YuviSense: Codin Kid

I feel kinda, uhm, well, left out. I discovered this post about this disease called NADD which is exactly what I am suffering from! I can’t study unless some Music (usually Tamil) is playing. My next stop is while commuting in a close share auto with 13 other noisy people. It was written four years ago, at around the same time I “discovered” VB6. The times when you could come back from school and just code….. [sigh]

This photograph has nothing to do with the iPhone. It was done before I discovered post-processing. The guy on the left is Peter Joseph. A nice guy. Plays basketball really nicely. Runs like hell. Fantastic athlete. Could dance if he has to. Good enough on the academic side of things. And, do you know what he was talking to me about yesterday? The iPhone. And the thing isn’t even launching here yet(And even if it did, it won’t quite sell that well due to the cost and the battery life(But it would sell like hotcakes (or panipuris, if you prefer (I just had some on the way out from school. delicious) if it had these features(are you listening, Steve?)))

… somewhere, someplace else, a single hardworking electron is doing a lot of work for me. It has been doing so for almost 2 weeks now. Thanks electron, and thanks to the person to whom that electron belongs to.

… when you see a guy with a Windows Vista Tattoo (did I spell that right?) on his shoulder. Wonder how many Linux fans have Linux tattooed (is that correct?) somewhere (As far as I can tell, much more)

I’m just acting bored because, well, I am bored. The Football match has been postponed due to rain, and I’ve got lots to think about, which paradoxically make me bored. Reading Douglas Adams doesn’t help either.

If you are nearby Chennai, do drop in at Proto.in, where you’d probably (not confirmed yet though) find me proudly flaunting my White Blue Monster T-Shirt. And in case you haven’t noticed (shame on you), Proto is the place for up and upcoming Indian Startups to Show-off. DEMO, if you will.

Personal Joy. Social Sorrow.

Am just sharing it, as it’s not a problem in our all-boys School at all. In fact, it was just around 6 hours ago that around 6 people literally cornered a single guy, pushed him into said corner and made poses of hitting him so that I could take photographs of the whole action. Lots of bodily contact, I must say.

The video below contains a boatload of my friends onstage, dancing. While nothing spectacular in itself, it was cool in that most of them were considered more “studyish” and this was their first time on stage. And the parents of the students were present as well, so it will take a bit more courage than usual.

Another defining moment? I’m playing my first Football Match (Soccer for ye ‘mericans)! I’m playing reserve goalkeeper, since my weaker constitution would prevent me playing any other position. We’re playing against a rather powerful team as well, so wish me luck and faster limbs!

Here are two clips I shot a long time back showing some of the work we did while cleaning up the volleyball court at our school. Memoirs, you could say, as we probably won’t be called to do this kind of work again

(If you are using an RSS Reader, the videos won’t show through. Click through to the site and have a look)

Is funny, but a bit scary as well. Where is humanity going? There would have been wars about it, if not for that we are getting a bit lazy of late to go about warring with each other over trivial issues.

In case you are wondering, what he writes is damn true as well. And, don’t ask me whose Fan I am: I swear no allegiance

Lightning Strikes Everyday: Rajinikanth: The Phenomena

P.S: Hawkeye is one of the most funny, insightful, stylish blogger on earth. Violent Acres doesn’t even come close (At least for me). One of the first blogs I encountered, and one of the best blogs around. Subscribe, if you haven’t.

Video sharing streaming site (like UStream.tv) using Silverlight, meaning you’ll get higher quality video and better responsiveness. Yay! (P.S: I’ve grown used to seeing the phrase Video sharing so much that I wrote “Video Streaming” when I really meant “Video Sharing”. Thanks to Steve for correctin me!)

Steve Clayton: Signup for the LiveStation Beta

Go Read this. The next step in the evolution of the browser. Salivating.

Tim Sneath : Programming HTML with C#

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I think I’m getting better at this.

Click through for a better view.

Update: You can digg this here.

This is Part II of my Engadget Analysis. Part I is here. In Part II, I’ll analyze their linking and what we can learn from it. Also, I’ve made a handy OPML file for you so that you can keep up with the top 20 sites that the Engadget folks have to keep up with to pick the best for us. Head down for the download link.

But before we start…

<blatantAdvertisement>I have a list of books I’d like to read in this Amazon Wishlist. If you like what you read, you can either buy me one of those books or donate to me (PayPal to yuvipanda@gmail.com). Also, custom analysis is available for quite a reasonable price, so if you want anything, ping me!</blatantAdvertisement>

Links

The same dataset that was used in Part I was used. So, we have the same 27,953 posts in 1,169 days at our disposal. Those 27,953 posts had a grand total of 117,739 links, at an average of 4 links a post, which is double the linkage of Scoble (at least last time I checked).

Most Linked To Domains

Here’re the top ten

Most links are back to themselves (as with Matt Cutts). In fact, it has about 25 times the number of links of it’s closest competitor (which incidentally happens to be EngadgetMobile, an offshoot of Engadget). Heck, 42% of all links were links to themselves! This makes a lot of sense, as they’re just linking back to previously run gadgets/stories that might be of interest. Here’s a graph showing the difference visually:

Links to stories and site

No.3 is also Engadget.com, but there’s a difference between finding a link to www.engadget.com and just plain ol’ Engadget.com. The difference is that the www.engadget.com link is copy pasted from somewhere and most probably links to a previous story, while just Engadget.com is hand-typed and most probably link to the site itself, rather than a particular story. The people who write the stories are savvy enough that whenever they want to visit Engadget, they’d type Engadget and press Ctrl + Enter rather than type the .com themselves. The mere idea of putting the totally unnecessary www prefix hasn’t even crossed their mind. So, when they are inserting a link to Engadget the site in their blog posts, their instincts would make completely sure that they would just type Engadget.com and forget about the www. So, if the link is to www.Engadget.com, it is to a story, while if it is missing the www, it is to the site itself J

A-List?

Also, in the Top Ten, 5 are owned by AOL (Engadget, EngadgetMobile, EngadgetHD & Joystiq), two by Google (64.233.179.104 the Google Cache and translate.google.com, the translation service), one is owned by Yahoo (Yahoo News) and one is owned by CNET (news.com). That leaves only one site in the top ten which is not owned by any major corporation, and it is akihabaranews.com. They’re a firsthand news source, located near Tokyo (or at least so they describe themselves in their about us page). This first hand source kinda surprised me, as I’ve actually never heard of them! (But maybe, that’s because I ain’t no Gadget Geek (Except when drooling over the Creative Vision M, that is))

Via Links

Via links identify where they found the material for the post. There won’t be a Via link if the post is found by a Press Release or is original content. Out of the 27,953 posts, 8,869 contain a Via Link identifying where they were found. The rest probably point to press releases & featured articles.

And here are the top ten sources:

AkihabaraNews tops the list with 387 posts, or around 1.3% of all Engadget Posts. Google Cache comes second, followed by Textually (Cell Phone News), Joystiq (Gaming News), I4U (Cell Phone News), DAPreview (Digital Audio), and TheRawFeed, RedFerret, WeMakeMoneyNotArt and Boing Boing (Trivia). The presence of four trivia sites in the top ten is because Trivia don’t come out in Press Releases. Also, Joystiq is pretty high up here because instead of having to dig through Gaming news themselves, the people at Engadget just let their friends at Joystiq do it for them.

Pervasiveness of Cell Phones

Also, the presence of 2 cellphone specific sites in the top ten, along with the fact that it was the category with the most number of posts, indicate that cell phone related news has crept into other news channels as well. Joystiq reports on Cell Phone Gaming news, DAPreview reviews MP3 players in Cell Phones and Boing Boing reports on Cell Phones being flushed down toilets. Cell Phones are just getting more pervasive, going into every area of technology. They are no longer a specialty. They are churned out by the million, bought by the million, posted by the thousands, but not exactly commented on by a lot. They’ve silently become the first computer many people would encounter. I would like one. Any PR people out there looking for someone in the young middle-class demographic that is targeted by so many Cell Phones?

Colorful Sources

When your top source is contributing just around 1% of your total posts, you know your sources are very varied. In fact, 969 unique domains have been listed as sources, with each domain contributing an average of 9 posts. However, of those 969, 489 proved to be the source of only 1 post and an additional 304 contributed less than 10 posts. Then there were 99 which contributed less than 25 posts, leaving us with just 79 sites which contributed more than 25 posts. Here’s a chart showing this:

Only a very small slice of that pie acts as the source for most of the posts on Engadget. That small blue colored slice with 8%. Let’s break it down further and have a look:

Note that this pie is a breakup of that small 8% slice in the pie above. So, an even smaller percentage acts as the source of most of the stuff. Which brings us to the next section about…

Dare to drink from the Fire hose? The Engadget20

Unrelated to TechCrunch20, Engadget20 is a list of 20 sites which Engadget cited as sources a considerable number of times (the yellow slice above). If you really want your daily fix of gadgetry undiluted by the kind folks at Engadget, then download the OPML file here and Go!

Read Links

Read Links are the stories themselves, while Via Links are a hat tip to the site that bought the site to Engadget’s notice. The Press Releases, the links to the product pages, the link to the cached copy of the blog post that was removed after 20 minutes are all put up in the Read Links.

Of the 27, 953 posts, 22,444 posts contain a Read Link, while the rest were probably Live Reports, Hands-on Galleries and Features.

Here’s the list of top ten most linked to domains in the Read Link:

Google Translate makes this list as well, showing that a lot of Gadget related sites are non-English. The usual big names are all here: Yahoo News, News.com, BBC, PC Magazine, NYTimes, and of course AkihabaraNews as well. BusinessWire and PRNewsWire are Press Release agencies. No surprises here except Google Translate.

A Total of 6,552 domains were in the Read link at least once, but 4,969 of them got only a single link, a further 1316 sites had less than 5 links and 420 sites had less than 25 links. That leaves us with just 120 sites with more than 25 links! Here’s the pie:

The number of sites which have at least 25 links is so small relatively that it doesn’t find any place in the chart. There is a 74% chance that Engadget will not link to a site more than once. J So, just because a new product by a new company shows up in Engadget, it doesn’t mean the company is not goanna kick the bucket. Also, the comparatively small number of sites which contribute most of the Reading Material shows the upperhand of the Press, Big Companies and the Press Releases. Press Releases ain’t yet dead people!

Takeaways

Here are the takeaways from today’s post:

· Each post has about 4 links on average

· Engadget links the most to themselves, with 42% of all links back to their own articles.

· AkihabaraNews is one of their major sources of news.

· Cell Phones are no longer a specialty. They’re just another form of a computer.

· Foreign Language sites are quite rampant, as evident by the generous use of Google Translate.

· There is a 74% chance that Engadget won’t link to the same site more than once.

· If you want your dose of gadgetry fix undiluted by the kind editorial staff at Engadget, you can grab this OPML file and read 20 blogs from which Engadget gets tipped off quite a bit. Be warned if you start feeling guilty that you can’t keep on top of the information inflow though.

What’s Next

This doesn’t quite end the series though. I tried doing a Gizmodo vs Engadget, but hit a brick wall when the Gizmodo server turned me up a blank page here. Hope to do that comparison post soon (Any ideas on getting a proper page turn up there?).

And, there’s bigger game afoot, atleast in terms of size. The processed raw data for Engadget was around 49 megabytes. Right now, my friggin freaky awesome friend Rob La Gesse (I’m just stacking up adjectives because I can’t think of anything exact to say) is using his servers to run an analysis for me that has unprocessed data run into around 7 gigabytes! I expect the processed data to be a file of around 4 gigabytes, which is the largest I’ve handled yet. My resources are constrained enough that even Engadget would be stretching them to their limits, and this new analysis would have just been impossible to think of. And, he’s even given me more access to more processing power, and that too with full administrative access to a smoking Server 2008 box. You rock Rob!

So, wait for that big analysis to hit next. I hope to learn quite a bit about System Administration and SQL Server 2005 from this adventure! Expect some technical details as well, along with some rants on School. (On an entirely off topic, mind-venting, tangential note: They’ve shifted to a new schedule that gives us 8 hours at school. 8 tiring hours L I can’t even think straight for a few hours after the ordeal is over. Made more daunting by the undue (and unneeded) pressure they’re putting on us. I might seem to be ranting out on this, but really, I would rather be learning to tune SQL Server than sit at School and memorize pieces of poetry or do manual mathematical calculations by hand. Who wouldn’t?)

But before you head over…

<blatantAdvertisement>I have a list of books I’d like to read in this Amazon Wishlist. If you like what you read, you can either buy me one of those books or donate to me (PayPal to yuvipandda@gmail.com). Also, custom analysis is available for quite a reasonable price, so if you want anything, ping me!</blatantAdvertisement>

We all hate those forwards that somehow make it into our inbox via the obnoxious relative or friend who has just got an email account. Most of mine just go to the trash, but when I saw the forward below forwarded(?) to me by this cool guy with this cool title above, I had to open it. I wasn’t disappointed to the least, and you too probably won’t be. If I had to highlight all the cool bits, then the whole thing would’ve been a tad too gaudy, so just read it for yourself

My name is Billy Evans. I am a very sick little boy. My mother is typing this for me, because I can’t. She is crying. The reason she is so sad is because I’m so sick. I was born without a body. It doesn’t hurt, except when I try to breathe.

The doctors gave me an artificial body. It is a burlap bag filled with leaves. The doctors said that was the best they could do on account of us having no money or Insurance.

I would like to have a body transplant, but we need more money. Mommy doesn’t work because she said nobody hires crying people. I said, ” Don’t cry, Mommy”, and she hugged my burlap bag. Mommy always gives me hugs, even though she’s allergic to burlap and it makes her sneeze and chafes her real bad.

I hope you will help me. You can help me if you forward this email to everyone you know. Forward it to people you don’t know, the too. Dr. Johansen said that for every person you forward this email to, Bill Gates will team up with AOL and send a nickel to NASA. With that funding, NASA will collect prayers from school children all over America and have the astronauts take them up into space so that the angels can hear them better. Then they will come back to earth and go to the Pope, and he will take up a collection in church and send all the money to the doctors. The doctors could help me get better then. Maybe one day I will be able to play baseball. Right now I can only be third base. Every time you forward this letter, the astronauts can take more prayers to the angels and my dream will be closer to coming true. Please help me. Mommy is so sad and and I want a body. I don’t want my leaves to rot before I turn 10.

If you don’t forward this email, that’s okay. Mommy says you’re a mean and heartless bastard who doesn’t care about a poor little boy with only a head. She says that if you don’t stew in the raw pit of your own guilt-ridden stomach, she hopes you die a long slow, horrible death and then burn forever in hell. What kind of cruel person are you that you can’t take five freakin’ minutes to forward this to all your friends so that they can feel guilt and shame about ignoring a poor, bodiless nine-year-old boy?

Please help me.

I try to be happy, but it’s hard. I wish I had a kitty. I wish I could hold a kitty. I wish I could hold a kitty that wouldn’t chew on me and try to bury its turds in the leaves of my burlap body. I wish that very much.

Thank You,
Billy “Smiles” Evans

P.S. Who wrote this? Bloddy hillarious parody. No images of the burleap bag though. And I do know a few friends who might as well actually fall for this!

P.P.S: A bit of ill health and school’s keeping Engadget Analysis Part 2 from hitting the tubes. You’ll find it online within the next few days though.

Awesome read.

Cool, ‘coz this is where I am. Read the hilarious article, made even more hilarious if you are Tamil. The sad thing is, this is actually quite accurate

Gene Weingarten - Hack for Hire - washingtonpost.com

Finally, this reporter determined that Dr. Haminahamina was actually speaking another language altogether, and was apparently making some very good jokes. One of them sounded something like, “Ellam koo vena kam!” It killed.

The “Ella koo vena kam” is actually “Ellarukkum Vanakkam”, which means “Good Day to Everyone”. The article’s a killer

Link via the fantastic India Uncut (A must read for everyone. They should keep printouts of this in the Indian Parliaments).

Part 2 of Engadget Link analysis coming soon…

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