Brian Zhang Larsen’s Blog

Due to online buying frenzies, I now have too much reading material queued up every month. Besides my “planning to read” queue, I now have 5 magazine subscriptions each month. Well one of those (the acm crossroads) is an extra magazine they throw in for free while subscribing to the CACM as a student (it is cheaper, ok). I like to read offline materials, while it is less selective, and it thereby strengthens the ability to be a specialized generalist. This reason is just a minor addition to the fact that reading paper based material, while lying on the couch sipping coffee just is damn relaxing.

I more or less just finished my first facebook app. It is an electronic version of Chinese flashcards, with some testing and scoring functionality. It started as a mix of my interest in learning the Chinese characters, and trying out the facebook developer framework.

As a facebook developer, you have the choice of writing your application as a canvas page which is embedded parsed html, returned from your script, or as an iframe. Though you have more freedom on the iframe page, you can’t really make use of the specific functions provided by the facebook framework, so the right choice would be to use the canvas page. The framework is pretty well thought of, even though it has its shortcomings. For security reasons and to generally prevent mess-ups, facebook provides their own version of javascript, called FBJS. Even though it is a serious pruned down version of JS, it does the trick.

I used the CEDICT database, for the Chinese words, and sorted them into difficulty categories according to their natural frequency. This does not necessarily reflect the number of strokes, which also can be a sign of difficulty. While not everybody has the Chinese language pack installed, I had to generate images of all the characters, and their pinyin representatives. I haven’t yet found the optimal font for generating pinyin images, so some of the representations can look a bit off.

The Gloves are off, who’s side are you on? You better check the location of your nearest bomb shelter, and begin to hoard yeast and other necessities. The battle for the much wanted “Lomonosov Ridge” (in black) is on the verge to begin,… and this won’t go down quietly. Already the Danes and the Canadians are in open war, each trying to get a hold of the strategic Hans Island, which can mean easy load off of endless troops for the final battle. The Island can be compared with Stalingrad during World War 2.

The Danes have their U-boat “The Seal” which proved itself during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The Canadians have Celine Dion. But what secret card can Russia pull from their vodka stained sleeves?
Due to global warming, ice is becoming a scarce resource. By the year 2050, ice could be worth more than gold and a demand bigger than iPhone’s. For these reasons, these three countries are willing to risk it all.

via Wired [...]

While working in a IT service company, strongly influenced by ITIL, I have been inspired to divide my friendship services into service categories. These categories each have their KPI’s on certain areas, which indicate the goals for the service level.
I have yet to develop a payment plan for these categories, while I obviously expect something in return.

Bronze

SMS responsetime: 36 hours (8-22, weekends only)
Event attendance ratio: 5% (measured over 1 year)
Invitation to my events: 0% of events
attention at events: 5 min talk.

Silver

SMS responsetime: 12 hours (8-22, 7 days a week)
Event attendance ratio: 15% (measured over 1 year)
Invitation to my events: 30% of events
attention at events: 20 min talk (mostly demeaning jokes).

Gold

SMS responsetime: 2 hours (8-22, 7 days a week)
Event attendance ratio: 25% (measured over 1 year)
Invitation to my events: 80% of events
attention at events: 45 min talk (mix of seriousness and demeaning jokes).

Visualization and processing are currently hot topics, and still more ideas, tools and techniques evolve to help process and visualize various data. Seldom has data been more abundant, and seldom has data had more power. By the latter I mean that data is strongly used in interpretation of buyer patterns and behavior, which lays the foundation of, or ads ridiculously amounts of value to, marketing strategies, which again when all comes down to it, pretty much rule the world.

Jasmine Novak and Aaron Koblin at Yahoo! have succeeded in making a cool way of visualizing search queries, including dimensions such as time and location. take a look at it here.