60 years ago: UNIVAC predicts the President

60 years ago on election night, a UNIVAC I computer was used to predict the outcome of the presidential election. The computer predicted the correct outcome early in the evening but its operators were skeptical because the race between Democrat Adlai Stevenson and Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower was perceived to be too close to call at that point.

Here is the full story from National Public Radio.

My election prediction today

Before 10 a.m. EST this morning, while all the polling places were open, I bet a Republican friend that not only would Barack Obama win the Presidency but that he would win at least 300 electoral votes. Will I get a free lunch at Skyline Chili? Stay tuned!

I also predicted that we would have an announced winner before midnight Eastern Time.

Update: I was correct on both counts (based on ABC News projecting Virginia going for Obama). Obviously, the vote counts need to be finalized and the provisional and overseas votes counted, but if Fox News can say that Obama is the winner, it must be accurate enough as is.

Two distinctive houses for sale in Cincinnati

I did something today I rarely do: I stopped at an open house. I've been driving past this house several times a week, watching the remodeling in progress, since my mother moved to Cincinnati in February. This house is distinctive because it has five front doors. I asked the Realtor®, Doug Spitz, about this and he said that it's a decorative touch and it's not like the house had five small apartments originally. The house is located at 1615 Spring Lawn Ave., Cincinnati (Northside) 45223, which is at the corner of Spring Lawn and Hamilton Ave. At the open house, there was a lot of interest in this house; there were at least 10 groups of people at the open house in the 10 minutes that I was there. Price: $280,000.

(Note: The U.S. Postal Service, which I consider authoritative, says the street is "Spring Lawn" but Dusty Rhodes, the Hamilton County (Ohio) Auditor, says it's "Springlawn" (see screen shots). Somebody should get these two on the same page.)

While I'm on the subject of houses, I'd like to mention the church-house for sale at 4117 34th Ave., Cincinnati (Oakley) 45209. Since it's converted from a church to a house, it has a nice performance space that would be ideal for a musician or other types of artists (art gallery, theater?). My connection: one of my friends is a friend of the owner. This house has a Facebook page. Price: $284,000.

(Once again, we have a difference in street names. The USPS says it's "34th Ave." while Dusty says it's "Thirty-Fourth St." [34th St. is in Covington, Ky.])

These two houses are interesting opposites yet similar in price. The former is for someone who wants luxury living in a small space and the latter is quite a bit larger but could be a lot of fun. Both are in the City of Cincinnati and close to downtown.

Financial Disclosure: I do not have a financial interest in either of these houses and I will not receive or accept any compensation when either house is sold. It is not likely that I will purchase either house. It's my blog and I can feature houses that catch my eye if I want!

Extended file names in IBM DB2 for i database

If I told you that I could use an exclamation point (!) in a database file name in an IBM DB2 for i database, would you call me crazy? But I just did it on an IBM i server running V4R5.

First, let's review the standard rules for file names:

• They are from one to 10 characters long.
• They must start with a letter or one of these special characters: $, @ or #. ($, @ and # have been considered letters by IBM at least as far back as the announcement of the IBM System/360 in 1964.)
• The remaining characters after the first may also be numbers, underscore (_) and period.
• Spaces (blanks) are not allowed as part of the name.
• Names are not case sensitive and lower case letters will be converted to upper case letters.

So far, no exclamation point. What's the trick? If you include a double quote ("; one character, not two single quotes in a row) as the beginning and ending characters of your file name, you can put any characters in between, except a double quote, and still have a valid file name. You must have at least one character between the double quotes and the total number of characters, including the double quotes, is limited to 10 characters. I like to think of the whole string, including the double quotes, as the file name.

Here are the rules for extended file names:

• They are from three to 10 characters long.
• They start and end with double quotes (").
• They must include one to eight characters using any characters except for a double quote.
• Spaces (blanks) are not allowed as part of the name.
• They are case sensitive. Lower case letters will remain in lower case.

I just created two database files with names of "a!+&=^]z" and "A!+&=^]Z" (including the double quotes). Despite the letters being the same except for case, these are two separate files.

I tested this on V4R5, but it should be available on any later version.

Will you ever need to use this trick? Who knows! But it's available in case you do.

Updated Nov. 12: Corrected the extended file name minimum length from one character to three characters.

(IBM i is also known as iSeries, System i and AS/400. The database is also known as DB2/400.)

Apple still doesn't apologize

In Great Britain, Apple was required to run an advertisement and post a copy online mentioning that they had lost a court case to Samsung over claims that Samsung had copied Apple's design of the iPad. The first advertisement did not meet with the court's approval so Apple issued another advertisement today. I wrote about this on Oct. 26 and noted that Apple did not issue an apology. With the new advertisement, I am still right as it does not contain an apology either. So my original post, updated below, stands.

From my post of Oct. 26, 2012 with updates:

We have a problem with the technical press in the United States: They're like a herd of sheep. One of the sheep will bleat out something that sounds reasonable and the most of the rest of the sheep will repeat and amplify the bleating. You need to understand that a lot of what pretends to be journalism in this country is just click bait: An attempt to get you lured in to read a story so that the publisher can make money on advertising.

One recent example is the kerfuffle over Maps in Apple's iOS 6. The technical press went wild but many users, including me, don't care. In addition, one source, not realizing that the new Maps requires a fraction of the data of the old Maps, falsely claimed that Apple users had almost stopped using the new Maps.

We had another case last week. Search Google news for "Apple apology" and you will get almost 40,000 results. Many headlines are like this one from the Los Angeles Times: "Apple loses appeal, has to buy ads in Britain to apologize to Samsung."

Today, Nov. 2, Apple reissued its statement to comply with the court order and, again, there's no apology to it. It's just a bland statement of the ruling of the court.

The Washington Post still doesn't understand. The headline yesterday was "British court: Apple must reissue apology to Samsung." Considering that Apple didn't apologize either time, especially not in the statement today which is presumably in full compliance with the court's ruling, the Post is exaggerating.

Will the sheep in the technical press admit they made a mistake? Don't count on it.

The trick here are to distinguish the sheepherders from the sheep. There are a few blogs that can separate the bleats from the informed opinions. I will post later about these blogs.

Spam on LinkedIn has dropped dramatically

In September, spam on the LinkedIn groups that I subscribe to showed up at least once a day. I dropped some groups and sent a message to LinkedIn that they needed to help the group owners deal with spam. For whatever reason, spam in October on LinkedIn has dropped dramatically. I kept a log in October and I only saw five spam messages.

In November, I'm going to subscribe again to all the IBM i (also known as System i, iSeries and AS/400) groups that I can find and review them for this blog, including how much spam they have.

Great story about NASA's Mission Control Center

ars technica has run a great story about NASA's Mission Control Center.

A related story shows a diagram of the Apollo console stations and their functions.