The first few examples do not appear to be Javascript. It's implemented in Javascript, yes, but Javascript does not have the BASIC-like functionality that is used in the examples.
My book, Flickr Hacks, contains a number of examples of using ImageMagick (via the Perl API) with Flickr. This is one area where it really shines. I used ImageMagick to create these mosaic posters, the Flickr Colr Pickr and other cool things.
Connie Willis's novel Bellwether, which is about the science of fads, deals with this phenomenon in depth.
The title comes from a middle english word used describing a practice in sheep farming. Sheep tend to follow each other. But farmers would sometimes use a castrated ram with a bell around his neck to lead the rest of the flock. The ram would tend to move first, but in a very subtle, nearly undetectable way.
At the center of any cloud of popularity must be a seed of initial impulse - the bellwether.
> At the end of the day, we don't play games for social interaction... We play games to escape.
I think Pachter is right that Microsoft's strategy is flawed, but for the wrong reasons. It's not that online multiplayer gaming is a limited market, it's that consoles are a terrible platform (as compared to desktop computers equipped with keyboards) for online multiplayer gaming.
I typically use my console sitting on the floor with a game controller in both hands. This is a terrible interface for chatting with other players, and chat is an essential component of most multiplayer games.
You need a keyboard, and your computer already has a good one.
On a related note, back in February, I searched Flickr for photos matching the tags Lisa or Mona. The results indicate that 9/10ths of the women in these photos are named Lisa. I built a photo mosaic from the results, which can be seen here:
Personally I welcome this, but with some trepidation. My coverpop system uses Amazon's web services to build interactive mosaics.
Currently their search system tends to produce a lot of irrelevent results, because vendors tag their own products, and unscrupulous vendors tend to assign misleading tags. For example, when I tried to build a "harry potter" mosaic, I got a ton of search results that had nothing to do with harry potter.
A collaborative tagging system has the potential to produce more accurate results, especially if there is a system in place for users to collaboratively give weight to tags, similar to Slashcode's moderation system. A free tagging system (like Flickr has) is likely to be problematic on a system in which is commerce is involved, because there is a huge incentive to abuse it.
I already monitor keyword searches of such sites as Technorati, Google Blog Search, IceRocket, and BlogPulse using an RSS reader (Sharpreader, in my case).
IBM's service sounds like it is essentially dong the same thing, and then summarizing the results a bit. I don't really see any significant added value over using these existing services.
Ning allows user/authors to set up permanent URLs to their apps, which take the form XXXX.ning.com. I imagine there will be a bit of an initial landgrab as cybersquatters grab up some of the more obvious ones. It would be nice if Ning had a policy in place to deal with this, but I imagine, with a project this ambitious, their plates are pretty full -- and this leads to what I think is the most flawed aspect of this idea -- it's just too damn big. If successful, Ning has the potential to be a host, provider, authoring tool, and community hub for a huge chunk of web content. The question is, can the company successfully do all these things and do them well? Managing successful communities is a tricky business, and the downside is that when the users get pissed off, you've already provided them with an excellent channel for mouthing off about it (for the inevitable whiners, this is an excellent time to reserve "ihate.ning.com" and "ilovewhi.ning.com").
While Google's Blogsearch is more comprehensive, it does a terrible job of filtering out spam blogs. Many spam blogs are hosted on Google's own Blogspot, which they seem to mine exhaustively, sadly.
I find that both Technorati and Blogpulse produce fewer, but more relevant results.
I assumed when I first heard about this that hi-fidelity microphones were employed, however, the researchers used cheap PC mics. In addition, they speculate that eavesdropping over the phone is possible:
Another observation that can be made from the experiments is that higher frequencies are generally less informative. Of particular interest is the 300-3400 Hz interval telephone audio band. The relatively good ADCS for this interval in our experiments suggests that eavesdropping on the clicks over the phone [...] is potentially possible.
I've worked at a number of jobs including ones where I was the most knowledgable person, and ones where I was the least knowledgable in the problem domain I was working in.
It is tempting to accept jobs in which you will be the most knowledgable person because it is gratifying to the ego, but ultimately it gives you an over-inflated sense of your abilities, and causes you to hate your boss.
I now believe it's best to have at last one or two people on both sides of you, a buffer if you will, so that you are neither the most, nor the least knowledgable.
Ideally, it's good to be on the upper side of the bell curve, but not at the far end of it.
And yes, it really helps your working relationship if your boss is smarter than you.
Re:Using Captcha for distributed processing
on
Defeating Captcha
·
· Score: 1
Now you've created a puzzle that computers are really good at solving, but humans suck at.
What's a human going to do when presented with sin(34)+10? Find a computer.
Flickr is very cool and I hope it stays that way.
on
Yahoo buys Flickr
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I'm a big fan of Flickr, which if you haven't heard of it, is a community-oriented photo-sharing service. Their photo-sharing API has enabled me to quickly assemble some nifty things such as this Colr Pickr and photo mosaics. However, I must admit I have mixed feelings about this acquisition, perhaps due my experiences in the late 90s, in which I found myself in a continual battle with new corporate overlords.
If you read the posts that founders Stewart and Caterina have been making in the Flickr Blog, and elsewhere, it's clear that they truly believe that this acquisition is for the best, and I don't doubt that both the Ludicorp folks and the Yahoo folks have the best of intentions.
Just as small children sometimes accidentally mistreat beloved pets, large groups of people with the best of intentions sometimes break things. Flickr currently has the feel of a 'mom & pop shop' and it is hard to believe that this state of affairs will continue with the influx of more money & extra management. But let's hope so!
I got my degree in Music. If your goal is to make a lot of money and retire early, this is not the degree for you, and I am not recommending it for you. However, I am quite happy with my choice of degree.
I would suggest you choose a program that interests and excites you, and completely ignore the financial aspects (unless that is what interests and excites you).
I ultimately ended up going into computer programming. I am completely self taught. My lack of a degree has never been a huge problem.
Since the age of 30, I've been able to work on jobs that are fun and that I derive significant pleasure from. There are other jobs that pay more, but it's not worth it to me if I will be unhappy. Being happy is more important than being rich.
I'm now 42. I'm not a millionaire, but I live comfortably - I have enough. Most importantly, I'm very happy, and I often drive to work with a big shit-eating grin on my face.
This happiness is my most valuable asset - it helps me to get new jobs when I need them (because people like to work with happy people) and it is significantly more valuable than my degree.
I've been playing with Flickr, since it was mentioned on Slashdot a few days ago.
Flickr has a really nice API for retrieving images. I used Perl and ImageMagick to build a database that provides this amusing tool for searching images by color:
http://www.krazydad.com/squaredcircle/colorfinde r. php
One of the nice thing about early 80s PCs was that the individual pixels were large. So you could accomplish a lot with a simple program like this one (which I often entered into floor models at the local radio shack):
10 COLOR RND(15) 20 SET(RND(20),RND(20)) 30 GOTO 10
Sadly, it is harder to find programming environments for kids that provide this kind of simplicity these days.
Last year I started teaching high school aged kids to make simple videogames using Flash. My class is called "Make your own videogame in Flash Actionscript". Essentially, my class is an introduction to programming, and something of a "stealth math class." I would much prefer to be using BASIC on old VIC-20s, but Flash isn't too bad for this activity.
I'm aware of the huge anti-Flash sentiment on Slashdot - one I generally share when I see it needlessly used on websites. However, I think Flash is pretty good for teaching kids to program.
Since it's vector based, the equivalent code to produce the effect of the above (raster based) BASIC program is too large (see http://krazydad.com/bestiary/index2.html for my implementation), so I have had to rethink how I approach things. I have to start with programs that are simple in Flash, not programs that were simple for me in 1981.
Still, I have to spend a couple classes getting past some unnecessary high-level concepts integral to Flash (like "timelines" and "the stage") but eventually we do get down to programming.
When a kid writes that first program in which they can control something on the screen, they invariably yell "Yes!!" or "Alright!!" This is why I like teaching programming.
The reasons I chose Flash, over something like LOGO (or Squeak) are:
It provides a hands-on enviroment for the kids to paste in their own artwork and manipulate it without yet knowing how to code.
It's possible to make some very simple games that look good without a huge amount of coding.
The kids can share their games with others by publishing them on a website.
It's a real-world technology that may get them a job or money.
Without knowing exactly what is in the code, I would be very wary of participating in such a scheme.
It is very difficult to control massive economies in software. A single floating-point error in the software could result in massive inflation or deflation which would have a real effect on the players of the game.
There are also numerous ways the game developer can provide a 1:1 exchange rate (or 'no transaction fees') on the dollar->game exchanges, and still leach off the economy in the game. The purchases within the game are still controlled by software which may be exacting explicit or implicit processing fees.
Bots in the game posing as players can create goods artificially, sell them to players, thus transferring their cash to the system.
Slashdot Mirror
The first few examples do not appear to be Javascript. It's implemented in Javascript, yes, but Javascript does not have the BASIC-like functionality that is used in the examples.
Back in 2009, I did something very similar with one of the 1997 Kasparov vs. Deep Blue games.
One difference is that I used a chess engine, and made the search tree audible, so you can hear the chess computer "thinking". Here's my original blog article: http://www.krazydad.com/blog/2009/05/musical-chess/ and here's video from the concert: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42G6P0b72Gk
I made some lovely graphs to illustrate this growth. These graphs use actual thumbnails from youtube as data points.
That's right - the medium is the message!
My book, Flickr Hacks, contains a number of examples of using ImageMagick (via the Perl API) with Flickr. This is one area where it really shines. I used ImageMagick to create these mosaic posters, the Flickr Colr Pickr and other cool things.
Connie Willis's novel Bellwether, which is about the science of fads, deals with this phenomenon in depth.
The title comes from a middle english word used describing a practice in sheep farming. Sheep tend to follow each other. But farmers would sometimes use a castrated ram with a bell around his neck to lead the rest of the flock. The ram would tend to move first, but in a very subtle, nearly undetectable way.
At the center of any cloud of popularity must be a seed of initial impulse - the bellwether.
> At the end of the day, we don't play games for social interaction ... We play games to escape.
I think Pachter is right that Microsoft's strategy is flawed, but for the wrong reasons. It's not
that online multiplayer gaming is a limited market, it's that consoles are a terrible platform
(as compared to desktop computers equipped with keyboards) for online multiplayer gaming.
I typically use my console sitting on the floor with a game controller in both hands. This is a
terrible interface for chatting with other players, and chat is an essential component of most
multiplayer games.
You need a keyboard, and your computer already has a good one.
On a related note, back in February, I searched Flickr for photos matching the tags Lisa or Mona.
s et-95771/
The results indicate that 9/10ths of the women in these photos are named Lisa. I built
a photo mosaic from the results, which can be seen here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/krazydad/4921613/in/
Hey Thanks :) Moderate parent up :) tee hee.
Personally I welcome this, but with some trepidation. My coverpop system uses Amazon's web services
to build interactive mosaics.
Currently their search system tends to produce a lot of irrelevent results, because
vendors tag their own products, and unscrupulous vendors tend to assign misleading tags.
For example, when I tried to build a "harry potter" mosaic, I got a ton of search results
that had nothing to do with harry potter.
A collaborative tagging system has the potential to produce more accurate results, especially
if there is a system in place for users to collaboratively give weight to tags, similar to
Slashcode's moderation system. A free tagging system (like Flickr has) is likely to be problematic
on a system in which is commerce is involved, because there is a huge incentive to abuse it.
I already monitor keyword searches of such sites as Technorati, Google Blog Search, IceRocket, and
BlogPulse using an RSS reader (Sharpreader, in my case).
IBM's service sounds like it is essentially dong the same thing, and then summarizing the results
a bit. I don't really see any significant added value over using these existing services.
I posted about Ning yesterday:
http://www.krazydad.com/
An excerpt:
Ning allows user/authors to set up permanent URLs to their apps, which take the form XXXX.ning.com. I imagine there will be a bit of an initial landgrab as cybersquatters grab up some of the more obvious ones. It would be nice if Ning had a policy in place to deal with this, but I imagine, with a project this ambitious, their plates are pretty full -- and this leads to what I think is the most flawed aspect of this idea -- it's just too damn big. If successful, Ning has the potential to be a host, provider, authoring tool, and community hub for a huge chunk of web content. The question is, can the company successfully do all these things and do them well? Managing successful communities is a tricky business, and the downside is that when the users get pissed off, you've already provided them with an excellent channel for mouthing off about it (for the inevitable whiners, this is an excellent time to reserve "ihate.ning.com" and "ilovewhi.ning.com").
While Google's Blogsearch is more comprehensive, it does a terrible job of filtering out spam blogs.
Many spam blogs are hosted on Google's own Blogspot, which they seem to mine exhaustively, sadly.
I find that both Technorati and Blogpulse produce fewer, but more relevant results.
I assumed when I first heard about this that hi-fidelity microphones were employed, however, the researchers used cheap PC mics. In addition,
they speculate that eavesdropping over the phone is possible:
I've worked at a number of jobs including ones where I was the most knowledgable person, and ones where I was the least knowledgable in the problem domain I was working in.
It is tempting to accept jobs in which you will be the most knowledgable person because it is gratifying to the ego, but ultimately it gives you an over-inflated sense of your abilities, and causes you to hate your boss.
I now believe it's best to have at last one or two people on both sides of you, a buffer if you will, so that you are neither the most, nor the least knowledgable.
Ideally, it's good to be on the upper side of the bell curve, but not at the far end of it.
And yes, it really helps your working relationship if your boss is smarter than you.
Now you've created a puzzle that computers are really good at solving, but humans suck at.
What's a human going to do when presented with sin(34)+10? Find a computer.
I found this article helpful, as it provides some background info on who Ms. O'Gara is.
http://www.corante.com/mooreslore/archives/2005/02 /22/the_jonesogara_feud.php
I'm a big fan of Flickr, which if you haven't heard of it, is a community-oriented photo-sharing service. Their photo-sharing API has enabled me to quickly assemble some nifty things such as this Colr Pickr and photo mosaics. However, I must admit I have mixed feelings about this acquisition, perhaps due my experiences in the late 90s, in which I found myself in a continual battle with new corporate overlords.
If you read the posts that founders Stewart and Caterina have been making in the Flickr Blog, and elsewhere, it's clear that they truly believe that this acquisition is for the best, and I don't doubt that both the Ludicorp folks and the Yahoo folks have the best of intentions.
Just as small children sometimes accidentally mistreat beloved pets, large groups of people with the best of intentions sometimes break things. Flickr currently has the feel of a 'mom & pop shop' and it is hard to believe that this state of affairs will continue with the influx of more money & extra management. But let's hope so!
Excluding the more than 30 moons that orbit the ringed planet, it's the first discovery of a moon orbiting the ringed planet!
I got my degree in Music. If your goal is to make a lot of money and retire early, this is not the degree for you, and I am not recommending it for you. However, I am quite happy with my choice of degree.
I would suggest you choose a program that interests and excites you, and completely ignore the financial aspects (unless that is what interests and excites you).
I ultimately ended up going into computer programming. I am completely self taught. My lack of a degree has never been a huge problem.
Since the age of 30, I've been able to work on jobs that are fun and that I derive significant pleasure from. There are other jobs that pay more, but it's not worth it to me if I will be unhappy. Being happy is more important than being rich.
I'm now 42. I'm not a millionaire, but I live comfortably - I have enough. Most importantly, I'm very happy, and I often drive to work with a big shit-eating grin on my face.
This happiness is my most valuable asset - it helps me to get new jobs when I need them (because people like to work with happy people) and it is significantly more valuable than my degree.
I've been playing with Flickr, since it was mentioned on Slashdot a few days ago.
e r. php
Flickr has a really nice API for retrieving images. I used Perl and ImageMagick to build a database that provides this amusing tool for searching images by color:
http://www.krazydad.com/squaredcircle/colorfind
And a related project:
http://www.krazydad.com/squaredcircle/
- Jim
10 COLOR RND(15)
20 SET(RND(20),RND(20))
30 GOTO 10
Sadly, it is harder to find programming environments for kids that provide this kind of simplicity these days.
Last year I started teaching high school aged kids to make simple videogames using Flash. My class is called "Make your own videogame in Flash Actionscript". Essentially, my class is an introduction to programming, and something of a "stealth math class." I would much prefer to be using BASIC on old VIC-20s, but Flash isn't too bad for this activity.
I'm aware of the huge anti-Flash sentiment on Slashdot - one I generally share when I see it needlessly used on websites. However, I think Flash is pretty good for teaching kids to program.
Since it's vector based, the equivalent code to produce the effect of the above (raster based) BASIC program is too large (see http://krazydad.com/bestiary/index2.html for my implementation), so I have had to rethink how I approach things. I have to start with programs that are simple in Flash, not programs that were simple for me in 1981.
Still, I have to spend a couple classes getting past some unnecessary high-level concepts integral to Flash (like "timelines" and "the stage") but eventually we do get down to programming.
When a kid writes that first program in which they can control something on the screen, they invariably yell "Yes!!" or "Alright!!" This is why I like teaching programming.
The reasons I chose Flash, over something like LOGO (or Squeak) are:
Without knowing exactly what is in the code, I would be very wary of participating in such a scheme.
It is very difficult to control massive economies in software. A single floating-point error in the software could result in massive inflation or deflation which would have a real effect on the players of the game.
There are also numerous ways the game developer can provide a 1:1 exchange rate (or 'no transaction fees') on the dollar->game exchanges, and still leach off the economy in the game. The purchases within the game are still controlled by software which may be exacting explicit or implicit processing fees.
Bots in the game posing as players can create goods artificially, sell them to players, thus transferring their cash to the system.
A is for Amazon, which sells Segway scooters.
B is for Best Buy, the favorite of looters.
C is for CNN, only slightly left-leaning.
D is for Dictionary, spelling, syntax and meaning.
E is for Ebay, which sells used lunch boxes.
F is for Firefox, which IE outfoxes.
G is for games, and not Google. Amazed?
H is for Hotmail, which GMail will raze.
I is for IKEA, selling meatballs and sofas.
J is for jokes, favorite pastime of loafas.
K is for Kazaa, full of pirated bands.
L is for lyrics, puerile and bland.
M is for Mapquest, disorientation prevents.
N is for news, for current events.
O is for online dictionary, full of lore.
P is for Paris Hilton, stupid whore.
Q is for quotes, quips and barbs.
R is for recipes, all lo-carbs.
S is for Spybot, your adware must die.
T is for Tara Reid, of American Pie.
U is for UPS, which has the brown trucks.
V is for Verizon, whose reception just sucks.
W is for weather, like cyclones and twisters.
X is for Xbox, my thumb still has blisters.
Y is for Yahoo, still in business. A mystery.
Z is for zipcodes, which soon will be history.
Clearly, someone at Epson's been reading
Danny Dunn, Invisible Boy one of my favorite childhood reads...