Ministry of Intrigue

Why social media gurus should be trampled by elephants

daniel@andrlik.org (Daniel Andrlik) — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 17:41:16 -0000

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This is a fun read from Alexander Blom on how to identify if your social media guy needs to go. It’s definitely a polemic, and is targeting the more clueless of the social media crowd, typically the ones that refer to themselves as “gurus” or “mavens”. I don’t disagree with any of his points, although I think he paints with a wide brush, as there are a significant minority of people in social media that know what they are doing.

I also highly recommend that you also read his post Social Media is NOT New for a level-headed view of what social media actually represents, and it is less of a change than most people in social media would lead you to believe.

Tagged with business douchebaggery marketing social media

Stripping Chatroulette Chick Morphs Into Last Exorcism Hell Spawn

daniel@andrlik.org (Daniel Andrlik) — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 16:51:36 -0000

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Perfect viral advertising. The reaction shots are priceless.

Tagged with advertising funny marketing video

NASA Expanding Tests of Star Wars-Inspired “Droids”

daniel@andrlik.org (Daniel Andrlik) — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 14:10:16 -0000

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NASA , in cooperation with DARPA, has been designing little robots for use in space. These robots are designed to be able to conduct synchronized flight with each other, in order to conduct a variety of tasks in space, such as emergency repairs, that previously would have required an astronaut.

From the article:

Known officially as Synchronized Position, Hold, Engage and Reorient Experimental Satellites, or SPHERES, the droids have been on the station since 2006. Astronauts have conducted more than 20 experiment sessions with them, and are on tap to conduct many more. Each SPHERES droid is self-contained with power, propulsion, computing and navigation equipment. Together, they are testing techniques that could lead to advancements in automated dockings, satellite servicing, spacecraft assembly and emergency repairs.

snip…

Miller says that, when his team designed the SPHERES droids, all of their uses couldn’t be imagined up front. So, they built an “expansion port:” into each droid where additional sensors and appendages can be added, such as cameras and wireless power transfer systems.

It looks like they are being tested inside the International Space Station right now, but eventually they plan to move to tests outside in space. Very cool stuff.

Tagged with future nasa robots space

7 Scientific Reasons a Zombie Outbreak Would Fail (Quickly)

daniel@andrlik.org (Daniel Andrlik) — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 13:37:59 -0000

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I found this article through the Zombie Doom tumblelog that my friend Dan Patterson runs. It’s a clever and funny dissection of zombie outbreaks, and how unlikely it is that any real zombie swarm — assuming they are the traditional living-dead notion of zombies — would have any chance of bringing about a full-on apocalypse.

Tagged with apocalypse funny zombies

An imaginary city that changed the twentieth century

daniel@andrlik.org (Daniel Andrlik) — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 00:25:41 -0000

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This piece from Annalee Newitz is an overview of the utopian city designed by King Camp Gillette back before he began his razor empire. He diagrammed out this future city — which he named Metropolis — in his book The Human Drift, which was released in 1894. Gillette apparently designed his city not just for efficiency, but also in an attempt to resolve the issues of social inequality.

From the article:

[Metropolis] would be built on top of Niagara Falls. Gillette wanted to Nikola Tesla design a water-powered electrical grid, which would be amply supplied with energy from the falls.

The sidewalks of the city would be transparent so that workers laboring beneath the buildings, dealing with plumbing and other infrastructure, would have light. But Gillette also wanted the city’s residents to see the people at work below their feet. The idea was to prevent people from forgetting about all the essential work that goes into making a city run.

It’s a fascinating article, but to be fair, Newitz never successfully makes the case for claiming that this design in any way “changed the twentieth century”. Regardless, it’s still a great read and well worth your time.

Tagged with future urban planning utopia

Brief Scribblings on Facebook Questions

daniel@andrlik.org (Daniel Andrlik) — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 00:22:22 -0000

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I will preface this post by saying that I know how close I am skating to social media douchebaggery by writing a post on a new Facebook feature, but I was reading about Facebook Questions today in a post from Dan Patterson, and as I began to pen my response I realized that I had more to say than what could be reasonably considered a comment. Fair warning, this piece is opinion only, and is based upon my initial reactions to the new features, as opposed to detailed analysis.

If you want some background on what Facebook Questions is, I highly encourage you to take a look at Dan’s post, as he provides a great summary of the new features along with his commentary. Also, he has screenshots, which I will not be able to provide.

Go ahead and read his post first. I’ll wait.

Done? Awesome, let’s move forward.

You may have noticed that Dan has included a link to a Mashable post that explains a number of ways that Facebook Questions can be improved. As the service is not rolled out to me yet, I can’t comment on that aspect of it, but in principle the ideas outlined in that post make a lot of sense. It would behoove Facebook to follow up on those suggestions, particularly the integration into a user’s profile and wall. To be honest, I am a little shocked they did not integrate it that way in the first place. I’m sure most — or all — of the suggested functionality will be incorporated to future versions of the feature as development continues, especially if Facebook wants to be able to effectively capitalize on their user base to make FQ a success.

Now, if your interest in Facebook Questions was totally confined to UX and playing with your social graph — there’s a dirty euphemism in there somewhere, but of course I am too classy to make such a vulgar insinuation — that would be the end of the matter. However, I don’t think the features or success measured in number of users is the real test of a Q&A site.

I think the real test of a service like this is how useful the answers actually end up being to the end users. FQ is a publicly available feature, covering any topic under the sun, which is a bold move aimed at leveraging the diversity of knowledge available among its 500 million users. This answers-for-anything approach is a tantalizing path for any company that would like to start seriously monetizing based on search, but ultimately it can become more of a weakness than a strength for this type of service. There are a number of general purpose Q&A services on the web, and the consistent trait among all of them is that the quality of answers vary radically, with most of the answers being pretty useless, e.g. most of Yahoo! Answers. The general rule — at least in my experience — is that quality answers to questions typically are best found by visiting niche Q&A sites — such Stack Overflow when I have a programming question — or hitting up forums dedicated to the specific topics I am asking about. These types of niche communities tend to have more experienced participants, and also tend to be more rigorous when it comes to community management, with the aforementioned Stack Overflow being a stellar example.

That’s not to say there haven’t been some unique approaches to trying to solve this problem in general purpose Q&A sites. Mahalo’s approach involves incenting users to provide good answers by providing a way for the asker to set up a cash bounty for the best answer. Now, I don’t have enough information to gauge how effective this has been for them overall, but a quick browse reveals a number of good answers to questions when a “tip” or cash reward is offered, but the quality of questions — and respective answers if there are any — seems to drop otherwise. Although, I must say, that I’m surprised at the number of cash bounties being offered for opinion/discussion based questions. It’s an interesting model, and it certainly seems to have built up an engaged community.

It’s clear that FQ has a significant advantage just from the raw user base available to them, and I don’t have any doubt that the product launch will be successful. Although, if Facebook does not quickly integrate FQ deeply into the social experience on Facebook, it’s going to be treated as separate service by it’s users, which diminishes the likelihood of prolonged interaction with the Q&A aspects of the site. Further, if they don’t provide some incentive for users to produce great answers, it is in danger of becoming yet another of the worthless general purpose Q&A sites littering the search results in the SEO-dominated wastelands of the Internet.

It’s only fitting that I conclude this piece by asking you all a question: Will Facebook Questions become a useful service, or will it only add to the noise?

That’s up to you. I’d love to hear your answer.

Tagged with douchebaggery facebook social networking

Ted Chiang on Writing

daniel@andrlik.org (Daniel Andrlik) — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 15:24:37 -0000

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Great interview with Ted Chiang, who happens to be a rather brilliant science fiction writer. Seriously, if you have not read his wonderful story “Exhalation”, you have missed a gem. You can also hear an audio production of that story here.

There’s lots of good stuff in this interview. Chiang talks about writing, his process, thoughts on AI, and the differences between science and magic, as well as the differences between science and religion. It’s an interesting conversation, and well worth your time to read.

Tagged with interview magic religion sci fi ted chiang writing

Bill Murray Is Ready To See You Now

daniel@andrlik.org (Daniel Andrlik) — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 19:40:43 -0000

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Great interview with Bill Murray in which he talks about Ghostbusters 3, Garfield, comedy and his future. Some gems from it are snipped below.

On comedic acting:

I have developed a kind of different style over the years. I hate trying to re-create a tone or a pitch. Saying, “I want to make it sound like I made it sound the last time”? That’s insane, because the last time doesn’t exist. It’s only this time. And everything is going to be different this time. There’s only now. And I don’t think a director, as often as not, knows what is going to play funny anyway. As often as not, the right one is the one that they’re surprised by, so I don’t think that they have the right tone in their head. And I think that good actors always—or if you’re being good, anyway—you’re making it better than the script. That’s your fucking job. It’s like, Okay, the script says this? Well, watch this. Let’s just roar a little bit. Let’s see how high we can go.

On Ghostbusters 3:

Is the third Ghostbusters movie happening? What’s the story with that?

It’s all a bunch of crock. It’s a crock.

Lots of good stuff in this interview from one of the masters of comedic acting.

Tagged with acting bill murray film interview

Easier custom Model Manager Chaining

daniel@andrlik.org (Daniel Andrlik) — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 19:00:33 -0000

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Via Simon Willison:

This is a really convenient way to add custom functions to model managers in Django. Way easier than defining custom managers each time you need extra functionality.

Tagged with django orm programming python

Boredom & Stats For Nerds

daniel@andrlik.org (Daniel Andrlik) — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 10:39:02 -0000

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Last night I found myself looking through old blog posts on this site in an attempt to avoid thinking about any of the other things I need to get done. As I was looking back through the posts from 2004-2005, I was struck by how much my writing style changed when I switched from blogging anonymously to using my real name. My earlier writing was much braver, and significantly more personal. I took more risks with how I approached telling my stories, and in general I think the material was more interesting. However, after making the decision to use my own name, the posts slowly began to veer away from the personal and became much more distant. Topics became centered around surface-reactions to news items, formal reviews of books or services and discussion of technical concepts.

This was disappointing for me, as I consider this type of writing pretty boring. I mean, it is always fun to express one’s opinion, but the formal reviews and technical writing are completely at odds with what what spurred me to create a blog in the first place. In fact, I think this is the primary reason that I post so rarely these days. Certainly, I’ve been very busy, but come on, who can’t find 20-30 minutes every few days to write up a blog post?

Now, I have noted this change before, and my desire to revert back to a more interesting (not to mention more frequent) approach to posting here, so I won’t belabor the point by going over all of that again. Certainly not until I show much better follow-through in this regard.

While I was pondering all these things, I noticed that most of my recent posts have consisted of very long reviews, and I began to wonder if all of my posts were as long. I started paging through blog entries, but quickly realized that this would only give me an anecdotal grasp of how much (or little) I write here. So, like any good geek, I wrote a script to do my work for me.

The results were interesting to me. The average number of words per blog post were significantly lower than I expected, but there are a significant number of long posts (which I arbitrarily defined as anything longer than 500 words) which may give an impression that I produce more content per post than I typically do.

The results for blog entries were as follows:

Entry Stats:

Total Blog Entries:       317
Total Words:              94705
Average Words:            298
Max Words / Entry:        2544
Min Words / Entry:        9
Entries w/ 500+ Words:       58

Of course, I don’t just post to my blog here, I also write descriptions and commentary in all of my Diigo bookmarks, which I then import here as link entries. I knew these would be shorter in general, but it was only a few more lines of code to get that information as well.

Link Stats:

Total Links:              567
Total Words:              24029
Average Words:            42
Max Words / Link:         365
Min Words / Link:         4
Links w/ 500+ Words:         0

Now, of course, if you are a geek, and you end up with two sets of stats, there is no way in hell you are not going to take the extra time to find out the overall average for all posts.

Overall Stats:

Total Posts:              884
Total Words:              118734
Average Words:            134
Max Words / Post:         2544
Min Words / Post:         4
Posts w/ 500+ Words:         58

Of course, the links weigh in heavily and bring down the average number of words, but I was pleased with the overall results and a little surprised at the overall word count for the site.

These kind of stats seem like a fun way of evaluating how often I am posting, and could be a useful motivational tool. So, exchanging a little bit of sleep for geek power, I went ahead and created a stats page for the site that I can use to monitor how I am doing in general. At some point, I would like to add functionality to track posting by day of week, and percent change over given time intervals, but for now this will do.

These are the kinds of things nerds do when they are bored, and don’t want to do anything else that they are supposed to be doing.

Tagged with assorted geekery personal

Daring Fireball: Translation From Apple’s Unique Dialect of PR-Speak to English of the ‘Letter From Apple Regarding iPhone 4’

daniel@andrlik.org (Daniel Andrlik) — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 20:11:10 -0000

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Funny and insightful parsing of Apple’s letter regarding iPhone 4 reception issues.

It must be where I live, but I haven’t experienced any reception issues on my new iPhone, even when I wasn’t using a bumper. My call quality has actually become better. Still, I’m amused at the PR dancing and missteps.

Tagged with apple funny iphone pr tech

Smokescreen

daniel@andrlik.org (Daniel Andrlik) — Sat, 29 May 2010 15:57:44 -0000

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Smokescreen is an interesting project that provides a pure JavaScript and HTML5 player for Flash content, allowing creators to serve up their flash content onto iPads/iPhones and other non-Flash devices without having to make any modifications to their source material.

The demos on the page are pretty impressive, and it looks like it will be a pretty compelling option for mobile ad designers and Flash developers in general. However, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that none of the demos include actual video, which makes sense, as HTML5 already provides a capable alternative to Flash for serving up video. Smokescreen seems aimed at Flash developers that focus on other kinds of animation and interactive tools.

The group behind the project says they will be releasing Smokescreen under a free and open source license, but will offer paid support plans for businesses and professionals.

Tagged with flash html5 javascript smokescreen

reCAPTCHA Field for Django Forms

daniel@andrlik.org (Daniel Andrlik) — Fri, 21 May 2010 01:54:36 -0000

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This is an older tutorial, but it works splendidly. I just used this approach with a Django 1.2 project I am working on to create a reCAPTCHA field for my custom forms. The automatic validation works like a charm.

Tagged with development django programming python

BankSimple

daniel@andrlik.org (Daniel Andrlik) — Tue, 18 May 2010 12:56:58 -0000

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I’m intrigued, but skeptical of BankSimple, a new bank start-up that aims to make banking easy and painless. I found out about it because Alex Payne has recently announced that he is leaving Twitter to join BankSimple as their CTO.

Their FAQ paints a pretty enticing picture of the planned service, but I’m curious if an implementation focused on simplicity will be able to maintain the level of flexibility that I associate with traditional multiple account banking. It’s definitely going to be a service worth looking into when they launch, although it is currently invite-only.

Tagged with banking

LESS - Leaner CSS

daniel@andrlik.org (Daniel Andrlik) — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 12:20:04 -0000

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LESS is an awesome project that extends CSS by adding variables, operations, nested rules and more. Since it supports exisiting CSS syntax, just rename your existing files from *.css to *.less to start using the advanced features in your existing stylesheets. When you are done, you can use the LESS Ruby gem to compile your code to standard CSS for use on your site.

Very cool stuff.

Tagged with css design development ruby

jQuery Masonry

daniel@andrlik.org (Daniel Andrlik) — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 17:31:18 -0000

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jQuery Masonry is a layout plugin for jQuery that produces some truly stunning web pages. Looks pretty easy to use too. Make sure to check out the examples, including those found in the wild for an idea of what you can do.

Pure concentrated awesome.

Tagged with css design javascript jquery