Andy Dick finally tells the story of Phil Hartman and his wife (who shot her husband) and the cocaine that he may of given her. This is a story he would not even sell to Larry King. Andy also talks about Chris Farley passing. Very touching moments. All on the Tom Green web show "The Channel".Direct video link full screen: http://tinyurl.com/2vwylf
Facebook recently grew beyond 30 million users, whilst it is not fully supportive of Australia (versus the USA), it is a fantastic social networking tool.
Facebook is free, and makes money through advertising, plus you can buy gifts for others for $1US or pay for your own advertising - like flyers for $10 for 5,000 semi-targeted views.
I recently had trouble paying for flyer advertising, due to Australian issues (the State field only allowed two characters for the USA, Australia needs three), and the support from Facebook was fast, personal, good and iterative. Very impressive for a free product.
Finally a lot of good work continues to be done on the system, which can be a little buggy, especially with third party apps (such as the Rock You slide shows). An impressive completed project is their own search engine, customised for their own particular data, is worth reading for anyone in IT.
We wrote a crawler for the site, created an in-memory reverse index using both hashes and ternary tries and created a ranking system that scaled to return unique results for over 28 million user profiles.
Facebook search results are sorted by an approximation of social graph distance. People closer to you in the graph—your friends and people in your networks—are likely to be more relevant to you and thus are ranked higher. We also use this concept of "social proximity" to order results within applications like groups and events. Facebook search's key differentiator is that search results are unique to every user because they are based on a individual's place in the social graph.
Over 600 million searches per month. This makes us one of the top 20 search engines on the web in terms of number of searches.
For instance, the following is opinion, IMO, as it assumes Google's intentions which, even if it were true, they would never confirm:
"When the Justice Department sought an extensive list of anonymized search queries from the company, we only learned about it because Google fought the request in open court, out of reluctance to part with a trove of valuable data for free."
Now, this happens on a lot of blogs, opinion stated as fact, but for an amateur blog it is expected. For a news or professional site, even for their blogs, I would think that some sort of disclaimer or label, such as "editorial", is needed?
Whilst going a little too far, IMHO, this article makes a good point, when considering a Linux environment don't discount other costs, like supporting it, just because the price tag is $0.00.
Best Really Free Game of the Day - Crawl - online We had nethack online now Crawl! A free ASCII based RogueLike RPG game that you can play online, compare high scores, and watch others as they play, via a terminal. http://crawl.akrasiac.org
Best Really Free Download of the Day - Image Magick SourceForge Quote: "ImageMagick is free software to create, edit, and compose bitmap images in many formats from the commandline or via programming interfaces. Images can be cropped, resized, and combined, effects can be applied, and text, polygons, and curves can be added." http://sourceforge.net/projects/imagemagick/
Here is a repost of these very cool links to start your PC pinball collection... no-one noticed the first time this was posted and it is too cool not to try again!
vPinMAME et al Pinball simulation and emulation. Your adventure starts here; vPinMAMEhttp://www.pinmame.com
This is starting to get mature enough to be useful but early enough to still be a pain to put together and make work! The picture shows how Rocky and Bullwinkle actually appears on the screen and is playable with a pretty good pinball physics engine. It is a weird collection of different products including vbscript but seems to work ok.
Three main elements:
A Visual Pinball Table file (.VPT) (with textures from photos of the real table) is combined with ROMS in vPinMAME (including sound ROMS) to emulate and simulate playable real pinball machines pretty well - and the electronic back glass display is independent as an always on top resizable window! The VPT files actually can run by themselves and Visual Pinball comes with an editor allowing the creation of original pinball games!
It's kind of cheating but here is a link to download the 10MB install pack that does all of the above for you - save collecting ROMS and Tables;
Best Really Free Game of the Day - NetHack - online A free ASCII based RogueLike RPG game that you can play online, compare high scores, and watch others as they play, via a terminal. http://alt.org/nethack
Best Really Free Download of the Day - PHPList Quote: "phplist is an open-source newsletter manager. phplist is free to download, install and use, and is easy to integrate with any website." http://www.phplist.com
public void openFileInEditor(File file) throws MyFileOpenFailedException { List lines = new ArrayList(); BufferedReader in = null; try { in = new BufferedReader( new FileReader(file) ); String line; while ( (line = in.readLine()) != null ) { list.add(lines); } this.editorBuffer.setLines(lines); } catch (IOException e) { LOGGER.log(file, e); throw new MyFileOpenFailedException(file.toString(), e); } finally { if (in != null) { in.close(); } } }
I suggested changing the readability as in the below code.
public void openFileInEditor(File file) throws MyFileOpenFailedException { List lines = new ArrayList(); BufferedReader in = null; try { in = new BufferedReader( new FileReader(file) ); String line; while ( (line = in.readLine()) != null ) { list.add(lines); } this.editorBuffer.setLines(lines); } catch (IOException e) { LOGGER.log(file, e); throw new MyFileOpenFailedException(file.toString(), e); } finally { if (in != null) { in.close(); } } }
As Mark points out in this response post on Java Code Style that is actually how he used to do it but was convinced otherwise:
"That's how I used to indent code, too, but co-workers finally convinced me to switch. The Sun Java style guide specifies how Java code should look, so it's always consistent between developers. As soon as you work on a team with source control, consistent style becomes very important, far more important than individual preference. Merging code with whitespace changes is a pain. Reading code with randomly-varying indentation styles because 10 different programmers have used their own styles is a pain."
Blog Talk at Sydney Writers Festival 2007 - Australia
I was at an interesting blog talk at the Sydney Writers Festival on the weekend (3/6/2007). Some views from the panel of bloggers:
Some don't consider corporate "blogs" as real blogs (diaries are real blogs).
They predicted the end of the recording monoliths.
The published writer who was a blogger predictably said that he felt there was still a place for paperbacks in the future.
Successful blogs don't have to have 10,000 readers... they can just have a good community.
They saw a future to online TV viewing, youTube etc. Most online video was seen as copyright violation with some other user generated stuff that was good.
The blogger who was threatened with sexual abuse in the comments of her blog was mentioned. Question is - those sort of comments are normally moderated out... why were they left in?
In terms of writing skills, blogs were seen to be good practice... 1st million words are practice then you really start writing!
Payola or Blogola - as with Radio in the 60's in the US (when Payola was rampant and the term was invented), this practice is concerning but will be reigned in eventually also it was felt that natural selection would help weed out such sites.
Trends in blogging - some were seen to be good things, others were seen to be troubling:
Comments - a defacto standard for blogs now, a small % of comments were good the rest were from "hairless chimps" = noise.
Lots of blogs - the good ones would become more popular = natural selection = good.
People are writing - it is a good thing, the popularity of blogs, as it gets people writing.
Here is a study on Payola the pay for comment situation on the net, they found around 20% payola from web sites everywhere English speaking (except Australia - probably just lack of data or more careful here). Payola sites would accept pay for articles and around 60% would accept pay for editorials.
For sites where the editorial staff were also the sales department they found a higher incidence of payola including pay for pumping a product in their own forums as a non-staff user.
FaceBook vs MySpace
Also FaceBook is catching up to MySpace... a long way off but growing at a faster rate. FaceBook looks a lot cleaner at least.
DiggEffect - a popular story on Digg linking to a site causes the site to go down from traffic by many Digg users.
Such as the site promoted by this Guy Kawasaki blog on By the Numbers: How I built a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for $12,107.09
About CodeMonkey: Supporting those geeks who have lost the will to live in the Real World and have immersed themselves in the world of the computer and the Internet. We offer training to current and aspiring Monkeys, a forum, certification articles, assistance, advice, a collaborative free open source community of Monkeys. We promote a New Way for the New Millennium that resembles a Star Trek society of self improvement and technology (I told you we were geeks!).
What is "Really Free"?
"Really Free" is a completed, fully functional, forever free and good quality product/game/site/service with no cost, no spyware, no strings attached, no intrusive advertising, no popups, no trial period, no shareware type limitations and so on. Asking for donations and modest ads are ok - open source or GNU type "freedom" software license is a plus.
Best Really Free Game of the Day - Sangband A free tile based RogueLike RPG game based on Angband. Press '=' for options, '!' for user interface, and switch to 32x32 tiles rather than ASCII display. http://sangband.runegold.org
Best Really Free Download of the Day - Synergy Share keyboard, mouse and clipboard over multiple computers and monitors for free (SourceForge project). http://synergy2.sourceforge.net
Adult content... - Sarah Silverman takes a dig at Paris Hilton at the MTV Movie Awards, and the entire crowd laughs at the jail-bound heiress' expense - legal footage embed from iFilm (so this video won't go "unavailable" like half the webs versions of this video e.g. youTube).
Internet TV (the future of TV?) is a way to reach a world wide audience, on demand, that may not have access to a show on TV, and exposes that audience to advertising, and taps into web advertisers that may not be interested in advertising on regular TV. Everyone wins? As with the music industry and MP3's it is better for TV show producer to air on the net collecting ad revenue and have audiences watch their professional release than for the audience to seek rough quality boot legs on the web.
IFilm.com repeats up to date broadcasts from Comedy Channel such as the Daily Show and Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report. This is funded by advertising. Each "bit" of the show is presented as one clip. You have to watch the professional shows on the site although viral videos can be embedded. More than a weeks current content can be seen.
Craig Ferguson Show on YouTube - Craig speaks on his past problems as an alcoholic and why he will not ridicule Britney Spears.
Tom Green's The Channel is a new type of TV: Internet TV. It is broadcast on the net ("National Webovision") in good quality. Tom interacts with the web, skype users, instant messages, phone calls, snail mail, and CB radio during the show. The show is hosted in Tom's house in an hour long, one guest only format. The relaxed atmosphere brings out the best in guests and is a refreshing change from regular talk show formats. It is also recorded live and uncensored, even the phone calls are unscreened, there is no advertising, and one can embed his videos as above. Other titbits such as viral videos, blogs, myspace, youtube, maniatv, search, links etc are included on the site.
Dave Thomas and Andy Dick on Tom Green's "The Channel"
The next step will to be able to get TV as full screen, full quality, on demand, on the desktop, in realtime with no download delays - rather than watching in a tiny high resolution box with varying degrees of quality.
