Everything that comes out of Dossy, from the strange to the banal.
Tonight, driving home from dinner, the subject of Mother Nature came up. Charlie, my 7-year-old daughter, asked, “What about houses?” We explained that houses are man-made, to which my daughter explained without hesitation, “Oh, that must be Father Nature, then”–which logically follows since fathers are men.
I am constantly reminded of how I want to be as smart as she is when I grow up.
del.icio.us/dossy (RSS) links since August 13, 2007 at 09:00 AM:
I love that Jason comes out and says “Mahalo is not for you” to the geeks:
“The fact is, if folks who are in the .001% of the internet population are in love with our service that’s probably a BAD SIGN.”
He goes on to say:
“[…] what the vast majority of people want from search is to type a word into a box and get an organized list of high quality links. That’s it. It’s that simple, and that’s what we’re doing.”
There’s a reason why Jason was a good fit for AOL–and a tremendous loss for AOL when he left–because Jason naturally “gets” the ideas that the AOL founders have known for almost 20 years now.
It goes back to something I’ve argued with user interface designers on and off for years: users don’t want to browse the web, they want to find information. Getting more than one result back means having to make a decision and most people aren’t educated or informed enough to make the decision as to which path will result in finding what they’re looking for. They don’t have time to navigate down until they reach a dead-end and back-button their way to the decision point and try again.
Sometimes, I wonder if Mahalo’s going to miss the mark because they still give users too much to choose from. This is why Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” button is such brilliant genius–if only Google’s search result quality were much, much higher. Once Mahalo’s data set grows sufficiently large, it might be useful to just redirect people to the top link instead of serving them a results page. Yes, this means you can’t monetize on eyeballs with paid display ads, but perhaps you could revenue share with the destination that you send users to.
This is why I kept wanting to launch a little skunk-works project inside AOL to build out keyword.aol.com … which would just reuse their existing keyword database and redirect users, so if you went to keyword.aol.com/sports it would redirect you to the page that is already programmed as the destination for KW: Sports. No real additional “work” would be done by the editorial team–just repurposing the existing data.
Oh well, AOL may have missed the boat on this one but maybe Mahalo has a chance to win here. I can’t wait to see how things turn out.
As an off-shoot of the monthly MySQL meetup that I co-organize with Steve, we started a weekly Hackfest meetup that meets on Monday nights. Last night’s Hackfest had a good turnout–7 of us at the start, 6 at the end–and there was lots of activity, even some coding! Here’s some pictures I took half-way through:
After Mary came and presented Rayt at the August MySQL meetup, I suggested she come to our Hackfest and I’d work on it with her. She was working up the design comp for the user interface and I started working on the bookmarklet and portal and soon we’ll have enough done to take some reasonably interesting screenshots.
I hope we can keep the momentum up and get more folks coming to work on their projects at the Hackfest. It would be nice to get someone to provide us a better venue–we currently meet at the Panera Bread in Paramus, NJ, which offers free wi-fi and is very accomodating of us, but it can be quite noisy and we usually can’t get the private room you see in the picture behind us. If you know of any organizations that would be willing to give us space with tables and chairs, a few electrical outlets, and some form of Internet connectivity for an evening every Monday night, let me know!
del.icio.us/dossy (RSS) links since August 6, 2007 at 09:00 AM:
In my attempts to wean myself off as many commercial applications as possible, I decided to give The GIMP another try. I grabbed the Win32 installer for GIMP 2.2.17, which made installation a breeze. It certainly starts up much faster than Photoshop CS2, which is another big plus. It is amazing how featureful it is for a free software application.
But … there’s still a functionality gap between it and Photoshop and that’ll make it hard to switch completely. Specifically, where is GIMP’s equivalent of Photoshop’s “Median” filter? Not sure what I’m talking about? I’m referring to this:
It’s a really useful filter and I can’t seem to find the equivalent in GIMP. It’s good for smoothing sharp edges into curves, like this:
(Before and after)
Getting this effect is as easy as this in Photoshop:
But, how do you do it in GIMP? I’ve searched and the best I’ve found is people suggesting that GIMP’s “Filters > Enhance > Despeckle” has a “Median” filter, but it’s not even close to the same effect.
So, if there’s a GIMP wizard out there who knows GIMP inside and out, what’s the magic incantation to reproduce this effect that’s easily done in Photoshop, in GIMP?
Update: I found
I just found out that MySQL Camp II is being held in Brooklyn, NY, later this month, on August 23-24, at Polytechnic University. Hopefully there are still slots available and I’ll be there.
Nick Gonzales over at TechCrunch points out that Spock publically launched yesterday. The notion of aggregating information about people by crawling the open web isn’t new–ZoomInfo.com, as well as other companies, have been doing it successfully for a while now.
Given the recent attention associated with the launch, Spock got hit with a bunch of traffic today. According to their about page, “Spock is the online leader in personal search, helping users find and discover people.” However, given the number of error pages that were being returned throughout the day, Spock is the online leader in “Uh Oh. Looks like we’re having problems right now” errors. (“Web 2.0: It’s like Web 1.0, without the uptime.”) It’s always amazing to see how people build these services, always deferring the scalability issues “until later” and when “later” comes, they’re wholly unprepared and get trounced.
After all that, I do have to say that one aspect of Spock’s result page for my name really made me smile:
Spock actually knows that I like blondes! Now that’s an intelligent search index. Of course, this same feature knows who likes analingus, so maybe it’s not such a great idea, after all. :-)
Tags: Web 2.0, Spock, stalkerware, people search
The other day while I was grocery shopping, I dropped my Treo 650 and bricked it. It would power up and the touch-screen was responsive, but the keyboard wasn’t. Sad, but not defeated, I decided to try and fix it myself since it was bricked anyway. But, it’s secured with Torx T5 screws and I haven’t found a good source for smaller Torx bits. I already have drivers as small as T6, but where could I get a T5 bit?
Of course there’s bound to be plenty of online shopping sites where I could order one, but I wanted immediate gratification–plus, I needed to see if my phone was truly unusable, in which case I’d need to go and get a replacement right away. Luckily, I discovered that Home Depot carries the Husky 8-in-1 Precision Screwdriver, which has 4 double-sided bits ranging of sizes T4, T5, T6, T7, T8, T9, T10 and T15, all for $5.97! I drove down to my local Home Depot and picked one up, got home and took my Treo apart.
It turns out that the lower-right pad under the right-hand shift button on the keyboard PCB was permanently depressed. I’d carefully lifted it with a pair of precision tweezers and popped it back up, exercised it a few times and closed the Treo back up. The keyboard was working once again and I had a usable phone! However, if I weren’t so lucky, apparently Cellular Nationwide Network, a company based out of Hong Kong, is selling a Treo 650 replacement keyboard PCB for $9.99. I have no idea what the shipping costs from HK to the US are, though.
If you’re going to take a stab at fixing your own Treo, this video walkthrough shows you how to take it apart:
I’m just glad I was able to get my Treo working again! I really didn’t want to have to spend money to replace it right now.
If this helped you out with your own Treo repair, I’m glad. Feel free to let me know in the comments below–or, ask any questions you have and I might be able to answer and help you out.
elfs (yes, that Elf) wrote in his LJ today about Ashley Evans’s rant and it helped me clarify some thoughts I’ve had for a while but couldn’t express in words.
As much as I tend to believe that some theory of evolution is more likely to be correct than some formulation of a creationist myth, I think it is fair to say that there’s a non-empty “gap” in The Theory of Evolution. I can explain why with one question: Which theory of evolution is The Theory of Evolution? The fact that I can ask that question demonstrates the flaw.
Is it Darwinian natural selection? Punctuated equilibrium? Something else entirely?
Ironically, while I said I tend to believe some form of evolutionary theory is correct as opposed to some creationist myth, I have a hard time accepting that any of the currently expressed theories of evolution to be the actually correct one, either.
But, I trust, through good science and rigorous discipline, we’ll continue to iterate towards the correct one.
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