Category: Posts

If the future of social bookmarking and Internet news is indeed Digg, then there is something seriously wrong with the collective attention span of the public. I’ve spent probably an hour in total tweaking my Yahoo Pipes “Digg Stupidity Filter” RSS feed, which performs the following functions:

Removes idiotic stories from the general Digg feed: any meta-stories about Digg itself, pictures, Ron Paul, Huckabee, impeachment, or stories with two or more selected punctuation marks in the title. Removes any story without a lowercase letter. You’d be surprised how much more readable the site is. Takes some cues from the Digg Asinity Filter and removes some ridiculously biased “blogs”. Updated 2008-03-11 to remove Top X lists.

All in all, my biggest problem with Digg these days is the creatively-named lists of content. Because most people trying to make a quick buck off Google AdSense are lazy, and their readers suffer even more from the Deadly Sin of sloth, an article that’s guaranteed to attract views generally involves

1. WordPress, Ubuntu, or Google
2. A craftily-named topic guaranteed to draw these fanboys with a unique number

This is what reading Digg lists makes me feel like.

So an article liberally sprinked with ads, offering “17+ Ways Ubuntu Users can Improve Google PageRank with WordPress,” is the standard fare on Digg these days. The problem is that these lists only contain minor commentary and find creative ways of stretching the definition of their number.

Possibly the worst offender in this category is Mashable. It’s a social networking blog, and doesn’t necessarily appear on Digg on a regular basis. Yet still, Pete Cashmore’s authors can’t go two pages of content without posting “9 Great Games For The iPhone” or similar low-content lists.

Anyone who’s seen Idiocracy can tell what these lists essentially entail: dumbed down news for the proles.

To illustrate the scope of the problem from a technical perspective, here’s the main regular expressions that I use to filter some of these items. (Case insensitivity is not possible on Yahoo Pipes, or at least hasn’t functioned correctly when I’ve tried it.)

(The)?([0-9]*|One|T(wo|hree|en)|F(our|ive)|S(ix|even)|Eight|Nine)? \+?((b|B)iggest|(c|C)oolest|(m|M)ost|(p|P)eople|(g|G)(uy|reat(est)?)| (t|T)hings|(w|W)(ays|eird)|(r|R)ules|(k|K)iller|(e|E)ssential| (u|U)seful|(l|L)e(ast|gal)|(f|F)avo(u)?rite|(s|S)igns)

So, will people stop this nonsense? On my next post: The Top 4 (And More!) Reasons Why They Won’t. kthxbye.

Lets face it. Nobody likes that guy [or girl] – the one who always pipes up and corrects the teacher. Its annoying, and usually he disturbs class just to make himself look smart.

The unfortunate fact is that we should all be that guy. I realized this today as I was sitting in Math class when my teacher asked a question. I replied with what I thought was a fairly obvious and logical answer – but my teacher disagreed with me. She then went on to explain to the class the correct answer – which was the exact same method I had suggested moments before, but using confusing terminology.

After she had finished this topic, she then went on to explain about arc-overlap graphs. While constructing an example, she made a mistake. Now, I will admit that I corrected this mistake out of vindication – but to my surprise she was quite happy that I corrected her – and she began to praise me for my “sharp eye”.

It was at this point I remembered; at the beginning of the term, she openly called for students to correct mistakes like this. The reason being, that if the mistake was not caught students who were taking notes would write down an improper example.

Come study time:

• the students might be confused as to why their example didn’t work
• the students might learn the material incorrectly – assuming that the example was correct

This started me thinking; why is it that it’s so hard to be the person that corrects the teacher – especially when it’s a fairly critical function for effective learning? As much as I really dislike my math teacher’s style of teaching, in acknowledging the fact that she makes mistakes, she really enhanced the classroom experience.

In my own experience, I find that once I learn a concept I eventually discard the details and retain a general idea of how the concept works. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been doing an assignment or homework, complaining that “Being able to produce specific answers isn’t a good test of my knowledge”. It is painfully true – spitting out answers is not an accurate test of knowledge – but it is a very good way to learn the concepts.

A few of my professors admit to being awful at basic concepts of math such as addition or multiplication – but they understand the high level concepts that rely on these basics. Logically speaking, the only way they learned these high level concepts was by practicing them through homework and assignments just like us, churning through the gruntwork to get the results.

That said, it’s entirely likely that our teachers may have become foggy on the details. As people who know these high level concepts, teachers aim to pass on their knowledge by making us learn the details – even though their examples using the details are prone to having mistakes. As students who are paying to learn these concepts – it should be us that prompts the teacher to correct their mistakes and thereby further the learning environment. In time, when we have a good understanding of the ideas, we can forget the concepts but retain the ideas.

By being quiet and scribbling down everything the teacher says, we don’t really commit ourselves to learning. We’re just memorizing information, and that is not the same as learning it. My point is, the classroom should really be a learning environment – and sitting quietly in your chair writing down what the teacher says verbatim does not take advantage of the possibilities presented in a classroom.

[Update] Fixed some typos – thanks Laura.

Part of a comment I posted at BlackBerry Cool, which is complete speculation and relies on general industry-wide knowledge:

With respect to WiFi, RIM’s strategy seems to be that they offer it to carriers committed to UMA. This is likely because carriers still derive revenue from UMA clients, which makes up for the offset data costs over WiFi. At present I can’t think of a CDMA carrier with UMA planned – Sprint seems to be intent on selling base stations with native 800/1900 coverage – so I wouldn’t expect to see a WiFi device on a CDMA network any time this year.

January 16/09: This post has been modified to avoid giving the impression that I speak in any official capacity. I’m merely a mobile phone enthusiast and these are my personal observations about the wireless industry.

Normally I’m not into YouTube video whoring, but the United States of Pop video (which remixes the Billboard top hits of 2007) is alternately impressive, but really demonstrates that all the top songs of 2007 sounded the same, and that “Umbrella” is a track that can accompany any lyrics.

So allegedly Jake is foolish enough to have given me an “Editor” account on here – which not only lets me post stuff – but also lets me edit his posts. Now I’m a generally responsible person, but seriously – I made the Martina-Shot, okay?

Also, the new WordPress admin panel is much nicer than it use to be, and comes with a nice Web 2.0 colour scheme; mixing pale and vibrant blues with a sandy yellow, as well as a blue tinged black that would look much better were it brown.

This is not the right kind of partition!

However I digress, I have something more important to say than the obligatory “first post“. This, my captive audience, is a story of extended partitions.

A while back I decided that I wanted to give Vista a try, and the only machine I had that was capable of running all the whorish features I wanted to try was my laptop – and there was no way at that time I was making my laptop’s primary OS Vista. So my friend Murdoch who runs Linux suggested I download partition magic and make a partition to install Vista to. This sounded like a great idea, so I tried it, it worked – and for a while I was happy with my dual boot.

That is until I realized I wasn’t using Vista that often, and my hard drive size was becoming increasingly small. So I decided to embark on the quest of removing this extended partition.

Allegedly this is not something easily done. Partition magic failed at it, which didn’t really make me all that happy – and after some quick google searches and conferencing with Jake I came to the conclusion that the only way to do it was to wipe my entire disk and reinstall an OS.

Three months later [read: last night], I was finally ready to do a reformat. In went the Vista disk [which I’ve adopted on the laptop now], and up came the “Install Vista where?” screen. I saw my quarry – sitting proudly ontop of my 15 gigs of space that I’d like back – but it had outsmarted me because the Vista install disk had no idea what the fuck and could not delete, reformat, or do anything to the partition.

Great. So I installed Vista overtop of the old XP install and decided to try the Vista Disk Management tool that a few of my friends have been talking about. The extended partition showed up as “Free Space” which unfortunately is neither “Unallocated Space” or an “Extended Partition”. After a few attempts at deleting the partition – each time met with the oddly inapplicable error message: “There is not enough space available on the disk(s) to complete this action”.

After some posts on the good old interweb, I’ve been suggested a few apps to try and help recover my 15 gigs. I’ll post back if I end up reclaiming them.

The moral of the story though? Don’t use extended partitions unless you never want the space back!

For Business 121, one of the major projects for the term is to develop a marketing strategy for a company offering a new product or service. Our group developed a concept for an offshoot of Curves, which offers fitness facilities and quick workouts for females.

“The Man’s Gym” is a male-oriented gym that avoids the traditional approaches of isocentrism and healthy lifestyle maintenance. Rather than focusing on pumping iron and bodybuilding, or cardiovascular training, The Man’s Gym employs unique activities such as:

The presentation is intended to be tongue-in-cheek: we rotated pie charts to display statistics with more favourable outcomes and slides are (generally) only on screen for about five seconds each. I tried for a Steve Jobs keynote feel with this design, and it seemed to work out pretty well.

Download “The Man’s Gym” presentation

Hit the picture below to grab a PDF copy of the slide deck. While the accompanying business plan document is significantly more dry (and thus not worth publishing), the presentation was worth a 96% and that’s really what counted in this effort.

The accompanying audio ad for the “Radio Ad Sample” slide that I whipped up in five minutes with GarageBand can also be acquired here, and should be playable in iTunes or any other utility that plays AAC audio files.

It’s notable how the tone of this site has changed recently. Most of my posts lately are about the wireless industry in Canada, or other hot button topics that I can rant about without giving a personal view of the situation – apart from being a CS student with clearly too many cell phones, today’s posts aren’t all about me.

Offtopic: Perhaps this is a good thing: I was accosted several weeks ago by someone I attended high school with and told “I shouldn’t write about people that I don’t know anything about.” The world does not work this way, and “know[ing] anything” was misused in place of “don’t say anything if you don’t have anything nice to say tell me what I want to hear.” Likewise, hilarity would not ensue if I were prevented from writing about Soulja Boy.

(I did indeed attend a semester of classes with this individual, which is a decent basis for knowing at least SOMETHING about someone. For what it’s worth, I don’t even remember the post, and a quick perusal of my former site didn’t turn up the allegedly inflammatory remarks.)

Apart from this, though, I’m almost done my first semester back at UW out of two. Of my courses, CS246 has been the most interesting and informative; I’d say my command line C++ skills are now significantly improved.

The big news, though, is that on May 1st I’ll be moving out from home again. I’ll still be in Waterloo, but living with some friends for a year. It’s something I’ve really been looking forward to; there might even be a good business idea when we’re all in reasonably close proximity. Significant downsizing of personal effects will be necessary, and all I’ve essentially done is trade a basement room 20 minutes away from school for a basement room 5 minutes away.

Still, exciting news and interesting times ahead.

Rogers users last week were delivered letters indicating the provider’s intent to start implementing usage caps of 60GB and 95GB for the two standard tiers, Express and Extreme. Their misinformation site contains some interesting usage calculations, but essentially muddies the waters by describing activities in an “or” context: for example, you could download 24 high-definition videos (at about 4GB each) OR download 24,300 songs.

I’m admittedly surprised at their references to BitTorrent and high-definition movie downloads, but frankly that’s what their target audience is with this particular site: heavy users that they hope to coerce into keeping under a specific 95GB point.

The problem for consumers with this approach is that it’s no longer just the top 10% of users being targetted – a 95GB cap means that the top 10% of users will be using close to that amount, and it would be trivial for the ISP to reduce the figure in the future, even as more bandwidth intensive applications emerge.

Good news, though: extra bandwidth usage charges top out at $25 extra per month, which is a fee I’ll likely be paying part of every month upon my next move. (I also have full intent to purchase a TekSavvy unlimited account as well.)

From a network management perspective, I understand the need to keep subscribers and abusers of the service under control. There have always been provisions in every Internet contract for disconnecting people based on overuse, even back when dialup connections were standard. I’m irked that something previously touted as “unlimited” has gotten to the point where a hard cap and extra charges are necessary. Having heavy users on your network comes with the territory of having users like Granny checking her email once a week.

Rogers injects a usage frame into a webpage.

Admittedly, my Internet usage patterns tend to encompass newsgroup downloading and hefty SCP/SFTP transfers – on a regular basis working for IBM, I’d have to prop the latest Eclipse builds from Ottawa down the home line. Combined with the rest of the mandatory software suite, the nightly package could be 5GB.

One thing that will be interesting to see is Rogers’ deep packet inspection and rewriting – the usage message that caused issue back in December. They have an example image shown on one of their magazine property websites.

As soon as they start to insert HTML arbitrarily into webpages, that’s where they’ve crossed the line.

Are you going to change your internet usage patterns as a result of these developments? How much bandwidth are you using on a monthly basis?

Facebook’s finally heard the hue and cry from all of those kids whose parents insist on “friending” them. You’re now able to restrict access to profile features and content based on specific users and groups of people, which I’ve promptly employed to sequester elementary and high school acquaintances away from viewing specific adventures.

I’d suggest you go ahead and update your settings, mostly because I could swear mine were more restrictive before the update was pushed.

As the two most commented posts on my site show, people are really interested in getting their high-definition MKV files to play on the Xbox 360. Unfortunately, the existing GOTsent utility isn’t working out as a complete solution, and complicates the situation by trying to cater to PlayStation 3 users. 😉

I’ve developed a tool in VB2005 that automates the conversion process. It doesn’t transcode the video – just the audio so that the file will properly play. While the tool isn’t complete at present, and probably won’t work for files above 4GB, it’s served my immediate needs. I’d encourage anyone interested to check out the XenonMKV site and download a copy if interested. There’s also a support forum for people that run into issues with files.