Tag Archive for ‘Personal’ at Kyle Anderson

Tag Archive for 'Personal'

Blogging = Human Salvation

Published on October 9, 2007 in Personal. 0 Comments

Now hear me out, I used to be a hater. It seems that the more people blog, the more the internet is loaded up with wasted bandwidth and ad space. The truth is that blogging has a very small marginal cost, and usually blogging occupies time that would not otherwise be spent doing “productive” things.

But! What if all of humanity blogged, and then we could aggregate all blogs on the internet. Now, what if a mother of a special-needs child is having a hard time putting her child to sleep, so she blogs about it. Then the blogging software analyzes the blog and finds similar posts from other authors (Google plugin?) and she reads about the other experiences of other mothers. Can you see how the sum of human experiences, not just book knowledge (like Wikipedia) are tagged, sorted and searchable.

That is what I think blogging is all about, not hits. I don’t care how many people read my blog. None for all I care. Its the sum of all blogs that adds to our collective experience repository called the internet which is important.

Another way to think about it is like this: imagine a graph where number of reads is the Y axis and you lined up webpages on the X. Sort it and it would look something like this:

(From the Wikipedia Article)

So most people read the most popular websites. My blog, your blog, your moms blog, they are all in the yellow. Guess what? The sum of the yellow is more than the sum of the green! (Sometimes) That is the true power of the internet, is the capability of supporting an infrastructure for the tail end. How? You guessed it: blogs, wikis, and other user generated content. (I hate to say, web 2.0? ::shivers::)

Whiteboard Whiteboard Interactions

Published on January 27, 2007 in Personal. 0 Comments

Here are some of the messages that are passed back and forth between my roommate and I…

Sometimes we make up silly things… late at night…

Sometimes we borrow each others things…

And we get the better of each other with our antics…

Our true feelings for each other?

To do list…

Sometimes we DON’T let each other borrow things…

Compact Flash Replacement

Published on January 20, 2007 in Laptop and Personal. 0 Comments

My laptop is a Sharp MM20, which I knew I was going to spraypaint eventually, I just needed a reason to. After about a year of wear and scratches from abuse, it was time.

I’m replacing the harddrive in my laptop with a 4GB flash card.
It should be faster:

/dev/sdb:
Timing cached reads: 3532 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1766.79 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 58 MB in 3.10 seconds = 18.69 MB/sec
root@kyle-desktop:~# hdparm -tT /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads: 3532 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1766.13 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 78 MB in 3.04 seconds = 25.67 MB/sec

Pros: Faster seeks and sustained I/O. Lifetime Warranty.
Cons: Expensive. 25% Disk Space. Bad blocks over time.

So lets do it! I started with instructions from this guy.

First step, disassembling the laptop:

You can see that this is not a normal size laptop hard drive. This is a 1.8″ drive. So I bought this card and a cheap laptop IDE to flash converter off of ebay. (Sorry I don’t have a picture.)

We used containers with numbers and a legend to keep track of small screws and parts. When we were done, these were left over:

(Don’t ask me whats in compartment 8, I really don’t know what it goes to. But there is the leftover drive and screws)

Second step, spray paint it! Oh, and don’t forget to put in the flash card when you put it back together.

Can you spot the laptop?

Of course, with only a 4GB drive, I will be running my favorite operating system of course, Ubuntu!

And the obligatory screen shot!

Want more? Click here to download every picture we took.
Closing thoughts:
I’m extremely impressed. The camo-finish is beautiful and feels great thanks to the clear coat. Nothing broke, and everything went back together correctly thanks to good documentation and pictures for reference. If you have any questions about what I did, post a comment and I’ll come back and answer them.

Help Expose Scientology

Published on July 1, 2006 in Uncategorized. Closed

One of my personally favorite websites is YoureTheManNowDog.com. (You may have noticed the cameo in episode 1.) Founded in 2001, an uncountable number of spoofs have been made, and are stored at the sister site, ytmnd.com. There you can setup your own account and create your own YoureTheManNowDog’s! I love it.

Also, being in Tampa, I live close to the Scientology headquarters in Clearwater. Recently a YoureTheManNowDog has been created that exposes some of the terrible things that the church of Scientology has done. They are a very dangerous cult using blackmail, scare tactics, and a strong legal team to achieve their ends.

Many people don’t know the specifics about their beliefs, nor are they aware of the underhanded tactics they use to shut down those who oppose them. I encourage everyone to see this ytmnd, then read on for how to help. (Click on the image below to see it in a new window.)

Seen it? Terrible isn’t it. But what can we do? Expose. How? Google bomb . If you are not familiar with the term, here is the Wikipedia article on it. Basically the procedure makes a certain page come to the top of search results for a certian term. In this case, the ytmnd will come up when someone searches for the word, Scientology. Then anyone looking for information will be shown the truth.

You can help! If you have any web page, blog, forum, in your signature, mailing list, anything, create links! Anywhere you use the word, Scientology, link it to http://theunfunnytruth.ytmnd.com/. The more links in place, the more Google’s search algorithm will believe it is the webpage most relevant to the word, Scientology. That is it! Simple. A successful Google-bomb will bring this site to light, and put Scientology under even more scrutiny. Perhaps over time the word Scientology will be associated with its horrific deeds, and be put to an end.

Myspace Friend Maps

Published on May 22, 2006 in LaserTag and Myspace. 0 Comments

Ok, I have a seceret: I am a Myspace sellout. Everyone around me was like ooh yea, check out my myspace! Or Ooo, your myspace is sooo cool. Or, Wow, your myspace cures cancer. Well, so I made one, and added friends. I soon realized that Myspace.com is interesting. (Although it sucks too. Ads everywhere, people’s pages are often littered with cpu sucking garbage and animated gifs and crappy css.)

But the Myspace chain bullitens or picture comments are not what makes Myspace.com interesting. Its is the social network map that is what is interesting. But how can I see the big picture? And what does it look like? In my search on how to do this, I came across Ben Discoe’s website and read about his work with a similar website: friendster. I decided on a similar approach.

First, because I do not have direct access to Myspace.com’s database of friends, I would have to create my own local database, and then write a spider to crawl around and populate it. So I did. I wrote it in what I know best, are you ready people: bash scripting. You can look at it for yourself in the download below, its called myspace.robot. Basically it parses a myspace profile, grabs friends, pictures, music, interests, as much information that can be harvested, and then inserts it into the database. This robot is called by other scripts that say oh, pick a random profile. Or I have a robot caller that calls in a tree like fashion, starting at a given place and traversing so many levels (myspace.tree).

Once I have the information (friends in particular). We can use this information to create a map. At first I used imagemagick to generate an image. It sucked.

It took me a while to find graphviz.

Graphviz is the perfect tool for the job. I feed it the nodes, and weights between nodes. It calculated the best positions to put the nodes. It is very configurable, including different ploting algorithms, graph styles, and output formats. It take all of this and put it into a php-mysql interface for others to input their graph-making requests. My server on the backend takes the top one on the queue, grabs the appropriate profiles, creates the friend-map, then sends an email to let the user know that the map is ready!

A simple map that includes you and your friends turns out to be pretty large. If you want to go any deeper than that you have to use svg. (bitmaps turn very large.) But how does the program know where to put each friend, realative to the other friends in the map? Answer: It uses the “howgoodofafriendareyou” metric. The more friends you have in common with another person, the better a friend you are.
I’ll have the link up in a while for the interface for others to make their own maps. You might be interested to see who myspace thinks their closest friend is.

Kyle Anderson