Tag: Nerdy

Shaun Inman’s “Fever” a day later

Posted by Chris – June 19, 2009

I’ve had a Fever install up and running for 24 hours now, and I’ve gotta compliment Shaun for working through the emailed bug reports – he responded back twice, once to acknowledge my email, and a second to ask if I had any tips on reproducing one of the errors I reported. ( I couldn’t reproduce it either.)

Where I am seeing problems, though, is in the feed updates. I thought it seemed kinda slow today activity-wise, so I just went and opened up Google Reader. Sure enough, GR has nearly 1000 unread items, just from the last 24 hours. I’ve seen maybe 200 or so in Fever today. I spot-checked a couple of feeds, and yeah, they’re missing. For instance, Andrew Sullivan over on theatlantic.com has at least a dozen updates since this morning… but Fever, even though it says it’s refreshing every 15 minutes, doesn’t have anything newer than 16 hours old.

My one fear with host-it-yourself apps like this is that all of the connectivity issues get thrown back upon the user (and webhost) to resolve – i.e. if there’s no other discernible bug, maybe it’s just something with your server. In this case, though, I think there’s something else going on.

Anybody else have any Fever reports, good or bad?

A first look at Shaun Inman’s “Fever”

Posted by Chris – June 17, 2009

Twitter and the blogs have been abuzz today over Shaun Inman’s newest creation, called Fever. Some of you may be familiar with Shaun’s previous creation, Mint, a really nifty blog stats package that you host yourself. Inman is on familiar ground this time with Fever, creating a spiffy feed reader, full of AJAX-y goodness, suitable for hosting on your own website.

I’ve been a regular Google Reader user for years now, occasionally trying out other readers… there was that fling with Feedlounge, before it went under, and occasional dalliances with NewsGator’s line of readers… but I’ve always gone back to Google Reader. I took a look at Inman’s demo of Fever, though, over on feedafever.com, and knew it was time to give it a try.

Does the world really need another feed reader, anyway?

Creating a new RSS feed reader is no simple task. Taking accepted existing designs and improving on them requires creativity and good ideas about usability. Inman is on the right track here. But aside from the UI design, Inman has created a dual-purpose tool. On one hand, Fever is a traditional feed reader. You subscribe, it updates the feeds, you read. On the other hand, though, Fever is something like your own personal Digg. You can subscribe to all those noisy feeds, those linkdump feeds that occasionally have something interesting in them, and identify them as “Sparks”. Then Fever will aggregate them, pick out the hot topics, and present them to you in a “Hot” category, grouping them around a specific topic or link. This, to me, looks like the really slick part of Fever.

After the jump: my experience with installing Fever, importing my feed list, and some thoughts on usability and performance.

More…

There might be something to this Facebook thing…

Posted by Chris – February 9, 2009

Yesterday afternoon we went over to a friend’s house for her belated 30th birthday party. It was a good time – the carrot cake was tasty; there were friends there we hadn’t seen in quite a while; all in all, just about what a birthday open house ought to be. It seemed, though, that I couldn’t go more than about two minutes without hearing Facebook pop up in a conversation.

Now, mind you, this wasn’t a party entirely populated with geeks. Sure, I was there, but I’m the exception rather than the rule. But let’s review. The invite I got for the party: via Facebook. Several comments from the party with the flavor of “yeah, I saw that on your Facebook”. Comment to the parents with the new baby: “oh, I haven’t seen him yet… except on Facebook”. And it wasn’t just the thirty-somethings; the fifty-something retired friend is quite active there, too. (She’s probably challenging my wife to another game of WordTwist right this very minute.)

Got home from the party, popped out my iPod Touch to check my email. (Couldn’t do it at the party, since our friends have secured their wifi and I didn’t take the time to ask for the password.) Saw that the host of our church small group had added me as a Facebook friend. I kick over to the FB app and confirm him as a friend. Long story short, he needed to call to ask about us hosting small group. He didn’t have my phone number. So, he looked me up on FB, wrote on the Wall to get my attention, then asked my phone number via chat. (He could’ve shortened that a bit if he’d just looked at my Info tab, which has my cell # on it… but oh well.)

I’m starting to think there might be something to this Facebook thing.

Still in queue at IntenseDebate

Posted by Chris – January 25, 2009

So I had planned on waiting to blog about this until it was all live, but, well, this is getting annoying. I’ve been looking into social commenting tools for a while now; Disqus and Intense Debate seem to be the two biggies at the moment. When I realized yesterday that Intense Debate had been purchased by Automattic (the folks behind Wordpress), I figured it was the way to go for my Wordpress blog. So I installed it and tried to get it up and running.

The signup and install are easy enough – create an account on intensedebate.com, then install their Wordpress plugin and activate. At that point IntenseDebate is supposed to sync all my blog comments into their site, and then any further comments will automatically be saved both to my blog and to their site. (This is handy, because if I ever decide I want to get rid of them, I just deactivate the plugin, and all my comments are still in place on my blog.)

The sad part is this: I activated the plugin yesterday about 1300. They warned it might take a few hours to complete the import, and assured me that I would get an email when it was done. In the mean time their plugin is active on my blog, so any new comments are run through the IntenseDebate system and show up fine, but all the previously-posted comments are MIA until they get done importing. It’s now almost 0800, and the status page still says “Queued, waiting for import.”

I’m not sure what course to take at this point. I’ve posted a couple complainy replies on Twitter to @intensedebate, but have heard nothing back. (Not that I expect they must reply, but… well, that’s another post.) I’ll give it a full 24 hours to try to import, after that I’m calling it a big pile of FAIL and deactivating. Maybe I’ll give Disqus a try then after all.

A weird iPod Genius playlist bug

Posted by Chris – November 17, 2008

Discovered this one last night: when I tapped the Genius icon to create a Genius playlist out of the currently-playing song, the playlist it created began with a different version of that song. It was repeatable, happened twice.

In detail: I was playing “All the Way Home (live)” from Andrew Peterson’s Appendix M record. I hit the Genius button to create a playlist, and it generated one quite neatly. Unfortunately, rather than starting the playlist with “All the Way Home (live)” from Appendix M, it started the playlist with “All the Way Home” from AP’s Carried Along.

Don’t know quite what’s going on here, but something ain’t quite right with the Genius.

Reason #264 Best Buy is Evil:

Posted by Chris – October 31, 2008

I need a SATA cable to hook up a new (to me) hard drive to the motherboard of a new (to me) computer. It looks something like this:

SATA cable

I found them online from a reputable retailer for $1.99 each. I bought two. The retailer has a First Class USPS shipping option that only cost me $2, so for $6 I have two cables on my way from North Carolina.

I stopped at my local Best Buy over the lunch hour to see what they have, and sure enough, they have a SATA cable in stock. (Probably the only place in town that does.) Their price: $19.99.

I rest my case.

moving around

Posted by Chris – September 25, 2008

So, it was time for a little blog reorganization. I’d started chrishubbs.com about a year ago, with the intent of posting more regularly there on topics surrounding the church plant. Well, we’re no longer at the church plant, so that doesn’t really make sense. In addition, my old scheme of having a place where my various family members could blog never really came to fruition, because, well, I seem to be the only inveterate blogger of the bunch.

So, my conclusion: time to move things around. So, with the help of my intrepid hosting provider, those of you visiting thehubbs.net/chris or rmfo-blogs.com/cakeboy (yes, I know there is still at least one person with a bookmark to that original location… and I won’t name names, but I’m married to her!), you will now be seamlessly routed to the new chrishubbs.com. All the same content, just a new location.

If you notice anything acting weird, let me know.

How much experience have presidential and VP candidates had?

Posted by Chris – September 3, 2008

A warning to my casual readers: this post is going to get more than a wee bit nerdy, and probably a bit political, too.

OK, with that out of the way, let me note that one of the things that’s been bugging me ever since John McCain’s announcement of Sarah Palin as his VP choice last week is that while there’s been a veritable chorus describing her as “inexperienced” and “unqualified”, no one has really bothered to set down what they thought a VP’s experience should be. I had this discussion with a guy who is a big Obama supporter over on a forum I frequent, and even he was unwilling to suggest a criteria other than that it should be “the same as if they were running for president”.

I decided it was time to give myself a history lesson. How much experience, exactly, did our various candidates for president and vice president have? Geof suggested plotting that data against their presidential ratings to see how it panned out. So I did that, too. To bound the problem a little bit, I decided to limit my study to the more modern presidential era (starting with 1960). Then I headed off to Wikipedia to do some data collection.

The Setup

A person’s experience is, in some ways, difficult to quantify, but I settled on the following categories of experience:

  • Years of college education (I also tracked whether it was Ivy League and whether they got a law degree)
  • Years of military service
  • Years in a state legislature
  • Years as a state governor
  • Years in other federal government service (i.e. cabinet or civil service positions)
  • Years in Congress
  • Years as Vice President
  • Years as President

The tricky part, then, is how you choose to sum these up; let’s just agree that, for instance, years served as Vice President or as a governor are more valuable, year-for-year, than those served in the military or in a state legislature. I settled on some multipliers to try to help even things out. Feel free to argue over these if you want to.

  • Years of college education (I also tracked whether it was Ivy League and whether they got a law degree) – 0.25
  • Years of military service – 0.25
  • Years in a state legislature – 0.25
  • Years as a state governor – 1.0
  • Years in other federal government service (i.e. cabinet or civil service positions) – 0.5
  • Years in Congress – 0.75
  • Years as Vice President – 1.0
  • Years as President – 2.0

So, for example, George H. W. Bush, in 1984, had 4 years of college, 4 years in the military, 5 years in government service, 4 years in congress, and 4 years as VP. That gives him a score of ((4*0.25)+(4*0.25)+(5*0.5)+(4*0.75)+(4*1.0)) = 11.50.

With those multipliers in place it was easy enough to get Excel to do some sums and give me some totals. (You can download my spreadsheet here if you want to.)

What I found was fairly interesting.

The Data

The average experience score for a presidential candidate: 16.8.
The average experience score for a VP candidate: 12.9.

Highest score for a presidential candidate: 28.75, shared by Bob Dole in 1996 and Gerald Ford in 1976.
Highest score for a VP candidate: also 28.75, Joe Biden this year.

Lowest score for a presidential candidate: 5.25, Barack Obama, this year. (second lowest: George W. Bush’s 7.50 in 2000.)
Lowest score for a VP candidate: 3.00, Sarah Palin, this year. (second lowest: Spiro Agnew’s 3.75 in 1968.)

Highest POTUS/VP combined score: Dole/Kemp in 1996 (45.75)
Lowest POTUS/VP combined score: Reagan/Bush in 1980 (17.25)

So that’s a lot of data, how about some analysis?

Analysis

I did a plot of the experience ratings against some presidential performance ratings (as found here, which claim to be amalgamated from several different ratings on Wikipedia), but found that to be a mixed bag. There were experienced presidents who ranked poorly (Nixon) and well (LBJ) and inexperienced presidents similarly (Reagan ranked high, Jimmy Carter much lower). Result: Inconclusive.

Next, I noticed an interesting trend. If you throw out the few elections where strong incumbents were running for second terms (LBJ in 1964 after finishing JFK’s term, Nixon in 1972, Reagan in 1984), in each of the other cases, the POTUS/VP pair with the lower experience score won the election. Result: If that trend holds through this election, McCain/Palin will win.

If you want to do a little more hardcore statistical analysis,

POTUS Standard Deviation: 6.59
VP Standard Deviation: 5.82

Just for sake of argument, this means that Obama’s POTUS score (5.25) is 1.75 standard deviations below the mean, and that Palin’s VP score (3.00) is 1.70 standard deviations below the mean… which means that, per these ratings, Obama is slightly more relatively inexperienced as a presidential candidate than Palin is as a VP candidate. (Only slightly, though.)

Conclusions

Well, this is great data for us dataheads who like to ponder such things. What it really shows, I think, is that there are far more factors that play into the election (and the subsequent job performance) than just experience.

I’ll also conclude that I still haven’t answered the question regarding “how much experience is enough?”. Yes, Palin is the least-experienced VP candidate in the past 50 years. But Obama is also the least-experienced POTUS candidate. Hey, the nature of number is that somebody will have to be least-experienced. So until somebody can give me some quantifiable other measures, I think it’s still gonna come down to gut feel and politics… like usual.

I tried Opera for a day

Posted by Chris – June 18, 2008

No, Dad, regardless of the title, I’m not talking about Wagner or Puccini or that kind of opera… sorry. But with Firefox 3 coming out yesterday, I figured I’d be the contrarian and give that other browser a try; Opera was promising more features with version 9.5, and I hadn’t played with Opera in quite a while. So yesterday was Opera trial day. Mind you, I’m a quite-happy Firefox user, but I figured I should give it a try.

My first impression when starting Opera: It’s pretty. I like the UI, though admittedly I’m a sucker for new, shiny toys. But it looks good. And the rendering looks good, and it seems fast. So far, so good. Sadly, on my list of comments/thoughts about Opera, that’s pretty much the end of the good things.

Then there’s my list of annoyances. First stop: Gmail. I keep Gmail open all the time, and use the Google Talk function embedded in Gmail as my primary chat engine. It seems to be the only thing that’ll function here at work. Well, the GTalk panel doesn’t even load in Gmail. Quick Google search, and ah, I can use the &nobrowsercheck option in the URL. Then it shows up. Cool!

But it ends up there’s a reason Gmail doesn’t load chat in Opera; it doesn’t work. You can’t initiate a chat with anybody from the chat panel, it won’t pop up the little window. If someone else starts the chat, then you can pop it up, but you can’t pop it out; it’s stuck within the main Opera window. No good to me.

Another Google search provides my next try for GTalk: load it up in the “Panel” aka sidebar. It loads up better there, but again you can’t pop out chat sessions; they’re all stuck within the panel. Given that I like to have more than one session going at once at times, this just won’t work for me. Bummer.

Oh, and as long as I’m talking about searches – one weird thing: the hotkey to get up to the search box is different between Opera and Firefox/IE. FF/IE both use CTRL-K to put your cursor in the search box. Opera uses CRTL-E. Would it have been that hard to stay consistent?

Firefox users who check out Opera quickly notice that there are no extensions for Opera like there are for Firefox. Opera proponents quickly point out that some of the most popular “extended” functionality in Firefox is built-in to Opera natively; they cite Mouse Gestures and Content Blocking as examples. Now, Mouse Gestures I have to give them. I love using Mouse Gestures and they work well in Opera. Content Blocking… not so much.

I’m hooked on Adblock for Firefox. It just works. The net it casts for ads catches most all the ads without filtering out the pictures I want to see. Opera has a built-in “content blocker”, but it’s not very user-friendly. Right-click on a blank area of the screen, and choose Block Content. Then it highlights all the blockable items on the screen. Then you have to click on the ones you want to block. By default, it blocks everything from a pretty high level in the domain the ad is hosted. This is fine if the ad you’re blocking is from an adserver, but for some of the sites I visit, the ads are hosted right on the domain… which means Opera ends up blocking ALL the images from that domain, including the ones I want. Yes, you can fine-tune it, but it requires opening up another dialog, and it’s a pain. I’ll take the Adblock extension for Firefox any day.

Other little annoyances: I’ve grown to love the Remember The Milk extension for Firefox that embeds my to-do list into my Gmail screen. Not available in Opera. The drag-and-drop arrangement for my fantasy baseball team in Yahoo Fantasy Sports? Not available in Opera. It’s little things like that here and there that make my choice easy.

This morning with some relief I clicked on my Firefox shortcut and was happy to see FF version 3 loading up. This is a browser worth keeping.

Shared Posts on the Sidebar

Posted by Chris – June 5, 2008

Some of my regular readers will remember that from time to time I’ll have link posts that will show up here; interesting things I’ve noted on the web and wanted to share. I’ve been notably inconsistent with that type of post, but still link some stuff from time to time. I was surprised, then, when after posting a couple of links yesterday to my del.icio.us account, they didn’t show up here overnight. Come to find out that the del.icio.us service that cross-posts apparently hasn’t run since March sometime. Phooey.

So I’ve been using Google Reader as my usual feed reader and it has a nifty little interface to share items which will then show up for any other Google Reader user who’s one of my contacts, or anybody who wants to subscribe to the shared items feed. What GR doesn’t provide is a similar sort of remote-posting functionality. What GR does provide is a little bit of javascript that will pull in the most recent shared items and list them. So, for the moment I’ve put that on my sidebar. The obvious downside is that anyone who just reads my items from a feed reader won’t be able to see them. (On the other hand, those folks could easily enough subscribe to my Google Reader Shared Items feed.)

If and when I find a better way to do this link sharing, I’ll do so. For now, hey, I suppose anything is better than nothing.