November 5, 2009

New Coupon Site

If you are looking for coupons, check out Coupon Dynasty

It's a new coupon site/fun game we've created over in the Big Orange House.

The game is kind of neat--you can win virtual money and potentially earn real money as well!

July 27, 2009

Posterous | Re: hello world

awesome! posterous is installed and working, linkrap, qduke, and the other 4 sites that i decided to keep alive are all working on the new server. time for bed.

July 27, 2009

hello world

this is my first post to posterous.

just migrated the blog over. seems good so far.

also dropping hundreds of sites and domains and moving everything that i want to keep(less than 10 sites!) to 1 slice.

May 6, 2009

What you focus on, increases

There's a discussion on a mailing list I belong to about piracy and the iPhone. One of the responders I thought was really insightful. The basic premise is "what you focus on, increases"--at least in your mind--so it's better not to focus on negative things. In this example, by focusing on the small problem of pirated iPhone apps, bigger opportunities are missed. I've reprinted the part below:

> There are a variety of sayings along the lines of "what you focus on, increases". I'm not saying that more people will pirate your software just because you're paying attention to the pirates, but at least the problem increases in your mind! The more you think about it and worry about it and try to fight it, the bigger it becomes (subjectively speaking). I try to look at it another way entirely. The time and effort I've put into my software is a "sunk cost", and the revenues I receive from sales cannot really offset that cost in a direct way; unlike consulting, where revenues are tied directly to expended effort, in this case it's basically a different category on the balance sheet. Any person who buys a copy increases my revenue. Anybody who doesn't buy it, *including*pirates*, has no effect on my revenue. Of course I'd like to increase the number of buyers, but singling out the pirates as the market segment I'd like to expand into seems like a lost cause. A lot of people installing pirated apps are people who just can't or won't buy software (since we're talking about iPhone apps that go for a few dollars, I guess that "can't" doesn't even apply, it's almost exclusively "won't"). Even in a perfect world of indefeatable piracy protection, those people probably *still* wouldn't buy apps. They'd just stick to the thousands of free apps that are out there.

May 1, 2009

Long Executing PHP Scripts Can Cause Other Pages to Hang When Using session_start

Imagine you've got a PHP script that takes an hour to execute. Imagine it uses session_start(). If you then try to call another file that also uses session_start(), session_start() will hang as long as the first script is still executing.At least this is what I'm seeing. I haven't delved into the mechanics yet of session_start(), but in my situation the problem was easily remedied by not including session_start (which wasn't necessary) in the long executing script.

April 25, 2009

Bigger Telescopes are needed to Solve Global Warming

On August 31, 1854, a Londoner living on Broad Street fell ill with cholera and died. In three days, 127 other Londoners would also contract and die of cholera. By September 10th, over 500 people had died and panic was setting in on the London streets. Doctors studied the dead but could not solve the epidemic. Then John Snow, a British Physician, gathered a huge sample of data and determined that people who drank from a certain water pump on Broad Street died, and those that didn't, lived. The well was boarded up. Problem solved. Because John Snow studied a large sample size of patients, he was able to determine the relatively simple cause and cure. If we're going to solve the global warming problem we need data like John Snow's. If Dr. Snow had spent all his time studying just one patient, whatever "cause" and "solution" he would come up with would likely have been incorrect. It was only after looking at a large sample size of hundreds of patients that he was able to come up with a cause and solution much more substantiated than a guess.Right now, nearly every global warming article I read about the cause, consequence, and solution, is guessing. In the global warming problem, the patient is the earth. Everyone is overanalyzing the heck out of one patient and as a result all the conclusions have as much bearing as random guesses. If we want to take this problem seriously, we need to be like John Snow: we need to collect data on dozens, if not hundreds of patients. Only then will we be able to make rational decisions about the problem. So, we need to start looking outward to other planets. We have some nearby data in the form of Mars and Venus. Mars is damn cold and there's no life there, so likely a hotter planet is a positive thing to a certain extent. Venus is damn hot and there's also no life there, so likely if earth heads in that direction we're screwed. But that doesn't leave us with a whole lot to go on. We really need to find patients more similar to us, and hundreds of them. I know very little about astronomy or telescopes. But I'm pretty sure that those are going to be our best tools to fight global warming. All the doctors in the world couldn't have stopped the cholera outbreak if they studied one patient. But one doctor, studying hundreds of patients, was able to solve the problem. Likewise, if we can give one astronomer a big enough telescope, he could probably solve global warming for us. Maybe he'll find out that the chances of turning into Venus are extremely slim and the problem isn't a problem at all. Or maybe it is a problem, but other earth like planets have solved it somehow. It could be just as simple as boarding up a well.

April 16, 2009

Some of My Favorite Software Programs

In no particular order. Windows: Firefox Chrome Mindjet MindManager PHP Designer Navicat SSH Shell DropBox Excel Mac: Mindjet Mind Manager Komodo Navicat TextMate DropBox Firefox Safari Numbers(iWork) iWeb & Pages Blackberry: GMaps GMail BlackberryMessenger(BBM) Web: Gmail HackerNews Wordpress

April 14, 2009

The Truth about Web Design

Here's what I'm going to assume: craigslist, Google, and eBay do not have very pretty designs. How can a website be so successful if the design isn't pretty? My position is that because design doesn't matter a whole lot. Utility and function matter a whole lot more.Why doesn't design matter a whole lot? What would you rather look at:

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Imagine trying to compete with that. My premise is that you go to a website for the utility of it. Design is far secondary. There are plenty of prettier things to look at in the real world.Of course, you can make a website that is pretty to look at, that people will love spending time on. The way to do that is to make it look like the real world: Facebook photos, YouTube videos, etc. People will spend a lot of time on those sites because pictures and videos look pretty. But if you make a website with a whole lot of utility, design is secondary. (And if your goal is to make a website that sells something instead of providing a service--then sometimes ugly designs win--in that case the trick is to try a lot of variation to see what works).

April 14, 2009

Computer Screen versus Mountains

April 6, 2009

Twitter Search Wins Again

Twitter Search is starting to replace a ton of websites that I used to visit.

I used to check ESPN.com for sports scores. Now I use Twitter Search. It's *significantly* faster. Just checked the UNC/Michigan State score and saw it's a blowout early. No need to load up the slow espn.com homepage.

I used to check NBC.com, Hulu and other websites to see if the shows I want to watch are new this week. Now I use Twitter Search. Seriously, every Thursday I search "the office" nbc, to see if it's new.

I'm even using CNN less now. I wanted to learn more about the earthquake in Italy. I used Twitter search and found a link to a page with photos and a lot more.

When I experienced my first earthquake in San Francisco last week, within 1 minute I used Twitter search to confirm that it was actually an earthquake.

Twitter Search is trending up in my own life. I think the odds are high that it will be *huge*. I think the odds are high it will become THE source for news.