Social Networking (2) - Replacing the Social Graph with Social Gravity

So, after we looked at how {moscontentlink:my primer|I saw Social Networking (SNW) develop}, here is my look at how I see things develop. As I mentioned in the article above, working for Bluepulse made me think about SNW a lot, and I decided the starting point for any conversation on the future of SNW had to be the current standpoint of Facebook. Now, you see, Mark Zuckerberg has been talking a lot about the social graph. Continue reading

Social Networking (1) - my primer

You know, having worked for a social networking startup (Bluepulse) made me spend a ton of time thinking about the purpose of social networking (SNW) itself. I had spent a lot of time on a bunch of different SNW sites, pretty much enjoying just the fun of looking at them, at how they tried to solve a problem, trying to get to the bigger picture. Of course, it all started with Friendster, the grandmother of SNW. Continue reading

com_sync - Starting the project

Like all good open source projects, this one was born out of a frustration. I wanted to be able to write entries for my personal site when off-line, but the only good software I could find to do so, Blogg-X, refused to work for me. The installer for the latest version wouldn’t run on Linux, and the previous version failed to login to a current Joomla site. What to do? Of course, write your own. Continue reading

Microsoft bids $44M for Yahoo!

Ok, the market and I saw this coming: Microsoft just announced last night they were going to start an unsolicited bid for Yahoo! at a share price of $31. There had been rumors (confirmed with the bid) that Microsoft and Yahoo! were talking about a merger, but (as Microsoft confirmed) they went nowhere fast. As an ex-Yahoo!, and one that cares about the company a lot, I am sad to see one of the flagships of the Internet (potentially) disappear, but it was a catastrophe long in the making. Continue reading

Intrade trading (2) - what are the risks?

Now that we have a perfect way to make money, let’s look at the risks associated with it. Here is a list of risks, and we’ll discuss how they affect the trading below: There is no change in behavior: the undersold contract stays undersold, and the oversold contract stays oversold until it matures Of the two components of the multiplied expected value we picked the wrong one Intrade finds out about this method Method trading becomes a large part of overall trading, skewing the values Intrade runs out of business There is no change in behavior: the undersold contract stays undersold, and the oversold contract stays oversold until it matures Continue reading

Intrade trading (1) - is there a system to be gamed?

Well, those of you who know me well have already heard my humble endorsement for this year’s race: I am all for Hillary, despite not being allowed to vote as a non-citizen-permanent-resident. Despite the fact I can’t vote, I still think I am entitled to an opinion; after all, I pay plenty taxes and the President of the United States of America is the Prime Mover of all tax expenses. Continue reading

Plan of Attack (B. Woodward)

It’s been a while that I wanted to read the Bush trilogy that Bob Woodward put together. In three volumes, the celebrated co-reporter of the Watergate affair describes the inner workings of the Bush administration with the kind of depth that only a journalist with access to the original sources can have. It sounds like President Bush was eager to have this reporting going on. Maybe he was trying to ensure that there was a full account of what had been going on, so that history could judge on its own with full disclosure, instead of relying on opinions of the uninformed. Continue reading

Updated com_weight

I just tried out my old component (written some time in 2005, amazingly): com_weight. It’s a weight table written as a component for Joomla, as the PHP version of my programming test in different languages. It all started with me trying to lose weight in preparation of going to the military, where I knew I was going to be subjected to a strict regime of workout. So I wrote something that kept track of how I was doing, since I really don’t care about my weight otherwise. Continue reading

Perfect Day

It’s Saturday evening, and the party people in the house are not budging. There are lots of places to go, lots of booze to drink, and yet nothing moves. Why is that? Well, tomorrow is a powder day! We decide to leave early in the morning. Whistler has this wonderful program called Fresh Tracks that gets you up the mountain at 7:30a (one hour before the general population is allowed to join). Continue reading

How do I get my gravatar.com URL

This is a really easy one, but since I had to crawl across the gravatar site to find out how to do it, here is a quick introduction to get the URL for your gravatar. No thrills and frills, but it does what most of us will need. First, you need to create a gravatar account, if you don’t already have one. Gravatar is a site that aggregates avatar images for the different social networking sites (like Facebook, MySpace, etc. Continue reading