CodeMonkey Blog

LinkedIn with Tim Ferriss' 4-Hour Workweek!

noreply@blogger.com (ABCGi) — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 23:10:00 +0000

I recently got LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com) with Tim Ferriss so I thought I would recommend his web site and book, "The 4-Hour Workweek".

http://fourhourworkweek.com
http://fourhourworkweek.com/blog
http://photomatt.net/2007/08/21/tim-ferriss-interview

I'm not greedy - I'd be happy with a 4-Day Workweek! Or how about we all just work Monday, Wednesday and Friday? Really, really, really hard!!!?!

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CodeMonkey Blog

Andy Dick talks about Phil Hartman being shot dead by his wife

noreply@blogger.com (ABCGi) — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 04:26:00 +0000

Andy Dick finally tells the story of Phil Hartman and his wife (who shot her husband) and the cocaine that he may of given her. This is a story he would not even sell to Larry King. Andy also talks about Chris Farley passing. Very touching moments. All on the Tom Green web show "The Channel".

Direct video link full screen: http://tinyurl.com/2vwylf

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CodeMonkey Blog

Facebook has 30 millions users and their own search engine

noreply@blogger.com (ABCGi) — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 00:17:00 +0000

Facebook recently grew beyond 30 million users, whilst it is not fully supportive of Australia (versus the USA), it is a fantastic social networking tool.

Facebook is free, and makes money through advertising, plus you can buy gifts for others for $1US or pay for your own advertising - like flyers for $10 for 5,000 semi-targeted views.

I recently had trouble paying for flyer advertising, due to Australian issues (the State field only allowed two characters for the USA, Australia needs three), and the support from Facebook was fast, personal, good and iterative. Very impressive for a free product.

Finally a lot of good work continues to be done on the system, which can be a little buggy, especially with third party apps (such as the Rock You slide shows). An impressive completed project is their own search engine, customised for their own particular data, is worth reading for anyone in IT.

Facebook's own search engine:
http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=2535632130

Quotes:

We wrote a crawler for the site, created an in-memory reverse index using both hashes and ternary tries and created a ranking system that scaled to return unique results for over 28 million user profiles.

Facebook search results are sorted by an approximation of social graph distance. People closer to you in the graph—your friends and people in your networks—are likely to be more relevant to you and thus are ranked higher. We also use this concept of "social proximity" to order results within applications like groups and events. Facebook search's key differentiator is that search results are unique to every user because they are based on a individual's place in the social graph.

Over 600 million searches per month. This makes us one of the top 20 search engines on the web in terms of number of searches.
Approximately 1 terabyte of in-memory data.
Average search query time of less than 100ms.

Most used people search engine on the web.

Best Comic of the Day:
Diesel Sweeties - Meaningless Quiz

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CodeMonkey Blog

Should Opinion Pieces on the Web carry a Disclaimer?

noreply@blogger.com (ABCGi) — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 00:32:00 +0000

This article on Wired: Google's Half-Hearted Commitment to Transparency in my view is an opinion piece that presents itself as factual.

For instance, the following is opinion, IMO, as it assumes Google's intentions which, even if it were true, they would never confirm:

"When the Justice Department sought an extensive list of anonymized search queries from the company, we only learned about it because Google fought the request in open court, out of reluctance to part with a trove of valuable data for free."

Now, this happens on a lot of blogs, opinion stated as fact, but for an amateur blog it is expected. For a news or professional site, even for their blogs, I would think that some sort of disclaimer or label, such as "editorial", is needed?

Best Comic of the Day:
XKCD - Elevator

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CodeMonkey Blog

Don't be fooled, Linux is not free

noreply@blogger.com (ABCGi) — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 02:19:00 +0000

Whilst going a little too far, IMHO, this article makes a good point, when considering a Linux environment don't discount other costs, like supporting it, just because the price tag is $0.00.

read more | digg story

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CodeMonkey Blog

Free Pinball MAME on your PC

noreply@blogger.com (ABCGi) — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 09:37:00 +0000

Best Comic of the Day -
ASCII Art Farts - "WEBGINEER"


     . .                                                       
    . * .          I DEFTLY FIXED MY PROBLEM BY BACKING OUT    
     .|.       THE CHANGES I MADE WHICH BROKE THINGS !!!!!!!!!!
      |      .                                                 
   .-'|`-.   |                                                 
   `-.|.-'  .-.                                                
      |    `._.'                                               
      |      |     *                                           
     | |     |     |__                                         
     | |    /|     [__]                                        
     | |   / |      ||                                         
    |   |  | |      ||                                         
    |  _|_ | | /\  |  |                                        
   _|_|   || ||  | |  |                                        
/\|    |  || ||  | | _|_                                       
|||    |  .-.||  |_||   |                                      
|||    | |   |     ||   |_                                     
|||    | |   |     ||     |                                    
|||    | |   |     ||     |                                    
|||    | |   |     ||     |                                    
|||    | |   |     ||     |                                    
|||    | |   |     ||     |    FOLKS I'M A WEBGINEER           
|||    | |   |     ||     |                                    
|||    | |   |     ||     |                                    
|||    | |   |     ||     |                                    
|||____|_|___|_____||_____|__________________________jro

Warning: ASCII Art Farts contain adult content and very bad taste!

Best Video of the Day -
30% of Americans do not recall year of 9/11 attacks!

I tested some Australians and they also had a bit of trouble!

Best Link of the Day - Kung Fu Master
From Killer List Of Video games (KLOV)... good times, good times.
KLOV - http://www.klov.com

Best Really Free Game of the Day - Crawl - online
We had nethack online now Crawl! A free ASCII based RogueLike RPG game that you can play online, compare high scores, and watch others as they play, via a terminal.
http://crawl.akrasiac.org

Best Really Free Download of the Day - Image Magick
SourceForge Quote: "ImageMagick is free software to create, edit, and compose bitmap images in many formats from the commandline or via programming interfaces. Images can be cropped, resized, and combined, effects can be applied, and text, polygons, and curves can be added."
http://sourceforge.net/projects/imagemagick/

What is "Really Free"?

Free Pinball MAME on your PC

Here is a repost of these very cool links to start your PC pinball collection... no-one noticed the first time this was posted and it is too cool not to try again!

vPinMAME et al Pinball simulation and emulation.
Your adventure starts here;

vPinMAME http://www.pinmame.com

Latest: Visual Pinball downloads - vPinMAME downloads

Combination Install Guide, putting the two above together - bit out of date: Visual PinMame install guide

AJ's Tables http://www.vpforums.com/vptables

ROMS - iPDB Internet Pinball Database! http://www.ipdb.org

Front End - MAME style, optional http://vplauncher.rolandscholz.de

Files Needed http://irpinball.ztnet.com

This is starting to get mature enough to be useful but early enough to still be a pain to put together and make work! The picture shows how Rocky and Bullwinkle actually appears on the screen and is playable with a pretty good pinball physics engine. It is a weird collection of different products including vbscript but seems to work ok.

Three main elements:

A Visual Pinball Table file (.VPT) (with textures from photos of the real table) is combined with ROMS in vPinMAME (including sound ROMS) to emulate and simulate playable real pinball machines pretty well - and the electronic back glass display is independent as an always on top resizable window! The VPT files actually can run by themselves and Visual Pinball comes with an editor allowing the creation of original pinball games!

It's kind of cheating but here is a link to download the 10MB install pack that does all of the above for you - save collecting ROMS and Tables;

Visual Install Pack 1.3 and info thread.

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CodeMonkey Blog

Java Coding at Mark Damon Hughes Blog

noreply@blogger.com (ABCGi) — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 00:28:00 +0000

Best Comic of the Day - Diesel Sweeties - "Game Set and Theory - Elitism"

Best Video of the Day - SuperMarket 2.0
What if a super market were web 2.0 compliant? - from Glumbert

Best Link of the Day - NetVibes
A great start up page like iGoogle or My Yahoo.
http://www.netvibes.com

Best Really Free Game of the Day - NetHack - online
A free ASCII based RogueLike RPG game that you can play online, compare high scores, and watch others as they play, via a terminal.
http://alt.org/nethack

Best Really Free Download of the Day - PHPList
Quote: "phplist is an open-source newsletter manager. phplist is free to download, install and use, and is easy to integrate with any website."
http://www.phplist.com

What is "Really Free"?

Java Coding Response by Mark Damon Hughes

Looks like I may have to change my coding style.

Over at Mark Damon Hughes Blog I commented on his post on Checked Exceptions in Java which included some Java code in this style:


public void openFileInEditor(File file) throws MyFileOpenFailedException {
        List lines = new ArrayList();
        BufferedReader in = null;
        try {
                in = new BufferedReader( new FileReader(file) );
                String line;
                while ( (line = in.readLine()) != null ) {
                        list.add(lines);
                }
                this.editorBuffer.setLines(lines);
        } catch (IOException e) {
                LOGGER.log(file, e);
                throw new MyFileOpenFailedException(file.toString(), e);
        } finally {
                if (in != null) {
                        in.close();
                }
        }
}

I suggested changing the readability as in the below code.


public void openFileInEditor(File file) throws MyFileOpenFailedException
{
        List lines = new ArrayList();
        BufferedReader in = null;
        try
        {
                in = new BufferedReader( new FileReader(file) );
                String line;
                while ( (line = in.readLine()) != null )
                {
                        list.add(lines);
                }
                this.editorBuffer.setLines(lines);
        }
        catch (IOException e)
        {
                LOGGER.log(file, e);
                throw new MyFileOpenFailedException(file.toString(), e);
        }
        finally
        {
                if (in != null)
                {
                        in.close();
                }
        }
}

As Mark points out in this response post on Java Code Style that is actually how he used to do it but was convinced otherwise:

"That's how I used to indent code, too, but co-workers finally convinced me to switch. The Sun Java style guide specifies how Java code should look, so it's always consistent between developers. As soon as you work on a team with source control, consistent style becomes very important, far more important than individual preference. Merging code with whitespace changes is a pain. Reading code with randomly-varying indentation styles because 10 different programmers have used their own styles is a pain."

Can't argue with that! And well put too...

Links

-> http://kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu - Mark Damon Hughes
--> Blog: Checked Exceptions in Java
--> Blog: Java Code Style
---> Sun Java style guide

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CodeMonkey Blog

Payola or as I heard at the Sydney Writers Festival - Blogola

noreply@blogger.com (ABCGi) — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 07:42:00 +0000

Best Comic of the Day - Bigger Than Cheeses - "Internet Roulette"

The noise level from the "hairless chimps" of the internet is high...
Deviant Art - http://www.deviantart.com

Blog Talk at Sydney Writers Festival 2007 - Australia

I was at an interesting blog talk at the Sydney Writers Festival on the weekend (3/6/2007). Some views from the panel of bloggers:

Some don't consider corporate "blogs" as real blogs (diaries are real blogs).

They predicted the end of the recording monoliths.

The published writer who was a blogger predictably said that he felt there was still a place for paperbacks in the future.

Successful blogs don't have to have 10,000 readers... they can just have a good community.

They saw a future to online TV viewing, youTube etc. Most online video was seen as copyright violation with some other user generated stuff that was good.

The blogger who was threatened with sexual abuse in the comments of her blog was mentioned. Question is - those sort of comments are normally moderated out... why were they left in?

In terms of writing skills, blogs were seen to be good practice... 1st million words are practice then you really start writing!

Payola or Blogola - as with Radio in the 60's in the US (when Payola was rampant and the term was invented), this practice is concerning but will be reigned in eventually also it was felt that natural selection would help weed out such sites.

Trends in blogging - some were seen to be good things, others were seen to be troubling:

Comments - a defacto standard for blogs now, a small % of comments were good the rest were from "hairless chimps" = noise.

Lots of blogs - the good ones would become more popular = natural selection = good.

People are writing - it is a good thing, the popularity of blogs, as it gets people writing.

MySpace was considered part of the blogosphere!

Payola

Here is a study on Payola the pay for comment situation on the net, they found around 20% payola from web sites everywhere English speaking (except Australia - probably just lack of data or more careful here). Payola sites would accept pay for articles and around 60% would accept pay for editorials.

-> http://dailytech.com/Pay+to+Play+Uncovering+Online+Payola/article7510.htm

For sites where the editorial staff were also the sales department they found a higher incidence of payola including pay for pumping a product in their own forums as a non-staff user.

FaceBook vs MySpace

Also FaceBook is catching up to MySpace... a long way off but growing at a faster rate. FaceBook looks a lot cleaner at least.

-> http://valleywag.com/tech/buzzmeter/facebook-gains-on-myspace-265846.php

Buzzwords

DiggEffect - a popular story on Digg linking to a site causes the site to go down from traffic by many Digg users.

Such as the site promoted by this Guy Kawasaki blog on By the Numbers: How I built a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for $12,107.09

-> http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/06/by_the_numbers_.html

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CodeMonkey Blog

About CodeMonkey...

noreply@blogger.com (ABCGi) — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 23:54:00 +0000

About CodeMonkey: Supporting those geeks who have lost the will to live in the Real World and have immersed themselves in the world of the computer and the Internet. We offer training to current and aspiring Monkeys, a forum, certification articles, assistance, advice, a collaborative free open source community of Monkeys. We promote a New Way for the New Millennium that resembles a Star Trek society of self improvement and technology (I told you we were geeks!).

What is "Really Free"?

"Really Free" is a completed, fully functional, forever free and good quality product/game/site/service with no cost, no spyware, no strings attached, no intrusive advertising, no popups, no trial period, no shareware type limitations and so on. Asking for donations and modest ads are ok - open source or GNU type "freedom" software license is a plus.

Best Really Free Game of the Day - Sangband
A free tile based RogueLike RPG game based on Angband. Press '=' for options, '!' for user interface, and switch to 32x32 tiles rather than ASCII display.
http://sangband.runegold.org

Best Really Free Download of the Day - Synergy
Share keyboard, mouse and clipboard over multiple computers and monitors for free (SourceForge project).
http://synergy2.sourceforge.net

Best Video of the Day - Sarah Silverman Blasts Paris Hilton Live

Adult content... - Sarah Silverman takes a dig at Paris Hilton at the MTV Movie Awards, and the entire crowd laughs at the jail-bound heiress' expense - legal footage embed from iFilm (so this video won't go "unavailable" like half the webs versions of this video e.g. youTube).

Best Link of the Day - Button Men Online Web Game
A free popular dice/button based web game with great site and community.
http://www.buttonmen.dhs.org

Added site to Technorati index...
Technorati Profile
Added site to FeedBurner (now acquired by Google)
http://feeds.feedburner.com/codemonkey

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CodeMonkey Blog

Internet TV - Tom Green .com and iFilm's Daily Show and The Colbert Report

noreply@blogger.com (ABCGi) — Wed, 09 May 2007 23:24:00 +0000

Wee Man on Tom Green's "The Channel"...

Internet TV (the future of TV?) is a way to reach a world wide audience, on demand, that may not have access to a show on TV, and exposes that audience to advertising, and taps into web advertisers that may not be interested in advertising on regular TV. Everyone wins? As with the music industry and MP3's it is better for TV show producer to air on the net collecting ad revenue and have audiences watch their professional release than for the audience to seek rough quality boot legs on the web.

IFilm.com repeats up to date broadcasts from Comedy Channel such as the Daily Show and Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report. This is funded by advertising. Each "bit" of the show is presented as one clip. You have to watch the professional shows on the site although viral videos can be embedded. More than a weeks current content can be seen.

Craig Ferguson Show on YouTube
- Craig speaks on his past problems as an alcoholic and why he will not ridicule Britney Spears.

Tom Green's The Channel is a new type of TV: Internet TV. It is broadcast on the net ("National Webovision") in good quality. Tom interacts with the web, skype users, instant messages, phone calls, snail mail, and CB radio during the show. The show is hosted in Tom's house in an hour long, one guest only format. The relaxed atmosphere brings out the best in guests and is a refreshing change from regular talk show formats. It is also recorded live and uncensored, even the phone calls are unscreened, there is no advertising, and one can embed his videos as above. Other titbits such as viral videos, blogs, myspace, youtube, maniatv, search, links etc are included on the site.

Dave Thomas and Andy Dick on Tom Green's "The Channel"

The next step will to be able to get TV as full screen, full quality, on demand, on the desktop, in realtime with no download delays - rather than watching in a tiny high resolution box with varying degrees of quality.

Internet TV Shows
http://www.ifilm.com
http://www.tomgreen.com
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on iFilm
The Colbert Report with Stephen Colbert on iFilm
Retirement Living TV!
The Sarah Silverman Program on iFilm
The Showbiz Show with David Spade on iFilm
New Duck TV
The Whitest Kids U Know - NYC TV Show
Smosh - YouTube comedy show
Comedy Central

Daily Video Link Sites
http://maniatv.com
Portal Of Evil TV
http://www.break.com
http://www.youtube.com
Google Video
Daily Motion
DivX Stage6
Veoh Video Network

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CodeMonkey Blog

gViM - best open source text editor

noreply@blogger.com (ABCGi) — Sat, 05 May 2007 09:03:00 +0000

.

For Windows users...

The below was created in "ViM", for Vi iMproved, voted the best open-source text editor. For Windows users, used to UltraEdit or other notepad type editors, there is some adjustment to ViM which is the standard Vi editor that comes with almost every Linux distro. Vi is a UNIX based text editor.

Bram Moolenaar, author of ViM (now up to version 7.0), gives this 1.5hr video speech on "7 habits of effective text editing" which I have summarised underneath the video. The video is a little dry and overlong but the tips are good in general and in regard to ViM.

Seven habits of effective text editing

by Bram Moolenaar
Bram@Moolenaar.net

3 STEPS FOR EACH HABIT

1. Detect inefficiency (that one wastes time on)
2. Find a quicker way (just learn things as they are needed)
3. Make it a habit (do the habit every time and improve the habit over time)

SEVEN HABITS FOR ANY TEXT EDITOR

0. Use your current editor if it is good otherwise use ViM.
1. Move around quickly
   - Navigating and searching text.
2. Don't type it twice
   - Use substitute, auto complete and spell checking to minimise errors.
3. Fix it when it's wrong
   - Autocorrect common mistakes and highlighting of 
     unknown words.
4. A file seldom comes alone
   - Tagging multiple files, grep (search) amongst multiple files.
5. Let's work together
   - Editor integrates with other products that do their own job well.
6. Text is structured
   - Create scripts in ViM to automate jobs 
    (eg :make to compile your code and then show errors).
7. Make it a habit
   - Do not learn all functions, just find what you need when you need it, 
     make it a habit from then on.

* Oh and learn to touch type with 10 fingers without looking at the keyboard!
A good trick is to have some object between your eyes and the keyboard.
* Always have backups so you can go back in case some command you are trying back fires!
* Copy your blog or web comment before posting in case it goes into the nether-net
(nether-net: the unsearchable, except in hell, internet where all our lost code, files, data and text goes).

USING VIM

* Like Vi
* Starts in read mode
* Press 'i' to go into insert mode, press ESC to exit insert mode
* in read mode all commands start with ':'
* Use gViM for windows GUI (check file menu for :command shortcuts)

gViM for Windows can be downloaded from the ViM site...

Links
http://vim.sourceforge.net
Author's ViM page
Download gViM 7.0 install (GUI ViM for Windows)
More info on ViM (from the author)
7 habits text
Google 7 habits vid (as shown below embedded)

Quickest way to get started is to:
* Download gVim above and install it.
* Run it (full gViM not gViM easy).
* press 'i' to insert.
* ESC to go back to read/command mode:

This post inspired by Mark Damon Hughes post on ViM and then Windowfied.

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CodeMonkey Blog

In the jungle... cute video

noreply@blogger.com (ABCGi) — Thu, 03 May 2007 07:24:00 +0000

.

Direct link to video.

TV Show wisdom!

Take 20 minutes each day for yourself to reflect and relax.

Don't be afraid to open your heart to those dear to you.

Put yourself in others shoes before judging them.

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CodeMonkey Blog

ARG - Alternate Reality Game - World Without Oil

noreply@blogger.com (ABCGi) — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 23:59:00 +0000

An ARG (Alternate Reality Game) is a web based game that pretends a certain situation exists and everyone plays along. Smacks of role playing and there have been several examples.

This one, World Without Oil, looks forward to the time when demand for oil starts outstripping supply. This page explains about the ARG otherwise the rest of the site is "as real":

http://worldwithoutoil.org/what.aspx

It was created by about 10 people who produced a lot of content.

Other examples, I guess, are Nation States (based on the book Jennifer Government, a multinational run future world where everyones surname is the company they work for: such as Phil Nike) and Zombie World News (which pretends zombies have invaded Earth).

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CodeMonkey Blog

Top 15 Great Web Comics 2007

noreply@blogger.com (ABCGi) — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 15:27:00 +0000

This is a list of web comics, in order of greatness and regularity of updates, that is good for a daily rotation. Use the FireFox Morning Coffee plug in to check comics daily or save comic links in a folder in FireFox to the task bar and right click, open all, each day.

GREAT WEB COMICS 2007
1. PA Penny Arcade
Video game humour.

2. D Dilbert
Office cube dweller humour.

3. KITH Kick In The Head
A daily satire or photo from Manhattan with cartoon character.

4. OOTS Order Of The Stick
RPG humour and adventure.

5. EW ErfWorld
A clever adventure story based inside an RPG game.

6. EL ExtraLife
Video game humour plus a decent podcast.

7. CAD Ctrl+Alt+Del
More computer game humour.

8. TH Theatre Hopper
Movie review and humour.

9. BTC Bigger Than Cheeses
Irreverent humour.

A. HDB Hyper Death Babies
Bad taste humour.

B. GaP Geek and Poke
Web news related comic plus link to related story.

C. CA Chugworth Academy
Jock humour.

D. NB Nerd Boy
Nerd Boy is back in 2007! ASCII art geek comic.

E. UFie User Friendly
Geek comic.

F. AW AcheWood
Offbeat humour.

Slipping off the top 15, for lack of recent updates, are Loserz and Firman Productions's Mo.

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CodeMonkey Blog

Microblogging

noreply@blogger.com (ABCGi) — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 23:50:00 +0000

Microblogging is a sentence or two updated more frequently than daily or weekly like a blog. It is new enough that define:microblogging does not work on Google, yet.
On twitter.com microblogging is occurring in real time, with users sending quick updates of "what they are doing now" from the web interface, a twitter application on their desktop, via instant message or mobile phone via SMS.

How much of an "evolution" is microblogging?

We used to have home pages where the news page was updated and new content was added (and before that bulletin boards). The problem with home pages was updating html was too much work for some to keep regular and you had to maintain your own web site.

Services came along to host your home page for you (like Yahoo who also provided free email) - making it easier to update and less hassle to set up.

Along came diary blogging which started out as people's personal diaries online for all to read and comment upon. Comments were like an online forum except relating to the current blog entry and limited to the one thread.

At the same time as blogging was evolving so was social networking which is an important aspect of the blogging communities. It is interesting the way the concepts of online forums (and the bulletin board before it) and other Web 1.0 ideas contributed to the evolution of social networking in Web 2.0.

Blogging services, like blogger, made it easier to get up daily content. This allowed for an explosion in the number of blogs online. Doing a decent blog entry will still take an hour or so though.

General blogging became a daily/weekly update about a topic/area/interest/subject as professionals, organisations and corporations took it up, often with a web page attached, as frequently the blog was in part to promote visits to the site.

Some commercial and popular bloggers state to be serious you have to run your own blog web page and not use a service (which looks cheap/tacky/unprofessional/common). For instance some sites that collect "the best blogs on the net" (such a 9rules) may frown upon blogs that use a "common" blogging service. This is going back to the work of running your own web site....

A further regression was the MySpace home page. MySpace is the "home page" concept again except with a web interface and easy content addons/tools to make updating easy for its many young users. An example of easy content to add is posting an MP3 player to a favourite track to play as background music on the homepage - a very old school idea that used to be done with MIDI files on "lame" home pages years ago.

Instant messaging, live online tech support and online chat bled into a kind of pre-cursor to microblogging with an instant message board on home pages and blogs for users to leave live comments called shout outs - such as myshoutbox.

Now microblogging (5 seconds per entry) which is easier again than blogs (1 hour per entry) to update and faster, with users waiting much less time for more updates with less in them.

Why is microblogging catching on?

a) Quick and handy tools/methods to update. Such as twitteriffic.
b) Really short entries so users don't have to think up and write a whole "blog".
c) Ideal for short attention spans - as the web becomes more glib users are not reading whole articles, just the headlines, and only of articles made popular by others such as on Digg.com (where some users will read only the digg summary and read/write digg user comments without clicking through to the actual article itself!).

Proponents of microblogging say it is cool and an extension of social networking; critics say it is a fad and that "who wants to know each and every minutia?"

The actual latest live microblogs from the last few seconds on the twitter.com homepage show a sample of what is in store: some silly comments, some promoting their blog or website updates, some spam, some professional/corporate promos, some intriguing personal microblogs and some useful links. This can be followed up by visiting that users microblogs and reading their recent history.

Twitter users can become friends and/or followers of a person's microblog adding to the social networking aspect, by using @username one can carry out online public instant messaging with such "friends" and then others can view this convo amidst the collected microblogs of friends in time order.

For example Drew talking at Claire.

DrewMcLellan  @clairecelsei -- gotta say, picturing Sansone in a do 
rag has me laughing out out!  about 24 hours ago  from web

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CodeMonkey Blog

SEO - Google's Supplemental Index

noreply@blogger.com (ABCGi) — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 22:30:00 +0000

Google have a main index and a supplemental index. Pages on the supplemental index are penalised in search results so you want to stay out of that!

http://tropicalseo.com/2007/how-to-escape-googles-supplemental-index/

Have trusted links to your site from high quality big sites.

A unique meta description and unique title for every page.

Link within your site not just to home page (avoid hollow site).

Each page should have a significant percentage of unique content.

Don't link to low quality sites from your site as this will result in less pages indexed (Google penalising link sharing programs).

You can have some sub pages of your site in the supplemental with your home page and your main pages in main index, so you want to get as many pages as possible to stay in the main index.

SMM - Social Media Marketing - is using community sites like Digg, Delicious, Stumbleupon, Netscape, Reddit, Yahoo My Web, Fark.com etc. in order to generate links to your site to help your Google ranking. You should always provide a link to Digg your article and a Delicious link to bookmark it, to make it easier for users to increase your articles popularity on these sites - having a few friends click on these will get the ball rolling.

Whilst in the first 48 hours your traffic will increase and you will get more eyeballs, this is not the main purpose, you want people to backlink to your page from their sites and blogs. It can also be called "link baiting" and can be unpopular with users of these social sites if the content linked to is not seen to be valuable enough. So content is still king, you need good content, but you also need to market it effectively so people will see it.

A good article on Tropical SEO explains it:
http://tropicalseo.com/category/link-baiting/
also check out:
http://tropicalseo.com/2007/how-to-escape-googles-supplemental-index

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CodeMonkey Blog

Like GNU I'd like a share of YouTube 2!

noreply@blogger.com (ABCGi) — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 07:12:00 +0000

A complaint when YouTube was sold was where was the share of the spoils for all the content providers (the users) of the site.

The value of YouTube has at least five major components:

Eyeballs (unique browsers, page views etc.)
Users (content providers)
Site (intellectual property, implementation of a great idea, web code)
Staff (skills, knowledge, experience with particular site)
Infrastructure

No doubt there are other considerations but in the interests of simplicity let the above be assumed as major.

Consider a GNU style license for a "community owned site" (COS). Consider a "community site" such as YouTube with an agreement that 1/3 of the value of the company, upon sale, would go to its content providers. Or a free online community game, like a MMORPG, with users providing content via "mods" and revenue generated by ads. It remains then to determine a system of equity for those users.

An example might be:

1/3 value of the company upon sale is represented by 1 million "shares".
These "shares" are allocated to content providers for providing content.
One share for becoming a user.
One share for first contributing anything (eg posting on a forum). Once only.
Five shares for a reasonably popular video (or widget or whatever).
Twenty shares for video of the day and so on...
When 1 million "shares" has been allocated the "shares" are split (doubled).

Note these "shares" are not legal shares of the company and only entitle the user to a payout when the company is sold. Viral elements might be needed in the legal license to ensure the users keep their entitlements under all circumstances. One third of the companies real shares would be set aside to payout these virtual "shares".

Probably there are like endeavors out there. The closest I have seen is efforts to share ad revenue with content providers based on the videos popularity. Other models allow users to retain their copyright over material. The model "community owned site" (COS) above would avoid paying users anything up front to encourage the right spirit of participation and to allow the community web site to grow as it can tend to be financially lean until sale day.

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CodeMonkey Blog

HomeStarr Runner points on GTalk

noreply@blogger.com (ABCGi) — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 01:09:00 +0000

A system to track users on gtalk. Once your gtalk user base gets pretty large it gets harder to use. This system puts a score after each persons name so you can remember how cool they have been and how long you have known them.

Use rename to add a score after the persons name in gtalk.
eg: Roger <3.5>

Romantic partners start at <10.0> strongbads, the rest at zero homsars.

Increase the rating by 0.5 only each time the person does something cool.

Decrease when the person does something uncool.

Decrease must be back to a full integer (so <2.5> becomes <2.0>, <3.0> becomes <2.0>)

Increase by 1.0 full points only if the person has done something super good.

Only increase once a day. Only decrease once a day.

The first <5.0> points should be easier to come by and are more "probationary"

Above <10.0> points should be harder to come by.

In this way the homestarr's increase as you spend more time with ppl and quicker if they are cool to you.

Based on http://www.homestarrunner.com the points are broken into groups of 5.


* <-5.0 strongsads>             <- enemies!
* <-.5 strongsads>
* <0.0 homsars>          <- starting point
* <4.5 homsars>
* <5.0 homestarrs>
* <9.5 homestarrs>
* <10.0 strongbads>      <- romantic partners start point
* <14.5 strongbads>
* <15.0 kingoftowns>     <- very special friends
* <19.5 kingoftowns>
* <20.0 thecheats>       <- somebody is probably cheating!
* <24.5 thecheats>
* <25.0 ??????>          <- from this point add your own favorite characters...

You should find most friends sit in the homestarr region whereas special friends make into into strongbads because strongbad is: http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail.html

Homestarr Runner

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CodeMonkey Blog

YouTube Videos of Extra Life Comics being drawn

noreply@blogger.com (ABCGi) — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 08:36:00 +0000

Extra Life comics are pretty cool, here is the author drawing and colouring some of his comics.

Pretty interesting transition from the blank piece of paper to the final product, a mix of pencil, pen and paper with computer. Click here to see more videos... or goto http://www.myextralife.com for more comics...

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CodeMonkey Blog

DivX Stage6 - a high quality Google YouTube!

noreply@blogger.com (ABCGi) — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 01:59:00 +0000

I like this idea, the developers of the divx codec have got a social video site that has full dvd type quality movies... for those with broadband2 (ie ADSL2) it works pretty sweet.

http://stage6.divx.com

Perhaps Google, having now purchased YouTube, might consider a part of YouTube for high quality video with their massive bandwidth. It is one of the things that currently sucks about Internet video - watching crappy quality in little square - when I can turn on my TV and get a nice large good looking picture (even if in reality it is fairly low resolution... unless you have a HD-TV of course).

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CodeMonkey Blog

ABC TV hosts Good Game in Australia

noreply@blogger.com (ABCGi) — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 01:47:00 +0000

ABC TV in Australia are hosting Good Game - a video game review site with videos GoodGame.

The thing I like about the video is it just keeps playing other clips after the first is finished, or you pick something else, or pause. ie like real TV. Very good and simple idea. Of course ADSL2 helps.

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CodeMonkey Blog

AntiVirus - ClamWin versus AVG

noreply@blogger.com (ABCGi) — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 22:18:00 +0000

ClamWin

http://www.clamwin.com - main public page
http://sourceforge.net/projects/clamwin - also a source forge page

ClamWin is an open source product and so is completely free. It has no active scan. Combine it with Winpooch Watchdog which adds an active antivirus scan (using ClamWin's definitions) and some adaware active scanning, and adaware scanning services. ClamWin comes with no definition when installed and its first job is to go grab one.

WinPooch stands alone and is a handy way of monitoring activity on your Windows System directory and the Registry - you should only really see these alerts when installs or Windows Updates are going on - however they can timeout some install processes.

AVG AntiVirus

http://free.grisoft.com - make sure you download from this site...
http://www.grisoft.com - not the main AVG one.

AVG is a commercial product but with a very reasonable free personal edition for personal use (if you try to use it on a DOMAIN on XP you will be asked to get a purchased version - stay on a WORKGROUP). The free version includes an active scan and free definition updates, and the program is downloaded with some definitions already (making it useful when not connected to the web).

The downside is the free version doesn't have very good auto-removal of virus files and you need to manually delete the viri found. Also when trying to buy online there was no PayPal option :(

THE VERDICT - AVG versus ClamWin

ClamWin is a geeks complex solution and has the advantage of open source should you like to code in it but AVG is definitely easier and more professional to use. It would be perfect to give to a noob all set up except that it doesn't remove viri automatically.

In either case WinPooch is a good pick up - although you will get a lot of alerts :) I also like to have FireFox ask me for every cookie which gives you more control (Allow always, Allow for session, Deny) but again means lots of alerts!

Windows XP Password Crack

http://sourceforge.net/projects/ophcrack

Whilst searching SourceForge found this Windows XP Password cracker which looks like a good free version of some of the other utilities used in a previous story. This is handy if a user has forgotten all their passwords but wants to get their personal info back (this is lost if you reinstall or override their password).

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CodeMonkey Blog

University style IT problems...

noreply@blogger.com (ABCGi) — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 00:30:00 +0000

In reality, in the business world - most problems are not complex University style problems, but are problems that need to be solved well and in keeping with popular demand etc.

The key to most system design (like engineering) is keeping it as simple as possible while still being functional = less bugs.

The ultimate judge of your product is how many users you can attract, even at a free price. Critical mass is the goal.

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CodeMonkey Blog

Web 2.0 AJAX pros and cons

noreply@blogger.com (ABCGi) — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 05:30:00 +0000

Web 2.0 AJAX pros and cons from a conceptual point of view... this article is also of interest (annoying ad though).

The problem I see with AJAX and javascript and the whole Web 2.0 client side performance is that it is not natively supported by browsers and HTML as a standard. Instead of Flash as an intermediate layer... we have a different additional layer on top that is not as easily accessible to all, thus limiting its access and growth rate. Conceivably functionality currently delivered in a myriad of ways via javascript could be built into browsers as a standard implemented robustly and accessing this functionality for a web page could be in the order of complexity as making text bold or adding a table.

Also from a coding point of view the javascript being generated is awful and the whole thing feels kludgey, thus the need in GWT for these things to be written in a "proper language" and then "compiled" into javascript. Clearly there is maturing to do in the engine area of Web 2.0. It is not in keeping with the original idea of the web, in marking up text, and to some extent it still could be and would be better off like that.

That being said the functionality is pretty cool and the end-user experience is that of a client-side application running in their browser, which is of course a good step forward from server side page refreshes... which I see as the biggest fundamental change from Web 2.0 so far (even though others do have it encompass a whole lot more, such as concepts like social bookmarking and so on).

What is happening with video lately is interesting, searching Google Video is now a link from their main page... but only on the US google not yet from http://www.google.com.au

http://video.google.com

Also Australia just got the latest GDS update with the inclusion of gadgets which has the typical explosion of interesting "plug-ins"...

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CodeMonkey Blog

Google Spreadsheet and Google Writely now live!

noreply@blogger.com (ABCGi) — Sat, 12 Aug 2006 00:50:00 +0000

How can you argue with this? Google have released its online spreadsheet (a link should appear atop your gmail in the browser)... and also you can now log on to Writely which is an online word editor that is great for online collaboration of documents.

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CodeMonkey Blog