I still love technology

Andrea did not know about Find/Replace in document editors. Instead of replacing all occurrences of a word she was rereading an assignment. I showed her Find/Replace which not only found every occurrence, including some she had missed, the feature also saved her several minutes. As Kip says, “I still love technology! Always and forever.”

This random tidbit merely illustrates the benefits of being technical / surrounding yourself with technical people. Work smarter, not harder!

For anyone that does not know, most word processors and text editors (Google Docs, Microsoft Word, Open Office Writer, etc) have a feature that lets you find words and phrases matching your input. You can even replace the words and phrases. This functionality can save hours if you want to alter the style of a document, for example adding two spaces after a period. Find a period followed by a space, replace it with a period followed by two spaces. You can get fancier with regular expressions, but this is a start.

Annoying commercials

I won’t validate the ads by pointing them out, but we can all think of a number of annoying commercials. I suppose the marketeers who generated these wretched pieces truly believe that “no press is bad press.” Don’t focus groups give feedback? I can’t imagine anyone seeing such choice pieces of advertising and saying, “YEAH! I want to buy X now!”

More and more ads are moving online, but no one knows what works in online advertising. I block obnoxious ads online, but allow non-obtrusive, possibly even helpful, ads. Last night Mike and I discussed when we click on Google ads–and it’s not when Google would like us to (i.e. all the time). I have to wonder if I’m the standard user or a corner case. What brave new world awaits us with advertising?

By the way, I avoid most ads by using Firefox with Adblock Plus. If you’re not already using these two, I’d highly recommend it. (More to come later on this subject.) Opera 10 has built in ad-blocking although I don’t find it works as well. To augment the service you can use Admuncher (I don’t link because they charge a lot) or any other technique described on wikipedia.

Four continents and counting!

I researched Google APIs recently. The Google Charts API was particularly intriguing so I decided to map the countries I’ve been to. Below you should see my four continents (ten countries) I’ve been to. In the coming months I should see another continent or two! Soon, I will have been to all six inhabitable continents

Update: Riding your bike to campus

I previously wrote about riding my bike to campus. Now, thanks to the nifty website, www.mapmyrun.com, I know that my route is 8.91 miles. Not bad whenever I can do that 5 days a week!

MMORPGs

MMORPGs have been on my mind recently. Yesterday I was talking to a co-worker who is a hardcore gamer: he played three accounts at once in EQ, he plays two in WoW, he has every console, etc. It occurred to me that one reason he likes the games is because he plays an entire group by himself, so the entire game is open to him.

WoW has terrible soloability; solo quests and PvE are mindless, I mean it can be automated pretty easily (I would know ). However, there’s no way you can solo any dungeon until you’re 20+ levels above it, and all end game content requires at least one other person (PvP arenas) and up to 39 others (40 man raids). I personally do not want to join a random guild with random people; I don’t want to have to try to make friends in MMOs–I want to play by myself, anytime, or with my friends. In Ultima Online friends seemed to come more naturally, and you could solo almost everything so the entire game was accessible. DAoC gave group bonuses so it was beneficial to group with anyone you could find.

Another big problem I have with WoW is the fact that the game revolves entirely around gear. The best gear wins everytime. The best gear is a pain to get (long, hard quests or massive dungeon runs with virtually no chance of getting the drop). The difficulty of getting gear inherently favors the hardcore and leads to another nasty feature: soulbound items. Soulbound has at least two negative effects:

1), you cannot trade/sell gear which hurts the economy and is unfair to users with multiple characters–you can’t even trade your own items to yourself!

2) people with the best gear will always have the best gear–there’s no way to lose it; armor’s broken, repair, done. In UO items were easy-come, easy-go which made for a much more casual feel and required much less time. UO also lowered the gap between a hoss in the best gear with perfect skills and a newbie with starter gear and no skills; everyone was competitive and could have fun. The point of this gargantuan post is that MMORPGs are not out of the casual gamers reach; we simply need the right game (with high soloability and little reliance on gear/level). I hope a game satisfying these requirements will come out soon although I doubt I’ll play.

Some good people

My adviser, Dr. Christine Julien, has an exceedingly cute daughter, Maya, whose life is being chronicled via blog:http://drsjulien.blogspot.com/

My lab mate, Drew, is an amazing architecture, developer, and person. Follow his exploits over at http://dstovall.org/

One of my favorite conversants, Hyrum, seems to know everything. Find out for yourself at http://www.hyrumwright.org/

Enchanté! My family is full of good, nay–GREAT, people! My sister, Allison, is getting her PhD at Wisconsin: http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ahollowa/

Genius. Brother. Secret agent? You won’t know until you visit http://www.laneholloway.com/

The love of my life has her own website, and one day she may even do something with it   http://andrea.sethholloway.com/

Spam bots… on blogs?

Where’s there’s a will, there’s a way. And likely, if there’s a will, there’s money. We’ve all felt the effects of spam in our email, but some of you may have never seen the amount of spam posted to blogs. Once a day I have to moderate comments with content similar to that of spam email. While that may not sound like much, I am grossly understating the achievement of finding my blog. Try googling for “blog” and you will not find my site easily.

The level of sophistication necessary to post spam on blogs is very high: find a blog, find a post, click to comment, paste in the spam, click to add the comments, and repeat. Anyone with the skills to do so could be gainfully employed as a programmer. What does it say that some would choose to be spammers instead? Hmmm…

Truth be told, a lot of spam is created by script kiddies who download an easy-to-use hacking kit and start doing their thing. There’s something inherently strange about trusting a stranger to furnish tools specifically for illegal, or at least maligned, activity. For example, this story gives details on how a hacking group released a phishing kit that benefits the original group as much as the script kiddie using the package.

Spam is not going away until we make it unprofitable. Although it is hard to stop, please do the world a favor and stop buying all those penis pills you heard about from the stranger online.

UPDATE: This post was more about my continuing amazement with nefarious people, but Lane informed me of the Akismet plugin to fight comment spam which the nice folks at Wordpress talk about here.

Apparently GUI automation tools are so easy to use that any decent programmer can develop a script to post spam arbitrarily. Very clever. Very cool. Luckily, the counter measure to comment-spam is equally elegant.

Ahhh, and a good chuckle because the first comment on this post was spam…

Happy Cinco de Mayo

As a Texan, I would be remiss if I did not wish you all a happy fifth of May. Eat some Mexican food, drink some margaritas, and enjoy!

My experience taking time management advice from the web

We’ve all felt the crunch of deadlines and work piling up, as we balance the working world and the life we’re meant to live. In this busy, always-on environment, I am a big fan of getting things done. I am also open to suggestions. In an effort to improve my productivity I went to the “experts” that I found online, namely lifehack–a website touting useful resources in personal productivity. However, the official lifehack blog fills with overblown, verbose posts like this one that took me minutes to read and essentially said… well, nothing.

I prefer the minimalistic approach of http://five.sentenc.es who practice what they preach. We as information consumers should not support these modern-day Dickens who write like they’re paid by the word. Even worse are the wolves-in-sheep-clothing producers who waste your time instead of improving your efficiency. In the interest of not wasting your time, I’m done with this rant now.

(Re)Using common items

I was just cleaning the apartment and I realized that my simple life is full of clutter–every week I pick up the same few items and throw them away. Among the offenders are

• Plastic bags (groceries)
• Plastic water bottles
• Magazines
• Junk mail

Most of those can be recycled… somewhere, somehow… Unfortunately, I do not have any convenient way of disposing of these items in a more environmentally-friendly way (and as much as I care about the environment, I don’t want to store boxes of stuff, find the drop-off locations, and then make multiple separate trips). I’ve been searching (reading and brainstorming) for clever ways to use these items, but I have not found much. Lifehack had an article on 10 ways to reuse plastic bags. If you have any ideas, please let me know!