Warren Seen

After having signed up for slicehost six++ months ago, I’ve finally gotten around to migrating this site from my old shared host onto my new slice, so here it is. Everything appears to have come across smoothly, although it took more than a few hours to tweak everything to my liking.

In the end, I opted not to host my own email, a strategic decision based on the time and effort required on my part to set up, configure and most importantly, secure and maintain a mail server. Instead, I spent fifteen minutes of my time setting up Google Apps. Being able to keep my personalised email address, with 6Gb of storage and full access via POP3 and IMAP (although it’s a tad quirky since GMail doesn’t support folders in the traditional sense) plus access via the GMail web UI on the go, it offers the best solution for my mail needs across multiple machines.

It’s been a busy time of year for me surprisingly, so much so that I’ve again picked up the GTD book and made another, more concerted effort to get my “things” done. It really feels like I don’t have enough hours in the day with all these different things on the go, and I’ve really noticed the relief that comes from being able to “braindump” everything that’s on my mind and start tackling it in a sensible way.

I’ve never been one for new year’s resolutions, but I definitely have started making plans to be more proactive this year, rather than just letting all this “stuff” control me. So here’s to new beginnings…

When I started this blog last month, I thought “Standard Deviation” was a snappy title. Of course, I also knew about standard deviation as a statistical tool, however I didn’t expect that this overlap would cause Google search to drive 50+ visitors a month here looking for implementations of the standard deviation formula.

So as a “public service”, here is some code to figure standard deviation in Ruby and Java.

(disclaimer: no warranties as to correctness, particularly to the nth decimal place, don’t use this to run your home made nuclear reactor or air traffic control system, blah blah, etc, etc :-))

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Noticed Blogcode last week, signed up and had a play, but haven’t really collected my thoughts on this one. I’ve been flat out with “real” work, etc., so have neglected to write anything this last week.

Anyway, precis on BlogCode is fairly straight forward, drop the name and url (not the feed tho) of the blog you want to code into the UI, then score the blog on a range of sliding scales covering content, tone, etc.

Neat, but essentially useless in and of itself.

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Quick follow up to the previous post - I wanted to get my thoughts out before I was influenced by anyone else’s thoughts

• Steve Rubel takes the classic high school debate approach of defining the word and building an argument from there. Conclusion - yes, it’s not authority, it’s popularity, people.
• Data mining agrees with Steve, “name things for what they are, not for what they are used for”. That is quite obviously right out of Usability 101.
• Jack Krupansky leaves an excellent comment on Scobelizer: “to Technorati, “authority” is simply popularity. That makes *no* sense.“

Consensus seems to be that tracking popularity but calling it “authority” muddies the waters… There is nothing wrong with the feature itself, it’s just the name that’s misleading.

It’s been a busy few days for me, but I’m back in time to notice this:

Technorati has just added ‘authority’ filtering to their search (see Scoble, TechCrunch, Dave Sifry, et cetera).

My issue with this is simple - the number of inbound links does NOT necessarily qualify the source as being an “authority” on anything. This is nothing more than a popularity contest.

Ben Barren hits the nail on the head here.

So its very hard to determine relative popularity, on a regional basis

Before pointing to this New York Metro quote:

In the blogosphere, the biggest audiences—and the advertising revenue they bring—go to a small, elite few. Most bloggers toil in total obscurity.

Popularity, that’s all it is. And that’s sad, because some of the people who deserve to be held as authorities in their field are lost amongst the noise, while the “blogosphere” (gack, I HATE that “word”) becomes more and more like a conversation between a panel of “A-list” bloggers with everyone else on the sideline. Then you’ve flipped from being “citizen” media to just media.

Disparate thoughts to follow…

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I’ve just added my del.icio.us bookmarks to my Feedburner feed, and I’ll be adding a sidebar del.icio.us component in the next day or so, so you can keep up with what I’m keeping up with online

It sounds like you could use one of these right about now…

Sit tight, relax and take it easy while I finish moving into this wordpress install and getting it tweaked to my liking…