W-Shadow.com

We all know the phrase “raised by wolves” – it’s as old as Rome. And it appears Internet users around the world have worked hard to come up with ever-stranger parental situations (you can’t just let our postmodern culture be outdone by some ancient fairy tale!). So here’s a chart of the results and their [...]

It is customary to laud every new Web 2.0 social networking semantic online service as The Next Big Thing. Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed and friends all get their share of hype and fan fiction. And that’s fine, as some of those sites really have achieved a lot of success and influence.
However, sometimes reviewers get carried [...]

Imagine two Twitter accounts. One has 100 followers, the other 200. Which account is more popular? And yes, this is a trick question.
At first it might seem like the answer is braindead-simple – users with lots followers are obviously more popular (on Twitter) than those who have just a small bunch of people looking at [...]

Behold, today I present you my glorious plan to save the world!
Well, this post is actually my attempt to answer a burning question : “How can we download stuff for free and ensure that musicians, actors, programmers and other people who create stuff still get paid?”. It’s a longish, wistful rant on intellectual property and [...]

Even after two years of blogging, I’m still not rich and famous. Why is that, and how can you avoid the same moderately unpleasant fate? In this post I’ll discuss some blogging mistakes that (still) interfere with the success of this site.
#1 Lack of focus
Pretty much every blogging-related guide begins with “pick a niche”. Having [...]

Most people make a common and incorrect assumption when thinking about targeted advertising. They whine about how the tracking and data mining that would enable it hurts their privacy – and that’s a fair concern, really. But sometimes they go on to remark that “well, it’s not all bad, because targeted ads would definitely be [...]

In this post I’ll discuss some of the failings of existing RSS readers and suggest a few wistful and highly hypothetical improvements. The genre is moderate technobabble, the layot – web2.0 bulletpoint-y. A lot is left to your imagination to allow for personal interpretation (and other things that rhyme with “elation”). Would you like to [...]

If you’ve ever tried to write a program that fetches search results from Google, you’ll no doubt be familiar with the excrutiating annoyances of parsing the results and getting blocked periodically. Run a couple hundred queries in a row and bam! – your script is banned until proven innocent by entering an captcha. Even that [...]

Take a look at this cool homemade keyboard. Plus an accompanying rant about how surely there has to be something interesting in the gap between QWERTY and a brain implant.

ver heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect? Even if the name doesn’t ring any bells you’re probably familiar with the basic idea : stupid people tend to overestimate their competence and underestimate the competence of others. The effect was famously demonstrated in a series of experiments performed by two researchers (Justin Kruger and David Dunning) in [...]

In the last few months I’ve spent about $100 on PC games and about $40 on sci-fi books. In the same period, I’ve spent exactly $0 on research that could actually bring about the future envisioned by those games and books. What about you?
In a recent article, IO9 paints a bleak picture of our future [...]

Browsing popular science/tech news sites often creates an impression that great new advancements and products are just around the corner, but somehow they seem to never actually arrive. Common examples include super-efficient solar cells and cures for cancer or AIDS. If one is to believe the news stories there is a new breakthrough nearly every [...]

If you frequent science and tech-related sites you will have noticed that some topics seem to come up all the time. Genetic engineering, AI, nanotechnology – there’s one breakthrough discovery after another, all promising the next Industrial Revolution very soon indeed, probably within our lifetimes. The revolution(s) may actually arrive – there’s definitely plenty of [...]

I’ve noticed there is a cycle of information creation and information consumption. When I run out of ideas I can’t simply sit there and wait for some bright thought to pop into my head – ex nihilo nihil fit. I start going on walkabouts, playing with things and looking for interesting material online. Receiving new [...]

Lets talk about that plugin-related code you have to put in your theme files when you want to add something nifty to your blog, like a “Related posts” feature or AdSense ads. It occurs to me that most plugin authors have been handling this the same way – you get a custom function that you [...]

After reading a recent article about how the Internet could become alive I started wondering what it would be like if it actually did and wrote down some of my musings. Note that this is more of an outline than an actual article.
(Internet map image via Wikipedia)

Network Subconscious
We, as humans, are not consciously [...]

Noticed a piece of anticopyright propaganda on Digg. Another simplistic visual aide saying that (online) piracy is not the same as theft. So I decided to make my own, a bit more accurate version.

In some FPS games the players view will move slightly from side to side (or up and down) when walking or running. This is known as “camera shake” or “headbob”, a so-called “feature” that is supposed to add realism to the game. The most extreme example that I’ve seen is in S.T.A.L.K.E.R : Shadow of [...]

I don’t have a consistent stance on copyright and intellectual property – I suspect most people don’t. We just make do with shaky beliefs and half-assed ideals. So I decided to finally think it through and come up with some sort of philosophical basis on this issue. Below is the the resulting epic rant. If [...]

Yes, I’m talking about backlinks, the spawn of evil. Everybody craves them, craves the promise of power, wealth and getting laid that links offer. And this craving is both abhorrent to and blessed by the mischievous higher powers, a dangerous path leading into the darkness. Outrageous!
Here’s further proof that links are the cause of suffering [...]

What will search engine optimization be like 30 years from now? How will the SE algorithms have evolved in this huge – from the technological perspective – time period? Will every SEO have a solar powered flying car, or will they be reduced to working at algae farms?

Google has done it again. Just today, I discovered they have banned a specific keyword Google Trends because it was being used to estimate search volume of other keywords. This makes me, as the Cheshire cat would say, vaguely discombobulated, and willing to consider some far-fetched conspiracy theories.

And now, for something completely different! All of my programming projects are currently in various stages of R&D, and I’ve got no scripts or algorithms to show you today. Fortunately I have other interests, too, like visual art and magic So here are some amateurish photos I’ve taken.

Touchscreens definitely have their place in the so-called modern consumer electronics market, but some people just take it too far. A recent article predicted that soon the now-ubiquitous keyboard & mouse combination would be totally extinct. All computers would come equipped with huge (50 inches!) touchscreens that would double as virtual keyboards, and you’d do all the point-and-click stuff with your fingers. Now I’m annoyed by these ridiculous predictions, so I’m going to devote a blog post (this one) to why I think they are wrong.

I read a very interesting post today. It tries to prove that science – as opposed to religion – is not faith-based. The story also got on Digg frontpage and was heavily discussed there. One comment thread in particular caught my attention, and it gave me some ideas that I feel I should write down [...]

It seems logical that mutual friendship could have been produced by evolution – the I help you, you help me, contract-style relationship can be seen as beneficial even from the selfish PoV or evolution. What caught me by surprise was the idea that true friendship – perseverant, everlasting despite circumstances – is also a product of survival of the fittest. This post talks about some interesting ideas in CFAI.

A few days ago I saw an IRC quote that went basically like this :
When voice control interfaces finally go mainstream, the very first thing they need to do is make “Oh fuck!!!” immediately abort and undo the latest command or task.
Sounds fun. Below is my lame attempt to produce some ideas along the [...]

Randall Munroe, of XKCD fame, just posted a very interesting blag entry (sic) about an interesting way to ensure that IRC discussion remain unique and thoughtful. The idea itself is very simple, and I sure did get the slightly annoying feeling of “damn-this-is-obvious” when reading the post. The trick is that, as far as I [...]

A short and whimsical list of weird ways to lose some weight (mostly aimed at guys). It’s a semi-serious parody of the ubiquitous Top X lists.

I just found out about the Wikipedia “scandal” recently (by reading a webcomic), and somehow my thoughts turned immediately to how this could be exploited. Monetary rewards are unlikely, but one could get a good bit of publicity/backlinks… if they found a way to attract the attention of the same people who voted the aforementioned “scandal” to the frontpage of Digg. Here are some ideas on how to do just that.