nothing to see here... move on.

It's been a while since I've posted on this blog. Since I feel like it, here are some disorganized thoughts.

As is being widely reported, Rojo got bought by Six Apart. It seems like SA isn't interested in Rojo as a feed aggregation service, but as a platform. My immediate thought is: It's starting... I need to get FeedMuncher out there NOW!.

It's only a matter of time before someone (else) realizes that feed aggregation today is like email circa 1994, and that we all need standards that can be implemented by open platforms. I created FeedMuncher sort of as a proof of concept, to show that you can have a feed aggregation platform that provides a known set of APIs to interoperate with various clients.

I still personally use FeedMuncher on a daily basis (couldn't live without it), but between a full-time job and a full-time side project (more on that soon), I'm hardly finding enough time to sleep, much less work on another project. Maybe some day...

(As a fun side-note, I visited Rojo a little over a year ago and showed Kevin Burton what I had of FeedMuncher. He seemed to like it, although I never really talked to him much about feed aggregation as a platform...)

On a completely unrelated note, the stop motion animation project I worked on at the UofC is now on YouTube.

• Trailer 1
  
• Trailer 2
  
• Ducky at the Reg (final version)
  

Several days ago a "powerful bomb" demolished a Shiite shrine in Iraq, and I couldn't stop myself from coming up with a conspiracy theory. I'm no expert, but pictures show thick cables sticking out, which, to me, means reinforced concrete. If that's the case, we're not talking about a stick of dynamite, or even a couple of artillery shells duct taped together; we're talking hundreds of pounds of explosives. Also, the dome seems to have been levelled completely flat at the top, which seems to imply equally distributed forces, caused by a centrally located explosive device.

If my assessment is correct (likely not, but stick with me here), this raises some questions. Who would be able to carry out such an attack? And who gains from such an attack? Unfortunately, the answer to both questions would be: the US.

The former case is obvious; we have the most capable military in the world, there's not much we couldn't destroy (well, fixed targets, at least). The second case requires a bit more of a stretch. The last few days have proven the incident to possess sufficient volatility to incite significant sectarian conflict. If the US is unable (or unwilling) to quelch such conflict, it is likely to lead to a messy, bloody, full blown civil war. This would definitely be a loss to US intentions, yet it would give us an exit strategy. If the administration were to say "We tried to bring them democracy, instead, they decided to fight themselves" the US public (and I'm talking about the same public that voted this current administration into office), would likely accept that as reasonable grounds for withdrawal (besides, Vietnam was a civil war --I think people still remember that). Alternatively, and perhaps more likely, a civil war in Iraq would compel the UN and the rest of the world to become involved in Iraq, allowing the US to relinquish control and responsibility. With sufficient international cooperation, there is also some chance of peace in Iraq, thus fulfilling a US objective that is clearly currently unattainable. Either way, the US gets an out.

This past week, Yahoo! caught some flak for cooperating with the DoJ's request for search data, while Google got some good press. From what I've read, the story's been given quite a spin, so here are some thoughts (disclaimer: I work for Yahoo! but not in Search and I don't know any more than what's been reported in the media. I do, however, have not-yet-vested interest in YHOO stock prices):

• Spin 1: Yahoo! (and others) simply rolled on their backs and cooperated with Big Bro. If the official statements from Yahoo! and others are to be believed (and I think they can be believed), this was not the case. They did cooperate, yes, but only to a limited degree, and no personally identifiable data was released. I think that's an important distinction to make.
• Spin 2: It's a slippery slope from here... Um, no. In between giving the government data with no personally identifiable information, and giving them data with identifiable information lies not so much a slope, but a big cliff. If we're at the point where companies like Yahoo! and Google hand over personally identifiable data on millions of private citizens to the government, we've gone over the edge and it's time to stop talking and start packing. But unlike slipping down a slope, you know when you've fallen off a cliff.
• Spin 3: Giving the government data sets a dangerous precedence Perhaps so. But Google went all adolescent on us, and they got themselves sued by the DoJ. What happens if, on the off chance, the DoJ wins? It sets a legal precedence, which is far far more dangerous than this "Oh, but Yahoo! gave us this data once..." type precedence.
• Spin 4: Google resisted the government's request out of ideological righteousness, because Google can't do evil Granted, that was a brilliant PR move, but anyone who thinks they're doing this to be "good" might be under the influence of the Google Reality Distortion Field. Their decision was likely based on technical and business reasons (1. they have tons of data, 2. they're very secretive), at least as much as on moral reasons.

In principle, I support Yahoo's decision. By giving the DoJ limited data with no personal information, Yahoo! (and MS and AOL) managed to balance the need for government compliance with customer privacy. Seeing how Yahoo! got hammered by Wall Street partially for high operating costs early last week, a fight with the government on this one wouldn't have benefitted anyone.

Having said that, this turned out to be a huge PR loss for Yahoo! and others. I've seen a number of people comment on how they are less likely to use Yahoo! over Google now (if they ever did use Yahoo!, of course). Yes, such people are misguided in their reasoning, but ignorance happens, and Yahoo! may suffer for it in terms of decreased search traffic -> decreased ad revenues and market share -> lower stock prices.

Then again, this may not have been a clear victory for Google either. After being heroically defiant, they got sued by the DoJ, which may have caused the sharp drop in GOOG prices. And depending on how the court case ends up, they may ultimately end up giving up data after all, or possibly set a worse legal precedence. So the jury, quite literally, is still out on this one. I guess we'll be hearing more. [Tagged: yahoo search doj google ]

In Jakob Nielsen's comments about the Internet userbase exceeding one billion, he says:

The Mac, for example, already matters less than you think. Although it has a prominent role in the U.S., it's hard to refer to a company with single-digit market share as "dominant." In Asia, the Mac is practically nonexistent.

I disagree with his assessment. Apple has a noticeable presence and market share in Japan, and at one point, something like 55% of Apple's international sales were from Japan. The only reason why Apple has practically no marketshare in the rest of Asia is because most of Asia (population-wise, that means China and India) can't afford Macs. But with economies modernizing in those countries and as disposable incomes increase, I think there's a very good chance Apple will see significant growth in those markets. [Tagged: macs asia jakob+nielsen ]

A week or so after I bloged about my dream search box, Yahoo! internally released a new search feature called Open Shortcuts that was functionally equivalent to my hack (the timing, AFAIK, was completely coincidental). Well, as of yesterday, this feature has apparently become publicly available. Read more over at the Yahoo! Search blog.

Despite working at Yahoo! (though not in the search division), I admittedly still use Google as my default search engine. For me, the main reasons that I haven't been able to switch (I've tried, I swear!) are:

• Google's result are marginally better (more relevant, less spam) than Yahoo
  
• I like the weather forecast display better on G
  
• I like the stock ticker display better on G
  
• Google's calculator is better (try: "0xef to binary","e^4", "14!" --none of these work on Yahoo!)
  

Open Shortcuts is kind of cool because it does lower the barrier for conversion. I can set my default search engine to Yahoo! and selectively send queries to Google with 3 extra key strokes. Or I can send my stock symbol lookups to Yahoo! Finance (which, at the end, is usually what comes up as the #1 result on Google anyway). But then, 3 extra key strokes to lookup a 4 letter ticker symbol adds 60% more work... and that's a lot.

The other cool thing about Open Shortcuts is that it adds stickiness to search. Since the shortcuts are completely customizable, once you've set things up the way you like them and get used to it, you're likely to keep using the product. Whereas with generic non-customized search, the cost of switching is practically zero (assuming equivalent functionality and quality). [Tagged: yahoo search open+shortcuts ]

Lots of talk about the death of IE5 for Mac (well, more like 2nd death, the 1st death was when MS halted development), and the general tone seems celebratory. Now I'm anti-MS, anti-IE, yadda yadda yadda as the next, but I think people are losing context here.

*dreamy transition sequence*

It's a long time ago. Year 2000 or there abouts. MacOS X PR1 comes out to revolutionize the platform, to bring the Mac OS out of the stone ages. Guess what browser it comes with? Yup, MSIE 5. And guess what? It worked. Safari wasn't out yet, neither was Firefox. Lots of people were still using Netscape 4.7, and Netscape 6 was one slow buggy hunk of software. Frankly, for a while, MSIE 5 was the best browser on OS X.

*dreamy transition sequence*

Sure, by today's standard, IE5 is a crappy browser no matter how you look at it. But at it's moment of death, let's at least acknowledge it for what it was. At the very least, the developers who fought an uphill battle to get it out deserve it.

As has been widely reported on the interweb, the Fench Department of Culture is apparently trying to ban the publication of Free/Open Source (and presumably, open source) software source code, and I'm rather baffled. If they had decided to ban all foreign books, for example, I'd at least understand the rationale; I wouldn't agree with it, but I can atleast comprehend how foreign books can affect culture. But source code? Programming languages are a highly constrained form of expression, barely capable of conveying complex ideas, muich less ones of any cultural significance. Hell, I'd say software (in executable form) has much more impact on culture than code, but they don't seem to take issue with that... Baffling. Absolutely baffling. [Tagged: open+source french+department+of+culture ]

I really like the Firefox toolbar search box, but I hate how it essentially ties you to a single search engine. Sure, you can get plugins for just about every site out there that's searchable, but to switch engines, you have to use the mouse, click a couple of times, and then bring your hand back to the keyboard to type in your query. That's way too much work.

So, I created my dream search box plugin. Basically, you can prepend queries with prefixes to specify which site/service you want to search. For example, if you prefix your query with "amazon:" it'll send the query to Amazon, use "ebay:" and it goes to eBay, and so on and so forth for a dozen or so supported sites. You can also set your own prefixes, so I can just type "d:" to search Dictionary.com or "p:" to search PHP function docs. Of course, you can search without specifying a prefix, and it'll go to your default search engine (it's Yahoo by default, but you can set it to whatever you want). To top it all off, you can add your own search query if it's not supported by default, by sending a simple query.

Read about it and download it here.

Now that I'm out of school, I've been trying to catch up on some reading, and I've been keeping a slowly growing reading list to ensure that I don't actually catch up (but then, seeing how I still never get around to reading much, that doesn't seem to be that big of a problem).

Anyway, up until tonight, I've just been maintaining a wish list as a text file on my PowerBook. But, since that's so Web pre-alpha, I decided to upgrade to Web 1.0 by creating an Amazon wishlist.

So that was cool for all of about 5 minutes, but I decided to upgrade to Web 2.0 and do something cool like import my Wish List RSS feed to my 360 profile. Except, I couldn't find the damn RSS feed anywhere... and I still haven't found it. They have an RSS page, but no mention of wish lists there. So I looked on the big wide interweb, and found a 3rd party site that does RSS 0.91 (ugh), and another one that simply doesn't work.

Well, I figured it was, yet again, time to do some RYO. Fast forward a couple of hours, and I ended up with a hack that uses an AWS and spits out your wishlist as an RSS 2.0 feed. It's pretty skeletal, but well, it works:

http://www.openhive.com/wishlist.php?id=Z2X5CRD0C6BW

If any one else finds it useful, you're welcome to use it. I won't guarantee that it'll always work, or that it'll work forever, but, eh, welcome to Web 2.0. All you have to do is replace the 12-character ID with your own wishlist ID (which should be burried in any URL that points to your wishlist).

So Yitz and I were hanging out, trying to decide whether we should go to my apartment and code, or go to the pub. After a while, we somehow ended up wondering what day of week pubs were the busiest, and being the geeks that we are, we decided to look for an algorithmic solution. And where would you go to collect data on pub patronage by day of week? Why, Flickr, of course!

The premise of our theory was very simple. We guessed that people are bound to take pictures when they go to the pub, then upload and tag those photos on Flickr. Sure enough, there are over 14,000 images tagged "pub" on Flickr. We decided that would give us enough data points, to at least get some info.

Since we couldn't find API calls to extract the data we wanted, and we don't have API keys anyway, we decided to do it the quick and dirty way. Yitz hacked together a Perl script to extract all the photo IDs tagged "pub", then extract the date taken from the details page, and compile all the data into a single file (well, technically, we had up to 10 of these processes running in parallel). I then scratched together a PHP script to collate that data, and this is what we got:

Exhibit A: # of pictures tagged "pub," by day-of-week

Sun:1857 (13.38%)
Mon:1771 (12.76%)
Tue:1286 (9.26%)
Wed:1507 (10.85%)
Thu:1735 (12.50%)
Fri:2944 (21.21%)
Sat:2778 (20.02%)

The list shows the total number of pictures taken, by day of week, with percentages. As it turns out, Friday seems to be the busiest day at the pub. (We decided that for this experiment, we should define a day as starting and ending at 7am. It just intuitively seemed like a good time when a trip at the pub should end --more on this later).

Encouraged by these results, we decided to do the same with photos tagged "bar":

Exhibit B: # of pictures tagged "bar," by day of week

Sun: 2917 (11.14%) [896]
Mon: 2803 (10.70%) [795]
Tue: 2949 (11.26%) [780]
Wed: 2690 (10.27%) [840]
Thu: 4196 (16.02%) [941]
Fri: 5101 (19.47%) [1185]
Sat: 5540 (21.15%) [1301]

(Square brackets show number of unique users who posted images.)

Since no experiment can be considered legitimate without pretty graphs, we passed our data to GNUPlot:

Exhibit C: # of photos tagged "bar" and "pub" by hour

Here are some observations we made:

• The "pub" and "bar" graphs are strikingly similar
• Friday and Saturday around 11pm-midnight seem busiest
• Everybody goes home at 7am (recall that we defined a day as starting and ending at 7am -the ticks are shown at 7am, which happen to also be the lowest points)
• Have a case of the Mondays? Hit the pubs and bars like everybody else!
• People don't seem to need extra booze to get over "hump days"
• Tuesday might as well be called "Sober Day".

It was close to 2am when we got this far... but there was one more thing we wanted to know. How does all this correlate to when people are the most drunk? Well, check out what we found:

Exhibit D:Pub/bar-crawling vs drunkenness

There's a very clear phase shift... and as it turns out, drunkenness peaks at 7am, when they've all gone home from the pubs and bars!

Conclusions
It's past 3:20am, and I really should go to bed. Besides, everybody knows conclusions are complete BS anyway. So let's just skip it, and let me go to bed...

Also see: Yitz's LJ post

I'm at BarCamp right now, kinda kicking myself for not having come out here earlier (I got here a little after 4pm today). So far I got part of a session about SVG, and a service called Pandora which is basically a music streaming service that makes recommendations based on music you like (and finds matches from less well known artists --the so called "long tail"). One interesting little tidbit I got out of the Pandora session was about naming; apparently nonsensical names are memorable than the sensical ones. Right now I'm catching the tail end of the Women in Tech session where, it sounds like they're talking about creating an Open Source mobile-based geolocation-yummy service thinggy. [Tagged: barcamp ]

It's been a while since I've posted in this blog, so a quick update. I moved to Sunnyvale last week, and have moved into an apartment that I'm pretty pleased with. My phoneline isn't up yet, I don't have internet access at home (unless I mooch my upstairs neighbor's wireless connection), I still haven't unpacked my clothes or books (which is 80% of the stuff I own), but I feel pretty comfortable here anyway.

I started work this week, and so far, I'm pleased with that as well. There's a bit of a learning curve because I'm not used to structured development environments with large teams, and because 360 uses an advanced architecture that's different to what I've done in the past. Having said that, the people are just amazing, and they've been extremely helpful in getting me on my feet... although it'll be a while before my foosball skills are up to Yahoo standards (of course, the team's helping me with that as well :-).

All in all, things are pretty peachy out here. Once I settle in, I'll probably be able to post more regularly as well...

I'm excited to announce that earlier this week, I accepted an offer from Yahoo! for a Senior Web Developer position on the Yahoo! 360 team. I'll be starting at the Sunnyvale campus on June 27th.

I had also received an offer from what's probably one of the sexiest startups in the valley right now (at least in the area I'm interested in), but ultimately decided to take Yahoo's offer because:

• Yahoo 360 is/will be an awesome social networking/blogging/etc tool that'll be used by millions
• my past experiences would be highly relevant to the job, but I would also learn a lot and be challenged
• Yahoo seems more dedicated to their employees' well-being and development (for example, through internal training courses)
• I'll be in an environment where I'll have access to some of the industry's great minds and leaders, including people like Rasmus Lerdorf (creator of PHP) and several alpha-bloggers (and a large pool of smart Yahoos).
• the 360 team went to great lengths to pull me in, and convinced me that they were a team I'd want to be a part of
• as my first "real" job out of college, I think working at Yahoo maximizes my future options, both inside and outside of Yahoo

Graduation was today, and I'm happy to say that I now have a B.A. in Computer Science from the University of Chicago.




This marks the end of a journey that spanned literally 2/3rd of the way around the world, involving 4 colleges and universities over a span of 6 years. Yet, at the end, graduation itself was rather anti-climactic. If anything, I'm more excited about my new job (which I'll be able to officially announce sometime in the next week or so).