Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Athens is lovely.  The perfect weather and ancient history enable such activities as last night’s open-air concert by the Vienna Philharmonic in a 2000-year-old marble amphitheater underneath the Acropolis.  Everyone speaks English.  When in the company of a local it is very difficult to pay for meals or entertainment.  I asked one of these hospitable locals how come the Greeks are reported to hate the U.S. so much.  His answer:  “It depends on one’s party affiliation.  The Left Wing hates the U.S. because of its support for the Right Wing against the Communists 50 years ago.”  That’s wonderful, I thought.  Only half of these guys hate us!  “Actually, no,” he continued, “the Right Wing was sympathetic to the Serbs in Bosnia and Kosovo and after Bill Clinton’s bombings in support of the Muslims they hate the U.S. too.”

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This AP story about the failure of air traffic control communications in southern California marks an interesting milestone in the American culture of victimhood.  Pilots and passengers were the ones at risk but “Three [FAA ATC] workers filed injury claims, saying they were traumatized by seeing flights veer toward one another on radar without being able to do anything.”

In a society where “software and medicine are the only things that regularly fail,” the last line of the article was not too surprising:  “Ghaffari said a backup computer system was activated, but it failed too.”

[This letter from an FAA controller published by avweb.com might inspire some young folks looking for career ideas.]

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For many years I’ve been inviting a group of friends over to brunch and/or wine/cheese via a personal mailing list.  This is just a text file of the form

bcc: foo@bar.com

bcc: yow@baz.org

bcc: student@veryrich.edu

I prepare an email message in Emacs, to: philg, and then insert all of these bcc: headers.  This then gets sent to a mailer at MIT and off to the world.  Worked great in the mid-1990s before spam made the Internet the time-waster that it has become.  Now many of my friends don’t get the email at all.  Hotmail, for example, when it sees something to: philg@mit.edu, bcc: happy_user@hotmail.com, sends it straight to the junk mail folder.

The challenge now is the best way to divide this up so that 100 individual emails are sent, each one from: philg, to: person_on_list.  One answer would be to write a Perl script on the Unix machine.  It would take two arguments, one the filename of a message and the other a filename with one email address on every line.  The Perl script would look through the email addresses and send out an email on my behalf.  (Anyone know where to get a script that does this already?; I checked cpan.)

Unix boxes typically have list managers such as Majordomo installed but as best as I can recall the email from these programs usually has a bulk look and feel, being sent to “fish-lovers-list” instead of the recipient.  I’m thinking that these are likely to be trapped by spam filters as well.

Another answer would seem to be Microsoft Outlook.  I switched to Outlook a couple of years ago when I got a Handspring Treo.  So why not just add every brunch guest to my Outlook contacts folder and somehow spam them from my desktop machine?  This has the advantage that I’m only keeping one database of contacts.  This has the disadvantage that it doesn’t work when on the road.  The regular Outlook distribution list mechanism produces an email with multiple To: recipients, which I don’t want to do because when people reply they often unintentionally reply to the entire list (in this case about 100 people).  Are there VB scripts out there that will force Outlook to send one email at a time to each person on a distribution list?  It seems as though there is a product, http://www.mapilab.com/outlook/send_personally/, that claims to do the job.

Finally there are Web services such as Evite.  I don’t really need a count of who is going to come.  These tend to more drop-in sorts of events so Evite is rather too heavy-handed.  Also Evite, I think, subjects users to banner advertisements and I’m not sure that I want to surrender control of my database to them.

Thoughts?  Scripts?  Recommendations?

[Update:  My favorite solution so far is Ryan Tate’s very simple Perl script, referenced in the comments at http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~ryantate/massmail.pl.txt; I got this working with the help of one of the Unix wizards at MIT who installed the Mail::Send library.  I modified the script to add a Reply-To header and will eventually modify it so that it takes a database file with multiple fields per line, e.g., first name, last name, group membership (e.g., “kids”, “nerds”, “night_owls”) and can send selectively to members only of one or more groups.]

[Conclusion:  The Weblog seems to be truly powerful.  At 4 pm I asked a question.  By 6 or 7 pm I had a raft of workable answers.  By 9 pm I used one of those answers to invite more than 183 people to a going-away party on Wednesday evening (I head off to Greece on Thursday morning).]

[December 2004 update:  A friend and I managed to enhance Ryan Tate’s Perl script and the version with more features is available at http://philip.greenspun.com/software/brunch-spam.pl.txt]

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One of the handful of English-language books that is easy to buy in Japan is Dave Pelzer’s bestselling A Child Called “It”.  Waiting for a train I managed to skim through most of this popular work and it has come back into my mind today as I take care of Roxanne, Alex’s 5.5-month-old cousin.  Mr. Pelzer says that, as a child, his mother made him live in the garage and eat scraps of food while his siblings were dining on lobster at the table.  It made me wonder what kind of book dogs would write it if they could.  “While the rest of the family chowed down on $200 of natural foods from the Whole Paycheck supermarket, I was nearly starved for the whole day and then confined to the floor and given one small bowl of 6-month-old dried out nuggets that had come in a bag.”

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A couple of MIT undergrads were over here at the house yesterday.  These technology connoisseurs said that the stagnation of features available in Windows will drive consumers to buying Macintosh computers, especially laptops.  Apple is apparently on a roll with new OS features including a disconnected and resync-able file system scheduled to ship in 2005 (didn’t Carnegie Mellon do this with Andrew File System many years ago?).  I compared their prediction to the high-end audio nerd’s belief that CDs would be supplanted by a digital format with superior sound quality.

In the audio market the connoisseurs were mostly wrong.  There are two competing high quality digital music formats, SACD and DVD-A.  Together there are fewer than 1000 titles available in these formats, more than two years after their release, and you can’t find these in most record stores.  By contrast the mass market has embraced digital music formats that are lower quality than CD:  MP3, XM Radio, Sirius Radio (the satellite radios put out about 64 Kbits/channel and are noticeably inferior to a regular FM station, even on a fairly cheap set of speakers).

Suppose that Microsoft never adds another feature to Windows?  Not even my personal pet desire, the ability to display and lightly manipulate camera raw format images that come from high quality digital cameras.  Would that drive consumers to buy Macintosh?  Not if the computer market turns out to be like the audio market where people said “CD quality is more than good enough; I just want music that is more convenient and/or cheaper”.  People would say “Windows XP Home is good enough but let’s get it for as little as possible”.  The result will be a $350 laptop at Walmart.  I met a senior Dell engineer recently and he told me that Dell was already producing a laptop on which they could cut the price to $500, without downgrading any components, and still make a profit.  The cheapest Macintosh laptop, by contrast, is $1100.

People who stopped buying CDs now spend their home entertainment budget on fancy digital cable.  If Microsoft’s feature stagnation leads to a big drop in the average price of a purchased PC who will pick up the dollars not spent?  My prediction is mobile phone makers and carriers.  I saw a billboard yesterday for a Nextel phone with built-in GPS and voice-prompt navigation.  That seems more useful to most people than whatever OS tweaks Apple and Microsoft might offer to their 1970s-style mouse-windows-keyword systems.

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Starting reading an interesting book this Labor Day:  Shadow Divers.  The journalist author chronicles the adventures of a group of guys who find a sunken WWII German submarine off the coast of New Jersey in 230′ of water.  This was in the early 1990s, when deep divers were mostly still using compressed air and therefore getting nitrogen narcosis and risking decompression illness.  None of the divers using the then-experimental trimix of helium, nitrogen, and oxygen got sick but three guys using compressed air died trying to figure out the identity of this wreck, which was not known to either German or U.S. authorities.

One of the main characters of the book is John Chatterton, who had been a medic in the Vietnam War, and in the early 1980s he was considering using his G.I. Bill benefits to learn computer programming:

“I can’t become a computer programmer.”

“What are you saying?” [his wife Kathy responded]

“I can’t spend the rest of my life sitting under fluorescent lights.”

Chatterton went on to become a commercial diver and visited offshore wrecks on weekends for recreation.  Bill Nagle was a legendary diver and charter boat captain.

One day Nagle paid [Chatterton] the highest compliment by saying, “When you die no one will ever find your body.”

That’s one way to pick a career…

[Last night I finished another interesting book, Snowball Earth, about life on Earth at the end of the Pre-Cambrian, which seems to have consisted of runaway glaciation (ice reflects sunlight thus breeding more ice) followed by CO2 greenhouse warming.]

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Alex, the bitch from Hell (Roxanne, mine all mine until September 6), and I were in Harvard Yard tonight and ran into a Mexican family that had moved to Wellesley, Massachusetts for one year in order to improve their English.  The kids had enrolled in the public middle school, transferring from a private school in their provincial Mexican town (a couple of hours from Mazatlan).  In subjects where they were able to compare, such as math and science, the school in Wellesley is a full year behind the school in Mexico in terms of what they expect from and what they are teaching to kids of the same age.  Students of globalization will find it interesting that Wellesley operates one of the most demanding public school systems in the state of Massachusetts.  The Wellesley high school is rated the #2 public high school in the Boston area by the September 2004 issue of Boston Magazine (full rankings available on their Web site, http://www.bostonmagazine.com/), with annual per-pupil spending of $9600 and an average teacher salary of $59,577.  For American workers who hope to earn more than Mexicans in an efficient globalized economy this seems like bad news.

[The news is far worse for graduates of the City of Cambridge public school system.  Our high school was rated #56 by Boston Magazine despite maxing out the spending column with $14,840 per year per kid and an average teacher salary of $56,450 (if you work the numbers a bit it would seem that Cambridge has more teachers per student and also more administrators than Welllesley).  The average SAT score of a Cambridge kid is 954 and only 67 percent go to a 4-year college so the bottom third of the class might not even take the SATs (92 percent of Wellesleyites go on to college so presumably their average SAT score, 1190, is more representative).]

I suggested to the kids that they take photos of the brand-new McMansions dotting their town, the splendid green lawns, and the quaint Wellesley town center then go back home and tell their friends that “everyone in the U.S. lives like this.”

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A group of us, aged 33-44, all enjoyed The Girl Next Door, which was last week’s best-selling DVD nationwide.  This was one of my cousin Harry’s smaller ideas, nurtured over the years and eventually spun off to a group of younger folks while Harry himself went to Omaha to make About Schmidt.  Harry likes quiet, subtle movies like Breaking In, which he did with Burt Reynolds at the end of the 1980s.  Hollywood, however, and the public to a large extent likes to pour youth and excess into even the quietest ideas.  It is the director who has the final say over what goes into the script and what goes into the film.  The young director of the Girl Next Door, Luke Greenfield, seems to have larded a lot of freight onto Harry’s small cart.  Some of it is loud, some of it is confusing (esp. when it touches on the bank), much is unrealistic, and none is really necessary.  Still we couldn’t understand how this movie was abandoned so quickly in the theaters.  I don’t remember even seeing an ad for the movie anywhere.  It seems like the sort of movie that could have been very successful with a young audience.

Anyone see this in the theater?  If so, what was the crowd reaction?  My friends were laughing out loud in the living room.

[Personally some of the stuff in the movie that struck me as odd:  (1) the school photographer was using a Hasselblad rather than a long-roll camera to do senior portraits [opening credits], (2) all the high school boys had their own VCRs and TVs in their rooms and were watching porn movies [maybe kids really do this these days], (3) substantial usage of VHS tape, both for watching porn and as a master tape of the final production even though the kids were clearly shooting using mini-DV.]

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My cousin Harry Gittes’s latest movie, The Girl Next Door, is out on DVD.  I will be showing it to some friends on Friday evening and then we can have a discussion about this important milestone in American cinema.  Perhaps other folks who read this blog can rent the movie on Friday night and we can host a discussion on Saturday?

[p.s.  After the movie I’m going to stop living like a slob with a huge TV in the living room.  I have put all of my living room video gear up on eBay: the 36″ Sony XBR TV, the HDTV tuner (broadcast HDTV is so strange and consumer-unfriendly it really deserves its own blog entry), the DVD player, the VCR.  This monster TV was supposed to go up in a little loft area but it wouldn’t fit so for several years I’ve had this in my living room and none of my friends would agree to take it.  It will be interesting to see if eBay works for items that must be picked up locally.]

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According to this NYT story, the management of Hollinger International took home 95 percent of the company’s profits for themselves over the last 6 years.  I.e., these guys were looters par excellance.  Yet graphing the price of HLR versus the S&P 500 shows that the company’s stock has outperformed the market as a whole.  How to explain this phenomenon?  Could it be that HLR has extraordinarily high profits and therefore 5 percent for the shareholders is still pretty good?  Or that the rest of the S&P 500 has managements that are looting more than 95 percent?

Let’s hear from some MBAs who can explain this to us.  You’d think this would make a great B-school case study.

[Addendum: It looks as though if we go back just a few years more the stock has underperformed the S&P: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=HLR&t=my&l=on&z=m&q=l&c=^GSPC]

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