Friday, July 23, 2010
Monday, June 21, 2010
IPython and libreadline Don't Work On Mac OSX ... Unless
This annoyed for quite some time: a default installation of IPython (even sometimes with python libreadline bindings installed) doesn't work to smoothly: IPython apparently loads libedit (the BSD variant) which garbles your text when you type past so many characters and doesn't support contextual history completion, etc. I was able to solve this problem with the following:
$ sudo pip uninstall readline ipython$ sudo easy_install readline ipython
Note that the second step should be "easy_install" - not "pip".
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Ding Dong, The (IE6) Witch is (almost) dead
I felt my office vibrating this morning but I soon realized it must be reverberations of the collective sigh of web developers all across the globe following Google's announcement of dropping support for IE6. Apparently the French and German governments are "[advising] citizens to switch to a different browser until the IE6 issue had been resolved" according to at least one source. I find that quite absurd considering the implication that someone might install a different browser and then switch back to "good old" IE6 ;)
It's depressing to note that IE6 still comprises about 9% of the browser market; so a web developer still has to fret over writing workarounds to account for about 1 out of 10 of their users. Out of all the theories I've heard over why people still use this browser (dating back to 2001), the legacy corporate Intranet one is the most convincing. I always new in my heart of hearts that ActiveX for the most part was a bad idea.
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The Cell
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4215 Fre 41 (Memoirs and Reflections | by Aubsoluone Jikro 89th)
A sister. The cold flesh. Birthed and on the table glowing in an effusive, self-contained bulbous cobweb of light, pulsating white, then blue, white, then blue ... This is the first memory of life. The decanter spilling her across the table, she breathes and tries to understand life, immediately she is a cold wet slimy puppet; in days a beautiful baby; in months a crawling sentient being; and in years a fellow worker in the hull, a friend.
She grows and learns to know and understand like I the laws of our very finite world: the size of only 10,500 cabinets interconnected like tunnels or stitched together with walls beat open to form small quarters - sleeping rooms, mess rooms, equipment access closets ...
We are here floating to our lineage's death. Marooned in a seemingly infinite vacuum of space.
2945 Jyr 33 (Recollections of the meteor field incident | Eschenon Rik 1st)
My age is 23 years and 17 months, I believe. There should be others here to talk with and help with my duties in the hull, but I am alone. I am literate but could not gauge the degree of my intellectual achievements good or bad having no living, non-artificial intellectual peer to compare myself to. I can read at a rate of 3,000 words a minute and can record approximately 1,000 words every five minutes, or 200 words a minute on average. None of the literature I've read in the library affirms my reading and writing capabilities as either success or failure in an intellectual endeavor.
I only have one endeavor in life. To activate the embryo cells and begin decanting members of my genetic family and race and preserve what little I remember of the spoken language and culture from my brief three years of contact with living members of my genetic family and race.
The ship was traveling through what I now believe to be a meteor field. Comm system was the first to be disabled by impact and if there were any transmissions they were not recorded in the library. I have already consumed the entirety of the library. I have memorized nearly on quarter of it as well. There are no traces of any trasmission.
(The written literature in the library's hull was of one differing from my family's spoken tongue. The remaining two drones on board were programmed to speak my native tongue, so I spoke that bastardized perhaps with the vocabulary I absorbed most through reading rather than dim, shallow interactive with the emotionless, persona-less machines.)
It was one of 10,000 cells, each the size of 1/40 of our home planet's moon, in network of self-sustained micro-orbitals. 10,000 feet from my head, is the curved wall of the main reactor, a the concetric hollow of a large sphere dumping oxygen and nitrogen through the system, its center, our spinning hull, with it tunnels and rooms wrapped around the inside of the ring to produce gravity.
Based on the number of years that have passed, I can only assume that our cell was not only damaged but detached from the main ship and launched off into open space. I am at least tens of light years away from any solar system that would have any planets, and those planets would not be life-sustaining from my projections. The cell is traveling close to 60,000 kilometers per hour through natural momentum. Based on the design requirements of the cell, I believe that it may last from 500 to a maximum of 2,000 years. Of course that could be made drastically short by collision with a dense cloud of space dust or a meteor collision.
They say there is a time of trauma in everyone's life. Trauma always produces potent memories, and a young age can provide a level of persistent lucidity in recollection otherwise impossible in such a young age. For me that age was 3, and 1 month, I believe. I was considered slower than the others, my genetic siblings, sister and brothers and had not yet been trained in writing or reading. I was expected to be a laborer on the hull. The methren (our genetic aunts) followed us toddlers, three aged three there were. (We talked in a soft, rolling tongue in Illenish, a language that have developed in 2367 - a strangely accented derivative of Chinese with vocabulary heavily borrowed from Icelandic. The language developed over the years after China's RMT corporation bought and inhabited the island nation. Or so the articles from history I have access to so document. There is not a tremendous body of literature devoted to this cultural subject.)
I remember the methren Lucinia who adopted me spiritually. I remember her name from my deep love for her and my memories of watching her die. The walls of the escape vestibule crushing her body and eyes showing an expression of horror as the life was squeezed out of here. There was a millisecond expression of her mind shouting "I love you" before the frozen pupils evoked only the hollowed sign of death. And then she was entirely consumed, crushed and hidden behind folding metal walls.
The others had been hurled out of the damaged escape vestibule, thrown violently into the thick nitrogen gases of the reactor and splattered against the opposing wall, the kernel of the micro-orbital.
Everyone had died. I was the last human survivor on cell AF1416.
Were it not for AD4, I would have died there; drowning any logic or clear reasoning in tears and screaming fits as I stared out a small intact polymer window peering out into the reactor. I only remember clouds of blood and imagined my sisters and brothers alive in the spinning mist of dark red blood. I was deluded in my horror by hallucinations of other methren nearby holding my fragile body there in the bubble formed in the collapse.
I didn't realize a small crawl space with light trickling in immediately behind me until I heard a nursery song and a voice effecting a methren whose name I have forgotten:
"Rik, rik, trick a trick" It sang in a soft voice perfectly emulating the methren. I lay there and fell asleep for what seemed like a long time - for how long I cannot be sure. I cannot remember the dream exactly but I know I had vivid and fantastic dreams trying to comfort my traumatized mind. I do remember waking with the false illusion that I was crawling up a bunker ladder, a feat I had never really managed but tried and failed many times.
AD4 was singing again. Some nursery song about climbing and falling. "Be brave and climb." And then I crawled toward what I though was a methren singing to me; my eyes were still swollen from crying. The last memory I have was after coming into the full light of hallway into which I had been summoned; the horrific moment of realizing it was AD4 emulating the methren. I had convinced myself, wrongly, that the drone was going to kill me and throw me into the reactor with the rest; or at least crush me somehow. I erupted into fitful sobbing again and stared back at the faceless drone which floated back from me playing a soft nursery song to calm my troubled self.
From there I have no recollections until the age of 3 years and 10 months, I think, when AD4 had taught me basic writing, the alphabet, the concept of colors. It spoke in its affected robotic voice after failing to convince me of its humanness. I often wonder if I spoke to an outsider, they would confuse me for an android? There is no way of telling.
I am the third generation of the cell, we were commissioned as miners to be used in later parts of the main ship's voyage. Now I am only racing time to make others to live in the little amount of time left. 0 generations? 1 generation? 2 generations? 100 generations? 1,000 generations?
Friday, January 15, 2010
Competitor Research in Global Markets
Image by mastaschmue via Flickr
The magic of quantcast.com, compete.com estimates [1] is simply getting scrubbed datasets from some ISPs. Therefore they can be drastically inaccurate due to natural anomalies such as a large majority of traffic falling outside of available data samples.
Quantcast only provides statistics for US markets; I wish I had a market research consultant sitting next to me now to suggest similar competitor research tools.
There are a host of these sites (basically great marketing planning software with many features free from the bat) which are incredibly great for domestic companies researching other sites with a strong presence in the US markets.
I don't see many with sites which offer estimation of non-US markets. I'll try completing a survey for my own purposes to hone in on options for researching some Asian, European and South American regions. Anybody know of other companies such as Quantcast offering statistics on non-US traffic?
[1] Quantcast and other similar companies do provide direct measurement to webmasters via javascript tracking codes.
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Thursday, December 17, 2009
2010 Is the Year Bullshit Takes Off
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Small business marketing is moving away from focusing on SEO. Why do I say that? Because, well, Google and Bing are changing the rules so often and are getting so good at figuring out the real businesses that deserve to be on pages.
A pretty weak argument, considering that the same can be applied to nearly any domain. Web Development is dead. Why? Well all the frameworks are changing so fast and big companies are figuring out how to use out-of-the-box frameworks without using web developers. Television advertising is dead. Why? Well consumers are using technologies to circumvent ads, like DVRs, and consumers are getting smart about what they really want to buy.
Concerning market demand for SEO, let's just look in Google Trends where its clear SEO has risen year after year with no sign of decline. (See attached figure). But apparently Scoble doesn't need data to back his argument, just take his word for it.
Secondly, its beyond absurd to claim that Google looks for "real businesses that deserve to be on pages." I guess Scoble really didn't do his homework on SEO, since anyone worth their muster knows this isn't Google's problem in search is to look not for businesses but rather "pages" alone to include in their SERPs. Page is the unit of trust and relevancy, fueled by contextual links. Concerning businesses and their relevancy to Google, only the inverse is true; that is, Google does look for sites or businesses that distribute malware, conduct phishing, try to hijack the browser's back button to keep a user on the site, or any other nasty tricks. Just see their guidelines for webmasters. Sad will be the day that you can't rank in Google because you don't work for some major media outlet.
For the records, "the stuff" is called verticals. Very informative. Good SEOs of course recommend a holistic approach to online marketing that includes verticals and other aspects that are starting to appear more and more on the SERPs. Many are already talking a lot about verticals. The idea that creating great content to get into a vertical is a stretch. Let's take maps, for example. I can have a site with very with little or no good content, but if there's a page for my local Pizza Burger restaurant in Atlanta with an address and listing, and there's little no competition, you damn well bet that a search for "Pizza Burger Restaurant Atlanta" will pop up in the map vertical. With competition, though, the unfortunate reality is that good content (good to humans, that is) doesn't preempt well-linked content. Better content can't fall below others in the SERPs if it isn't well promoted and referenced throughout the web (from trusted and relevant sites). This is all part of any good SEO strategy: developing quality content AND implementing a non-spammy link-building strategy through available PR channels on the web, including (ahem) things like Twitter and Facebook.With other searches, like one for Tiger Woods, you’ll get a page filled with stuff that SEO just doesn’t affect much anymore. In the middle of that page is a real time box that brings items from Twitter and Google News. It no longer is good enough to be just an SEO expert to get items onto pages like these. You’ve gotta be great at creating content that gets Google’s algorithms to trust it enough to shove it onto these new hybrid pages.
Can someone explain this paragraph to me? Google Analytics isn't controlled by Page Rank? Ummm yeah, okay, I'll agree with you there. Seriously, I'm trying to figure out if Scoble is trying to imply that SEO is all about page rank, or something. Maybe I can't read well, or something, but this guy just comes across as really, really dumb.But there’s something deeper going on. Google has built systems that aren’t Page Rank controlled anymore and are giving far better analytics to small businesses than they did a year ago. They know a LOT more about your behavior now other than you clicked on a link, even to the extent that they know whether you called that business or bought something and THAT is changing the skills SEO/SEM types need to have
Scoble tries to swoon us at the end of the article with revelations of the next big thing:
Dude, you are really out of touch. There's already even a word (and acronym) for this "new breed" of marketing you've just pretended to invent: Social Media Optimization (SMO).... the new breed is going beyond just search engines to provide holistic systems that find and track customers not only on search engines like Google and Bing, but on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.
While I don't have predictions for 2010 (the popular thing to blog about these days), I can only hope that sometime in 2010 Google figures out how to analyze blog entries and figure out which ones are total bullshit, and then maybe display a nice icon next to its text link on the SERP - like a steaming cow patty of something. In closing, I won't be reading anymore Scoble in 2010 - that's a fact, not a prediction.
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Google's AdWords Policies - Great Ideas, If they Only Implemented Them
Google recently did a review of it's Ad Policy, progress in the current year, and purported improvements they're making to algorithms and policies to protect users from "spammy ads" and even worse, sites that trick users into installing malware, revealing personal information for "free" goods or getting locked into recurring charges outlined in small text . The article is really laughable. This is one area where Google shouldn't be patting itself on the back, but writing a letter of apology to its users for either doing such a horrible job at improving the quality of approved ads and their landing pages, or just flat out lying about their efforts; I'm not sure which is the truth. Take this line from their latest installment of braggadocio:
To make sure that the ads are safe, we've also increased our efforts to detect scam ads and remove them from our system. For example, we’ve recently implemented a new process for permanently disabling AdWords accounts that attempt to harm users by doing things like installing malware on your computer, or offering free services that bait you into accepting hidden fees.
Hrmm, let's see, "permanently disabling AdWords accounts" for companies "offering free services that bait you into accepting hidden fees." Let's take a high profile case such as freecreditreports.com which has been under FTC investigation for tricking customers into monthly recurring charges for their "free" credit report. Google, maybe you've been following the news on this? Let's do a search for "free credit report." Wow! Looky there. The top ad is none other than freecreditreports.com. Maybe they're too high-paying of customers to permanently ban from AdWords?
Google also makes reference to it's help topic on disabled AdWords accounts which lists the following amongst others as a violation of their landing page policy:
Let' see. I did a search for "free government loans" (another popular scam Google has supported through its AdWords network) and found an ad linking to a site called us.peeplo.com which alas was yet another meta search engine returning results for the said search terms and some AdSense placements to boot. These kind of crap results without original content are still fairly common in both organic and paid listings.Arbitrage sites without relevant and original content that are designed for the purpose of showing ads
One wealthy man I truly respect is Warren Buffet who often speaks in frank and undecorated language even when his company fails to deliver results to its shareholders. As a
user of Google's services, I only wish they could speak with the same level of humility and admit fault in profiting off of scams and underachieving in its "efforts" to protect its users on the Internet.
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