TNSFF

Tech, music, sports, and other stuff.

21 Feb 2011

Baseball Prospectus | Baseball ProGUESTus: Scorecasting Review

I finished up reading Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won a couple of weeks ago. I recommend it whole-heartedly, but this is a pretty good summary of how I feel about it:

When Moneyball came out, it didn’t take long for the importance of on-base percentage to become part of mainstream conventional wisdom. It would be great if some of the findings in the book did the same—the debunking of the ‘hot hand,’ for instance, or ‘icing the kicker.’ However, I’d hate for ‘home field advantage is caused by biased referees’ to do the same—because that’s a huge claim, and I don’t think it’s true. Ideally, the authors would have consulted some of the practicing sabermetricians in the various sports—the Prospectus writers, Tom Tango, Brian Burke, Gabriel Desjardins, and so forth—who would undoubtedly have pointed out some issues and advised the authors to temper some of their conclusions.

It's possible that having to qualify some of the results would make for a less popular book. In any case, Moskowitz and Wertheim are outstanding at getting their ideas across effortlessly. With a little more collaboration from others who study this stuff, this could have easily been the best popular sabermetrics book since Bill James. As it stands, it’s still recommended reading, but I wish it came with a warning to take some of its conclusions with a grain of salt."

(Via Baseball Prospectus.)

Scorecasting is a great read. And, if you're reading it with a somewhat open mind, you'll learn a lot, but also pause a lot and say "wow, I feel like I'm missing a whole side of this argument." Which is pretty much exactly how I felt reading Freakonomics.

(Note: If you buy the book from the Amazon link above, I get like 12 cents.)

21 Feb 2011

Why I Laughed at the Phantom Gourmet Dude Working the Mall Kiosk

Around Christmas time, I was shopping in the Burlington Mall and saw one of the Andelman brothers working their little Phantom Gourmet booth shilling coupon books. And I laughed. Mostly because I imagined the internal thought process being something like "I'm a TV star, why do I have to work in a mall with these...plebians,", but also a little bit "Ha. What a racket. Sell coupons to the restaurants you review on TV."

Well, here's another reason to laugh at them.

Mike Andelman: We walk in and the hostess who’s the typical hot woman, rude, cold- as-ice, never would talk to me in high school-type girl...So she goes, “Two?”, and I said yes, and she looks at us and says, “I’m sorry, we’re not open until 5:30, so there’s nothing I can do.”

Dan Andelman: And what time was this at?

Mike: 5:05.

Eddie Andelman: It was about 5:10.

<snip>

Mike: And it’s not like this was 8pm on a Saturday night. It’s 5 o’clock, and guess what, if the owner of Grill 23 was standing next to this dumb hostess, this moronic hostess who was just getting her, uh, jollies off by sticking to the rules of her little brochure in a little binder, this little monkey, her only job is to look at this binder and say don’t let people in ‘till 5:30...

Dan: Although in her defense she was good-looking apparently. I’d like to see a picture. Was she wearing yoga pants? These are things I want to know. I have a thing for hostesses.

Mike: There’s not a hostess who’s not good-looking, because they’re incompetent and can’t do anything else in life. If you can’t model, when you’re good-looking enough and not tall enough to model, you stand behind a little box and say, How many?

Jesus. What enormous tools.

(Via Server Not Servant.)

18 Feb 2011

A Collection of Things I've Found Useful That I Will Forget About ... So I'm Typing Them Out

Lately, I've been in that mode where I'm basically just trying to stay ahead of my to-do list. The combination of work, getting my wisdom teeth yanked, and this drastic winter have lead to me mostly just trying to keep up. It's not a fun place to be, but with the combination of some long days and some Omnifocus, and I've mostly been able to come out the other side.

I've collected a handful of things that have proven very useful lately, so I figured I'd throw them up here so I can find them again in a year when I'm trying to dig myself out of another hole.

This isn't really much of a blog post, as much as it's just a collection of stuff that is useful to me. Feel free to stop here.

Skitch

Skitch is a super handy screenshot/quick image editing tool. It sits in your menu bar until you need it, and then you just quickly grab a screenshot, throw in some arrows or text or whatever you need, and then it shoots it off to an FTP site or wherever you want. It's super handy.

See, handy!

Ruby/Rails

One of the things I've been trying to spend more time doing is building little web sites. I'm a big fan of Ruby on Rails, but I hadn't upgraded to Rails 3, since building Rails on the Mac has always proven to be a big pain in the ass. After a whole bunch of Googling and piecing together different sets of instructions, I think I've got the steps down. They are, roughly:

  • Build a local version of readline and dump it in something like /opt/local or /usr/local
  • curl the latest version of ruby, untar it, enter the directory
  • run autoconf
  • run ./configure --enable-shared --enable-pthread --prefix=/opt/local --with-readline-dir=/opt/local CFLAGS=-D_XOPEN_SOURCE=1
  • make, sudo make install
  • Boom, you've got ruby in /opt/local

Next, you want to install rubygems and then rails:

  • curl the latest version of rubygems, untar, enter
  • sudo ruby setup.rb
  • sudo gem install rails

Now you've got ruby, rails, and your gems all setup in /opt/local (or wherever).

csshX

Cluster SSH is something I'd never seen before until one of my co-workers was using it the other day. We have a lot of servers where you need to do something on a bunch of boxes at once (or tail the logs on a bunch of boxes at once). Normally, I end up with 10 tabs in Terminal and flipping back and forth between them.

csshX is a nifty, Mac-native cluster ssh client. You open up a bunch of hosts, and then you can send the same command to them all, and it nicely tiles your windows so you can see them all. It's so simple, and so brilliant.

ddrescue

Finally, as I've been building up a media server to feed my AppleTV, I decided to go back to the many CDs I burned in school and grab some old music. It was like opening a time capsule--little video clips, email, school work, music--reminding me of who I was 10 years ago.

Sadly, my memory works better than the memory of an optical disk. There were a handful of CDs that I burned that weren't working very well (or, well, at all).

That sucked.

Thankfully, there's a little tool called ddrescue. I downloaded and built it. It's been running for the last week trying to scrape every last valuable bit off of those CDs (and has saved some of the amazing papers I wrote in college. Amazing.).

The big takeaway? Don't use ddrescue. If you're relying on CDs as backups, burn copies of CDs. Spend 100 bucks and buy a big ass hard disk ad back things up there. Back things up the cloud (Amazon, Mozy, whatever).

Basically, avoid having to use ddrescue.

14 Feb 2011

Twitter Updates for 2011-02-14

  • At the Grille, getting ready for Cs/Heat. I'd the Cs pull this out, it'd be a major upset, with only 9 healthy players. #
  • Huge Celtics win today! Rondo came up big in the 3rd, including standing in the middle of the Heat huddle. And LeBron chokes. #
  • Might be my favorite win of the season. #