And if Bing turns into a verb like, say, Xerox, TiVo or, well, Google, that would be nice too. Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, said Thursday that he liked Bing’s potential to “verb up.” Plus, he said, “it works globally, and doesn’t have negative, unusual connotations.”

One of the oft-cited reasons for Google's success, other than the fact that it offered a decent ground floor product at a time when the world was full of search engine suckery, is that it had a name which was susceptible to being immortalized as a household verb. To Google is to search the web, and to search the web is to Google.

Microsoft desperately wants this for Bing.

And I'm sure they thoroughly focus-grouped and psychology-tested and committee-reviewed the name ad infinitem/absurdum. At this level, the billions of dollars level, you don't draw names out of a hat. So the name went through the review and acceptance process and the experts pulled out their pocket protectors and proclaimed that YES, Bing is a GOOD NAME!

The only problem is, the experts were wrong.

While I won't go so far as to say that Bing is a stupid-ass name for a search engine, I will say that as a label for a mass-market search product, Bing sucks like a bag of three-day-old cheese puffs. And by the way: I like Microsoft. I've been using Microsoft technologies my entire adult life. That doesn't make the choice of "Bing" as a cultural moniker any less daft.

Allow me to explain.

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I've invested heavily in player notes over the years. Even though robust hand history analyzers and real-time HUDs have relaxed the need for hardcore note-taking, I still find that player notes are useful for storing all the "other stuff".

• Player psychology and personality
• Records from Sharkscope, OPR, PTR, and PokerDB
• Blogs or websites found by Googling the player's handle

Unfortunately, if there's one thing all this squinting at player notes has done, it's convince me that the online poker note-authoring experience is tedious, uninspiring, and ergonomically broken.

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Whether you're using a third-party poker bot or implementing one from scratch: be prepared to invest a lot of time. Depending on your needs, creating a mature poker bot can take anywhere from several months (in the simplest possible scenario) to a year or more. You've got to:

• Get the Input/Output mechanisms working smoothly.
• Produce an effective Poker A.I.
• Choose a stealthing mechanism.
• Set up the poker botting hardware and environment.
• Leverage rakeback and promotions.
• Handle various other meta-botting aspects.

That's a mountain of work, and unless you're dedicated and have a lot of time, you'll probably fail (however, you'll still have all that hard-won programming and poker knowledge, which is valuable in its own right). I've written three or four bots and only one was successful, and it was built with the advantage of a) a backer and b) ample time and c) obsession.

And I have to wonder: what if we made poker botting a lot easier and more accessible?

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“Ooh, Memento!”

Like you, I'm a fan of classic Gang of Four design patterns. But all too often it seems like architects pick their design patterns out of a hat. "Hmm, I've never used Visitor before, let's try that." You could call it dartboard-driven design. Just pick your pattern and go!

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Optical character recognition or OCR is one of those cool technologies which occupies a boring space. Document scanning is nifty and all, very useful from an office productivity standpoint, but it's not sexy. But take that same OCR component and embed it as a cog in the gearworks of an intricate real-time online poker botting rig...

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The presentation caused a splash, in a not-entirely-good way. Any publicity is good publicity they say, but the presenter in this case committed an unforgivable sin: he did something that made, or could have made, someone feel uncomfortable.

You see, this dastardly individual spliced 14 slides of suggestive imagery (read: scantily-clad but non-nude women) into a 79-slide Powerpoint presentation in order to get his point across: that applications built on Ruby and CouchDB "perform like porn stars". He didn't actually take a page out of Tyler Durden's book and use hardcore pornographic images. The images didn't even contain nudity, let alone porn, unless you have an extremely puritanical idea of what porn, in this day and age, actually is.

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Ah, music. A magic beyond all we do here!

If you've ever watched a movie without music (perhaps in the "deleted scenes" of your favorite DVD) then you know: a movie without music is like a bowl of cereal without milk. Subtract the music, what's left? A bunch of dry exposition without emotional or dramatic oomph. Music adds drama, excitement, psychological color. It can even suggest concrete meaning.

Take for example the vintage feel-good corn of the opening theme of the 80s-era sitcom, Diff'rent Strokes.

Change the music, keeping everything else the same, and a Rosemary's Baby-esque tale of murder or supernatural malice emerges: Disturbing Strokes.

Music can accomplish a full 180-degree reversal in the feel of a particular visual. No single component of a movie or video game has greater visceral emotional impact than the music. Probably the most famous example of the transformative power of music is, you guessed it, the genre-defining Star Wars soundtrack.

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I used to be a commercial database advocate.

These databases have put food on my table for a dozen years, you see. I am (or was) what you might call an entrenched practicioner, not necessarily an expert, but a practicioner. And in the manner of entrenched practicioners around the world, I've treated you heretics with the sadistic undercutting and poisonous rancor you've deserved!

"MySQL?" I would sneer. "PostgreSQL? Thanks, but this a serious project. We need a database we can depend on."

Ahem.

The number of times I performed due diligence to determine if, in fact, SQL Server/Oracle was the best choice not for me, but for the team, the client, the employer, the organization? 

And if I had performed said due diligence, what would I have learned? Just two things:

• SQL Server and Oracle are, indeed, excellent databases. (Okay, we already knew this.)
• SQL Server and Oracle are the wrong choice for 95% of data storage needs, including at the enterprise level.

Nowadays I like to think of SQL Server and Oracle as the Death Stars of the relational database universe. Extremely powerful. Monolithic. Brilliant. Complex almost beyond the ability of a single human mind to understand. And a monumental waste of money except in those rare situations when you actually need to destroy a planet.

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Hoodie-wearing, sunglass-sporting, iPod-listening, fratboy-raising, "OMFGYO MY AQ-SOOOOOTED JUST GOR CRACKED! FARK!" poker table...

(wait for it)

...douchebags.

Photographed in their natural casino habitat.

Look like anyone you know?

:-)

Twitter marches on.

The massive popularity of the Twitter platform means that Twitter users have the luxury of choosing from an army of custom websites and desktop applications (my personal favorite is TweetDeck) allowing them to tweet, browse, and search Twitter in new and imaginative ways. And one of the clever but often-overlooked features of Twitter is that it upgrades these custom applications to first-class citizens within the Twitterverse by tagging each tweet with the hyperlinked name of the tool or medium used to create the tweet:

This serves as a gentle encouragement for builders of Twitter tools, as well as a way to get the word out about the latest and greatest Twitter apps, and it even (in this author's opinion) helps foster a sense of Twitter power-user elitism: I use such-and-such a tool to post my tweets because I'm a developer/e-marketer/power user and I'm in the know.

It's a little silly, but what can you do? Twitter psychology is a powerful and subtle thing.

So everybody has their favorite Twitter tool, and power-users tend to gravitate towards the more powerful and/or newer tools, and it's a win-win for all concerned: for Twitter, for Twitter users, and for the builders of Twitter tools. But if you're a programmer-slash-web-developer, you have the opportunity to carry this to an extreme: you have the opportunity to build your own custom Twitter client.

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If you've turned on a TV in the past five years you've seen those nifty win percentages they throw up on the screen in televised poker:

In this multi-part series we're going to build a poker calculator (with complete source code) capable of computing these sorts of win percentages or equities for any poker situation whatsoever...

• Any poker variant (Hold'em, Omaha, etc.)
• Any number of players (22 players preflop vs. your pocket Aces? Fine.)
• With any type of hand (specific hand, hand range, random hand)
• On any street of betting
• In the language (C#, C++, Java, VB.NET, etc.) of your choice

...in a couple lines of code:

We'll also discuss the theory that goes into such a calculator:

• Monte Carlo
• Exhaustive Enumeration
• Hand Distributions
• Lookup Tables
• Recursion
• Combinatorics
• How To Speak To a Girl
• Hand Range Notation

Now: the above televised poker win percentages shown above were inserted by the producers, after the fact, with perfect knowledge of each player's cards. In the heat of battle, we don't have perfect knowledge of anything except our own cards. And the way we typically get around this is by assigning our opponents not a specific hand, but a range or distribution of potential hands.

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The Poker-Eval library is implemented in highly optimized, heavily macro'd C for unadulterated speed, but language mappings for .NET, Java, and Python are provided. Now, I'll be honest. The first time I saw the poker-eval source code, I immediately unlearned about sixty-two months of best-practices software development...

That statement was a little tongue-in-cheek, but still: it seems like every time someone suggests Pokersource Poker-Eval, a disclaimer immediately follows:

Don't use this library unless you're a competent C programmer! Danger, Will Robinson!

Just the other day, for example, I was looking at poker-related questions on Stack Overflow when I came across this: How Do I Programatically Calculate Poker Odds?

Hello, I'm trying to write a simple game/utility to calculate poker odds. I know there's plenty of resources that talk about the formulas to do so, but I guess I'm having trouble translating that to code. Particularly, I'm interested in Texas Hold-em ...

I understand that there are several different approaches, one being that you can calculate the odds that you will draw some hand based on the cards you can see. The other approach is calculating the odds that you will win a certain hand. The second approach seems much more complex as you'd have to enter more data (how many players, etc.)

I'm not asking that you write it for me, but some nudges in the right direction would help :-)

One of the answers suggested using Pokersource:

Take a look at pokersource if you have reasonably strong C abilities. It's not simple, I'm afraid, but some of the things you're looking for are complex. The poker-eval program that uses the library will probably do much of what you want if you can get the input format correct (not easy either). Sites such as this one or this also use this library AFAIK.

Still, it could be worse, you could be wanting to calculate something tricky like Omaha Hi-lo...

Again with the disclaimer! And it occurred to me: you know what? All this FUD is really kind of bogus. As of this writing, Pokersource is still the best and most complete library of publically available poker-related code in the world. Period. What's more: the Pokersource evaluator is extremely easy to use provided you understand the Pokersource way of doing things.

So I thought, why not put together a brief Pokersource Poker-Eval primer?

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Enjoy, and stay tuned for some related source code.

When you peek at your hole cards at the beginning of a hand, all of the 1,326 combinations are equally likely. Your chances of seeing [AhAs] are exactly the same as seeing [7d2c]. That is, the 1,326 starting hands are isometric with regard to probability: each has the same chance of occurring. So when you stare down at the opaque patterned backing of your hole cards prior to peeking at their undersides, you're not looking at a specific hand. You're looking at a probability cloud containing 1,326 possibilities, one of which will manifest when your hole cards are formally observed.

Prior to observation, a given player's hand isn't a hand; it's a probability cloud containing N distinct possibilities.

We call this probability cloud a hand distribution or a hand range and far from being a recondite mathematical theory of interest only to statisticians and poker geeks, it's one of the most powerful weapons we have in the battle against incomplete information. Good players use this weapon all the time, consciously or unconsciously. Every time a player deduces a piece of information, however vague, about an opponent's hand, he's creating a hand distribution.

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Now, I remember when a ringtone was a feature. Oooh! You can change the ringer! Aaah! You can upload your own songs! (Meaning, download songs from the provider at a dollar a piece.) Since then, the lowly ringtone has somehow...mutated...from an obscure cell phone gimmick, to a cultural monster. Love ringtones or hate them; you won't be permitted to escape them. Is a Nelson laugh appropriate here?

Anyway, after watching the episode, I decided to dust off the piano and compose and record a ringtone from scratch.

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