2008 Presidential Election Poll

I've created a 2008 Presidential Election Poll using my Range Voting poll that I wrote about earlier. The polling application is ready for general use, although I do have a few more features I want to add to it. In the meantime, cast your vote for president!

Range Voting Application

I'm happy to announce my new Range Voting Application, which allows you to set up your own range voting polls. After finding that Approval Voting didn't give my co-workers at the LA Times enough expressiveness, I started looking for a Range Voting system I could use for my weekly polls. When I didn't find a great Range Voting application, I decided to create my own. It's easy to use, both for voters, and for poll administrators. Try it out by voting in one of the example polls on the home page or jump right in by creating your own poll today! If you want to learn more about Range Voting, the folks over at RangeVoting.org have a fantastic site with lots of great information about Range Voting.

SuperDuperApps.com

After several attempts to get Google to index my server at home on my DSL (using a dyndns.org hostname, of course), I decided I needed to set up a more "legitimate" host. So, I bought a VPS instance at BuyAVPS.com for $9.99 a month so I could mess around with my own Ruby on Rails apps.

I tried to use some of the pointers I got from The Principles of Beautiful Web Design, which I finished reading last week, and ended up with a logo and welcome page that I can actually be proud of! Ok, so it's not much, but now I have a home for StampCalculator so people can actually discover and use it.

Werewolf: Kill the quiet people!

Well, today I had the opportunity to be the storyteller in a game of Werewolf at our L.A. Times gaming lunch. Having played as a werewolf in the last three games in a row, I figured the villagers were going to kill me in the first round anyway, so why not be the moderator and break my streak? Today, we went down to two werewolves, after three werewolves have won every one of the last 4 games, with 10-14 players total. I'm promoting a handicapping strategy similar to what we use in Go. Basically, the villagers are trying to handle as many werewolves as possible. So, if one side wins 3 games in a row, you increase or decrease the number of werewolves by 1. As the moderator, I got to immediately see what role each player had, from the very beginning. So I got to see the seer accuse the one person she knew was a villager in the first round! I thought this was a clever ruse at the time, but in hindsight, the only person she fooled by this was a villager. Oh, well. I guess that's my "werewolf logic" showing through! Anyway, to the point: The villagers lost again. However, if they had stuck to the rule of "kill the quiet people first", they would have won. Why? The werewolves were quiet. Now, pay attention because I think this next bit is the thing people haven't been getting: If you have a policy of "kill the quiet people", you force the werewolves to participate! Werewolves are liars, and when you're a liar, you don't want to draw attention to yourself. So if the villagers show that they're intent on killing quiet people, the werewolves have no choice but to participate in the conversation. By smoking them out in this fashion (and not letting quiet people off because "we don't think that person is really a werewolf"), you force the werewolves to participate, and you might catch them in a lie. Update: I remembered what's so clever about the seer accusing an innocent person. It fools the werewolves, who are looking to kill the seer as quickly as possible. Bonus points if the seer gets a quiet person in this fashion, because that helps to flush out the wolves. While they're off the scent of the seer, the seer can continue to gather data about everybody.

Improbable Truths in Ruby

The following statements are all true in Ruby 1.8.6: 0.6 - 0.5 < 0.1 (0.29 * 100).to_i == 28 0.28 * 100 != 28 (0.28 * 100).to_i == 28 (0.27 * 100) == 27 Well, what can I say? Floating point errors in Ruby can really bite you. I had always thought higher precision numbers were necessary only when dealing with very small numbers or when computing compound interest, but look out! Ruby floating point can really bite you with some strange, unexpected results. It makes me wonder why Matz included a to_i method at all!

Weird Floating Point Problem in Ruby

I'm working on a simple postage stamp calculator, just one of several projects I have for some Ruby on Rails practice. So I set up my rspec tests and find that one of my tests is failing. After stepping through the test, I found something that I find very surprising: 0.5 - 0.4 < 0.1: irb(main):001:0> 0.5-0.4 => 0.1 irb(main):002:0> 0.5-0.4<0.1 => true irb(main):003:0> ((0.5-0.4)*10) => 1.0 irb(main):004:0> ((0.5-0.4)*10).to_i => 0 irb(main):005:0> ((0.5-0.4)*20).to_i => 1 irb(main):006:0> ((0.5-0.4)*20) => 2.0 ...well, this certainly violates the principle of least astonishment, but I guess the lesson is that I should be using values in terms of pennies (ie, integers not floats).

Misconceptions about diet and exercise

Most people I talk to about losing weight have two misconceptions about getting and keeping their weight under control:

1. "Going on a diet" is a good way to lose weight.
2. If only I could exercise more, I could lose weight.

"Going on a diet" is a bad way to lose weight. Why? Because of the tacit understanding that the diet is something you would never willingly follow for the rest of your life, some day you're already planning up-front to go off the diet. What's going to happen then? You'll eventually be right back where you were before you went on the diet. As for exercise...well, we all know we should be exercising, but that doesn't mean we always have time to exercise. In fact, many of my overweight friends are just waiting for themselves to have time to exercise. Let's face it. Sometimes you'll have time to exercise, and sometimes you won't. There is no need to wait for yourself to have time to exercise. You can change the way you eat and lose weight without exercising. On the other hand, you could start exercising today, eat more, and not lose a pound. Diet and exercise are two different things that are very important to your overall health, but exercising while ignoring your eating habits is self-defeating: When you don't have time to exercise, you'll start gaining back whatever weight you lost. I submit that the only way to lose weight is to take in fewer calories than you burn. So, if your weight is relatively stable, then all you have to do is be consistent about eating a little bit less at every meal, and with no changes at all to your exercise, you'll stabilize at a lower weight than you have today.