My First Ajax Program

I finally got my fist Ajax program to work the way I wanted it to… It’s like getting my first PHP (or, Cocoa, or C++… etc*) program to do “Hello World” (only Ajax is slightly more complicated than simply doing

1
echo "hello world"

in PHP)… the excitement!

Now maybe I can finally solve a couple of the long standing problems I have been trying to crack with this project I have been working on…

Yay!

* I never really got anywhere with Cocoa, C++ or even Perl… never had to use them for anything; only if Neely can get me a freelance project to work with Cocoa or Objective-C, then I’ll probably have to do a crash course on it with a month… then my dream of being able to write apps for Mac OSX would be complete…

Growth of WiredAtom

It just so happened that exactly three months ago today, I took a snapshot of the stats of this blog at the time. WiredAtom just broke 10,000 unique visitors since I installed the stat tracker. Three months later, it seems like the site has been consistently getting 10,000 hits a month.

Page stats as of March 15, 2006

I also found it odd that my arbitrary post on using the WordPress Random Header plugin is ranked higher than the official WordPress site! What the hell? My entry on insurance fraud is also ranked among top 5 results when “unethical doctor” is Googled! I am convinced that Google takes into account the “freshness” of a topic relevant to the keyword. I mean, there’s no fricking way I should be out ranking WordPress on a plugin that it provides!

Destiny or Physics

When science took over teaching as the primary method of education, so did a wave of reawakening in people’s approach to philosophy and religion. Instead of “blindly” believe that the God(s)*, more and more people turn to science for answers. For the longest time, the religious followers refuse to believe that “life” was just a fluke and that they are descendents of monkies (ahem, chimps; there’s a difference). They also believe that nothing ever happens by chance and that there’s a meaning for everything that happens. In other words, God(s) has/have a bigger plan.

True that belief may be. But science just scored another point in that arena to its favor. For a long time science could only go so far as to prove and predict how and why certain relationships work and don’t work in social dynamics. But now there’s a new research that shows how certain “fate” in friendships can be scientifically proven and quantified.

By comparing people to mobile particles randomly bouncing off each other, scientists have developed a new model for social networks. The model fits with empirical data to naturally reproduce the community structure, clustering and evolution of general acquaintances and even sexual contacts.

Applying a mathematical model to the social dynamics of people presents difficulties not involved with more physical – and perhaps more rational – applications. The many factors that influence an individual’s fate to meet an acquaintance and decide to become a friend are impossible to capture, but physicists have used techniques from physical systems to model social networks with near precision.

Maybe this is still too far fetch to definitively link “destinies” to physics. But it’s scary the kinds of things physics/pure mathematics can do**.

* If you are a Christian, you are only permitted to pray to ONE god, or else everything else can be sacred like how the Native Idians view the world.

** The “Game Theory” developed by John von Neumann and later improved upon by John Nash was developed using pure mathematics, not some philosophical or social dynamics theory. Just math!

via [Slashdot]

More on Google Mapping

It’s been a while since my last entry on Google Maps. I am glad I stopped talking about Google Maps because it’s now become this monster with a life of its own since Google opened its API for anyone to tinker with. I’ll leave it to Google Maps Mania to do all the tracking.

CNet has a article on fans of TV shows creating “mesh up” sites to pin point where certain events took place in their favorite shows (and you guys thought I have no life?).

If you are a fan of Seinfeld or ever lived in NYC, you’ll like this site with a collection of most frequently visited locations from the show. Sometimes I wish I was back in NYC again (except during winter times). Another awesome map is some dude’s “Google video map” on direction to his house. Giving direction, redefined (in the video you can clearly see he made a left turn where the sign says “NO LEFT TURN”! Talk about self-incrimination).

Enjoy.

via [News.com]

WordPress Update — Random Header

It’s been a while since I made any significant changes to the WordPress structure of this blog. But for whatever reason, a sudden urge overcame me to make a randomly rotating header with new images. So I made 20 new headers and installed the Random Header plugin.

Let’s refrain ourselves from constantly refreshing the page to see new header images. 😉 Make it your surprise the next time you visit this blog instead. I will probably be adding more as I find more suitable images from pictures I took over the years.

I miss photography.

iPod the Cultural Icon

You know your product is a cultural icon when it’s mentioned repeatedly on the airplane before take off.

For the first time, I heard the name “iPod” mentioned among the list of items to turn off as flight attendents prepared the plane for take off during my trip to Savannah. But that was just with US Airways. And I found it interesting that they didn’t even bother with the category of MP3 players, but quite simply, “iPod”.

I don’t blame them. I paid careful attention to the kinds of portable players being used by other travelers during the entire trip. And it’s a very strang phenomenon to see only iPods for anyone who’s got a portable player. The ONLY exception was this one dude with all of his CD collections in one giant CD sleeve with his retro CD player sitting next to me on the flight back to San Jose. Where has this guy been in the past three years?

It’s scary to see how far and deep iPod has reached in the war of MP3 players and digital music. But at the same time, it’s also kind of comforting.

Remedy to Firefox Memory Leak

I wrote about reclaiming memory from Firefox’s memory leak problem. But apparently this supposedly memory leak is really a feature:

Excerpt from the Slashdot article:

“The Firefox memory leak is not a bug. It’s a feature! The ‘feature’ is how the pages are cached in a tabbed environment.” From the article: “To improve performance when navigating (studies show that 39% of all page navigations are renavigations to pages visited less than 10 pages ago, usually using the back button), Firefox 1.5 implements a Back-Forward cache that retains the rendered document for the last five session history entries for each tab. This is a lot of data. If you have a lot of tabs, Firefox’s memory usage can climb dramatically. It’s a trade-off. What you get out of it is faster performance as you navigate the web.”

Someone on that thread also found a way to remedy this memory leak once and for all…

1. In the Firefox URL box, type

1
about:config

2. Look for

1
browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers

and set it to “0” (default should have been “-1” )

According to Firefox’s online documenation, setting the value to “0” disables page caching and will damatically increase the time it takes to go back to a page using the back/front buttons (yeah, if you on dialup). But the documentation also gives guidelines on what values to set for the level of page caching you can tolerate (proportion to the memory Firefox will use).

Old School Keynote Speeches from Steve Jobs

Murdza sent me this pretty neat link to some classic keynotes of Steve Jobs back in the days…. The one in 1997, his return to Apple, was probably one of the best ones. He pretty much laid out the road map that Apple has been doing, except at the time it all sounded like secret codes that only he and the Apple board understood.

For you diehard Steve Jobs fans, this is a great place to collect those speeches that you’ve always regretted not having a copy of (I know Murdza and I now have a copy!). For you new comers to the Mac, this was the Second Coming of Steve Jobs…

OH, and the site also has pretty much all the classic Apple commercials from the old days… Fun!

UPDATE 02.27.2006: Another site filled with Appple ads.