Posts from — February 2006

Rumors are going around that Showtime is close to picking up Arrested Development. Hopefully something will come out by the end of the week.

I tried the recently updated Ask.com today, and it has a few neat things. First, its maps site (which works almost the same as Google’s) allows you to specify multiple stops on a route for directions, and also provides walking directions (they won’t have you go on the highway, and give a better time estimate since walking speed doesn’t vary as much). In search results, there is a binoculars icon that you can mouseover to see a thumbnail image of the page without visiting it. A lot of Google’s advanced search features are duplicated, too. The biggest problem with the site seems to be that its index is too small and isn’t updated often enough.

“Nobody denies that [Saddam Hussein] was supporting al-Qaeda…Well, I shouldn’t say nobody. Nobody with brains.”
– Orrin Hatch (R – Utah)

This barely even feels like it’s worth refuting, but you can look at a washington post article about the 9-11 commission report. It’s one thing to argue a point, but to just decide that everyone agrees seems delusional to me. Par for the course, I guess.

Before going to bed, I was digging through the logs and noticed that someone else wrote about runstoppable on their blog. Positive reviews are great.. especially considering they’re from people I don’t know.

Eventually we’ll be working more on publicity, but I keep telling myself that the site will be “good enough after the next version”. Even the 1.1 release won’t quite be where I want it yet. I wish school didn’t keep conflicting with this stuff…

Tonight Mike B and I worked on Runstoppable for a while. Our goal was to create an “elevation graph” for running routes stored in the system. The feature has been requested for a while, and some other similar systems have had it for a while. It took so long because we thought the other stuff out there was pretty terrible, and we wanted to do much better (really.. try to use that similar system I linked to and take a look at their elevation graph).

After much design and team coding (and eventually solo coding once Mike had to leave), here is our first draft:

(The blue markers are mile markers, if that isn’t clear out of context)

We used cubic splines to make the graph smooth, and I used a gradient drawing method that I came up with for a previous project. All of the graphics are generated by our code. Most of the logic is in PHP (which calls a web service to fetch elevation data based upon waypoints in the database), while the smoothing function is done with a python script. There’s more to be done, but this is definitely a good start.

If only we had a good business model…

What’s the shortest string that returns no results in google?

Update: Phil found a five character (alphanumeric) string that returns no results. I’m pretty sure that’s impossible to beat. For the record I tried this on different search engines and I was able to get it within three tries on yahoo, ask, msn, and aol.

I happened to watch documentaries about Tiennamen Square and the 1999 Seattle WTO protests in the same week. The parallels are pretty interesting, and both events are worth learning about. I’m not sure why I knew so little about what happened in Seattle. I was old enough to know about it, but I don’t remember learning much about what actually happened nor what groups were really involved. It must have been pretty terrifying to be in Seattle.

I was about to say that I don’t feel strongly enough about any issue to handle that sort of treatment, but on second thought that’s probably not the case. I don’t know, it seems like a waste of time to hypothesize about such things anyway.

What a great idea: This Israeli Anti-Semetic Cartoons Contest.

“We’ll show the world we can do the best, sharpest, most offensive Jew hating cartoons ever published!” said Sandy “No Iranian will beat us on our home turf!”

Yahoo’s User Interface Blog is a really good read for anyone who does web design. Their web components look pretty good, too, maybe I’ll try them out.

I wonder if a histogram of my IM conversation volumes by user would yield a Zipfian distribution. Maybe I’ll try to find out at some point.