SimianLogic

I went to the Yahoo! SearchMonkey (one word apparently) launch party/developer presentation thing tonight (a friend of mine works there and told me that there’d be free t-shirts, food, and beer involved… SOLD!). After I got back, I whipped up the little example above just to test the system out. All it does is scrape the Lottery Button, figure out how many tickets have been issued today, and supplement the search results with that data. Other than the fact that no one actually searches for it and that no one claims any tickets, the tech works pretty well… for me.

The biggest problem I have with the current SearchMonkey implementation is that it seems to be awesome for large, well-known publishers and utterly useless for small websites. Each SearchMonkey application has to be added manually by the end-user, which means that unless you search across a single website’s pages many many times (and see the “enhanced search results button”), you’re likely never going to feel the need to add that application. Worse, this will actually drive business away from the little guys in favor of the big guys.

Imagine Bob, who sells widgets. Bob was one of the first people to sell widgets, so he comes up first in the search results. A month or two after Bob’s shop started selling these widgets, Amazon also started to sell them. Bob’s page still comes up first in the Yahoo! search results, but now Amazon is second. Bob has almost no traffic (compared to Amazon, anyway), so no one ever bothered to add his SearchMonkey application (assuming the struggling small business Bob operates is even aware that it exists, and that he has enough time to build an application). Amazon, on the other hand, is an early adopter. Their search result, though second in the listings, shows a photo of the widget, used and new prices, a 4-star rating, and a user review–along with links to similar products. Which links is the average consumer going to click on?

Until the distribution model for SearchMonkey applications goes automatic (meaning site owners can verify that they do in fact own the site and automagically make people’s search results add their applications), I’m afraid it’s going to be bad news for the little guys.

I was poking around with Google’s webmaster toolkit today, and I came to the somewhat shocking realization that not a single one of my blog posts is in the Google index.  Whaaaaat?  I’d assumed that WordPress in general would be fairly SEO friendly, but such is not the case.  I’ve done robots.txt files and sitemaps for other little side projects in the last year or so, but this site has been around so long that it never even crossed my mind to get on the search engine bandwagon.  After digging around for approximately half a second, I “found” a pretty sweet plugin to auto-generate a sitemap.  I use Yahoo!’s one-click install of WP (still rocking version 2.0.2), so I had to dig around a little for a legacy version of the plugin.  While I’m a huge fan of the all-online interface for web-hosting (using Y! for 7 or 8-odd years now is one of the things that makes Heroku so appealing to me), but one thing it doesn’t allow you to do is fun stuff like CHMOD (the sitemap generator needs the sitemap.xml file to be at 777).  After looking around a bit further, I found Cyberduck… which also fairly rocks–and made doing the quick CHMOD a cinch.

I’d be a little more excited about my “discoveries” if I wasn’t fairly sure that the rest of the world has known about them for years.  Such is life–but hopefully I should start to see a little more Google traffic (already ~50% of my traffic) to pages other than the blog’s home page.  Next up on the list–create an actual home page.

I love how Flex’s (talking Flex 2 here, we haven’t jumped to Flex 3 yet at the day-job) LinkBar looks, but I’m not a big fan of view stacks. I wanted to use one just as you would normally use a ToggleButtonBar, but by default the LinkBar only grays out the “selected” item if its dataProvider is actually a ViewStack. Solution: subclass it and toss in a little hack that gets the results we want. Without further adieu, here’s the code to turn a link bar into a toggle bar:

package {

import mx.controls.*;
import mx.events.*;

public class ToggleLinkBar extends LinkBar {

public function ToggleLinkBar() {
super();
addEventListener(ItemClickEvent.ITEM_CLICK,changeToggle);
}

private function changeToggle(e:ItemClickEvent):void {
for(var i:int = 0; i < numChildren; i++) {
Button(getChildAt(i)).enabled = (selectedIndex != i);
}
}
}
}

Works like a charm!

Another day, another kooky web idea. This time, it’s the Stock Moose. We’ve had a lot of debate at work on how to gather data, how to present that data, and how to make that collection/presentation process engaging enough that someone might actually enjoy doing it just for the sake of doing it (rather than tying it to some future promise of “Oh, we’ll give you an edge on the trading room floor”). Back when the college football season was in full swing, Yahoo! introduced what they called the Team Ranker. The concept is incredibly simple: pick two teams out of a hat and display them both (with perhaps a few bits of useful info such as a win-loss record or… a stock chart). The user simply has to click on the one they think is better. Period.

Whichever team (or in this case, stock) has the best win percent is rated as #1, and the rest are sorted accordingly. The system was far too simple to game, at least for football. What this usually meant is that earlier in the day (when the East Coast is awake and voting) highly ranked teams in the SEC and other eastern conferences dominated the rankings. When it got later in the afternoon, teams with East Coast fan bases slipped in the rankings while PAC-10 teams rose into the top spots. This is unavoidable for something like football, where fans are fiercely loyal to their own teams over all others–but is the same true for stocks?

Would users on the East coast sway the list towards East-coast stalwarts like Coke and Home Depot while the West coast might favor silicon valley darlings over all others? It’s hard to say–especially considering that I limited the field to the Nasdaq 100, which is primarily dominated by tech stocks. Read the rest of this entry »

When I read about insoshi on Mashable and TechCrunch this morning, it got my mind buzzing… and immediately my thoughts turned to another Y Combinator startup–Heroku. I’ve been using Heroku for quite awhile now, and both my fondness for Ruby on Rails and my disdain (so far) for Google’s Big Table make it my prototyping engine of choice for the time being. The integration is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but here’s a quick and dirty way to get an insoshi install running on Heroku (assuming you have an acccount):

First Steps

1. Download the insoshi tarball
2. Create a new heroku app
3. Import the insoshi tarball (how convenient is it that the heroku app importer wants a tarball!)
4. Run rake db:migrate (this will run a ton of migrations… once complete you can press escape to close the little popup)
5. Run rake install (this will create the default preferences file and the default forum.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve had a Google App Engine account for around a week or so now, but my biggest problem with it is that I don’t have any time to spend developing an app for it. I’ve got plenty of website ideas kicking around in my head (some that’ve been kicking around entirely too long), but not a whole lot of time to spend developing them (between working at a startup, working on a contract game, and preparing to move into a new house). Finally, I decided to just do something dirt simple. Dirt. Simple.

Introducing www.lotterybutton.com.

Rather than spend any money on advertising, I’m going to spend $100 and see where it gets me (well, $20 on registering two domains and $80 on giveaways).  The idea is so ludicrously simple that I’m sure it’s been done before. People come to the site, then press a button to claim a ticket. Advertisers pay me money to show them ads. I take half and raffle off the rest. I would never even bother trying something like this on my own, as doing a secure user registration system alone would be more of a pain than it’s worth (whereas Google is already doing it for me).

Read the rest of this entry »

After scrimping a bit for the last month or so (and getting a nice fat refund check from Uncle Sam via direct deposit), I sent off $4000 to my Roth IRA as my 2007 contribution this morning. As far as I can tell, I’m completely done with my 2007 taxes now. Besides having income in both Georgia (while in grad school) and California, I can pretty much say that will be my last “tame” tax year. Income from Filler didn’t start rolling in until January of this year, but things should be pretty interesting this time next year. The IRS wants receipts for everything, but I’m wondering just how much they’ve done to catch up to the digital age. I can certainly prove exactly how much has come in via bank statements and PayPal transfer logs, but tracking digital expenses (for various hosting services, sound effects, etc…) might prove to be another animal altogether. Read the rest of this entry »

Interesting news tonight: it seems as though Google is opening up their massive resource pool to the public at large (well, at least 10,000 of them). I signed up for it and got my invite an hour or so later, and I have to say it looks pretty promising. I’ve been tinkering with Heroku for a month or so now, and that also got me pretty excited. The thing about Heroku, though, is that my application sort of exists only in the cloud. They have access APIs for replicating their specific rails environment in a local setup, but the hassle of setting up that environment is frankly just not worth it. I’ve already got mySQL installed, so installing postgreSQL just for running my Heroku app locally seems a bit excessive. Both products are in beta, but there are a couple of things about Heroku that sort of bug me–namely, there’s currently no way to write your own robots.txt file, which means its practically impossible to “release” an application. If it doesn’t exist in Google’s eyes, it might as well not exist.

Though I’ve only just learned about this new Google Apps Engine, I’m going to assume it won’t have that problem. And if it scales as easily as they’re claiming it will… well I might just have to learn Python. I poked around at Django’s documenation a little bit, and it doesn’t seem so different from Rails. There are a couple of drawbacks, of course–a 500 megabyte storage limit and a one megabyte single-file limit. Sockets are also prohibited, which isn’t all that surprising (though it would be nice of Google to offer something which could be used as a multiplayer game server…).

It’ll be interesting to follow what comes out of it.

After getting a friend request from a complete stranger (MySpace style), I logged into Whirled last night–only to find out that it’s no longer in super-top-secret alpha any more (confirmed at Daniel James’ blog). I have pretty favorable feelings towards Three Rings in general. I love Puzzle Pirates, and I love the idea of Bang! Howdy–that’s exactly the sort of game I used to play when I had endless free time.

There’s also Game Gardens. A year or so after I got to Georgia Tech’s program, I’d run across GG while looking for ways to do multiplayer java games (I was using Processing at the time for most of my stuff). I jumped on board, made a couple of experiments, and won 4th place in the contest they were running in the fall of 2006. I guess due to the fact that I was active on GG, I got one of the earliest invites. The fact that the thing ran in Flash was the only thing that got me to give the Flex SDK a shot, so in some ways I wouldn’t even be doing what I’m doing now if not for OOO. I was immediately in love with the idea–”a way to make money off of games? and do multiplayer? sweeeet!” (ahh, naiveté). Read the rest of this entry »

I have pretty strange dreams.  Some people attribute to eating right before bed, but I’d say it’s more likely an overactive imagination.  Last night I dreamed in polygons.  Sort of.  I essentially dreamed up a new idea for a game.  Rather than playing the game in the dream, though, I was actually in the game–a sort of bizarre abstract rail shooter/space invaders hybrid with square enemies bouncing around the screen.  I don’t know if it would actually be fun or not to play, but it sure was pretty to look at (maybe I’ve been playing too much Rez).  I spent a little time this morning brainstorming how I would actually take a surreal dream-game and turn it into something, but I think the scope of the project (maybe XNA?) would be just a little too much for my schedule right now.  I’ll have to do a few sketches and take some careful notes so that I can add it to my list of games I’ll make when I have a little more free time.