Yup. That StumbleUpon surge changed things a bit.

Not in a way they haven't been changed before, mind you. Every now and again, there's enough of a traffic surge that the traffic never fully dies back to near-original levels, even if the referrals aren't coming from StumbleUpon any more.

Usually, it's a combination of two things: 1) a steady trickle of referrals from dozens of forums like Stack Overflow, Reddit and language-specific phpBB installs. 2) A lot more people add "rosetta code" or "rosetta" to their search queries; I get the impression that this method of learning how to do stuff is getting more popular.

So, yeah, the ambient traffic appears to have permanently bumped up a notch. This has happened three times before, that I can think of.

[TSoC] Automated virtual plays - machinema for the social web

Ok, so here's the thought: Take a social medium like Twitter or blogging, and take such things as stage plays.

Tie each Twitter or blog account to a character in the play. Now, how do you automate it?

I see three pieces that need to be addressed to cover each member cast:
(character)
(service)
-(account)
--(contacts/friends)

I see four bits of information that need to be conveyed for each active line:

(trigger time)
(service)
(who is the message directed at)
(the message)

Now, think about this. How would you organize this data?

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:wq

[TSoc] Abusing TinyURL, bit.ly, and your browser--making the work someone else's problem.

So, lately, I've had a few ideas for simple, interesting websites, and there's one thing they have in common--they have no server-side state. Server-side state means you need a database, and databases don't scale easily or cheaply.

So here's basis behind one of the ideas: http://www.translationparty.com

TranslationParty works by taking your English phrase, using JavaScript to call into Google Language Tools to convert it to Japanese, repeats the process back to English, and back to Japanese--on and on until it finds "equilibrium", or is confident the phrase will never reach it. Of course, it only works with English-Japanese translation. You'll notice, though, that it uses an identifier to allow it to recall previous "parties". I can show you one I just created a moment ago, by having you click on this link: http://translationparty.com/#7180967

They're storing the seed phrases in a database, so that visitors can refer back to them. That's fine, I suppose, but that database is eventually going to get large and expensive, and most of the past seed phrases will have been forgotten about in the mean time.


I showed TranslationParty to a couple folks last night, and they noticed it only did English-Japanese translation. I'd just hit on the idea of doing something like TranslationParty, but using virtualhosts to allow language selection.

en.ja.example.com would behave largely like the existing TranslationParty site.
ja.en.example.com would start with Japanese as the seed language, rather than English.
en.de.example.com would bounce between English and German
de.fr.example.com would bounce between German and French.

So, $1.$2.example.com would start with $1 as the seed language, and #2 as the intermediate language.

Problem is, I wouldn't want to store that database. It's largely a waste of server resources, considering most of it would be forgotten ten minutes after it was created. The obvious solution is to store the seed phrase as an HTTP GET parameter. http://en.ja.example.com/?seed=What%20lies%20in%2the%2deepest%20regions%20ones%20our%2memory would have "What lies in the deepest regions of ones memory" as the seed phrase, and be equivalent to http://translationparty.com/#7181046 ...

Now, that's a long, nasty URL, not suitable for copying and pasting in polite company, but it means that I don't need a database for these things. Besides, that's what bit.ly and tinyURL are for, right?


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:wq

I'm a DLL?

src="http://www.bbspot.com/Images/News_Features/2004/10/file_extensions/dll.jpg" width="300" height="90"
border="0" alt="You are .dll You are dynamic. You are constantly in danger of bringing down the house, because you don't play well with others.">
Which File Extension are You?

What we owe Apple and Mac users

I tend to hate Apple software; it's overly simplistic and makes too many assumptions about what I need to do. I tend to hate Apple hardware; it's good stuff, but you pay too much for it.

However, they've got one heck of a marketing budget, and they manage to make their products mainstream, or, at least, 'hip.' That's something I can appreciate. Why? Because if it weren't for Apple making their hardware and software hip, there wouldn't be the demand for lookalikes and workalikes that leads to products I *do* want to use to become available.

(Yes, the Newton was a failure, but Palm followed up on the concept and made a device I enjoyed using for years.)

Consider the iPod. MP3 players had already been around for a while, but they weren't big sellers. Along somes the iPod, which takes the MP3 player market by storm, and drives the expensive little lossy-audio playback device into popularity. People discover the convenience of having a few thousand songs in their pocket, and show off to their friends. Their friends like the feature set, but balk at the price tag. Along come the products by other manufacturers and vendors, with similar functionality[1] and a lower price tag, and those friends buy. Apple made the MP3 player popular.

The iPod went through a few iterations. It added video, then it added video.

Now we consider the iPhone. Smartphones have been around for far longer than the iPhone, but I normally only heard about them being used by big corporate and institutional types. You didn't get them unless you had a financially-driven need for them, so they were only marketed to the organizations with pockets. Along comes Apple, with their iPhone and their marketing budget, and it *sells*, despite being an open-developer-unfriendly platform. Same as with the iPod, they show their friends this cool stuff, friends want something like it, and so you get things like Android and Windows Mobile[2] getting bought at cell phone retailers all over the place. Meanwhile, people got used to touch screens and video interfaces thanks to things like the iPod Touch, so adding a phone to the feature set doesn't seem too odd.

Now look at the iPad. Everyone teases it. I don't want one, because I don't like the development environment. Everyone teased iPod, too. Tablet PCs are nothing really new, either; they've been around for over a decade. The first one I remember seeing had an 80486 processor, and it was used for mobile logistical record keeping. It ran Windows 3.1, and had handwriting recognition. More recently, HP and other PC vendors have been selling laptop/tablet convertibles. My mother had one. It's kinda fun to use. Yes, they were never really popular. That's why people keep expecting the iPad to fail. They forget that MP3 players weren't popular before the iPod, and that smartphones weren't core culture until the iPhone. I don't know if it's a marketing budget, superb planning or superb timing, but Apple tends to take a known concept and get it to sell.

I expect the iPad will sell nicely. It's like a supersized cross between an iPhone and iPod Touch, with the phone features pulled. What with the requisite technologies for AR getting better and better, I suspect I know where Apple would like to go next.[3]

[1] Greater in some areas, lesser in others. I don't want to debate it.
[2] Yes, Windows Mobile has been around for a while. I didn't say it was *created* as a response to the iPhone.
[3] And a brief plug for an anime I've been enjoying lately. Dennō Coil

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:wq

[question] Testing Virtualized XP installs with more than two CPUs.

So Windows XP Pro allows the user to run at most two physical processors, but each such processor can have as many cores as you like. That's great for quad-core and above processors, if the operating system is running directly on top of the hardware.

So what if you have a quad-core or dual-quad-core system, you're running some virtualization package (KVM, VMWare Server, whatever), and you want your guest XP Pro instance to have more than two cores? On QEMU+KVM, there's no way to lump virtual CPUs as cores on a virtual physical processor, and there doesn't appear to be one on VMWare ESX Server, either. So how would you do it?

The particular scenario, in this case, is automated testing of software that's supposed to run on XP Pro with systems between four and eight cores. While it stands to reveal interesting bugs, running it on only two cores is non-optimal.

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:wq

Quote from my boss from a couple minutes ago

Working late tonight, wrapping things up. Boss just gave me this little gem:

I don't know if I said it
So you'll have to have to ignore the repeat
But I need to make sure I said it
...I forgot what I was going to say.