Ten Years Ago: "Cottingham TNG" Ships

This was originally posted to the InfoWorld Electric forums on 01 April 1999.

PR: "Cottingham TNG" Ships

April 1, 1999
For Immediate Release

 

Cottingham & Cottingham (C&C) of Olathe, KS, USA today announced their first product, Abigail Rose. "This product represents a major milestone for C&C," said marketing director Craig S. Cottingham. "Abigail Rose is was designed and produced entirely by C&C, from the ground up."

C&C describes Abigail Rose as "a cooperative set of non-linear servoactuators controlled by a non-deterministic processor, in a package only 20" long and weighing only 8 lb, 6 oz." What sets Abigail Rose apart is that the processor ships with only basic functionality enabled. More advanced tasks become possible as Abigail Rose adapts to its environment, effectively "learning" new behaviors. "It's amazing to watch," noted Cottingham. "In the few short hours since the release party, we've seen an increase in input/output processing and fewer audible error conditions." Abigail Rose also includes an adaptive code generator featuring C&C's Dynamic Realtime Object Oriented Language (DROOL), and can produce large quantities of DROOL in a short time period.

The product was announced at a developer's conference held on an unlikely date (April 1st, commonly known as "April Fool's Day" in the US) at an unlikely time (5:45 AM CST) in an unlikely location (St. Luke's Hospital in Kansas City, MO, USA). "At first we were worried that people might think that the announcement was some kind of April Fool's Day prank," Cottingham said. "At C&C, however, we believe that once the product is ready, it ships." As evidence, he pointed to the fact that the development team, led by Angela Cottingham, was working hard right up to the literal moment the product was released. "We're very proud of the quality of work they did. We in the marketing department basically provided them with an incomplete design specification, and they came up with this gem."

Additional details on Abigail Rose, including product illustrations, can be found at http://picasaweb.google.com/craig.cottingham/AbigailRose19990401

About Cottingham & Cottingham (C&C)

C&C was formed in 1995 from the merger of two unrelated corporate entities, with the goal of maximizing long-term gains while providing an enjoyable end-user experience. They can be reached at craig.cottingham@gmail.com.

Amazon is not killing the iTunes Store any time soon.

I have finally started clearing out our CD collection. There are a lot of discs in here that we never listen to, and others that we bought just for one song. (Remember when that was your only option?) Half Price Books offers a decent price for used CDs with little hassle, so that has been my outlet of choice so far. The proceeds from selling discs will go to buying individual tracks to replace more CDs, though I’ve found fewer than ten songs so far that I feel need to be replaced.

Not every song on CD is available at the iTunes Store, and getting rid of plastic mass outweighs brand loyalty in this case. Amazon’s MP3 store got a lot of press a few months back for offering DRM-free music at a price matching or beating Apple’s FairPlay-protected files. I figure that’s a good alternative, right?

One of the discs I’m looking to replace is a compilation of songs from movie soundtracks, produced by Blockbuster. The only track worth keeping is Vince Gill’s “Ophelia” from the Mel Gibson-Jodie Foster flick Maverick. The iTunes Store doesn’t have it, so let’s check the Amazon MP3 store.

Searching on “vince gill” is easy enough, but returns 285 results, more than I’m willing to sift through. Any way to refine the search? Not that I can see. Okay, I’ll sort by song title and just page down to the “O”s. Clicking on the “Song Title” column header doesn’t work. Off to the right, I notice a dropdown that says “Sort by”. That looks promising. My options are “Relevance”, “Bestselling”, “Price: Low to High”, “Price: High to Low”, “Avg. Customer Review”, and “Release Date”. No “Song Title”, no “Album”, apparently no “Artist” (assuming I searched on just a last name or the name of a song or album).

And like that, I suspect that I won’t be shopping the Amazon MP3 store again any time soon.

There used to be a company named Digital Archaeology (may still be; they got absorbed in October 2000). Their line of business was data mining -- sifting through all the myriad data that a company collects and generates, looking for interesting and useful patterns.

I'm finding out the hard way that they didn't know what real digital archaeology is like.

I bought a new computer recently. Okay, new for me; it's an HP Vectra VL, with a Pentium II processor and 64MB of memory. I picked it up for $25 from a company that upgraded all of their desktops. It's replacing my old desktop machine, a Compaq 486. You can see how I'm happy about this.

In the process of transferring all of the data from the old disk to the new one, I managed to wipe the old disk. Completely. No backups. (Please, no smart-aleck comments. Yes, I screwed up. Keep reading.) All of my personal email going back a couple of years was gone, as was my GPG key. I still haven't figured out what else was lost; I keep thinking of things.

Fortunately, what I lack in better judgement, I make up for in tenacity. After a few attempts to "repair" the disk (I didn't expect much success, since the disk wasn't really damaged to start with), I downloaded The Coroner's Toolkit. It copied all of the unallocated blocks (basically, the entire disk) to another disk, classifying them (as text, email, HTML, programs, etc.) as it went. It took the better part of two days to run, primarily because either it keeps a lot of history in memory as it works or it has a memory leak -- I set up 384MB of swap space, and about 300MB of it was in use at the end.

Now I have 2GB worth of raw disk blocks to try to string back together.

I'm working on my mailbox file first, and to be honest it's more tedious than heartbreaking. My email address is unique enough that I was able to find most of the appropriate blocks by grepping for it. Now I'm filling in the gaps, caused mainly by TCT classifying blocks containing mail from certain mail programs (*cough*Outlook*cough*) that send HTML by default. It helps immensely that ext2 keeps file fragmentation to a minimum, so usually all I have to do is look at all blocks between this one and that one, sequentially -- and it's usually just one or two.

That's the good news. The bad news is that I have a lot more of this to do. The good news is that most of the contents of the disk were part of Linux rather than data that needs to be found. The bad news is that the data that does need to be found is buried in the haystack of other data.

I finally read Paul Graham's seminal paper on Bayesian spam filtering yesterday (thanks to Jason Kottke for pointing me to it). I have to admit that my feelings are mixed.

On the one hand, I like the idea of an adaptive spam filter. To paraphrase somebody (was it a Supreme Court justice?), "I know spam when I see it." Besides, one man's spam is another man's portable, canned, processed meat product. So to speak.

On the other hand, it feels like closing the pantry door after the cans have gotten out. So to speak. By the time spam gets to the mail client, it's already done its primary damage, wasting bandwidth. If you try to push the spam filter further upstream, you lose the ability to define what constitutes spam; it becomes a collaborative definition or (worse) someone else (like your bandwidth provider) defines it for you.