A Conflagration of Randomness

A few weeks ago i was reminiscing about my Gmail account.  Years ago, in 2003, I heard rumors that a brand new email service offered by Google was going to be released.  Late in 2004, I finally discovered a way to get into the beta Gmail, Gmail Swap, since Gmail accounts were by invite only.

I remember in order to get a Gmail account, I had to write a poem.  I don’t remember or have a copy of this poem, but here is what the Gmail Swap page looks like.  However, I do still have my emails that I received to my Gmail account in October 2004.  That email is nearly 6 years old! And I still have almost every email since then.

Click to Enlarge

Click to Enlarge

We all know that Facebook’s application Farmville has nearly 70 million monthly active users despite its simplicity.  However most people do not know that Farmville was actually the child of a Chinese game that is also on Facebook, but has a much lower user base (currently 3,372,366 monthly users), called Happy Farm.  It lacks in organization and some features that Farmville has, but has other redeeming traits including nicer graphics, different items, and different abilities, such as stealing.  Being Farmville’s predecessor, Happy Farm was rated in the Top 15 Most Influential Games of the Decade.

Farmville and Happy Farm Similarities

Neighbors

Just like in Farmville, Happy Farm revolves around you having neighbors.  You need neighbors to build a bigger farm so you can grow more crops just like in Farmville.

Happy Farm allows to interact with you neighbors in a few interesting ways:

There are four ways to interact with your neighbors: helping care for their farms, stealing some harvest, sending gifts and sending messages.

Gifts

Just like in Farmville you can send and receive gifts.  There are 5 different kinds of gifts: “free gifts, flower bouquet, toy and decoration, some other special items.”

Crops

What would a farm game be without crops? Even though both have crops, Happy Farm tends to revolve more around flowers where Farmville includes many types of crops.  Also, Happy Farm crops tend to have pests on them so another action in the game requires you to remove the pests.

Farmville and Happy Farm Differences

Exchange Center

Happy Farm includes a place where users can exchange items such as Dog Food and Toy Seed.  Sometimes special items can be found here as well.

Pet Store

The pet store is where you can buy different pets to help guard your property from thieves.  Thieves drop coins if caught by a pet.

Stealing

Unlike in Farmville, you can steal neighbors crops in Happy Farm but simply clicking on their crop when visiting their farm and choosing “Loot Harvest.”

Conclusion

Obviously both games are fun and have their redeeming qualities. I think Happy Farm looks nice and has some interesting features, but its user interface is fairly complicated.  I started using the application and I couldn’t figure out where things were.  While Farmville uses words such as Market and Gift on its icons, Happy Farm just uses pictures, making finding stuff complicated.  Also, happy Farm doesn’t have much room for expansion, but for the precursor to Farmville I think it is pretty fun.   Obviously the rest of the Facebook population agrees with Farmville being the better of the two.

A recent patent application by Microsoft shows that Microsoft is planning on developing games that would limit certain areas and competitions to healthy Americans.  The players in-game avatars would reflect their own physique. Overweight players would  be restricted unless they maintained a proper health records.  The game would draw the information from digital medical records.  How this will go I don’t know, but it seems like there may be lawsuits of some form against equal rights for all Americans.  We shall see.

I have discovered four domain valuation tools in the last few months. Both calculate the value of a domain in very different ways leading to very different results. I tested both with my domain name http://shopthe.net. One came out to $700,000 while the other resulted in $100.

The first was Leapfish:

This gives a very generous estimate of a domain, obviously based on only popularity and not actual traffic, since I basically get none.

You can try their search for getting the value of your domain:

The other site is called Website Outlook:

This gives a much more modest and accurate result.

Search on Website Outlook. Enter your domain.

In addition there is another tool called Estibot.  This offered the lowest price of all.

Estibot

Finally I tried a tool called Valuate, which gave me the second lowest appraisal.

Results:

So which domain tool would you trust the most?

Google recently launched a tool to help you view your website in a new way, the way the majority of the people in the world view it.  Their tool, Browser Size, shows web developers the percentage of web users who can see sections of their site without having to scroll.  This is determined by monitor size as well as whether the browser is resized.  So now web developers know if that visitors can actually see that ad or poll they posted there.

According to Google:

The data is generated based on the browser size of users who visit Google.com. Google says that it found that the install rate for Google Earth increased by a whopping 10% simply by moving it 100 pixels higher on the page.

Below is a screenshot of what this blog looks like on browser size.

One of my friends’ AIM statuses today was “PC Load Letter… What the f*** does that mean?!” She’s a CS Major and I didn’t know what this meant so I assumed she was having an issue with her computer. So I googled it and found out that this message is actually what old HP Laserjets used to say when it needed more paper.

This message is confusing (I had no clue what it meant) and confused a lot of people:

The non-intuitive message confuses people for several reasons. The abbreviation “PC” is misleading because it is widely understood — especially in the context of electronic office equipment — to mean “personal computer“, suggesting to many that the problem lies in the computer, not the printer. The word “LOAD” is also ambiguous, as it can also refer to the transfer of electronic data between disk and memory. Furthermore, the word “LETTER” is only associated with paper size in the US and Canada as A4 is the standard size used in the rest of the world. Thus, users encountering this message may believe that they are being instructed to transfer the data or content of their letter to the printer, even though they have already sent the job to the printer.

The particular quote my friend had was from the movie Office Space when a printer in the film displayed this and the main character exclaimed the above quote.

Linked the the PC Load Letter on Wikipedia was an article with the title “lp0 on fire.”  Relating to a printer article this really caught my eye since I knew that lp0 was short for laserjet printer on port 0.  I read this article and this is what it said:

The origin of the “on fire” message was in the 1970s when line printers were large mechanical affairs with a high speed drum rotating at 1200 to 2400 RPM and impact printing heads. Misaligned operating components could cause the paper to come into direct contact with the high speed rotating parts, generating quite a bit of paper dust and increasing the likelihood of a paper jam. If a jam was not detected soon enough, the accumulated paper dust, ink dust and paper could generate enough friction along the rotating drum to start a fire. Furthermore, the cleaning solutions used in the printers were usually alcohol based, the fumes of which also presented a fire hazard. However, there have never been any actual reports of printers which had friction-related fires.

I think it would be really scary if my printer caught on fire, but thankfully these were the old printers.

Thanks for reading and see you next time.

Everyone knows the creepiness that Facebook brought to the online word in terms of cyber stalking.  All you need is a name and assuming your account has limited privacy, anyone can view most if not all of your information.  However, this form of stalking may soon end as a new form begins.  Enter Yatedo, a search engine to find anyone on the web.  On their main page they say the following about themselves:

Yatedo is the new generation free People Search Engine which lets you find and contact anyone on the entire web with any kind of information you have about the person you are looking for.

Now you will not have to have Facebook open when you are doing a school research project on Albert Einstein.  Instead just open Yatedo and search for both Einstein and your best friends.  I have requested an invite to this service, so I will see more of what it is like once I get one, but for now here is a screenshot of an info page.

The Bing search engine had a major outage on December 3, 2009.  As many search engines users know, if a search engine fails, that is many dollars of revenue for the company lost. A search engine as big as Bing get sometimes close to a million searches per minute, which means for the 30 minutes that Bing was down, that is approximately 30 million searches that could not be completed. Of course the half hour I chose to use Bing for the first time, it had a server error

With all the hard hours and late nights, this is what happens…

The fastest way to lose weight, guaranteed.

The user statistics of my app.

Have you ever used Facebook? You have, have you? Well then I built a great application for you. The Have You Ever Facebook application. I built this Facebook application last year in a night, but never blogged about it. It was down for a few months while I upgraded my webhost, but now it is back up and slightly improved. I currently have over 3000 current users and approximately 250 monthly active users which has increased from about 150 before I upgraded it last week. This application allows you to ask your friends a question and have them respond yes or no to the question. I am trying to improve this application so that it can do more things, but I will to sort out the source code. In order to create this application I had to use the Facebook Develper’s PHP api. I learned a lot from this project.  I got the idea to create this application from the game we had to play at college orientation.  We stood in a circle with some sort of marker where we stood.  Then someone in the center calls out something that they have done or are wearing etc and everyone who has also has to move to a new spot.

To visit my application go to: http://apps.facebook.com/have_you_ever/

My Application