Louis Florit

Hackers - Grand Central Station by Guy Pratt

Louis Florit — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 05:40:00 -0000

imeem one of the fastest growing social networks in February 2007

Louis Florit — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 19:57:52 -0000

Hitwise released its February 2007 rankings for the social networks category.

"Buzznet and iMeem showed the fastest growth within the category, with visits increasing 148.4% and 145.7% respectively from January to February 2007."

It definitely seems like the social networks idea has plenty of growth left in it, with MySpace leading the pack. It'll be interesting to see how this pans out as these systems mature.

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

Louis Florit — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 21:50:37 -0000

"... Ender had to remind himself that Graff was only acting like a friend, that everything he did was a lie or a cheat calculated to turn Ender into an efficient fighting machine. I'll become exactly the tool you want me to be, said Ender silently, but at least I won't be fooled into it. I'll do it because I choose to, not because you tricked me, you sly bastard."

If you've ever been pushed to your limits, you can identify with Ender in this book. Great read, light on the science fiction and much more angled on the psychological.

Spinning Cube

Louis Florit — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 02:32:17 -0000

PhotoRec: Recover your lost digital files and Gmail: keeping your mail archive forever

Louis Florit — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 02:00:21 -0000

Hey there, wanted to share a positive experience I had back in April of 2006, and once again today. Last year my family went out on a boat and we took a pile of pics with the digital camera. When we got home, we plugged in the memory stick (Sony) and none of the files showed up with exception of a broken movie clip.

I was thinking that the images were probably still there, just that the file table got wrecked somehow, and neither the Wndows nor Mac oses could show the files. My first thought was to hook up the card into my Linux box, image the 'drive' and then somehow sift through the bits to find the pics.

Then I thought that I can't be the first dipstick to run into this problem. I googled a bit and found a freeware app called 'PhotoRec', which also comes with 'TestDisk'. Console based app (not pretty), but it works real good. It has detection for a pile of file types and will recover all the files it finds as it bitcrawls the media. Has a high success rate because there is little or no fragmentation on removable media cards. I recovered all 28 pics and the 5mb movie clip as well.

Today, photos and video were accidentally deleted from the memory stick before they were copied to disk. I forgot the name of the app, but remembered I wrote a positive note to all my friends about the app; gmail email archive to the rescue; I searched for a few tries before I found my old email to my friends and the mailing list but got it eventually. After downloading the software again, I recovered a 41MB video along with tons of other pictures before cancelling it.

If you ever get stuck like this, its an alternative to try. PhotoRec
is compiled for Win (dos through XP), Linux and MacOS, and there is
also source available. I ran the Win version.

PhotoRec Website

Oh, and having your old email from a year, or several years back avaialable is great stuff. I definitely see gmail's 'search everything' idea at work here.

Don't Stop The Carnival by Herman Wouk

Louis Florit — Sun, 11 Feb 2007 03:46:44 -0000

I read this book back in the Spring of 2006, on one of my last trips with my previous job working for NOAA/AOML.

It's a fictional story about a New Yorker who goes to the carribean for a vacation and immediately falls in love with the place, to the point of selling his business in New York and buying a hotel on the island, and the challenges of running this hotel.

If you ever have someone that's got Island Fever and wants to move to the carribean, give them this book and make sure they read it; it will set their expectations regarding 'living in paradise'. The situations in it are hilarious, but definitely possible. The book is said to be set on a fictional island, but as it turns out, it's really based off the U.S. Virgin Island of St. Croix (which I happened to work on quite a few occasions during my 4 years with NOAA/AOML, working on the Salt River CREWS station).

Entertaining read! Take it on if you're feeling tropical.

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcom Gladwell

Louis Florit — Sat, 27 Jan 2007 00:15:16 -0000

This book was recommended to me quite a few times since I went to business school, primarily focused on the marketing theory that the book proposes. I read it on my trip out to California the first week of 2007. It reads well, and has good concrete examples and interpretations of the points the author is trying to get across.

The Tipping Point proposes that most social phenomena follow a pattern that causes things that are at one point uncommon to 'tip' and spread in a very short amount of time. Similarities are made between how shoe fashion and communicable diseases such as AIDS are similar in the way they spread within the population. It goes further and identifies the few individual types that have the greatest influence in starting and maintaining social epidemics: Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen.

Connectors are people that know people. They would be able to tell you who you should talk to when you mention a concern or issue you may have.

Mavens are domain experts - they know *everything* about a product: prices, features, pros and cons. These are the people that you would ask to find out what kind of computer to get, what shoes to wear, and much more.

Salesmen have the ability to influence your decision making process - not necesarily make you buy something, but convince you to adopt new behaviors.

These roles are all tied together through the following concepts: The Law of the Few, Stickiness, The Power of Context, The magic number 150, and the New Product Cycle. For brevity, I will discuss the ones that I thought were most relevant.

The Law of the Few points out that the key to social epidemics are really just a few critical people, specifically those tied to the roles above. If you have the ability to nudge these key people, you will be able to achieve the tipping point, after which its all automatic.

Stickiness is another concept that just makes sense. The effectiveness of a social epidemic spreading is directly related to how sticky the message is; if the concept or idea doesn't last a sufficient time for it to jump to other individuals, the epidemic effect is short circuited and the phenomena does not tip into the population at large.

Context is a difficult concept to understand for most individuals. This is why I think the discussion on the power of context may have been the most enlightening for me. The author points out several circumstances (or contexts) where the individual's behaviour is drastically different when operating within one context vs. a different context; one of the examples in the book is how New York city violent crime rate was reduced through managing simple crimes such as graffiti or fining building owners for broken windows. Because the environment doesn't look abandoned or lawless, the individuals that previously would be inclined to commit violent crimes would not do so.

Towards the end of the book it discusses The Tipping Point in a more modern context like the internet and email. This discussion is more surprising as he counters that people interacting through the computer networks are more isolated than when sharing in the same physical space.

To summarize, what 'The Tipping Point' proposes, in the end, is that by being aware of these individuals and these key concepts, you can better spread your message in an organic manner, exploiting the exponential effects. This is a very powerful concept.

Here's my takeaway: the concepts are sound and the author has put in the research to back his claims. If you have no previous marketing background, this book can give you a workable theory to start from.

I would definitely recommend this as an interesting read.

Updates to playlist: Favorite Videos

Louis Florit — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 23:31:56 -0000

MissionPeak-Cows

Louis Florit — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 09:11:19 -0000

Updates to playlist: Misc

Louis Florit — Sun, 07 Jan 2007 09:05:12 -0000