azeem's blog

Why i hate orkut

2008-07-19T18:51:00.002+05:30

I donno what made them think that it would be a great idea to let people use non alphanumeric characters in First and Last Names, not to mention allowing it to be changed anytime.. (No offense, Aneesh!!)

I'am Creative, Astute and Original

2008-07-01T12:42:00.006+05:30

Atleast, thats what SignalPatterns say. If you are patient enough to go through a 100 questions about yourself, you can generate your own personailty and music pattern analysis at SignalPatterns. Iam not sure how correct my analysis could be because no matter how hard i try, i always tend to know what aspect of my character a question is probably related to and so i think i bend the results to a desired one.

Rethinking FriendFeed UI

2008-07-01T12:07:00.004+05:30

Checking Google Reader last night after hanging around with FriendFeed for sometime sparked introspection of my ideas about the FriendFeed UI. The conventional stack by recentness approach was clear in FriendFeed, though in its fast pace it would seem a little unclear at first thought. Yuvi's opinion that FF deliberately chose to have such a UI seemed significant now, it is logical and hence people are more comfortable with it. Anything more complex would only disfigure the beauty of it. Recently active entries bubble up right to the top because FF considers discussions to be an integral part of an entry so much that it can in fact be considered as part of the content, in this context a new comment obviously means something new, an update, and hence it is but logical to place it on top as if it was a new entry.

What FF really needs is something to cope with the noise, services like NoiseRiver looks quite promising, in this direction.

Follow me on FriendFeed here.

Sum Fun

2008-06-26T20:41:00.011+05:30

Travelling by Mass Transit on road is something that i enjoy. Its a time when you leave yourself purely to the act of comprehending your senses, conjuring up newer trains of thought, putting all your energy into thought. Put in a better way, its called the process of Ideating (I just love those IBM ads).

Recently i came up with a fun, geeky way of having fun while travelling on road. Keep on summing digits of vehicle licence plate numbers till you get a single digit and do it in the shortest time possible, say you have 7043 then 7+0+4+3=14 & 1+4=5. And i found a really cool property that lets you do this fast, if you can make Nines then you can ignore them. Say you have the 951 then ignore nine and the sum is 5+1=6 which is same as 9+5+1=15 & 1+5=6, similarly 9496 is 4+6=10 & 1+0=1, see! its faster. You don't always have to have a nine in the number, you can shift numbers to near nine digits or sum smaller digits to make nine and then ignore it. Say you have 8245 then shift 1 from 2 to 8 to make it 9, 4+5=9 so the only thing left is 1 so the sum is 1. You might have already figured out why this is so, but still here is why : summing any single digit to 9 gives you a number from 10 through 18, in these numbers the second digit is one less than the number you added to nine and the first digit is one so the sum of the this number would give the original number itself, say 5 : 9+5=14 & 1+4=5, 7 : 9+7=16 & 1+6=7. It is not necessary to say that you can ignore zeros too. So how do we do 55293? 5+5=>1, 2+3=>5, 1+5=>6.

Got any more tricks? just comment!

rank + decay = my FriendFeed

2008-06-24T17:00:00.002+05:30

I don't use FriendFeed very actively, its home page drives me crazy at times. The items whoosh past the page really fast. A great deal of the active users who contribute interesting content are half way round the earth from where i live, which means most of the interesting stuff whoosh past when I'm asleep. And looking beyond Page1 of everything has always been a painful thought to me.

FriendFeed has a neat way to keep actively discussed items within the first pages, it pushes recently active items towards the top of the page. But what i want is it to be more slower so that i can spend time enjoying and discussing the item and not miss all the cool stuff. On a feed aggregator like Google Reader the items would pile up so that i can take all the time i want and do all the thinking i want and finally just mark it read.

A possible way of doing FriendFeed this way would be to use a sort of ranking that decays. Posts are ranked by their points. Each post would receive points based on several factors like number of comments, number of likes, number of comments and likes by friends, number of comments and likes by friends who have high like compatibility with user, semantic filtering etcetera. So now the items are in an order where items on the top are the ones that is hot and is interesting to the user. The next addition is decay, it is the product of amount of idle time and a decay factor. The decay is subtracted from the total points gained in the previous procedure so that an entry would slowly fall out unless there is some activity. Decay factor is a value that depends on the aggregate activity on an item, it would be more for a newer entry and less for an item which has a lot of comments and likes, this ensures that newer entries that are less discussed fall out faster than the more discussed ones. Every new entry would start with a point greater than the rank 1 entry, so that every new item is sure to appear on the top and in the front page just long enough for people to evaluate and start discussing it.

I am not a regular user of FriendFeed, nor do i have enough understanding of how FriendFeed works to defend this system. These are just some of the insomniac stuff that i think up late into the night.

azeem's blog

2008-06-23T19:33:00.003+05:30

This is not my first plunge into blogging. And I've learned a lot from my past attempts. I don't want to start defining what my blog is about, i would rather just let it be the way it ends up. I'm not sure if this would ever gain readership beyond myself and perhaps a friend or two, so lets just call it an experiment. So i better get the posts moving out and hopefully, bring out enjoyable stuff.

My Feeds

2008-01-01T12:00:00.000+05:30