nVirt

Video

2009-08-12T04:30:00.000-07:00

2.500 lines of code (really smart code!) later i'm getting closer to making this real cool thing, so wallrush is still on a standby. However a friend had a cool idea on how to change the links to the videos into thumbnails, and I already got that - what was it called? - really nice converter somewhere on the server. I suppose 2 hours of playing should fix that.

I'm starting a new job this week, and I'm beginning at economics at the University of Copenhagen next week - last week I moved from Østerbro til Islands Brygge.

Byte 16314

2009-06-18T09:26:00.000-07:00

I have made some additional changes to WallRush.com, among other I'm slowly working on showing who added the material. No rush though. Also I changed the way hits on vidoes are weighted against the freshness of the video, so that, hits counts 30% and freshness 70%. This seems to be a reasonable ratio, but it might turn out that 80-20 is even better.

I also remade Qys.dk entirely moving the Quick ASP Upload site to its own subdomain. I also had a glance at what people have uploaded the last 2 months. One word: Insane.

As a last note; is it possible to have a nightmare about an access denied error when trying to write to a file at byte 16314? The answer seems to be yes.

Parsing xml

2009-06-06T08:02:00.000-07:00

So I have updated the video add section so that videos are automatically resized to 450 * relativeheight. This required parsing of the html/xml the user supplies, and I chose only to allow, attributes and tags that are needed to show the embed (embed, object and param tags).

I am going to mess around with this a bit in order to make sure that hostile input is filtered correctly.

Annoyance

2009-06-03T05:41:00.000-07:00

Yes I am very slowly developing WallRush, but I guess there's some progress. I have finally cracked the RSS import problem - mostly. First of all I wanted it to be able to handle both normal RSS and ATOM. This isn't a crazy thing to demand, so I naivly thought i could use the XMLDoc object to parse both formats. I was wrong - some feeds are invalid and there's no way to make XMLDoc read invalid XML.

Workaround?
It seems, that microsofts implementation of the xmlhttp object believes that it should always use UTF-8 encoding if the mime-type is text/xml, when the responseText is accessed. This is bad, because ASP doesn't - to my knowledge - let me encode text as I please, and lets pretend i might losen up a bit on the parsing of invalid XML by writing my own parser. In that case I have to work with malformed text when using the responseText property. I tried to use the Text property of the responseXML, however it failed in the same manner as responseText returning malformed text because the it was incorrectly encoded with UTF-8.

Why can't i just use responseXML and the XMLDoc object? Because it refuses to parse invalid XML, and I can't expect everyone to pass valid XML every time. I'm of course not the only guy with this problem and it seems that using ADO to fetch the feed, it might be possible to decide the encoding of the text, but I will have to look into that.

However not all is bad. The import feature works again, just not with foreign character sets (like danish). I fixed the object_hit function so preferences is now recorded again for videos. I also changed some of the graphics. I think it is much better now. And i added a list of available videos so that i don't have to go through them all to find those I am interested in.

2009-05-14T06:09:00.000-07:00

So bad day today, I'm having the absolutely worst hangovers since that incident back at that bar in yeah whatever - massive pain.

Okay so i spent most of the day trying not to feel my head too much. But now i guess its time to do some work.

I saw another site slightly like mine called wallpipe.com. It looks nice, but it still suffers from the twitter / facebook problem of me being spammed with irrelevant comments from people i only halfway know.

I am quite worringly now starting to use wallrush.com though there's hardly any content. Specifically i feel a need to be able to browse through the videos so this is what I am implementing today. Maybe I'll also fix the remaining add content sections and change some of the design a bit.

Favicon.ico

2009-05-11T07:05:00.000-07:00

Yeah well I'm making some sideprojects for real green cash, so wallrush.com is not developing as fast as I desire. However last night I finally made some progress, so now there's a script for importing the title and favicon of linked sites. I think that's kind of cool. Next up is improving the RSS importer, finalizing the sign up, and add pages, and making a better design of the wall.

/Mathias

PCA

2009-05-05T06:38:00.000-07:00

Some time ago I read a very interesting article, about a competition by netflix.com (read more) where the point is to make a program that can predict users opinions of a new movie based on previous judgements of other movies.

The authors of the article had noted that no matter which method was used for prediction none of the competitors could get closer than 90%-95% (i think) accuracy in their estimates. The really interesting thing was that though very sophisticated mathematical methods yielded better results it was about 2%-3% better than simple methods.

Obviously this means you can use a lot of time being slightly better, but you should consider if it is worth it. That might be the case if you want storm predictions or something like that. But for a "simple" social entertainment site 90% is properly going to be as good for at start as 95%.

So I am opting for a "simple" method of deciding wheter content is relevant for the user. More on this later - gotta feed my self :)

2009-05-03T01:49:00.000-07:00

All right. So I have been writing about my WallRush.com project.

I am currently modifying the sql that retrieves content. As declared I want the content to be relevant for me (the user). To do this I have normalized personal popularity and age of the content and then weighted these when sorting for relevance. This won't suffice, I will have to include people of similar tastes evaluation of the content in the weighting before its good, but it still manages to retrieve the 3 videos in the base that I think is coolest right now :)

It will be fun to see how the SQL server will act if there are many request, since the SQL is not exactly "ressource friendly".

2009-05-02T04:27:00.001-07:00

Well some its been some time now. I have bought a new domain name WallRush.com, which I think is quite good. I am currently trying to make my self make the site, which involves lots of coca cola, pizza and candy.

The idea is that i don't find facebook.com og twitter very interesting. Almost everything that people put up is worthless selfpromotion. I do the same of course, but that doesn't make it interesting. I want a site that will:

a) Alert me of social events like parties, birthdays, valentines day and so forth.

b) Present me with funny, important or exciting news, videos, blogs, songs and pictures.

c) I want the site to (in-a-google-smart-way) to know how to prioritize this content for me, but i always want to be confronted with new/seemingly irrelevant entertainment/knowledge, so that i can choose to develop my taste in new directions.

So far so good. I have been doing a lot of coding, and I am about to discard it all because of JS crossbrowser problems, lack of animation etc. I think a classic site design is properly the best way now.

So why this post? Because i need it to test the RSS import feature ;)

Releases

2008-12-08T10:55:00.000-08:00

It is almost christmas, this is the time of the year when companies release their newest and shiniest products, and so have I.

Okay admitted this is not grand and posh, but it might evolve into something valuable over time.

Both releases have been made in cooperation with friends who take care of marketing and other administrative tasks - I am just the programmer.

First and most released is vinspireret.dk, a danish community site for wine enthusiast. We have booked a 32k user mailing list with ads (for free ^^) with ads until Jan.

This site is made in PHP and is almost entirely composed of a PHPbb3 forum, with some very slight modifications. I guess is spent 8 hours making it ready in total.

Next is findadvokat.com also a danish site in which we want clients to get price offers on different assignments from lawyers. The trick is to get clients through google ads and "sell" clients to the lawyers for a higher price than they themselves would pay if they were advertising on google.

Last but not least my own company site qys.dk which currently tries to push and ASP Upload component - check it out

ECMA

2008-12-07T14:30:00.000-08:00

Yes ECMA.

I remember when i first got my hands on a real compiler. It was a christmas present from my parents. They gave me visual basic 6.0 studio, including the best documentation package ever made, the MSDN Library. Back then the library was about 3gb big and was very very orderly.

I must have browsed almost its entire contents in search of new and exciting features to play around with.

One of the things that caught my attention was the documentation for DHTML and XHTML. I don't know the background story for the namings but essentially it was MS complete documentation for ECMAScript also known as Javascript.

I remember thinking it was an unforgiving language, since error messages in IE never has been very good, and Firefox hadn't really made it into my universe back then.

Little did I vision that Javascript would one day be one of the most important programming languages (forgive me, script languages) we have. As a language without access to a local disk, very limited data structures and somewhat weak programming constructs, it is amazing what you can do with it.

This year a friend and I wrote a Javascript based "program" to access an experimental grid computing service, for simulating ligand-protein interactions.

I believe the power of Javascript comes from its relative simplicity, and immediate results. It is so easy for kids write Javascript that will turn dumb static webpages into vibrant web 2.0 experiences.

However I also think that there is a tendency today to spend to much time on implementing fancy AJAX systems on webpages where oldfashioned content delivery would be faster and much more reliable.

Anyways currently i am playing around with a Javascript progressbar for my Quick ASP Upload component - which you can find here

Wonders of the business world - Titles

2008-06-04T11:27:00.001-07:00

I come from an academic home so i realize the importance of titles. Logically titles should describe what function the holder takes care of, but it appears they are really meant to impress.

So how does this work in todays business world. Well a bit about me first. I'm 23 and studies computer science at the University of Copenhagen. So if you were to hire me part time what title should I have?

Personally i would prefer something like "part time student helper" or "assisting web designer" or something not too godlike and overpowered. However my employer seems to think this is a bit too modest - though I find it rather accurate - so here are some examples of what I have been called at business meetings, presentations and so on.

Data specialist
IT consultant
SQL expert

I like these titles, but I could do without them and there seems to be a tendency towards customers actually believing those titles. The result is that they think I have actual decision power, and so expect that I can take action on subjects like business strategies and pricing. This leads to some confusion then the "expert lead specialist consultant" has to call the "layout guy" to decide which technology infrastructure we should go with.

Lesson, drop the silly titles.