Cool Programming

Stats Lie

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 20:22:04 GMT

Ninety percents of stats are simply used to justify untruths. Especially when you don't have a verifiable source for them. For example, my own first sentence. Where does that come from? I made it up. But even stats that do have a source are likely to be misused or miscommunicated.

On one project, we were using the Clearspring widget platform. Not only was our widget horrible, but the Clearspring wrapper was mostly broken as well. I knew this widget wasn't gonna fly, but the powers that be insisted otherwise. We had a deadline and we went live with the bad widget. We agreed to revisit the widget post launch. A few months after the launch, we reviewed the adoption of the widget. The manager in charge of the Clearspring integration said we had millions of placements and we should keep the widget as-is. Millions? Where? I could only find one or two. I told him I didn't believe him. He gave me the password to the Clearspring dashboard so that I could double check the data. I reviewed the data and noticed that almost every single placement had occured on our own website or internal development servers. Clearspring was counting our previews of the widget as placements. In actual fact, we only had a few placements. I explained this to the manager and he didn't believe me. He said he would review the stats himself and get back to me. I never heard from again. The project was basically dead because the manager had stats indicating we were getting adoption, when we weren't.

The lesson. Doubt everything involving stats. It's probably untrue. At least 50% of the time.

Behavioral Algorithms

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 03:50:53 GMT

Honestly, I'm fed up with behavioral algorithms. It's stupid. It's in every game you video or online game play. Lately, I'm playing NASCAR Cart for Wii. If I lose twice in a row, the third race is a cake and they actually slow down at the end of the race to let you feel good about yourself. What is the point of putting the game on the most difficult setting, if they are gonna flub the 3rd race and let you win.

It's the same in my NASCAR 2009 for PS/2. If you are losing, the lead cars slow down to let you catch up. Even on the hardest settings. It's also true of online (free) Texas Holdem Poker. When I try a new poker room, I get 4 of a kind, straights and flushes every few hands. But after playing for awhile, I can't get any of them. I worked for a gaming company and I couldn't believe it when they told me to implement this feature.

Honestly, I hate this shit. I know why they do it. They want you do feel good about yourself. If you lost every game, then you'd likely think the game sucked. I personally cannot stand winning every 2nd or 3rd NASCAR race on these stupid games. Give me something challenging. This is stupid.

mailto Link Handlers

Sun, 05 Apr 2009 15:58:49 GMT

On Talk-Sports.com, the users quite often report that their mailto links handlers are not working. This is most comon with Mac users, but it also happens to Windows users. This article will summarize the solutions that I've provided to users who complain that mailto links are not working on their Mac or Windows computer.

Gmail on Macs and Windows

Download the Gmail notifier to enable mailto link with Gmail on both Macs and Windows.

We haven't tested which Web browsers these work for, but we assume they work for the three major browsers; Internet Explorer, Safari and Firefox.

Yahoo! Mail on Firefox

This works on Firefox 3 and later.

Go to Tools | Options from the menu bar.
Go to Applications tab.
In the Search textbox type 'mailto' (no quotes).
Change Action column to Use Yahoo! Mail.
Click OK.

Credit to http://www.mydigitallife.info/2008/07/02/how-to-set-yahoo-mail-as-default-mailto-client-in-firefox-3/

Yahoo! Mail on Safari

We recomend installing Firefox and following the instructions for Yahoo! Mail on Firefox above.

Hotmail on Windows

Download and run the Register Hotmail with Default Programs utility.

http://www.winhelponline.com/articles/224/1/Register-Windows-Live-Hotmail-with-the-Default-Programs-tool-in-Windows-Vista.html

Gmail on Greasemonkey and Firefox

Download the mailto to Gmail handler Greasemonkey script.

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/595

You will also need to installed Greasemonkey for Firefox.

http://www.greasespot.net/

Help us!

Please send us any further solutions that you discover (randy@kbcafe.com).