Can't tell you more than I told you already?
| Battery: | AA or 14500 Li-ion |
| Switch: | Twisty |
| Modes: | H-M-L with memory |
| LED Type: | Osram Golden Dragon Plus |
| Lens: | Glass |
| Tailstands: | Yes |
| Price Paid: | $19.25 |
| From: | Manafont (Group Buy) |
| Date Ordered: | 01 Sep 2011 |
I was watching NBC news this week and they were saying that in the last 10 years, many people across the country now live close to a part of the 9/11 attacks. 
The wreckage of the twin towers has been broken up and distributed to a lot of different places, mostly fire stations. I found a website where you can track the different pieces to find the closest one and found only two anywhere nearby: one in Riverdale and one in Conyers. Neither of those is that close. Then I read on ajc.com that Dekalb County was unveiling a 9/11 memorial at their public safety headquarters in Tucker today at 8AM. Well, I wasn’t going to get up that early, but I did want to go by and see it, especially because it also includes a piece of the 9/11 wreckage. Not a big piece, the thing I saw said it was 18 inches long. It isn’t marked as being 9/11 wreckage, but it is there in front of the statue of a phoenix wing (most might think it is an eagle wing), and it is nice that you can touch it. It had some blue painters tape on it for some reason (could it be just the base of the rod that hasn’t been installed yet?). There were a handful of people there and there seemed to be a steady flow of people coming by.
I keep a spreadsheet of my investments and one of my favorite things the spreadsheet does is track not just the average cost of the investments, but overall how much it is worth over the net amount of money spent on the investment (accounting for dividends and so forth). It also tracks reportable gains or losses using average cost or by identifying shares sold. As I held onto investments for longer periods of time, I wanted to get an average annual return, so I came up with a formula based on the date I first buy shares in something to set a timeline up to now. And it uses exponents correctly so it doesn’t just say that if you have a 50% gain over 5 years that you have a 10% annual return (it would really be more like 8.4% annually with compounding). The flip side of that is if I buy something and it goes up even a small amount after the first day (a tiny fraction of a year), it shows a ridiculous annual percentage increase. Now, I don’t like to brag about stock picks because I am losing money on the year, but I did buy some Bank of America one week ago (not enough to make a difference since most of my money stays in mutual funds). I bought at $6.50 a share and soon it was down as low at $6.01 a share. But then Warren Buffet made a play and it went up over 20% during one day (less than that by the end of the day). And my spreadsheet showed some ridiculous percentage increase. But it has kept going up for a couple of days. Usually by a week, the percent gain drops to something reasonable, but right now my investment (on paper) is up 28% in a week. In fact the percentage is so high that Excel just showed #######, meaning the number is too large to fit in the square (as an investor this is something that makes you feel pretty good, like on the Dukes of Hazzard when Boss Hogg was calculating how much some scam of his would make on his calculator. Once he pressed the equals button he hollered for delight. Roscoe asked him “How much will we make?” And he said with great glee: “This calculator don’t go that high!”). It turns out that if you take into account compounding, 28% in a week gives me an equivalent annual return of 34,753,785% which would make me a millionaire by the end of the year (really in almost exactly 28 weeks). Actually I won’t last nearly that long because I put in a sell order when it goes up by 50% (I usually do 20%, so this is almost certain to backfire).
After getting the Flashlight Wiki secured, I wanted to upgrade the MediaWiki software to the latest version. I am running v1.16 from when I installed it last year, but since then they have come out with v.1.17. I’m not sure that 1.17 offers a whole lot, but I thought I would try the upgrade. I have been doing backups of the wiki almost weekly. I export the MySQL database that the wiki is based on, compressing it to a zip file first. This is about 1.5MB. Periodically I will also create a zip archive of the entire wiki folder and all the files it contains. This archive is about 20MB. It has all the images, all the installation files, the settings, and pretty much everything that makes it work except the content which is all in the database. Actually it has the content as well since the pages are actually generated and cached in folders.
I had a lot of success recently adding security questions to a community bulletin board to stop bots from registering and attempting to spam the forum. I have the same problem on the flashlight wiki, but it hasn’t gotten out of hand yet. Lately I have been getting one or two bot registrations a day. Just like on the bulletin board, registering doesn’t allow them to post spam, they still have to be confirmed by me to post anything. But I still go in and block them which takes a little time. So I was looking for a way to add security questions like I did for the bulletin board. I like the security questions because they are so easy for users to get correct (unlike the blurry text used in CAPTCHA systems). (To be fair, ReCAPTCHA, where you enter two blurry words, does have a practical purpose in helping to convert scanned books into text.)
But all I was finding for wikis was an extension called ConfirmEdit that is meant to flash a CAPTCHA every time someone makes an edit, which wasn’t what I wanted. I should have read more about it though. CAPTCHA doesn’t necessarily involve blurry text, it just means “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart,” which can be any kind of test. And in fact, ConfirmEdit has several choices including blurry text, asking simple questions, asking the user to solve simple math problems, and one that involves the user identifying pictures of cats. Yes, pictures of cats. People can easily recognize whether a picture shows a dog or a cat, but this is much more difficult for a computer. Microsoft has developed a system called ASIRRA (“Animal Species Image Recognition for Restricting Access”) which shows you twelve thumbnail pictures of animals. You then click on only the pictures that are cats. The thumbnails are pretty tiny, but a bigger version pops up when your mouse is over the picture. Some people might still have a hard time, for instance if they are blind, though I doubt many people interested in flashlights are blind. Also some of the pictures can be kind of blurry, but you can get a new set of images if you want. The pictures themselves come from millions of pictures stored at petfinder.com and you could even adopt the dogs or cats shown if you want (this is why they make their database available). You can try it at ASIRRA.
Additionally, ConfirmEdit can be configured to control several different types of events, not just confirming edits. One of the options is for new user registration. Perfect.
Well, I had to try out the cat thing. It was pretty easy to install the ConfirmEdit extension and add a couple of lines to my localsettings.php file in my Wiki installation, but it didn’t work because I didn’t realize I also needed to install the ASIRRA extension (supposedly ConfirmEdit includes ASIRRA by default, but it didn’t). Once I got that done, I configured it so that the only time it would use ASIRRA was when a new person registered. I already have anonymous edits turned off and only users that are confirmed by me are allowed to edit, so I’m not worried about spammers, just new registrations. I really like this idea.
