November 2010

Reddit’s new comment sorting system (charmingly explained by Randall Munroe) uses what’s called a Wilson score confidence interval. I’ll wait here while you read those articles. If you ever want to implement user-ratings, you need to read them. The summary is: don’t use average rating. Use something else, which in this case, is the Wilson score, which says that if you got 3 negative ratings and no positive ratings, your average rating shouldn’t be zero. Rather, you can be 95% sure that it’ll end up at 0.47 or above, given a chance, so rate it as 0.47. ...

Yahoo Clues is like Google Insights for Search. It has one interesting thing that the latter doesn’t though: search flows. It doesn’t have an official API, so I thought I’d document the unofficial one. The API endpoint is http://clues.yahoo.com/clue The query parameters are: q1 – the first query string q2 – the second query string ts – the time span. 0 = today, 1 = past 7 days, 2 = past 30 days tz – time zone? Not sure how it works. It’s just set to “0” for me s – the format? No value other than “j” seems to work So a search for “gmat” for the last 30 days looks like this: ...

There are some standard enhancements that I apply to my photos consistently: auto-levels, increase saturation, increase sharpness, etc. I’d also read that Flickr sharpens uploads (at least, the resized ones) so that they look better. So last week, I took 100 of my photos and created 4 versions of each image: The base image itself (example) A sharpened version (example). I used a sharpening factor of 200% A saturated version (example). I used a saturation factor of 125% An auto-levelled version (example) I created a test asking people to compare these. The differences between these are not always noticeable when placed side-by-side, so the test flashed two images at the same place. ...

As promised, here are some tips from the trenches on surviving in prison. (For those who don’t follow my blog, prison is where your Internet access is restricted.) There are two things you need to know better: software and people. I’ll try and cover the software in this post, and the more important topic in the next. Portable apps You’re often not in control of your laptops / PCs. You don’t have administrator access. You can’t install software. The solution is to install Portable Apps. Most popular applications have been converted into Portable Apps that you can install on to a USB stick. Just plug them into any machine and use them. I use Firefox and Skype quite extensively this way, but increasingly, I have a preference for Portable Apps for just about everything. It makes my bloated Start Menu a lot more manageable. Some of the other portable apps I have are: Audacity, Camstudio, GIMP, Inkscape and Notepad++. ...

When writing Mixamail, I wanted tweets automatically shortened to 140 characters – but in the most readable manner. Some steps are obvious. Removing redundant spaces, for example. And URL shortening. I use bit.ly because it has an API. I’ll switch to Goo.gl, once theirs is out. I tried a few more strategies: Replace words with short forms. “u” for “you”, “&” for and, etc. Remove articles – a, an, the Remove optional punctuation – comma, semicolon, colon and quotes, in particular Replace “one” with “1”, “to” or “too” with 2, etc. “Before” becomes “Be4”, for example Remove spaces after punctuations. So “a, b” becomes “a,b” – the space after the comma is removed Remove vowels in the middle. nglsh s lgbl wtht vwls. How did they pan out? I tested out these on the English sentences on the Tanaka Corpus, which has about 150,000 sentences. (No, they’re not typical tweets, but hey…). By just doing these, independently, here is the percentage reduction in the size of text: ...

HTML5: Up and Running is the book version of Mark Pilgrim’s comprehensive introduction to HTML5 at DiveIntoHTML5.org. Whether you buy the book or read it online, it’s the best introduction to the topic you’ll find. Mark begins with the history of HTML5 (using email archaeology, as he calls it). You’d never guess that many of the problems we have with XHTML, MIME types, etc. have roots in discussions over 20 years ago. From then on, he moves into feature detection (which uses the Modernizr library), new tags, canvas, video, geo-location, storage, offline web apps, new form features and microdata. Each chapter can be read independently – so if you’re planning to use this as a reference, you may be better of reading the links kept up-to-date at DiveIntoHTML5.org. If you’re interesting in learning about the features, it’s a very readable book, terse, simple, and above all, delightfully intelligent. ...