wekadesign

Jeff Atwood takes an interesting look at the history of changes to wiki pages and the balance between opinion and fact. The larger wikis (e.g. Wikipedia) have a huge amount of data around page edits and Jeff’s article also highlights an IBM study on how the more popular Wikipedia content evolves over time.

There’s also a comment about one of my favourite subjects – reading too much into statistics. Apparently Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia co-founder) looked into who was responsible for most of the articles changes and found that 0.7% of users were responsible for over 50% of all edits. But an “edit” may be a spelling correction rather than adding content or altering the facts or meaning in an article. As it turns out, the data points to these hyper-active users doing just that – cleaning up after everyone else.

Kisimi uses a basic string comparison function called simple_text() to show the relative difference between two versions of a page. We could also use the Levenshtein function which gives the minimum changes to go from string A to sting B, but that doesn’t always make much sense for larger content changes. If someone sees that two versions are 96% the same then it’s obvious they’re much the same.

The NYTimes has an interesting article about the cost of txt messages that I’m sure most of us have suspected in the past.
Not only is it extremely cheap for a mobile provider to run a txt message service, the data uses a portion of the transmission that gets sent anyway.
A scientist at the University of Leicester recently published some calculations that show txt messaging is a number of times more expensive than sending data to the Hubble space telescope.
Anyone smell a price-fixing investigation?

I’d like to say that I could make a title like “did you know . . .?” into a series of short articles but I’m not that knowledgeable or interesting. But one thing I did discover today was that Windows can mount external USB drives into folders and not just drive letters.

We have a long standing problem in that normal users cannot change the drive letters that Windows XP assigns to memory sticks/thumb drives/external hard drives. Not a biggie but in some cases XP decides to mount the drive using the same letter as a network drive. Your thumb drive is detected and mounted OK but can’t be used. Bugger. It seems that XP ‘user-space’ doesn’t talk with XP ’storage-space’ about who gets what.

To get around this we remotely use Disk Manager to change the drive letter. Windows ‘remembers’ the drive letter is associated with the USB device’s unique ID and in the future will keep using the same letter. Again, not a biggie and for the odd user in 10,000 a simple fix.

But with the proliferation of USB storage for anything and everything, the fight of the USB device versus the network drive for drive letters may be a problem for some. Enter the mounting of USB storage to NTFS folders! Users can create a folder on their local machine with a suitable name like, ‘My Pimptastic Red USB Stick – 2GB‘ and mount the device in that folder. No drive letters, no XP tripping over itself and a near infinite number of options.

Now who wants to write a tool that allows users to do that? You’d have my vote in any election.

Update – this old problem is resolved in Windows XP SP3. It knows to check your network mappings if you insert a USB drive when logged in.

Installing the free VMware Server is a common but slightly tricky process on some newer Linux systems. Having had to go through it again recently I thought I’d write some of it down. Of course if you are using Ubuntu 7.10 then the simple option is to enable the Canonical Partner repository and just use Synaptic to select and install VMware Server.

For the others in the audience that are installing on Ubuntu 8.04 or another Linux system that doesn’t have packages, you should have a working VMware Server install with web interface and a client console by the bottom of the page. Read more »

Often one of the more difficult things in running a help desk is measuring performance. It’s right up there with trying to find talented staff, but often doesn’t become an issue until everything else is in place.

If you’re part of a reasonably sized company, no doubt your employee reviews contain some sort of performance measurement, so everyone gets judged and maybe even rewarded. In some parts of the business, it’s fairly easy to measure an employee’s work e.g. marketing could get rated on new customers and the sales team by how many extra widgets you sold this month.

As a team offering a service, rather than a product, to their customers, the help desk team often solely gets scored on the number of phone calls or tickets they receive or close. Pretty soon these measurements will create behaviours among your staff trying to increase their performance in these metrics. Team members will go for the high volumes of the easy fixes, or calls that can get handed on to 2nd or 3rd level areas, to pump up their stats. Read more »

Read/Write Web has a list of . . . lists. All containing information about Web2.0 sites springing up like daisies around the internet.

What’s a Web2.0 site you ask? It’s one of those good-looking, fancy acting websites you’ve probably seen around. The developer of these sites use more acronyms than before, like AJAX, JSON, etc that allow users to interact in ways they couldn’t a couple of years ago. Some of these sites are so cool they drop vowels from their names – Flickr and HappyCodr are a couple of examples.

Overall they still need content and community but some of them are just beautiful to look at and fun to play with.

Friends last Saturday night started talking about how they were using Google AdWords to help drive traffic to their old-school business websites. We’re talking a locksmith and a moving company here – not a web savvy SEO or Web 2.0 developer in site!

Discussion turned to how much they were each spending on their AdWords campaigns and both were on the low side, in fact the same amount, $30. Now that is a small amount but probably typical of those dipping their toes into web marketing for the first time. It would be interesting to see some figures from Google about what the average spend was compared to site rankings. The internet search and advertising giant didn’t get US$11 billion by ignoring their customers.

Some of the comments at the dinner table also echoed the feelings I have toward established media outlets, especialy those in the print business. The locksmith had run ads in large newspapers over the last few years but recently had been coming up dry on leads from their not inconsiderable spending.

As trade across the internet becomes more accepted and traditional business embraces the new advertising services the old media methods will struggle and die. No one wants to spend an hour searching through the classifieds when they can run a global search or visit an online auction site and find and purchase what they want within minutes.

Sellers can target a certain audience easily and then get a range of metrics on how many viewed their ad and then followed through. Further marketing can then be narrowed again to increase the quality of the investment. Well targeted ads benefit both sides, buyers see things they’re interested in and sellers and more likely to see a purchase.

So if you’ve been thinking about doing some business on the web, now is a good time to invest some time and maybe a little money. You’ll be pleasantly surprised.

I’d been given the task of setting up two Windows print servers with a touch over 300 print queues. The queues would be split between the two servers, with one holding all the even numbered queues (they’re named things like CityA094 or CityB031) and the other the odd names.

Well, it gets rather boring doing this via the GUI. The process of creating the TCP/IP ports, then the queues and entering the location information takes a fair number of clicks and typing. With only the queue name, location and description changing between each, it’s a good task for a script.

You need three VBS files that already exist on a Windows XP system, a target server and a logon to that server. The three VBS files are prncnfg.vbs, prnmngr.vbs and prnport.vbs which should be in your (windows root)\system32 folder.

Then use the following in a batch script to call them to do the work. It’ll create the port (using RAW mode), then the queue and then configure the queue.

WordPress really doesn’t like the script syntax and is getting a little confused so here it is in a text file: AddPrinter Script.

Note that I’m only using the Generic/Text driver for all queues, so the
usefulness may vary if you’ve got lots of different models.

I’ve been using the Firefox browser addon called FireBug for a while now and am amazed at how helpful it is. If you’re a web developer, and especially if you use JavaScript and AJAX methods, you should be using it.

For example, while developing I like to add in timers to PHP based pages to show how long things are taking. This way if a SQL statement needs some fine-tuning or a change slows things down I can see it happen. FireBug extends this to the entire page and the HTTP traffic. Here’s what happens when I load a page that has a few JavaScript calls, small images and a single CSS link in it,

Straight away it’s obvious what’s taking up the bulk of the time – those two library calls. Once I take those out of the equation the load time drops to under a second. And through all this the PHP timer function only shows me how long the server-side work is taking.

With FireBug I know who (in a geeky code way) is doing what and with who and I can act on it. Now that’s helpful.

Last night the Auckland region was rocked by three earthquakes which did little or no damage. They were the biggest quakes in close to 40 years in a normally stable area. All three hit after the evening TV news had aired so people were looking for news on what happened. Where did they turn to, why the Web of course.

Only a few years ago, a news event like this would have gone largely ignored by what passed as online news agencies. Last night however, the NZ Herald (large daily paper) had a story on their site within 15min and the local GeoNet site listing recent earthquakes was unavailable due to high traffic volumes.

By this morning interest in the story will have waned and the traditional paper and TV media will not be seeing that many more sales or viewers than normal. You can bet though that hits on web news sites last night went through the roof and those inconspicuous page ads started paying good money.

Those media agencies that have been slow on the uptake of what their audience wants and where they are now going for their information, need to move now before they get left behind for good.