Monthly Archives: November 2005

Football, Volleyball, Basketball, Root Beer Floats, and Poker

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Last Saturday, I think it was about 10pm when I went out to play football with Mike and Kipp. Since I have little-to-no football experience, Kipp gave me a ’5 minute tutorial.’ It helped immensely. I was able to throw, run, catch. It was amazing! If you know me, you know I’m not a sports person at all. But this could be a turnaround. While I still like reading better, I must admit that I had an awesome time playing football. It was casual — none of us are actually any good. But still, I was able to catch the ball for once. It felt great.
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Free Analytics from Google

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Looks like Google’s making good use of their acquisition of Urchin. Like Picasa and Keyhole, Google is turning acquired products into products of their own by applying a Google flavor and then reducing the price (because they can). And having the name of Google behind it is likely to make the new Google Analytics one of the most popular statistics sites around. In fact, when I signed up today, I went to add it to my Google Forums. Much to my surprise, it was already there! (But under a different account.) Presumably, Darren (the other administrator) signed up and added the code.

Google is to launch a free web analytics service that measures the effectiveness of websites and online marketing campaigns. Google Analytics will allow customers of its AdWords service to see exactly how visitors interact with their website and how their advertising campaigns are faring. The hosted service will be available in English and 16 other languages, and uses technology from San Diego-based Urchin, which Google acquired in March. The proposal of a free service is likely to cause ripples in the web analytics business. . . Three summary views are available for executives, webmasters and marketing officials. Julian Smith, online advertising analyst at JupiterResearch, said: “This is good news for Google and for its small to medium advertisers which so far have found it hard to gain good analytics on their advertising campaigns. It will help them become more sophisticated in their approach to online campaigns.” Microsoft includes analytics in its adCenter keyword ad campaign tool, which will compete with Google AdWords. AdCenter is in beta testing in France and Singapore. Key competitors in the analytics field are WebSideStory, Coremetrics, and Webtrends.

via vnunet

eBay drops API fees

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‘FreeBay’ reaches out to developers across the world.

One of the main reasons I never tried the eBay affiliate program was the fees required to use the eBay API. It doesn’t make sense, because developers are just sending more visitors to the site — thus increasing eBay’s profits. If anything, eBay should pay developers to use their API, assuming it’s profitable (which I’m sure it is).

Members will now be able to use eBay’s application programming interface (API), the set of protocols and tools that people can create applications with, for free. The San Jose, California-based auction giant will waive the developers’ program membership as well as certification fees.

As developers build applications that help users buy and sell on eBay, they can charge for applications which drive sales and traffic to eBay. It’s win-win.

“Twenty-two percent of all listings come from third party-developers,” said Greg Isaacs, director of eBay’s developers program. “They’re continuing to add a lot of value. We wanted to remove any obstacles [that hindered their ability to innovate].”

As an example of a successful affiliate program, Amazon.com offers a free API with over 80,000 registered developers. eBay reportedly has 21,000 members who have produced more than 1,600 applications.

“By waiving all fees, the company is also hoping to reach out to developers in countries such as China and India, said Mr. Isaacs.”
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Microsoft College Puzzle Challenge

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Simply awesome. I put together a team including Adam, John, and Rupesh. We’re all freshman living in Marks Hall. Our team was named ‘DeansHalls.com’ (I wonder if anyone visited). It was held at universities across the nation; you can see the final rankings for just USC here. We ranked 5th, having solved five puzzles.

Considering our experience and the difficulty of the puzzles, I think we did exceptionally well. We made good use of some cryptic hints given along the way. Still, we came up with many good ideas ourselves, and worked together as a team. Surprisingly, John has tons of “useless” knowledge that becomes very useful in these types of events. (Although he missed a Simpsons reference — and he watches the Simpsons all the time.) I helped solve two of the puzzles. Perhaps I could post the puzzles here, so that you, as readers, could try them out.

Here’s our final solve record for the 12-hour day:
Count: 5
Puzzle Date/Time
Crimson Hat 11/12/2005 2:52:47 PM
A Sudoku Like Puzzle 11/12/2005 3:28:54 PM
Elementary, My Dear Watson 11/12/2005 7:35:05 PM
Opponents 11/12/2005 7:45:52 PM
Don’t Drink and Derive 11/12/2005 11:14:28 PM

The other participating universities did better than us, but that’s because they regularly hold these types of competitions. They are rarely held at USC. But the event today was a resounding success, so I think there’s a good possibility it’ll happen again.

WordPress Related Posts

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I was reading some blogs today, and noticed that the “Related Posts” feature was actually quite handy. I found some related articles that I was actually interested in reading. With that in mind, I decided to add this feature to my blog. There are actually many options available for this type of task. That’s what’s so awesome about WordPress: there are so many plugins available. And though I haven’t yet tried, I’m sure that writing one is a cinch, too. Anyway, I chose one of the plugins and activated it. Setup took 2 seconds. But it wasn’t quite right.

It didn’t have a heading above it. That’s just simple HTML: I went and edited my template so that “Related Articles” appears above the list. Another issue was that the links had titles with the prefix “Permanent Link: “. In my opinion, that’s a given for my URLs. So I went into the PHP file, and removed that redundancy. Also, it continued to list 5 bullet points, even if less than 5 related posts were found. This is what I changed to fix that (if you’re looking at the plugin’s code, I think you can see what this means):

if ($title) {
$output .= $before_title .'<a xhref="'. $permalink .'" rel="bookmark" title="' . $title . '">' . $title . '</a>' . $after_title;
}

Maybe this will help someone out there.

Reflection: This even helped myself as reference later on, when I upgraded the plugin as part of my WP 2.0 upgrade project.

Connection Refused to GoogleAdServices

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I can’t figure out what’s wrong with this. “Connection was refused when attempting to contact www.googleadservices.com”

Nevermind… I’ve found the problem:

C:\Documents and Settings\Elliot>tracert googleadservices.com

Tracing route to googleadservices.com [127.0.0.1]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms localhost [127.0.0.1]

Trace complete.

It’s blocked in my HOSTS file (C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc). I’ve commented the line containing the domain googleadservices.com, but now it says: “Unable to resolve target system name googleadservices.com.”

Reflection on High School

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Sometimes, I do wonder. What if I hadn’t left high school early? Was I really enjoying my time there? Was a learning?

The changes I made to Walnut High continue to resonate. I never realized how much of an impact I would make. High school was a smaller environment, where you could directly relate with the people. And it seemed possible to be at the top of of the school, be the #1 student.

I never had a chance. Part of the reason I left, I now feel, is that my grades and skills aren’t quite good enough. In an environment where it feels like I should be the best, I definitely was not. I fell somewhere in the middle of the class in terms of grades and standardized test scores. It seems that many students felt I was very smart. That makes me feel awesome, but it’s not true. I often kept my scores a secret. I justified this by considering such measures of achievement to be artificial and inaccurate. And they are. But the unfortunate truth is that, had I done better, I probably would have boasted of my scores.

On the other hand, I’ve always got to keep in mind the people that are seemingly below me. I can remember so many very humbling instances. People at the bottom, truly do have a brilliance. Every person can bring something profound to the table. So I fully disagree with any separation between classes of students – AP vs. honors vs. regular. Students in lower level course are geniuses. Just not in the way that academics expect. I sympathize most with these students. It’s where I belong. I’m somehow incredibly fortunate to have gotten to where I am.
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Health update by Google

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Google’s Staff Docutor, Dr. Taraneh Ravazi, M.D., warns us that flu season has arrived. How nice of them to give us these tips!

How to treat the flu
Treatment is mainly designed to reduce the symptoms with
- rest
- fluids
- acetominophen (like Tylenol) — not aspirin, especially in those under 18, to avoid Reyes Syndrome, which is a serious neurological disease
- antiviral medications (most effective if started within the first 2 days of onset of symptoms)

I’ll have to agree with rest and fluids: what works for me is sleep and water – lots of it.