Evilsoft.org

In 2006 I was introduced to ruby, and for a time I found it to be a fun language to work with. After about 6 months, I started to notice problems and shortcomings in the ruby/rails stack and went on to bigger and better things. The problem is that to this day I have to defend myself to legions of ruby/rails faithful who seem to think that it’s sacrilege to ever leave the faith. (That makes me what, an apostate?) A friend recently asked on a mailing list I regularly traffic why a person would consider ruby to be flawed. The best way I can express this is in some code.
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A few weeks ago, a video was passed around our office that was about Google interviewing people in Times Square about what a browser is. The results were fairly appalling. For the most part, people responded with various portal and search web sites instead of something like “IE” or “Firefox”. This coincided with a conversation I was having with someone in which I posited the hypothesis that IE as a browser would bias to the political right, and other browsers (specifically firefox) would bias to the political left. My reasoning was:

1. Conservatives would be more comfortable with a browser delivered by a major corporation that has faced antitrust charges over that browser then liberals would.
2. Liberals anecdotally are more prone to counter-cultural choices, and thus would be more likely to seek out an alternative to the default browser.

The Google interviews made me realize one other thing. In testing for this kind of effect, you would need to eliminate people who didn’t know what a browser was. Clearly, a person who doesn’t even know what a browser is is highly unlikely to proactively switch from their system’s default browser. Further, if a person’s political views are correlated at all with their likelihood of understanding what a browser is, not eliminating people who don’t understand could hide real results.

The company I work for, Knewton Inc, is becoming known in certain circles of its clever usage for the vastly underused (IMHO) Amazon Mechanical Turk service. When I mentioned my contention to our guy who’s been pioneering our MTurk usage, Dahn Tamir, he suggested that we build an MTurk task and get some real data to find out whether my hypothesis had any basis in reality. The rest of this post represents my findings.

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I was catching up on some of my Wired reading this morning when I came across an article about automagic stock investing. One of the links from the article was to a site called Wealth-lab. It is essentially a trading simulator/community where people can develop trading scripts and strategies and then simulate their usage. For example here is a script titled “BREAD & BUTTER #6: Swing Trading the Gap” written by somebody named quester ( I love the grown up names people use on the internet…)

var Bar,QClose,QOpen:integer;
var gap,Qgap:float;
QClose:=GetExternalSeries(’QQQQ’,#Close);
QOpen:=GetExternalSeries(’QQQQ’,#Open);

for Bar:=2 to BarCount-1 do
begin
Qgap:=100*(@QClose[Bar-1]-@QOpen[Bar])/@QClose
[Bar-1];
gap:= 100*(PriceClose(Bar-1)-PriceOpen(Bar))/
PriceClose(Bar-1);

if not LastPositionActive then
if (gap > 5) and (Qgap > 0.5) then
if PriceClose(Bar-1) BuyAtMarket(Bar,'');

if LastPositionActive then
SellAtStop(Bar+1,PriceClose(Bar),LastPosition,
'');
end;

The above script (code) encodes the following rules:

“Buy a stock when the stock is down the day before, QQQ is gapping down more than half a percent, and the stock is gapping down more than 5 percent.”

“Hold the stock at least until the next morning.”

“Sell when the stock goes lower than the prior day’s close.”

Without examining this language and the whole site in great detail (which I assure you gentle reader, I will be looking into this…) I gather that this script is run at the start and end of each trade day to determine what action should take place for a given stock. This is fantastic, it takes the emotional element out of stock trades. As anybody who has ridden a stock all the way to it being delisted just hoping that it will turn around, you know how important it is to have specific rational trading rules for when to sell and when to buy.

See I still use del.icio.us and here is why. Now my compatriot has been telling me how cool simpy is, but I have so much already invested in del.icio.us and frankly now that it has even tigher integration into firefox I am less likely to change. I mean its got handy buttons (See Fig 1)
and lets you take notes (See Fig 2) by highlighting portions of the current viewed page.

Fig 1

Fig 2

I will be using it for the next week or so and write a more formal review then, in the meantime if you use del.icio.us check it out.

Del.icio.us better watchout, because there is a new kid on the block: Simpy. While I have not noticed many new features out of del.icio.us since the experimental posting page, simpy is regularly adding useful new features. Thing I have noticed so far that Simpy does that del.icio.us doesn’t do (or I have failed to find):

1. It lets you essentially make Boolean expressions with tags. So instead of clicking on Development, and then seeing that it shares some links with java – I would expect when I click on java, I would only see links that are *only* java AND development – not so on delicious – in stead I’ll see all of java. Being able to narrow down tags is a *huge* improvement. Not only can you focus in on tags, but you can also remove links from the results based on tag. Very useful. I pretty much always wished del.icio.us had this feature.
2. Private links. Del.icio.us is great, and I love being able to share links with everyone – but there are some links that I just want to share across my browsers – and not other people. Say like the link to my bank and credit card company – or links from my company’s intranet.
3. Groups. Simpy lets the user join groups, and post links for the consumption of the other people in the group – once a link has been posted, you can then mark it as read – allowing you to track what you ahve looked at. Sweet.
4. Topics. Ever want to track someone else’s links on delicious? Simpy apparently lets you do this in what it calls a topic.
5. Notes. Simpy lets you take notes with their system that you can tag the same way you tag links. Not much use to me yet, but an interesting idea – since it’s centralized, it offers the same benefits for notes that both systems offer for links.
6. The killer one: Sync from del.icio.us. All the effort you have put into tagging things on del.icio.us is not lost – simpy can suck all the links out of your del.icio.us account, and it will tag them appropriately, meaning you lose nothing. This means testing Simpy is pretty risk free, because you can take your existing links, pull them in and see if you like it.

Now, it’s not all better then del.icio.us. If there is one single thing I think del.icio.us does far better it’s the link add form. The experimental interface for del.icio.us deals with tags far more eloquently then simpy’s tagging interface. Where del.icio.us will recommend tags to you from *your* tags, as well as showing you all your tags, and showing you popular ones, Simpy has a truncated list of your tags, and only tells you popular ones. This makes it *really* hard to consistantly use the same tags in your link collection. Furthur, del.icio.us’s link add page is far more eloquent allowing you to simply click or unclick the tag to add or remove tags. Simpy divides it across the page so that your tags are in a textbox, but there are a series of checkboxes on the side of the screen where you can add predefined tags. Unlike delicious, when you check one of those boxes, it doesn’t populate the link textbox, and unchecking it doesn’t remove one. The Simpy developers would do well to take a page from del.icio.us on tagging interface – the one area where del.icio.us far outshines simpy.

You can find me there are soulcatcher.

I am not sure how I am going to use this, but I am going to find a way, damnit. The ability to embed a web browser in a web page is just such a cool, little idea. As they say on their website, its like TV in TV for your web browser. Now I just gotta think of a way to use that here…

So my compatriot is using the GTD Tiddly Wiki to try and organize his life and notes, but I have taken a different wiki road. The GTD Tiddly Wiki certainly has a lot of eye candy, and can be very easy to use, but I am finding I need a more featureful solution to dealing with my notes about umm, well, everything I do. So I chose Mediawiki. It has a lot going for it:

• Easy to install (if like me you have a web server running linux. Gentoo makes installing mediawiki a breeze)
• You have access to it from anywhere, using anyone’s computer
• You don’t have to worry as much about losing your data. A server is easy to keep backed up. When is the last time *you* backed up your thumb drive?
• Rock solid – this is after all the software that runs the gigantic Wikipedia.
• Support for media – so I can upload related photos/drawings/other media and attach that to my notes.
• Lots of good patches are available, like the one I installed that lets you make pages private.
• Running this on a webserver means it’s simple to make any part of it accessible to other people – and you can give them accounts if you want to collaborate with people on an idea.

Course, now the software engineer in me wants to do all sorts of stuff with it, which is always dangerous. Ideas so far include finding a way to integrate it with Gallery, and writing a wiki that allows Game information to be stored in a wiki – with privledged accounts for referees/GMs, and accounts with lower permissions for players.

Hrm… Wonder if I can write a plugin for PCGen.

So this, the next installment of my “I just re-installed my box, what’s on it” series we are going to look at the wonder that is the Firefox extension. Firefox is indeed a fantastic browser, but what really makes it a killer app is the ability to extend it so that it perfectly meets your needs.

Bar none the best experience I have had with this was at work. Being a contractor, I have to punch in and out multiple times per day, but my employer’s IT department doesn’t support anything other then IE internally (this seems to be the norm). Well, they made 2 small mistakes in their html and javascript that made the site unusable on anything other then IE, which of course means that I have to use two browsers. Well, Greasemonkey came to my rescue. Because I can use greasemonkey to dynamically re-write sites, the timesheet app now works perfectly in firefox for me, and IT didn’t have to lift the finger they refused to.

So, what I have installed in my firefox:
Web Development:

• Venkman: A javascript debugger for firefox. This package is fantastic for javascript developers, and provides you with a number of useful features. Must have if you do javascript.
• Web Developer: Adds a menu bar

Google:

• Google Pagerank Status: Google Pagerank is the algorithm that pretty much controls the web, well now you can see in your status bar just how popular a particular site is according to google.
• GooglePreview: This extension is surprisingly useful. All it does is adds a snapshot of the web page into the google results. If you are looking for a link to a page you have been to before, the fact that you can see it is invaluable.

Just Plain Cool:

• FoxyTunes: Lets me control Winamp from the status bar of firefox. No more fumbling around to which desktop my winamp is on, just find the nearest browser.
• BlogThis: A plugin that well…lets me post here more easily.
• del.icio.us: A fantastic replacement for the bookmarklets that let you post a link to deli.icio.us. All the functionality of the experimental del.icio.us interface, but with a xul window. Yum.
• SessionSaver 2: I keep a lot of tabs open. I mean a *lot*. This makes rebooting, or for that matter shutting down firefix a 10 minute ordeal as I determing which pages I still need to read, and which ones I ma done with – as I save the links somewhere for after my reboot. Well, no more. Sessions saver grabs the state from the last Firefox session, and opens the same windows/tabs.
• Greasemonkey: This plugin isn’t interesting, it’s web changing. Greasemonkey is a paradigm shift in how the web works. No longer are we constrained by the piss poor design decisions other people make in their websites. Using Greasemonkey, you can write or download scripts that completely change the way that a web page works. You can alter the content, layout, javascript, whatever you need. Some really clever thing shave been done with this like the hack that overlays the subway system of Chicago on google maps.
• Aardvark: Sort of a cross between Greasemonkey and webdeveloper, Aardvark lets you select elements of a web page, and either remove them, or alter their formatting to make them easier to read/print. Perfect for printing sites that make getting a good hard copy a pain in the ass.