Interesting News Articles, Uncategorized

Social Bookmarking Websites

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A couple of years ago a friend of mine showed me a website he was working on. It was a site that allowed you to save a list of your favorite websites to a server, so that you could obtain a list of these sites no matter which computer you happened to be at. He told me it was fully functional, and he had even given a few test accounts out. When I saw it, I thought it was a pretty neat idea, though nothing revolutionary. Later that day I did a google search and discovered that there were already a couple of sites like that. “Hmm, looks like this idea has already been implemented pretty thoroughly…” And social bookmarking sites left my thoughts completely, until a week ago.

I frequent sites such as reddit.com. Mostly so I can get my daily dose of odd ball news and information. A lot of the sites that are posted on reddit are blogs, and lately I had been noticing that many of these blogs had these strange little buttons at the bottom of their entries. After having wondered what the hell they were for some time, I finally clicked on one out of curiosity and it took me to del.icio.us, a modern day social bookmarking site. I was actually kind of amazed that the site had become so popular that bloggers were posting a link to it in all of their posts. After some researching though, I figured out why.

  • Social bookingmarking sites allow you to share your favorite links with friends and strangers. For website owners, this is free promotion, and people are much more likely to spend some time looking at a link on someone’s favorites list than they are to spend time looking at some random site they came across in a search engine.
  • Links on social bookmarking sites actually get factored into your page rankings on most search engines. Thus, the more people who favorite your site, the higher your page is ranked.

The first point may be obvious, but the second point is probably the reason those little buttons have taken off. Search engines are a powerful tool in driving traffic to your site. It didn’t seem to make sense to promote some other site just for point 1, but with points 1 and 2 together you actually have a pretty nice combination.

Those little buttons have taken off so much that there are now sites that offer the service of providing you with the latest buttons. Sign up for an account on their site and you can have all the popular buttons easily placed on your blog or website. Check it out:

  • http://blog.addthis.com/ – A plug-in you can get for WordPress. Has a nice little popup of notable bookmarking sites when you mouse over the button.
  • http://badged.net/ – Free service that doesn’t require you to register an account. It looks like they survive by taking donations.

These seem like nice little services, but one has to ask themselves: How do these sites make money? My biggest fear with using a free service like the ones listed above is that they’d start putting ads everywhere once they got really popular. And the last thing I want for my visitors is for them to be greeted by some pop-up window, especially if I’m not making anything off of it. This may seem like a rather cynical thing to say, but most of the free services I’ve used in the past have all ended up being saturated with ads (geocities, xoom, various free counters I’ve had, and the list goes on).

For the moment, AddThis appears to be looking at data mining as a possible income generator:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/03/05/addthis-widget-gathering-lots-of-interesting-data/

Badged may be doing the same thing, but they don’t say anything about keeping track of clicks on their website. Personally, I actually prefer Badged’s setup. It’s nice to be able to choose which buttons you want. However, it’d be a lot nicer if there was no dependence on the main site. For example, after you selected the buttons you’d like, it’d generate the HTML for you and you’d simply right click and save the icons to your computer. That way there’s no chance of people putting ads on your site and no chance of them mining data from your users. I like that idea so much I may do it myself, maybe.

In the meantime, I’ve decided to put two social bookmarking buttons on my TAAG program. Just to see how that goes. TAAG will also be getting an update later in the week. To give you a hint, I’ve been reading up on AJAX.

As for my friend, to my knowledge, he didn’t really do anything with his bookmarking site, which is kind of a shame, since it was a neat enough site to leave an impression on me.

General News

Stats: July vs June

Visits were up for the month of July, I’m not exactly sure why, but it’s certainly encouraging! Thanks to all of you who come here, it motivates me to keep working on this site. As far as stats go, I’ve actually sort of been wondering how to best promote this site. Towards the end of the month I realized I hadn’t submitted this site to any search engines, so I did that. However, I was listed on most of them already, so I’m assuming manually submitting a site doesn’t do a whole lot. I did find some interesting web tools available from google though:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/

If you have a website you may want to check that out. It’ll give you interesting information about how your site is ranked in their search engine. Stuff like your highest ranked page, sites that point to you that count in your page rank, when the last time your page was crawled, and a couple of other things. Anyway, here are the stats…

July Stats:
Average Number of Visitors a Day: 120.94
Total Number of Visitors: 3749
Total Amount of Bandwidth Used: 2.91 GB

Links from an Internet Search Engine  
8 different refering search engines Pages Percent Hits Percent
Google 681 90.9 % 683 90.9 %
Yahoo 30 4 % 30 3.9 %
Unknown search engines 13 1.7 % 13 1.7 %
AOL 11 1.4 % 11 1.4 %
MSN 9 1.2 % 9 1.1 %
Ask Jeeves 3 0.4 % 3 0.3 %
DMOZ 1 0.1 % 1 0.1 %
MetaCrawler (Metamoteur) 1 0.1 % 1 0.1 %

June Stats:
Average Number of Visitors a Day: 84.00
Total Number of Visitors: 2520
Total Amount of Bandwidth Used: 547.01 MB

Links from an Internet Search Engine  
8 different refering search engines Pages Percent Hits Percent
Google 373 91.8 % 373 91.8 %
Unknown search engines 11 2.7 % 11 2.7 %
Yahoo 9 2.2 % 9 2.2 %
AOL 5 1.2 % 5 1.2 %
MSN 5 1.2 % 5 1.2 %
Ask Jeeves 1 0.2 % 1 0.2 %
MetaCrawler (Metamoteur) 1 0.2 % 1 0.2 %
Dogpile 1 0.2 % 1 0.2 %
Interesting News Articles

Programmers are lazy, self-important, unintelligent bamboozlers

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I recently read an astonishingly bad article by Tim Bryce on “managing programmers”. The purpose of the article was to help other IT managers better understand their software developers. Instead, the article just reinforces the stereotype of the “Pointy-Haired Boss” that inhabits the Dilbert comics. It actually scares me that this article was read by people who manage programmers. Let me give you a taste of Mr. Bryce’s idiocy:

Regardless of the image they wish to project, the average programmer does not have a higher IQ than any other worker with a college degree. In fact, they may even be lower. Most exhibit little imagination and require considerable instruction and coaching in performing their job. When they have mastered a particular programming task, the source code becomes a part of their portfolio which they carry from one job to the next. So much so, that copying or stealing source code is actually the predominant mode of development in most companies. Consequently, there is little original source code being produced in today’s software.

I’m not sure why he had to make the remark about programmers possibly having a lower than average IQ. Where is the data for that? First off, IQ tests don’t accurately measure intelligence. Secondly, IQ tests are all about problem solving, something a programmer has to do everyday. I’m sure your average computer scientist would score better on an IQ test than your average manager who knows nothing about science or engineering. In fact, here are is a break down by major of average GRE scores (not an actual IQ test, but close):

http://www.iupui.edu/~philosop/gre.htm

Notice that computer scientists rank higher than business majors in all 3 categories. I’m not saying computer scientists are super smart, but it’s certainly unfounded to make comments about them possibly having a lower than average IQ.

And the comment about programmers requiring “considerable instruction and coaching in performing their job,” that sounds like something you’d say when you’re talking about how to train your dog. Any manager that thinks that way is going to foster an unpleasant working environment. No one likes to be patronized.

Programmers tend to perceive themselves as free-spirited intellectuals who possess the magic of technology. Whereas the knowledge of the language is vital to performing their job, programmers often use it to bamboozle others and heighten their own self-importance. To outsiders, programmers are viewed as a sort of inner-circle of magicians who speak a rather cryptic language aimed at impressing others, as well as themselves. Such verbosity may actually mask some serious character flaws in their personality. Speaking in a foreign language may be amusing to a listener for awhile, but will inevitably alienate people over time.

The author’s contempt for programmers becomes pretty apparent here. “Magicians”? “Aimed at impressing others”? These comments sound almost like jealously. Here are some more gems:

“There are very few true artists in computer programming, most are just house painters.” – Bryce’s Law

Without basic organization and discipline, programmers will become mentally lazy.

Basically, the programmer’s task is to convert human understandable specifications into machine understandable instructions. From this perspective, a programmer can best be characterized as a translator.

This last quote states a gross over simplification. If some engineers were to build a car based on a list of features someone requested, would those engineers simply “translators”? This statement alone shows that Mr. Bryce doesn’t know what he’s talking about. There’s more to software development than simply translating human specifications into instructions that a machine understands.

It’s actually flabbergasting that someone who obviously knows very little about programmers would write an article in such an authoritative tone. Not surprisingly, Mr. Bryce took a bashing in the comments section of this article. In his final reply back to his antagonists he states:

These are the same people who believe corporate cultures should change to suit their needs as opposed to the other way around. It just doesn’t work this way.

Unfortunately for Mr. Bryce, supply/demand is such right now that programmers have a choice in where they want to work. If you want to run your company like an ass, the good programmers will go elsewhere. Maybe this is why Mr. Bryce has so much experience with the “house painters”.

As a final aside, here are some real tips on managing programmers:

1. Have a good understanding of the technology you’re using / developing.
2. Thoroughly plan out what you want before having your programmers code it up.
3. Make sure your programmers have plenty of work to do. As a plus, make sure this work involves some thought of their part.
4. Free soda. Maybe this is more of a perk, but I seriously think every office would be better served if there was an all you can drink soda fountain.

For those of you who are interested, here is a link to the actual article:

http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/pm/irm/archives/theory-p-the-philosophy-of-managing-programmers-4993

Uncategorized

Online “Girls”

A couple of years ago one of my friends introduced me to a rather interesting research project that his friend Matt had preformed. Matt had decided to take pictures of his then girl friend and post them up on a popular online dating site. He then wrote a profile for her – creating in effect what he felt was the perfect girl: Chrissy Parker. Chrissy was basically described as being nice, fun, down to earth, smart and obtainable. Matt wanted to see the kind of responses he’d get from guys on the site. Pictures are important, but how important is the content itself, and would that effect the responses that he received? And what kinds of letters do guys typically write to girls on these kind of sites?

About two weeks ago I had a chance to talk to Matt and asked him about the site. He laughed about it upon remembering it’s conception. He also mentioned that once he started reading the letters he felt kind of bad. I don’t think he was expecting the guys who wrote her to be so nice. He said they sounded like the type of guys he’d want Chrissy to date. His girl friend apparently also found this project interesting and read through the letters herself, though it’s unknown what she thought of them. According to Matt she wasn’t anything like the profile he posted up, and instead of being 22, she’s really 16 or 17 in the pictures that were displayed.

Anyway, if you’re interested in seeing a copy of the profile and letters that were received, you can find them in a nice little write up at the following link:

The Stupendous Chrissy Parker Project

Reading over it again it seems a little unethical, but it’s a neat idea.

Uncategorized

Online Girls

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I found the following blog post about being a female gamer somewhat entertaining:

http://lostinazeroth.blogspot.com/2007/07/being-female-gamer-for-profitor-why-do.html

Here’s the bit that fascinated me the most:

Although it is reportedly not as common nowadays as it was in the earlier days of WoW, every once in awhile, I will receive whispered questions of “Are you really a girl?” or “What do you look like IRL?”. I usually just shrug them off, but sometimes the invitations can be tempting. If you are supposedly a true female AND a sexy race (Night Elf or Blood Elf in particular) the attention you may receive can be insane. Being offered 5G (which when you are lower levels can be a small fortune) to “talk dirty” to a male character or a purported male player, isn’t all that uncommon.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with WoW, it stands for World of Warcraft and it’s an online role playing game. The game itself costs around $50, and then you have to pay around $15 a month for a subscription so you can play online. I’ve never played myself, but I had a roommate who was hooked on it for a few months.

Anyway, the whole idea of spending fake money to have some supposed girl talk dirty to you reminds me of the whole “cybersex” phenomena that was big in the mid to late 90’s. I remember being 16 and having a couple of friends over and all they wanted to do was to get on the net and “cyber”. I remember it being this huge thing, I remember being asked several times by people, after they found out I had net access, “dude, have you ever cybered?” Nowadays I don’t get that question so much. In fact, I don’t think I’ve been asked that question since I was 16. I’d hypothesize that the majority of guys doing that kind of thing in WoW are just horny teenagers, though I’m sure there are older guys doing that too, which is a little creepy, and a little sad too, I suppose.

Software

New Online App

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It’s here folks, check it out:

http://www.patorjk.com/software/colorfader/

About a month ago someone emailed me requesting I put my old online color fader back up. You can find it at the web archives here:

http://web.archive.org/web/20050310095844/www.patorjk.com/ColorFader.htm

It’s a neat little app, but I figured I could do a lot better, so I told that guy I’d write a new one and post it up in a week :P. It took a little longer than I suspected, mostly because I was distracted with other things (I didn’t start on it until last week). This new color fader is MUCH better. It can fade up to 100 colors, and has a nifty little feature that allows you to create background fades. Example:

With this app you can generate faded images 1 pixel wide which you can use as the background for certain page elements

I like the idea of generating images with PHP. I’ll probably play around with it a little more and see if I can make anything interesting. Though right now I’m still feeling pretty sick so I think I’m going to go lay down. Let me know what you think of the new app though!

General News

Harry Potter Madness

I was one of those people who waited out side the book store in a long line, right before midnight, when “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” was released. The atmosphere was great: There were people in costumes (one group showed up dressed as jedis – which made no sense), lots of excited people, and lots of cute girls. I was actually pretty astonished. There are a lot of cute girls that read the Harry Potter books.

It was kind of odd for me to be there though, I felt sort of like a charlatan since I was only 100 pages into the fourth book (even now I’m still on the fourth book). I was picking up my mom’s reserved copy though, and I couldn’t resist the idea of a midnight book release. It seemed like a fun thing to be a part of.

Anyway, it’s that time of year again. Since this is the final book, I knew it’d be bigger and there’d be more crazy stuff going on. But unfortunately for me, it wasn’t to be. I’ve been sick as hell the past 3 days, and right now my throat hurts so much that I can barely talk. So I had to pass on the opportunity to check out the madness. My brother did drive by one of the local book stores though, about 15-30 minutes prior to midnight, just to see what was up. Here are some pics from the front lines:

I feel sorry for the people who work at the book store.

On an unrelated note, I’ve changed the root directory of this site – patorjk.com – so that it’s a frame that points to this page. I felt this was better than having a crappy looking page redirect you here. A brief check out of things seems to indicate that all is well. Let me know if you have any problems though. It’s actually a frameset with only one frame object in it. I had no idea you could do that until I tested it out (on IE and Firefox).

Software

Three Crazy Software Ideas I’ve Tossed Out the Window

A while back I announced I was going to create 2 new online apps. I’m about 80% done with the first one. I started on it last week and have been working on it every once in a while. It’s a rather small app, but it’ll have some features which I think people will like – well, at least one person should, since it’s based off their request. It should be ready next weekend.

The other app, which I’ll reveal in the list below as #3, I’ve decided not to write. After thinking a bit, I decided it was the kind of application that would be cool to write, but that no one would have any practical use for. These kind of ideas come to me every once in a while, most of the time I come to my senses, though sometimes I actually end up implementing them and releasing them to the public (my Mini-Hex Editor comes to mind). Below is a list of four ideas I’ve had that I seriously considered and than later realized were ridiculous. If you happen to think any of them are not-so-ridiculous, feel free to take the idea and implement it.

1) Online Texture Synthesizer

Texture Synthesis is the process of taking in a texture and then outputting a much larger version of that texture. Usually, you want to minimize repeatability, so the texture seems more real, so you try to “learn” the texture and grow it out into a larger area. Below is an example. Texture A is inputted, and texture B is outputted.


Pretty cool, right? Texture Synthesis is the kind of thing you learn in grad school. It’s one of those weird topics that advisors try and push on their students since it’s apparently a ripening area with lots of creative solutions that people can publish papers on. My advisor had me learn all about texture synthesis. So naturally, as I was pondering possible apps to make, I thought to myself “Hey, why not make an online texture synthesizer!” It seemed like an intriguing idea at first. There are lots of algorithms to chose from, and I had already implemented a few of them for graphics projects I had to do. But then it occurred to me: What would anyone want with a texture synthesizer? Seriously. It’s a neat problem, but outside of a few far out purposes, there’s really no reason anyone would need such a program, at least your average person. And I’m sure people who would like a texture synthesizer would probably be more likely to build their own engine for it than to use some program some guy posted up on his website. So the idea was scrapped. It’s a neat problem though.

2) Moving Window Art Generator

A few years ago, while in daze of bordem at work, I suddenly had this weird idea of creating layered moving graphics. Only the graphics didn’t move, just the holes between them. I thought the idea was so cool that when I got home I whipped up a program to create the image stills and then I used a gif creator to make the gifs. Below are two such gifs I created:


I should say there is NO POLITICAL meaning behind the Pat/Bush picture. I just thought it was trippy looking. I made a few other various designs. Mostly people thought they were weird. Though I did have one Visual Arts major think they were really cool, which made my day. I thought about writing a polished version of the program that would fully create the gifs, but then I realized that no one had asked for such a program, and outside of a few friends, most people thought the images were really bizarre. Actually, if I get really really bored, I may one day re-write an app for this. But at the moment I have much more useful things on my plate.

3) Online Magic Eye TAAG Program

You’ve heard of Magic Eye pictures, haven’t you? Those neat little images where when you unfocus your eyes a 3D image appears? Well it turns out those things are actually called autostereograms and the wikipedia article on them explains the algorithm for how they are created:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autostereogram

I thought that article was really fascinating. So much so that I thought about creating a Magic Eye generator, but then decided that the Magic Eye people might not look too favorably on that. But then I found this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Image_Random_Text_Stereogram

ASCII Art autostereograms, and I thought “hey, I’ve just written a program for creating large ASCII Art text, why not make a program that lets you see them in 3D!” I figured it’d be something that people would get a real kick out of. However, only the “Banner” font would work, since the generated ASCII images would not have the characters from the fonts pop up, but the areas of space that those characters took up pop out.

However, after giving this some good thought I came back to what had stopped me from creating apps #1 and #2: Would anyone ever have any practical use for this?

It might be fun to use once or twice, but I couldn’t see anyone using it more than that. And I couldn’t think up any situations where someone would actually use the app for something – other than maybe making generating some 3D text to show someone for the sake of showing them something they hadn’t seen before. That’s not really the kind of app I want to make. Plus it’d be a lot of hard work for something that would get such little use. And what if the Magic Eye people made one that generated pictures and not text? That would be so much cooler.

Anyway, that’s a sampling of apps I seriously considered and then later ditched. Hopefully you’ve found them somewhat interesting. Talking about them makes me feel less bad about spending so much time thinking about them.

General News

Loose Ends

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I’ve added a few things from my previous site:

Basically, two programming related tutorials that were written for this site and a gallery of mosaics. I think I want my programming section to consist of just tutorials this time, instead of downloadable examples. Well, I may do a little of both, but tutorials appeal a lot more to me. And for the moment being, I’m not taking any submissions, even though I’ve had a few people offer to write examples. Somewhere inside of me there is a Regular Expressions tutorial, but I want to wait a while, and I need to think up some really good examples for it. In school when I was taught about regular expressions, they were presented in the most boring way possible and we were shown no real world application of them. It was only recently that I re-discovered them and realized how great they really were.

I’ve stopped doing Spot Lighted Site posts and no one has called me on it. Not that I’d think any of you would lose any sleep over it, I felt kind of corny doing a weekly feature like that anyway. From now on I’m only going to sporadically feature a site or an article, since a lot of “Spot Lighted” posts might clutter up the main page and make it harder for people to find the real news. I’m also kind of torn on what kind of sites to feature. In the past I’ve featured some completely non-programming related sites like antigirl.com and sullen (now defunct), but it doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense for me to do that. I think I want to keep this site mostly on focus – though deviations from time to time are good. So I guess with all this rambling what I’m trying to say is that there’ll be less Spot Lighted Sites (like what’s been happening for the past month), and when something is talked about, it’ll hopefully have some kind of interest to the people who come here.

Uncategorized

Kwik-E-Mart

During the past 2 weeks I’ve had a few friends tell me that one of the local 7-Eleven convenience stores had been transformed into a “Kwik-E-Mart”, the cartoon convenience store that the Simpsons shop at. Being a huge Simpsons fan, I had to check it out.

It took us 45 minutes to drive down there. Luckily, and as you can see from the above pic, they went all out. They were even selling actual items from the Simpsons TV show, like Buzz Cola, Krusty O’s, pink donuts, and Squeeshies. Sadly, there was no Duff beer. Below you can see my brother Kyle holding a box of Krusty O’s.

I couldn’t resist buying a box, along with a huge case of Buzz cola, a Homer cookie, and a Squeeshy. The place was pretty packed, and it seemed like everyone else was doing the same. I’m glad I only bought one box though, I saw several people buying 2-4 boxes. They’ll probably be pretty bummed out when they get home and find out it’s just fruit loops inside (I was somewhat annoyed at this – come on, Krusty O’s != fruit loops).

Before this, I don’t think I’d ever been to a 7-Eleven. So even though there were decorations everywhere, I wasn’t sure how far they’d gone to make their business look like a Kwik-E-Mart. I thought it was cool they had gross looking hot dogs for sale though. If that’s what they normally sell, I’m surprised anyone eats them.

Everyone else in the store was taking pictures like crazy too. You couldn’t move 5 feet without getting in the way of someone’s photo. However, I highly recommend a trip up to one of these stores. It’s probably the most fun I’ve ever had in a convenience store. You can find the closest one to you here:

http://www.7-eleven.com/kem.asp

Here are some more photos I took:

http://www.patorjk.com/images/kwikemart/freezer_man.png – The freezer man!
http://www.patorjk.com/images/kwikemart/kyle_buzzcola.png
http://www.patorjk.com/images/kwikemart/kyle_comicbookguy.png
http://www.patorjk.com/images/kwikemart/kyle_outside.png
http://www.patorjk.com/images/kwikemart/pat_chiefwiggum.png

As a side note, the Buzz cola is just generic soda, and it doesn’t taste that great. So don’t buy a huge case unless you’re doing it for the cans. Same with the Krusty O’s – they just generic fruit loops. The Squeeshies are good, you should definitely get one of those. They were out of pink donuts when we got there, but I imagine they taste like any other donut you buy with pink frosting. There were a couple of other Simpsons themed products, but those were the main ones.