and a custom (and good) auto-ISO mode (the Canon auto-ISO mode is flat-out dumb). One of the less useful but cool set of features is the ability to do extended exposures (up to 64 seconds from 15 seconds), disabling the dark-frame subtraction, and scripting. This lets you automate extremely long exposures (as long as you remember to take a dark-frame and subtract it in post, lest you get a sea of hot-pixels).

I took this stack of 9 shots 64″@f/4.0.. I don’t have an wall-wart adapter to power the camera, nor a good tripod (just a freebie 6″ piece of crap), so this is the best I could do for now. However, I would like to do an all-night type of shot eventually, either stacking them to get streaks or a time-lapses (also possible now with the hack).

I did my best to try to take a shot of lightning from my veranda. Again, the hack let’s me script the camera to take an endless series of shots without the dark-frame subtraction delays, so I took an endless series of 5″@f/4.0 hoping to catch something. Unfortunately, most of the lightning was to the south and I have a nice pine tree over there; however, I did manage to capture a lone strike hitting downtown (my guess would be one of the IU buildings as they are highest point that direction).

Wasting time with the best of them..

On December 31, 2007 the Insight Communications of Bloomington, IN was acquired by the Comcast Corporation. Having been a customer of Insight, I was continually delighted by the competition-beating speed of the High-Speed Internet service. The standard Insight speed was 10mbit/1mbit (down/up), but the Comcast is slightly slower with 8mbit/768kbit (down/up). The mailer that was sent out about the acquisition was quite clear that the Insight speeds would remain. They were not telling the whole truth.

The Insight speeds will remain only as long as you do not make any modification to your services. The moment your account is changed by the Sales Department, your HSI configuration will be changed to the Comcast standard. For the more technically savvy of the bunch, on the Bloomington TFTP servers, there are currently a group of modem configuration files named "dXX_m_M_insightstandard_c01.cm" (where XX is the DOCSIS version and M is the model number of the modem) that correspond to the grandfathered accounts. Once you modify your service, you will be given a configuration named "dXX_m_M_insightbasic_c01.cm". The significance of the new names is that they are not "dXX_m_M_silver_c01.cm" as are used by authentic Comcast customers. In other words, I’m saying that the switch was deliberate because a special set configuration files were made.

The bait and switch was classic. I was called by a Comcast representative who kindly wanted to let me know that I was overpaying on my service. “Oh really?” I replied. “Yes, you can now get basic cable and pay $6/mo less than your current service,” the woman told me. Of course I said, “well then, please change that.” *BOOM* I got scammed by Comcast Corporation. I’m not sure why it didn’t alarm me that Comcast called me to make my bill cheaper. In retrospect, it’s obviously because they are saving a large amount of money on not having to upgrade the infrastructure to support the extra bandwidth. As near as I can tell, the Comcast Corporation defrauded a large portion of their customer base with similar offers to “upgrade” their service, when in reality they were only intending on downgrading it subtly.

I am currently in the process of playing phone tag with Comcast representatives. Besides the fact that their Telephone Support is terrible, they cannot agree about the issue internally. I spoke with two members of the tech support group who understood my explanation and explicitly agreed with my assessment of how the change came about, but neither could offer me a solution because they believed it was a “sales” issue. The Sales Department was unavailable by phone. The clerk at the local office failed to understand my complaint, did not believe me, and told me no one on-site could handle my inquiry; she took my phone number and promised that someone would respond to me within the next 24 hours.

I’ll make updates as I go along, but I wanted to get the word out because I don’t imagine many people are aware of this yet..

UPDATE (04.04.08): This afternoon, I met with Jeff Harrington, the Technical Manager with the Bloomington instance of Comcast. He insisted that the speeds shouldn’t have changed, but then was unaware of the “insightstandard” and “insightbasic” configurations; however, he spoke with another member of the technical staff who confirmed what I said, that the configured rates were reduced, but made the rather dubious claim that they were functionally unchanged. In other words, the modem is told 768k, but it should perform at 1m! Crazy. I asked him if he was talking about SpeedBoost, and he said that was not it. He attempted to say that the diagnostic information can say one thing, but perform entirely different.. I don’t believe he really knew all the details and was trying to get past that point to discuss a potential remedy. However, he agreed that I lost the grandfathered status by modifying my account. So, in fact, he agrees with me that it will change, but not.. cause somehow 768k=1m..

He also asserted that 80% of the customers would not notice the change. This is a point I agree with, but on principle, I am disgusted by the idea. I told him that it was a bit shady to change the level of service like that, as a company policy. I fully agreed with him that the woman who called me was unaware of the impact the upgrade would have on my account and that the individuals involved were not intentionally defrauding customers. However, the grandfather policy itself, being so fragile (and not being explicit with customers about the nature of it), is negligent. The mailer said the speeds would remain the same, and I am certain nobody in Bloomington (except me) has asked, “are they going to stay that way forever?” I tried to suggest they inform their customer base, but he cited that 80% figure to me. Nevertheless, I don’t believe it is Jeff’s job or within his capacity to inform the public of the policy, so I can’t fault him for his lack of outrage.

My only hope is that I have informed the public of this policy..