I figured I’d announce that I’ve decided to scale back the ads on this web site. Something about putting ads on this blog has always felt a little odd to me. The extra revenue is nice, but I’m not sure its actually worth the commercialization ads bring.

There are still two ads on the site, the Google Custom Search box on this blog’s sidebar, and an ad on the Text Ascii Art Generator (TAAG). The search box is actually functionally useful and the ad on TAAG will still allow a little bit of change to trickle into the site. I don’t plan on adding any more ads until I need to upgrade hosting services.

Part of me wanted to justify my decision with the idea that “ads turn away visitors”, so I decided to make a chart pitting TAAG (which has an ad) and against the VB Array Tutorial (which doesn’t have any ads). Surprisingly, it appears that the ad on on TAAG didn’t have a noticeable negative impact on the number of visitors it received:

This might be like comparing apples to oranges, since both pages probably appeal to a different group of people. However, TAAG’s ad was added in April, so if it bothered visitors I’d expect its growth to go down after April, but instead it seems to have continued on with the normal growth of this site (the spike in June is due to it being popular on StumbleUpon for a few days). This doesn’t change my opinion on removing ads from the blog, I still feel they add an unwanted commercial element to a personal outlet, however, I figured I’d post up this chart for those of you interested in how ads may/may not effect site growth.

Most people are pretty familiar with Google’s Advanced Search Operators. You can use them to more preciously search for web pages or particular data. Anyway, earlier today I discovered that Microsoft’s search engine, live.com, has an amusingly useful search operator that Google doesn’t have. It’s called linkfromdomain. Now, this isn’t new news. I did some Googling and the operator has been around since late 2006, however, since not very many people use live.com, I figured some of you might find this info useful.

The linkfromdomain operator allows you to search the websites that a particular website links to. For example, if you search for “linkfromdomain:patorjk.com“, you’d get a list of all of the sites I link to throughout this website. At first glance this may not seem that useful, however, it allows you to ask some interesting questions as an individual and as a webmaster. Here are some examples:

• Does patorjk.com link to any questionable websites? Example: “nsfw linkfromdomain:patorjk.com“
• Does patorjk.com have any reciprocal links? Example: “linkfromdomain:patorjk.com inbody:patorjk.com” [side note: this isn’t perfect since I’m using the “inbody” operator instead of the “link” operator, however, live.com’s “link” operator doesn’t seem to work that well.]
• What youtube.com videos have been submitted to reddit, but not digg? Example: “(site:youtube.com linkfromdomain:reddit.com) AND -(site:youtube.com linkfromdomain:digg.com)“
• Which xkcd comics aren’t listed on reddit? Example: “(site:xkcd.com) AND -(site:xkcd.com linkfromdomain:reddit.com)” [side note: This isn’t perfect, as live.com doesn’t index all of reddit, it’s pretty close though.]

I don’t think Google currently has the ability to answer any of those questions, which is a little surprising. Anyway, there are probably lots of other neat questions you can form using the linkfromdomain operator. It’s definitely something to keep in mind when you’re surfing the web.

I figured a good companion for my Keyboard Layout Analyzer would be a Typing Speed Test. Right now the program is pretty bare bones, however, it does have a few neat configurable options. You can test your typing speed skills against typing words drawn from a database of the 978 most common English words or against words drawn from a database of the 1000 most common “SAT words”. You can also vary the time settings. You can type for 60 seconds or until you’ve finished typing a certain number of words.

In the next week or two I hope to add output stats about which fingers and keys were typed the fastest. I think I also want some more creative text inputs that a user can select from. Maybe programming code, text from popular books, and song lyrics. How fast you can type a given programming language probably isn’t that useful, but it might add to the fun factor. If you have any suggestions or comments about the app please let me know. It was written pretty hastily in my spare time during the past week, so it’s still a little wet behind the ears. However, I did test it in IE 6.0, IE 7.0, FireFox 3.0.3 and Opera 9.24, so it should work fine.

DoFollow WordPress Plug-in

As a way of saying thank you to people who comment and as a way to encourage more people to comment (as long as they don’t spam), I’ve installed the DoFollow WordPress plug-in. Basically, it makes it so linkjuice is passed onto the websites of people who comment. I will nofollow links of people who I think are being spammy, but I figured I’d be a nice/easy way of saying thanks to the people who do decide to say something.

Happy Halloween

Lastly, since the 31st is approaching…

My pumpkin is on the far left, it’s supposed to be two bats. I should probably stick to programming… it was a lot of fun though. If you have a few extra hours, it’s worth revisiting. For me, it’d been almost a decade since I’d carved a pumpkin.

Listed below are some small updates that have happened over the last week.

• The Color Fader now has a neat fade-in/fade-out interface. I figured this was more intuitive than telling the user to scroll down every time they hit the “generate” button.
• The Keyboard Layout Analyzer now has information explaining what it is and contains a handy chart mapping fingers to keys.
• I helped out Franz Tarr on a neat little VB app that lets you set the transparency of windows. It’s pretty simple and comes with its source code. I only helped out and didn’t write the app. Since Franz seemed like a cool guy I told him I’d mention his program in my next site update.

Somehow I felt like I did a little more than that, but that’s all that’s coming to mind right now. New stuff is being worked on, however, I’m not sure when it’ll be ready to be posted up.

Hopefully I’m not making myself seem like too much of google fanboy, but the other day I found a neat little tool by them called Google Alerts. Google Alerts allows you to monitor search results for key phrases you input to it. When a new webpage gets indexed for that key phrase, and it ranks above a certain threshold, you get an email telling you about the webpage. Though you can schedule these emails to only come at certain intervals. The idea is that you can get the latest info on topics you’re interested in. I thought it sounded useful, so I signed up for a couple of key phrases.

This morning when I opened by email, I found an alert telling me about this website. When I clicked it I found someone with the username “patorjk” was asking a question about Excel. Below you can see a screen capture of the post, my mouse is hovering over “patorjk”‘s username in this shot.

At first I naively thought to myself “whoa, another patorjk, I wonder if its a married couple or something…” So I clicked the username to see the user’s profile. Lo and behold, the user’s profile stated that their name was “Patrick Gillespie” and that they were from Baltimore. What the hell!? The statistical odds of there being another Patrick Gillespie with the internet pseudonym “patorjk”, who lives near Baltimore and programs computers, are basically zero.

I should also note that I had only been awake for about 2 minutes at this point, so I was kind of groggy. At first I thought it had to be some kind of joke, like that fake presidential candidate video going around, but everything I looked at pointed to it being real. So then I wondered what the exact motive for this person was. Was it sinister? Was it that the person was just lazy? Did the person just latch onto my name for some reason (maybe they have a patorjk shrine in their room)? I couldn’t really tell from their posts, but I did notice that they started signing them with the name “Murali Krishna”. So maybe at some point they decided they wanted to be themselves again. patorjk.com doesn’t get massive amounts of traffic, so pretending to be me is really weird and makes me wonder about the mental state of the person. I’ll report the user to the website’s owner if they don’t voluntarily delete their account or change it so it doesn’t look like they’re trying to be me. However, I figured I’d give them a chance to do it themselves or to at least say their piece, since there may be a mix up of some kind somewhere.

Anyway, besides keeping up with the latest trends, it appears as if this tool can also clue you in on when weird stuff is happening regarding your name or website. Whether its someone talking about you or someone trying to pass themselves off as you – whether they’re trolling, trying to slander you or trying to steal your identity. If you run a website or have an online pseudonym, I’d recommend creating a Google Alert for them. And although this post has focused on the negative, most alerts will probably bring you positive news.

Sept. 2, 2009 Update: About a month after this post was made the site owner contacted me to figure out what was going on. We did a little detective work and discovered that the problem was due to some database issues he had when he moved his site. Apparently I had created an account for his forum around 7 months before making this post, but never made any posts (I probably created an account thinking I’d post something, but then forgot about the site). When he moved the site, some accounts ended up getting mapped incorrectly, and the “patorjk” account ended up being one of them. He had been fixing the accounts manually when people complained, but “Murali Krishna” didn’t come forward wondering about his old posts, so they remained under “patorjk”. When Google saw the newly updated posts had “patorjk” in them, it alerted me via its Google Alerts. So “Murali Krishna” isn’t an impostor, his posts are just the result of a database mix-up.

When what had happened had been figured out, I think the webmaster was kind of embarrassed, though he didn’t say much. I didn’t want to do a post saying “hey, look at this guy’s mistake”, so I figured I’d say what happened if someone asked me. However, this post still gets a little bit of traffic and the “Murali Krishna” posts are still under “patorjk”, so I figured I’d put a small little update in this post for those of you who are curious as to what happened afterwards.

Today I went to a talk at UMBC on the Google App Engine, a product from Google that came out earlier this year. The talk was given by an old friend of mine from Grad School who now works at Google. I was his partner for an Operating Systems project where we built a distributed file system using Bamboo and for a Database project where we built an Amazon-like online grocery store. He’s a pretty smart guy and is usually on top of the latest stuff, so I figured it’d be a really good talk.

The Google App Engine basically allows web app developers access to some neat Google API’s and to have Google servers to host their application and its data. The main things I got out of the talk were:

• Relational Databases don’t scale well. If you create an insanely popular app, your Relational Database could end up becoming a bottle neck. Google got around this by creating their own Database Management System called BigTable. The Google App Engine lets you use BigTable for you apps.
• BigTable uses GQL, an SQL-like query language.
• Using the Google App Engine is free, however, there are certain storage and bandwidth limitations. I’m assuming that in the future they’ll charge users to go beyond the set limits, however, currently you cannot buy more space or bandwidth.
• If your application requires users to verify themselves, you can set things up so that users log in with their Google username and password.
• The same Google API’s that are available to in-house Google developers are available to you.
• Currently all Google App Engine apps have to be written in Python, which kind of sucks since it adds a barrier to entry. They do plan to support other languages, but that will be at some unknown point in the future.

I came away from the talk pretty impressed, however, I think I’ll wait to see what other languages they’ll support before trying it out.

Besides the talk, it was neat to walk around campus again. It was a nice cool Fall day and everyone walking around seemed pretty laid back. I miss being able to get up at noon and then to waltz over to the food court to get some lunch. Everyone looked really young too, I wondered if I looked old to them. The experience reminded me of when another friend of mine stayed in my dorm room for St. Patrick’s Day after having been out in the working world a year. It seemed refreshing for him to be out walking around the campus again. He kept joking about wanting to be a life long college student and to get all of the degrees the school offered, which I think would be a lot of fun, if it paid well and people didn’t age (you wouldn’t want to be the old creepy guy living in the dorms).

Anyway, if you have any thoughts or opinions on the Google App Engine feel free to share them. Right now I can’t recommend it one way or the other, since I haven’t tried it, but from all appearances, it looks really cool.

I just finished a very small glass of Disaronno, an Italian liqueur. I’m never sure if you’re supposed to take shots of liqueurs or if you’re supposed to drink them straight. I don’t think I’d want to do a shot alone, and Disaronno is really tasty, so I figured I’d use it as a night cap. Anyway, it’s almost 1:30 and tomorrow I have a doctors appointment at 8 so I should probably get to bed really soon. However, I’m having a hard time getting myself to hit the hay since I’ve been almost finished with my Keyboard Layout Analyzer for a few days now (I decided to rename it from Typing Analyzer since its really analyzing the layout and not the typing).

I’ve had a lot of ideas over the past two weeks, and rather than go in depth on every detail I’ll give you a really quick run down of this app’s updates:

• Pie chart statistics were added for finger, hand, or keyboard row usage. The pie charts were created using Plotkit, an awesome javascript library that uses Mochikit. I don’t know much about Mochikit, but according to Google Trends and its website’s own lack of updates, its future doesn’t look too promising. Which is a shame, since Plotkit is really cool.
• The hot spot visualization was fixed for IE6 users. Apparently IE6 does not like transparent PNG files.
• A tab view was set up to make viewing the data easier. The tab control comes from Yahoo’s kick ass YUI library.
• A fade-in/fade-out effect was added when processing data. I figured this way of displaying information would make more sense to the user. I noticed when I showed my parents to app my mom didn’t realize she needed to scroll down to see the output. This feature doesn’t work 100% of IE yet, but I’m deciding it works “good enough” for now.

To see the app just click the following link: Keyboard Layout Analyzer

Let me know if you have any problems or have any suggestions.

So I was thinking to myself today, “When would I ever use the Typing Analzyer?” The only situation I can think of would be if I got into some kind of argument over which keyboard layout was best, and even then I think I’d be kind of hesitant to play that card. Oh well, I think this project is one of those ones that is neat to make, but isn’t really that useful. Hopefully it can give passer-byers a couple minutes worth of amusement or possibly get someone to check out an alternative keyboard layout.

Besides questioning the relevance of what I’ve been doing, I’ve also made a few updates:

• Added “Left Hand Dvorak” and “Right Hand Dvorak” layouts
• Updated layout graphics
• Added the Shift and Tab keys into the calculations
• Fixed the IE issues (I’ve gotten in the bad habit of only checking my work in FireFox)
• Added a personalized keyboard layout to the output

I stole the last idea from Tritonio, who created his own app for layout generation. I thought the idea was really really cool so I put it in (I’ll make sure and give you a link on the app’s page, once I straighten out the “Other Typing Resources” section). Right now the generated layouts are kind of silly, though they have some semblance of being correct.

I aim to finish up this app next week. I’m going to tweak a few things and then add in some stats and pie charts on finger usage. After that I’m going to move onto a new web app. After a brainstorming session earlier this month I’ve got a collection of neat ideas I want to explore. Part of me wants to do a web app a month until the end of the year, but I don’t want to set goals I’m not sure I can complete. I’ll do the next one and then decide where to go from there.

I’ve created a new web app that allows you to analyze and visualize the typing patterns you create when you use a Qwerty, Dvorak, or Colemak keyboard layout. You can find it here: Typing Analyzer.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, the keyboard layout you’re currently isn’t the only one that’s out there, and not all keyboard layouts are created equal. Some are better for your wrists and allow you to type faster and with more comfort. Here are the layouts of the keyboards I mentioned above:

Qwerty

Dvorak

Colemak

My interest in keyboard layouts came after I read a Discover magazine article entitled “The Curse of QWERTY”. The article tells the story of the Qwerty and Dvorak keyboard layouts and makes a compelling case for switching from a Qwerty layout to a Dvorak layout. Here is a quick summary of its most important points:

• The Qwerty layout was created in the early 1870’s before touch typing and without speed or comfort in mind.
• The Dvorak layout was created in the 1930’s and is based on years of research. It takes speed and comfort into account.
• On average, the left hand does 56% of the typing when a Qwerty layout is used. With a Dvorak layout, the right hand does 56% of the typing.
• The Dvorak layout forces you to alternate hands more frequently when typing, this causes you to type faster.
• Users type fastest on the home row. With a Qwerty layout, only 32% of your typing occurs on the home row. With a Dvorak layout, 70% of your typing occurs on the home row.
• It’s hypothesized that the Dvorak layout will make it less likely that you’ll develop Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (CTS).
• Anecdotally, people who develop carpal tunnel syndrome seem to find relief when they switch from a Qwerty layout to Dvorak layout.

There are more reasons, but those were the ones that stuck with me. I was so convinced by what I read that I switched my work and home keyboard layouts to a Dvorak layout by configuring some Windows XP settings in the control panel (to see how click here). This lasted for about 6 days (3 of those were over the Labor Day weekend), and then I had to switch back since learning the Dvorak layout was slowing me down at work. I also discovered that the Dvorak layout made all the nice Qwerty keyboard shortcuts (Undo, Cut, Copy and Paste) virtually unusable. This was a big minus since I use those shortcuts constantly. The Dvorak layout also over worked my right pinky. I found myself having to take typing breaks, something I hadn’t done since high school.

After talking to someone who had Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (something I’m worried about getting), I learned about yet another improved keyboard layout that preserved Qwerty’s bottom row short cuts and didn’t put massive amounts of stress on the right pinky. This layout was known as the Colemak. Unlike the Dvorak, the Colemak layout is relatively new (developed within the last 5 years), doesn’t have a lot of research behind it, and it doesn’t have a very large following (online estimates put the number of users between 650 and 1,300). It also wasn’t on my computer at work (I can’t install things on my work computer) so in order to use it, I’d have to talk to some sys admin people. However, the layout looks really promising.

All of this research is what motivated me to create the Typing Analyzer. I wanted to visually compare my typing patterns with the different layouts and get some stats on what hand and which fingers I was using the most (a feature I’ll put in soon).

Hopefully the user interface is straight forward enough. Its in the same vein as the Image Color Palette Generator and the Color Fader, but with some adjustments. I decided to start the page off with a section explaining which fingers you use for which keys, since I know a lot of people don’t know the exact fingerings. In fact, I know people who constantly use a computer yet still hunt and peck for keys. After the chart comes the application’s controls and after that comes a section for the output.

I have more features in mind for this program, but I figured I’d release what I had now just to see how it’d be received and to see if anyone had any suggestions. The other ideas I have in mind are:

• Allowing a user to enter in a feed URL, so that the program can analyze all of their blog posts instead of having the user paste the text into the text box.
• Give stats on finger and hand usage. Possibly also include pie charts.
• Give recommendations to the user on which keyboard layout would benefit them the most.

Oh…

And I haven’t forgotten about patrickgillespie.com. I’m just not as excited about it as I was 10 days ago. I’m going to let myself mull over some more ideas before I take any action. I still don’t think I have the right idea for it yet.