YuviSense: Codin Kid

Saturn Sky in my rear view mirror, by Robert Scoble.

I’m suffering from serious DSLR envy. Seriously folks. Ever since I first put my eyes through an Optical Viewfinder (blame Shruti), they’ve managed to enslave me. Really. One of the problems of being a geek, is that you eventually want an infinite amount of money. Sigh.

Anyway, Digg Analysis Part II coming soon.

Kiss, by YuviPanda.

Taking photos during the lunch break at school is always fun. Rathan (right) was trying to sneak into the pics, and I think he did succeed.

Update: Digg this here. Thanks (again) to Rob for submitting!

Digg. The perfect time killer, as well as server killer if you are a webmaster. A Google search for the word “Digg” gives us 349,000,000 hits, while a search result for the actual word “Dig” gives us just 122,000,000 hits. It’s that effin popular. Also, it was the first site which I tried to analyze with Statbot, an experiment that went completely bonkers due to my underpowered machine. But this time, Rob La Gesse, total cool-head he is, ran my code on his monster servers and is the man who made this dream 5 part analysis of Digg possible. Despite many stupid mistakes on my part, he held his cool and made it possible for me to get an archive of the Comments and Metadata of all the Digg Stories that made it to the front page by June. Thanks yo!

So, here’s the first part of the 5 part analysis, dealing with the how Digg’s front page grew. Note that I’m dealing with only stories that made it to the front page: I could do it for the whole of Digg, but I just don’t have that much power in place.

Size

Just the size of Digg is huge, intimidating even. An XML file containing all the front page stories and their comments was 2.5 gigs, and that was only till June. Here, I’m not considering comments for now, and I did update dataset to include every front page story till 24/9/07. Starting at 1/12/2004 till 9/24/2007, that gives the dataset 1027 days (dangerously close to 2¹⁰, no?) or 2.8 years of stories. Those 1027 days contained a total of 61,614 stories, at an average of 60 stories a day. Here’s a graph showing the average number of stories reaching the front page per day:

It started small, took off around Feb 2005, had a stable period during starting July 2005 (when they launched Digg v2) to June 2006, and then took off again. In fact, the average number of stories reaching the front page before June 2006 was 35, and now, it is 60. This means, on a typical day, compared to June 2006, 15 more stories get on the front page today! Investigating the reasons, we arrive at this graph, showing just the No. of Stories reaching the front page per day:

See that huge first spike during July 2006? That was when Digg v3 was launched. There is a similar spike during July 2005 when Digg v2 was launched, though it was not that big. During Digg v3 launch day, a total of 212 stories made it to the front page on that day. I also think that they made some changes to the front page-story-picking algorithm when they released Digg v3, as the number keeps fluctuating for the next few months: Up at around 100 for a month or two, then back to normal for about 2 months, than up again during Sep-Nov 2006 before gradually coming down. Then a spike on May 2007 – the infamous (is it correct in this context?) censorship of the weirdo digits day(aka the AACS encryption key fiasco), when an all-time high of 215 stories made it, with at least 90% of them about the magic number. And ever since, cruising along at an average of 60 stories on the front page a day…

Also, note that the “girth” of the graph above is rather thin before Digg v3, and rather thick after it, meaning that before v3, there was not a lot of day-to-day variation in the number of stories that made it to the front page everyday. That changes a lot with v3. Methinks yet another algorithmic change…

Now, comparing this with traffic data from Alexa (the unreliable-yet-only-traffic-source-I-have-access-to):

That steep climb was around the same time as the launch of v3, so the increase in the number of stories on to the front page can be attributed at least partly to more visitors and consequently more users. However, the peak of traffic was during Nov-Dec 2006, yet the number of stories “dugg” during that time was lower than the Sept-Oct 2006 period, which had considerably lesser traffic. So, my hypothesis is that new user registrations had peaked during that time, causing a flood of diggs at that time. Unfortunately, I can’t test this hypothesis, since I don’t have access to the user registrations data, and Alexa is known to be damn inaccurate. It’s my best guess with the available data though.

Update:Indeed, it turns out that Alexa was highly inaccurate. Nathan Waters, an entrepreneur, comments about it:

I think the massive spike in traffic according to Alexa during Nov-Dec 2006 was because many people installed the Alexa toolbar. Because if you look at Slashdot and a couple of other popular tech sites they all had that same spike.

So the hypothesis is that a couple of “OMG Digg is in the top 100 sites on Alexa” stories made it to the front page, people checked it out, installed the Alexa toolbar and so when they also visited Slashdot and others it caused the spike.

So, inorder to check it, I compared the Alexa Data for Digg and Slashdot,

So, no sudden growth, no major spikes. Move along, people.

The traffic data shows that Digg traffic is tapering off. I wonder why that is…

So, summarizing:

• An average of 60 stories make it to the front page every day
• This is up from 35 during June 2006, and it jumped up when Digg v3 was launched
• They almost definitely made changes to the promoting algorithm during the Digg v3 launch.
• The day on which they started (and ended) censoring those HD-DVD Encryption keys had the highest number of stories promoted to the front page. And, most of those were about the keys.
• It got a huge spike of traffic just around the same time they launched Digg v3. Traffic peaked during Dec 2006, and has gradually been declining since.

Diggs

Diggs are the very basis on which Digg runs. Totally, those 1027 days of front page stories were dugg 47,053,590 times (yes, 43 million times), at an average of 763 diggs a story or a whooping 45,816 diggs a day. That’s a lot of finger taps and mouse clicks to build the Digg front page. Here’s how the Average Number of Diggs per story that made it to the front page grew:

Very stable, under 100 till around July 2005, and then takes off with the launch of Digg v2. Another plateau around Sept-Dec 2006, and then it starts crawling up again. So, till July of 2005, with v1 of Digg, you could get your Story to the front page with way less than 100 diggs, and it would go off the front page with less than 100 diggs, but not so now! The average number of Diggs per story now is 763, but the Median is 587, meaning that there are more stories with lesser than 763 diggs than above. In fact, 58% of all stories on the front page or 35,905 stories have less than 763 Diggs. Extreme outliers were not few: only 16 have more than 10,000 Diggs, but 9,863 had less than 100. So, here’s another, more accurate graph:

Yay, better one. So, yes, till July 2005, they were getting 100 or so Diggs on the front page at most. On July 1^st, Digg v2 launched & real growth in the number of stories started then. It started growing steadily, and goes up and down, sometimes even reaching 1200 diggs a story on the front page. There’s a small dip during Oct-2006, which is when Digg had the largest volume of stories hitting the front page per day, and it rose to an all time high during the AACS Encryption Key fiasco day. That whole month reverberated with energy, with a lot of stories getting Dugg high. It still is pretty higher than average though, with an average story reaching the front page today getting about 1000 Diggs.

Also, the Digg v3 launch had almost no effect on the Diggs per story. In fact, if anything, the V3 launch induced a small dip in it, but besides the initial growth during July 2005, the dip during Sept-Dec 2006 and the spike during the Key Censorship period, there seems to be no excitement around, just organic growth. And, to confirm that it is just organic growth…

Yeah, so besides the big spike during the AACS Encryption Key Censorship fiasco, the No. of Diggs that stories on the front page get is growing organically.

Distribution of Diggs

Now, looking at the distribution of Diggs,

That 75% of all stories on the front page have less than 1000 diggs, with 43% less than 500 diggs. Only 2% have more than 3000. So, if your story does make it to the front page, there’s only a 2% chance it’ll get more than 3000 diggs, and a big 43% chance that it won’t cross 500 diggs. If your story’s crossed the 1000 Diggs mark, consider yourself well above the rest.

I’ll post the specials (Most diggs, least Diggs, etc) on another part.

So, summarizing,

• Each story on the front page gets an average of 763 Diggs.
• Each day, stories on the front page get 45,816 diggs.
• The median no. of Diggs per Story, however, is 587 diggs per story, meaning that there are more stories (58%) with lesser than 763 diggs.
• Till July 2005, when Digg v2 launched or for 7 months after starting up, they didn’t have much people to Digg stories: The average number of Diggs per story that reached the front page was just around 75.
• The number of Diggs per story is growing, but organically.
• The day with the most number of Diggs ever was May 1^st, when the HD-DVD Encryption Key censorship Saga took place. A whooping 367,385 diggs were dugg just on the front page stories that day alone. Beats the closest competitor (Digg v3 Launch) by about a 3x margin.
• 75% of the stories on the front page do not cross the 1000 Diggs mark. 43% do not cross the 500 diggs mark. Only 2% have crossed the 3000 diggs mark.

Comments

Comments, the place where the Digg community lives. It takes just a click to Digg something, but a longer attention span to actually type out the comment. The 61,614 stories that made it to the front page had 4,553,052 (yes, 4.5 million) comments, at an average of just 73.8 comments per story or 4,433 comments per day. Since we are ignoring those Average graphs anyway, I’ll skip that and show you the more-useful Comments per Story graph:

As usual, kicked off after July 2005, when Digg v2 went live: They had close to 0 comments per post for quite some time till then. Unlike the number of Diggs, the number of comments per post does not show many hiccups where it goes way up or way down. There is, an upward trend starting at Nov 2006 and accelerating heavily at May 2006 (The AACS Encryption Key Censorship Fiasco again (I hate having to type that all over again!))

Splitting the comments up,

We see that a bulk of the stories (50% of them) get 25-100 comments, with only 254 having ever gotten more than 500 (the percentage is so small excel rounded it off to 0). Also, there were 338 stories with absolutely no comments, but still made it to the front page. However, only 20 stories with 0 comments made it to the front page this year, so I’d guess it’s a thing of the past.

Customarily summarizing,

• Not too many commenting binges around.
• 50% of all stories on the front page get 25-100 comments. The number of stories with greater than 500 comments is so low, the percentage is 0.
• 338 stories made it to the front page and out of it with absolutely 0 comments, though only 20 of them were this year.

Weekends or Weekdays?

When do the most number of stories make it to the frontpage?

Saturday has the lowest number of stories reaching the front page, followed by Friday. I kind of expected Sunday to follow Saturday, but turns out more Diggers are active on Sundays than I thought. Monday, Tuesday & Wednesday are neck to neck, with Thursday falling slightly behind (and, in case you are wondering, July 1^st, the Day with the Most No. of Stories on the front page, was a Sunday). Friday is slow news day, something which I observed in my analysis of Engadget as well.

And, the number of Diggs each story is getting?

Saturday and Sunday might have lesser number of stories getting to the front page, but those that do get there receive more diggs than the average. Friday has lesser number of stories and lesser number of Diggs per story: It truly is slow news day. Monday too, while having the highest number of stories on the front page, fares a bit poorly on the number of Diggs each story gets. However, note that the average number of diggs each story on the front page gets as a whole is 763, so the variations, while they do exist, are not that big.

So, if you want to get dugg, the easiest day to get dug is on a Monday-Wednesday, while the best time to get dugg (in terms of traffic, that is) is during a weekend. However, the previous sentence is extremely shabby and breakable: The easiest and best way to get dugg is to write great content J

Now, moving on to comments,

Friday’s weird here as well, with lower number of comments than the other days. Still, not by much though, as the overall average is 73, and Friday’s average is just about 5 less than that. The other days all are almost equal, with a small dip during Monday.

Customarily Summarization:

• Saturday has the least number of stories on to the front page, with Friday closely following
• Saturday, however, has the most number of diggs per story on the front page.
• Friday has the least number of diggs per story on the front page.
• In general, Digg activity is more during weekdays than on weekends. Methinks this is due to more people surfing Digg at work, though I could be wrong here.

What’s next?

So, that concludes Part I of my Digg analysis. I still have lot more data to analyze (users, topics, the actual sites to which they are linking out to, etc.) Part II will be link analysis, containing analysis of which sites are getting dugg the most, how many of them are actually alive right now, how many are blogs, how are they distributed, are many stories coming from a small number of sites, etc,. Part III would be about Topics, Part IV about the users who got those stories on to the front page, Part V would probably be about the words used in the Title and Description and then I’ll end with Part VI containing a long list of Trivia that nobody needs to know. Except for the waiting part (some reports take about 10 minutes to run, which sucks), writing this is Fun!

I would kill to have the data about when the story was submitted to Digg as well, but sadly, I don’t have it. Also, my data’s dates have no time data, which eliminates another area of interesting analysis as well. If only Digg provided data dumps the way Wikipedia does…. (Oh please, Kevin Rose or any of the other Digg staff, if you read this, can you do something like that? It shouldn’t be a problem, with the data being licensed under creative commons public domain, no?)

Teasers for Part II: Sites-Linked-To Analysis

Here’s some of the interesting data I found while researching for Part II:

• Nearly 72% of all sites on Digg get on to the front page only once. So, if this story gets on Digg, I’ve broken a good barrier!
• The top ten most submitted sites make up around 11% of all front page stories.
• There are two blogs in the top two, and they’re what I’ll call usual suspects: Engadget and Gizmodo. Engadget is higher up the order than Gizmodo, and I’ll reveal the order in Part II
• Youtube’s up in the top ten, while Flickr’s up in the top 15.
• Torrentfreak has about the same number of stories on the frontpage than all of ZDNet blogs combined. Go figure!
• The Unofficial Apple Weblog had more stories than Apple.com itself.
• Digg.com itself has been dugg 25 times.

This is just a preview: More to come!

Found this useful? Want a custom analysis?

Found this useful? You can help me write more stuff like this. You see, the main technical bottleneck for me, besides school, is my computer. She’s dying piece by piece now. First her graphics card died, and then the AGP slot itself (I tried 3 graphics cards, they all black out intermittently). And the on board graphics I am now on is slowly dying as well. The noisy Pentium 4 2.4 GHz single core machine with 1 gig of RAM not something that’s enough for me. I have a lot of experiments to do in my mind, but they all require more powerful hardware.

So, dear people-who-read-this, please consider helping me buy a newer, faster computer. The specs are up here and I estimate it’ll cost $1500. There are several ways you can do this:

· Donate to this at my ChipIn page here. Or use the widget on the sidebar or at the bottom. I’ll name a part of my computer after everyone who donates!

· Get your questions about Digg answered. Want to know something more specific about the Digg front page (Like, how many stories in the Apple category had Microsoft in the description (or vice versa?))? Ask! Simple question about Digg costs from $5-$20, depending on the complexity, while I can also do more complete analysis for a reasonable price(hey, I’m just trying to work my way to a new computer, okay?). For example, asking about the total number of links to sites other than apple.com in the category Apple would cost you $10, while an analysis of the relative popularity of your favorite linux distros would cost about $35. It’s easily negotiable. Contact me via email (yuvipanda@gmail.com)

· Get me to do custom analysis for your blog. I’ll accept most, and for a very good, double digit price, I’ll do an analysis of your blog as well as give you the data in a machine readable form if the inner-geek in you wants to do something more with it.

· Paypal me directly. My Paypal email is yuvipanda@gmail.com.

Offer open till I get $1,400(Yes, $1,400, as Rob had already sent off $100 towards this. Thanks Yo!) to buy a new computer

Sleeping in Class, by YuviPanda.

This is an actual, real, non-posed shot. Not very unusual, actually

The harsh lighting is photoshopped. The photo seems a bit crooked because the desks are slanted a bit.

How does this one look?

That pretty much sums up how I feel now. Here’s the cycle I’ve been repeating on and off today:

• Run a report on Digg’s Frontpage Data
• Get upstairs, watch a bit of any of the Mel Brooks’ movies they’re airing on Sony Pix right now
• Get back downstairs, get pissed off over the fact that my system Saki (I name my stuff) is so powerless in the face of Digg that it takes 10 minutes to generate the data for a simple graph (I know I can optimize my algorithms, but heck, I want to write them fast for this. Afterall, I can use it on only one website :))
• Get upstairs again, get pissed off at the commercials
• Get downstairs, see the chart, hunt out to find some context to interpret it, and write it out in Word
• Repeat, while repeatedly losing any form of coherence you might have developed in your writing.

I apologize to anyone who cares to listen for the delay, and hope to put the first part out by tomorrow.

Pink Flowers, by Aarthi.

Awesome, no?

Rory Blyth.

Teenagers are supposed to have some idols. Y’know, people who they follow around all the time on TV/Internet/MySpace/Whatever. Whenever said teenager talks about said idol, they’ll be frothing at the mouth and various biological compounds of unknown origin will find their way into the bloodstream of said teenager.

I’m a teenager, and Rory Blyth is one of my idols. His was one of the first blogs I read (I got there through another idol, Sriram Krishnan), and one of the blogs where I don’t just read through the RSS, but actually go out and read through the archives. I’m that kind of a Fan. Shruti often comments that I have a crush on his words. Not just his blog, but his videos and podcast as well. Infact, the only Channel9 videos(well, videos from anywhere, infact) I download are Rory’s, and the only podcast I listen to is Rory’s(Though he’s been off it for sometime now. Wassup yo?). While this is partly because of my bandwidth restrictions (Try living on 2.5 gigs of upstream and downstream data a month), this is also partly not because of my bandwidth restrictions. He could interview my Geography textbook and actually make it interesting.

I actually stole that above bit from a previous bit of writing. That previous bit of writing, ofcourse, was also mine. I was trying to write a StatBot on Rory Blyth. I had my Data. I had the fancy graphs. I had pretty much what I wanted (except, uhm, a lot of compromising things I can’t disclose here). But then, I was sucked into reading Rory’s archives (again). I was like, so frothing at the mouth again that I had to gave up. He could not be quantified. The words there, the text, the blog posts, they’re on a class of their own. That class doesn’t implement ICloneable, the fields are all private, and the only constructor is private, so you won’t be able to do anything about them except acknowledge that they are a class of their own. You can’t even use reflection against them, so, admit it, those words are a class of their own. Quantity can’t do justice to them. It really can’t, so I gave up.

This is the only time I have actually gagged laughing. It’s very much like reading Douglas Adams, except Rory actually responds to my comments. It’s almost kinda a drug: I swapped back to Firefox thrice while writing this short paragraph to read 3 fantastic old posts of his. It’s just that every post of his is so, well, ooglable.

So,

Rory, you’re my hero. I thought I should let you know. You have become a hero to atleast one (1) teenager around here. One day, I hope to have your qualities(Damn, my writing needs to improve. I’m writing in cliches) Thanks yo, I’m feeling better now because of you!

Your posts

And, as a small tribute to my hero, I’m leaving this XML file (right click, save. It’s 5 megs, crashes FF) containing all the posts he has written so far, along with their associated metadata, in an easily digestable format. Whip up Visual Studio Orcas and use LINQ over this to get some nice statistics or anythin. I’m using LINQ, and loving this. So grab that XML file and do something, anything, with it. For starters, I just ran one of Rory’s recentish posts through one of my not-so-recentish apps, Fudge, to produce some cranky output. Read it here.

On a completely different secential note, I dig this picture below and ask you all to atleast click on it and if you click on it because you really actually like it instead of because I asked you to, fave it as well. I assure you that there is a bening motive to this:

Rereading this post, what’s the point? I donno, I guess I just wanted to say thanks for his awesome writing. I say thanks just for the fun of it, and it makes me feel good as well: Ask Rob, he gets a bit irritated about it!

Also, he commented on my blog post here about my experience with Modafinil. I was pretty pumped up over that(buf, how many days do YOU wake up to see a comment in your inbox from your hero?). I had taken a bit of slack over that Modafinil post, and he made sure I calmed down and got on my senses. Thanks Yo!

And, I’ve been stealing his style quite a bit for my school essays, and getting good grades for them as well! So, there’s another reason.

So, ending with, Rory, you’re my hero! Okay, change that to, Rory, you are one of my heros!

Here’s a demo of some non-super-awesome non-innovative code that’s been lying around on my hard-drive for sometime. I call it Fudge, after Cornelius Fudge from the Harry Potter Series (yeah, call me a kid). It basically determines the Part of Speech of each word in the text, and replaces it with a synonym from a thesaurus. It tries to keep the meaning the same, but, well, it tries. Here’s the original, and here’s the “fudged” text:

When I went AWOL from piece of work while losing my idea, I knew I had to spend a penny a few changes. One of those changes was to de-crazy myself (failed), and the early was to strain and dissever my personal living from my oeuvre animation.

Working at Microsoft is a self-aggrandizing thing. You’re never quite trusted what your line is or when you’re supposed to cause it. You might pose hired to encipher your little fingers off, but then obtain yourself in the midriff of a merchandising exploit that has you working until midnight for a couplet weeks.

You just. Don’t. Know.

That can follow fun and exciting and neat-o, but it can turn overpowering. You finally tire of thinking through piece of work related problems while you shower. You don’t want to mark off your study e-mail at 11:00 PM, but you’ll coiffe it in any case.

It’s easygoing to present your animation and idea over to the company.

I wanted to puzzle my aliveness and brain backwards. And that isn’t an furious persuasion - I was the one who allowed it to chance. cipher at Microsoft always asked more of me than I was uncoerced to consecrate, and had I said ” No ” more ofttimes, I may never give reached a stop at which I knew things had gone likewise far.

step one was to come forth from Windows. I work in Windows. I live in Windows. I have various machines across all of which I have Windows installed. At piece of work and at home base, it’s Windows.

Windows, Windows, Windows.

At the first of my skittish dislocation (or whatever it was), I switched to my iBook. Living in OS X was a sound style to get down forth from what reminded me of piece of work.

It was fancy, but there were also many things I even needed my Windows machines for, thence another answer was needed.

During a conversation with my pappa, I mentioned that I was thinking about getting a MacBook Pro. He had scarcely picked one upward and loved it. as soon as I told him what the design was, he offered to bribe me one.

That’s near as effing coolheaded as it gets.

I told him I’d permit him subsidize the purchase, but that I wouldn’t admit an all paid for MacBook. He agreed, although after the thing was purchased, he nonetheless gave me a chip for the good amount.

Like I said, about as effing cool as it gets.

It’s one of the fifteen inch models. An assload of memory, big grueling ride, blah rant rant.

And Parallels.

as nice as the thing is, I even so couldn’t bear used it as a entire replacement for everything else since there were all the same those few Windows apps left that I needed.

If you haven’t seen Parallels, and you’re a nerd, and if you’re a grind who wants to utilize a Mac but all the same needs a Windows machine, and so I pity your unlettered somebody.

When I foremost heard about Parallels, I thought it sounded like yet-another-virtual-machine-app. And it is, but it goes a few steps further than anything else I’ve used. To the full point that it’s one of the single most impressive pieces of software system I’ve e’er seen.

For the technically-challenged (who in all probability aren’t yet reading this), the simple-minded explanation for what Parallels does is ” It’s this software matter that let’s you run Windows as an applications programme on your Mac. ”

not on the nose rightful, but in appearances, this definition should be ripe enough.

When I started it up, I expected dull, rotten performance. That’s what VMs are for. My persuasion might live tainted by having had to behave a mint of the form of work where you keep three VMs open at in one case, but there you proceed - corrupt feeling.

What I got alternatively from Parallels wasn’t merely all the amphetamine I’d need, but a style that allows me to persist Windows apps without seeing Windows. That is, as though they were Mac apps. only as I can sneak over the dockage and embark on a native OS X app, I can flick on Windows bouncy Writer - in the docking facility - and it’ll pour down up as an app without the rest of Windows.

It’s therefore outer-space tasteful. Fetch me my robot-suit, Jeeves. Entering hyperspace forthwith, chieftain. define your flazer to Incapacitate. Plot a course of study to Tarragon V, and somebody prep my birdie.

OUTER.

SPACE.

NEAT.

You can also configure ” default ” applications. For exemplar, if I’m running a Windows app and I click on a URL in a written document, the default app is going to constitute I E, and this goes for Parallels, also. Under Parallels, though, I can configure it and so that Safari (my preferred browser) opens the links - the links I’m clicking inside the Windows VM.

It’s been a long clip since I’ve wanted to fray an app in somebody’s grimace and state, ” L OO K, YOU - LOOK - THIS IS HOW IT’S DONE, DAMN IT. YOU WILL value THIS SOFT WARE. YOU WILL turn YOURSELF PROSTRATE BEFORE IT. AND, NO, IDON’ T MEAN’PROSTATE’ - I MEAN’PROSTRATE.’ IF YOU WANT TO become PROSTATE BEFORE IT, THEN THAT’S YOUR OWN BUSINESS. ”

Speaking of how it’s done, I’ve been backward at employment a lilliputian over a workweek, and I’ve gone rearward to spending my days in Windows and my evenings in OS X. The change from OS X all daytime to dividing the day between Window and OS X has been shocking. There are things I’ve tolerated in Windows for a retentive clip - things that genuinely didn’t disoblige me before. Or, possibly, things I had been exposed to therefore often that I no longer registered it when one came along.

I have a tilt. And it’s not then much a inclination of what I find ill-timed with Windows as much as it is a list of what I find right about OS X. It won’t embody phrased as such, but that’s the general purport of it.

These are things which, if the Windows team were to follow through them, would spend a penny Windows far better than it is today.

1. Stop stealing pore

When I’m going about my merry footling means in OS X, if there’s an app in the ground that needs my care, it’ll realise itself known, but it won’t hijack my whole experience.

In Windows, it doesn’t count what I’m doing - I could constitute focused on authorship (as I am at present), and some early app will happily do along, z-order its path on upper side of everything else, and refuse to spend a penny off until I’ve clicked on something I don’t even deal about. I’ve been dealing with that this workweek, and it drives me nuts. It doesn’t ask you to ante up care - it pushes everything else out of the way of life and forces you to fetch involved.

not cool down.

2. bar with those bothersome little bubble messages

After my machine starts up, I hardly want a clear place to sour. What I have or else is a horde of trivial bubble messages in the lower right-hand box, telling me things like ” Your protection is stupefied ” or ” please chink on this message to fix rid of this messag east. ”

I.

Don’t.

concern.

If my surety is stunned, it’s because I set it that manner. I don’t remember nagging a exploiter to interchange a circumstance that was deliberately set is a good direction to make things good.

3. Stopping hardware

When I have an external strong thrust hooked up to the Mac, I just drag the drive’s picture to an eject button on the pier to discerp the connection between the laptop and the driving force.

In Windows, I have to right-click on this dark icon that most people will never even know close to, pawl on something (” arrest hardwar due east “?I forget the phrasing), and then choose from a tilt the spot of ironware I want to halt. Problem is, there’s cypher intelligible in the bloody tilt. There might constitute five things, all of which look as likely as the others.

I’ve been doing this for years, and it’s however confusing.

What’s the liberal heap?Drag. D rop. Done.

On the Mac, this is a one-click matter. Under Windows, it’s at least four clicks. And they’re confusing clicks at that.

4. Never, of all time, EVER boot my automobile without asking

This one really gets me.

Non-existent on my Mac, but my Windows simple machine blithely reboots itself whenever the fancy strikes.

I was writing a forum Post for Channel 9 a twosome days ago, and it got up on that point in duration. not so many words that I sobbed over the red, but enough employment lost and enough defeat gained that I called it a sidereal day and went place.

To my Mac.

There’s no excuse for it. Yeah, security system, whatever.

Bad.

5. Stop asking me to reboot - I’ll boot when I’m dependable and ready

Another rebooting job. My auto grabs some up dates, installs the up dates, and wants me to restart my simple machine so they’ll hire result. I’m ok with that, but I want to reboot on my own metre. I hate having a whiny dialog pop up every few minutes to remind me to rebo ot.

I KNOW. I KNOW IT’S metre TO REBOOT. I KN OOOOOOOOW! immediately LET ME WORK.

When I write, interruptions are a Very Bad Thing. I get into a menses of idea that can disappear if I and then very much as walk three feet for a glass of piddle. Having that stupefied ” Reboot straight off?Well, how around now?Or straightaway?” window appearing every few minutes is decent to make me shout.

That’s all.

Five simple things which, if changed, would pull in Windows a much nicer environs in which to spend important amounts of fourth dimension. Windows is dashing, but the things that piece of work are the things I won’t notice. When something happens with hence little flash that I’m not really aware that it’s happened, and so it’s in all probability a expert thing. unluckily, when my care is repeatedly - and we’re talking about over and over every mean solar day - drawn off from my work, and so all I’m going to remember is the plaguy behaviour. The good material doesn’t even get down a fortune.

For directly, at house, I barely run XP on my Mac with most of the machinelike features turned off.

And I like it that direction.

It is fun to do this sometime, but can get boring as well. I’ll put up the non-awesome non-innovative code as soon as it’s clean enough to be non-sucky. There are a lot of bugs in there that need to be worked out as well, but this one proved to be good enough to win my school’s computer science exhibition price (We demoed fudging Shakespeare there(Imagine the Horror))

Red Light Area, by YuviPanda.

Taken during a photocommute. I love the way the light just bleeds out. Taken during the night.

These are some of the images taken during after-school hours while practicing for Teacher’s Day Dance (don’t worry, I’m not being cruel to the world by participating). About 75 usable images out of around 150 total images. I should really be getting a better ratio…

And, these images aren’t on Zooomr: They’re on Flickr. Yes, I’ve switched to Flickr from Zooomr. And, moving away actually made me feel guilty, which talks mountains of Thomas Hawk’s Marketing

So, why did I switch? I stuck with Zooomr through a lot of trouble, even when it was offline for a long time. But,

• There’s no API
• Which means no good Uploading Tools (last time I checked, jUploadr can’t hold a candle to Flickr Uploader)
• Slow. Slow enough for my friends to complain.
• Did I mention slow?
• No manually tweakable sets.
• Not many people have Zooomr accounts = Not many people can comment
• I didn’t feel it till now, but having something like Organizer on Flickr beats beating around for organizing.
• Small Community. It’s a Very Tightly Bond Community(believe me, the passion on the chatrooms run high), but small.

Things that would have made me stick with (evangelizing and using) Zooomr?

• Better Tool support. Kris made a fantastic move towards this by making the Zooomr API compatible with the Flickr API, which means Tools just have to change a few configurable strings and boom! It supports Zooomr! But, the API is far from complete now, which sucks.
• Make it fast. Much easier said than done.
• Add manually modifiable sets. Smartsets are cool, but, sometimes, I want to just remove a single photo from a set.
• Allow a bigger userbase to comment. Comments moderated by the user? I still have this gripe with Flickr, but atleast a lot more people have Yahoo accounts.
• Allow Flickr as a mode of authentication. As Zooomr now has OpenID and Email auth, adding Flickr as a mode of authentication shouldn’t be hard. And, it means that the thousands of flickr users immediately become Zooomr users as well. Easier said than done, as Flickr is demanding a full API implementaiton on Zooomr’s part before it will give it an API key.

However, these are suggestions by an idiotic, stupid, inexperienced, schizoprenic, epileptic kid (that’s me), so it may or may not be a good thing for Zooomr. But, I wouldn’t have left if these were there. My POV.

So, Bye Zooomr, Hi Flickr, Sorry Thomas. I owe my photography to you, Thomas: I think I have improved a quadrogazillion times in my photography since I’ve talked to you, so you could guess my level before he talked to me. Someday, I aspire to him. And, if I’m able to get the resources (server, bandwidth, Windows, etc), the first thing I’d do is to write a service that’ll *mirror* your photos on Flickr so that I can enjoy them at full speed (yes, Zooomr’s speed is that bad, especially at my place. I know that this partially has to do with my location as well as  my connection, but Flickr isn’t slow)

I’m trying to post the best of the 22,000 unbackuped photos that have accumulated in my ageing hard drive (hope it doesn’t crash), and it’s proving to be quite a task. I’ve got about a 100 up so far, and hope to post process (I do that a lot, improves photos a LOT (Thanks Thomas for showin me that!)) and post atleast 50 photos a day.

So, cya at http://flickr.com/yuvi!

Checking in on xkcd “the last thing before you start studying” is probably not a good thing. Especially if the cartoon is like today’s. I’ve not been able to get that graph mentioned there out of my mind, and finally gave up and am now online to try find out if I can get my hands on the US Census Data (turns out that I could, but am not entirely clear how. And, it seems BIG)

And then ofcourse, it came to my mind that I could easily crawl a good portion of Orkut and use that data here, but then again, the curve would be heavily damaged because most of the ages on Orkut are false (I’m 19 on Orkut, didja know!?)

And, going back to study how to make a paragraph bold using Star Office 8 doesn’t seem welcome. Sigh.

Great Article.

Really resonated with me: Right now, I’m doing something which I’m not good at, in a way that makes me feel that I don’t want to be good at it, while I’m sorely missing out on doing what I’m good at

Sad and Confused, by YuviPanda.

How I am feeling now. Divorce (as most things) seems very impersonal and matter-of-fact when it doesn’t happen to us. But when you feel it happen to someone who is almost like a sister to you, it takes a whole new dimension. It hurts. A lot. Sigh.

Perhaps you have gone through this hell. Perhaps you know someone else who has undergone that hell. She is only 14 years old. Her parents are getting divorced. I don’t even know what to say: I feel really out of depth. But, perhaps, you do know what to say. If you do, please please please email me(yuvipanda@gmail.com) or drop it in the comments. I’ll pass it on to her. You’ll be doing someone a very big favor.

And girl, I know you’ll be reading this. Remember, there are boatloads of people to be with you. Remember.