Kris Brower

Obama and fake posters

kbrower — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 23:34:31 +0000

So today Michelle Obama came to visit Haverford, and I went to see her speak. After she recapped the course of the campaign she gave a nice speech where she addressed things like supposed elitism.

According to an email from the college no one was allowed to bring any signs, but they did hand out some signs that looked like they were brought from home. Mine said UNITY. I tried to make a makeshift sign from the heart with the ballpoint pen I had in my pocket, but to no avail. I would be interested in knowing the reasoning for not allowing people from bringing their own signs. It seems a little silly.

Netflix “Watch Now” in Ubuntu

kbrower — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 02:35:14 +0000

Netflix now has unlimited online viewing with one catch: you must use Internet Explorer. This leaves the mac and linux users searching for virtualization software. I am an Ubuntu user, and I already had vmware server installed with both a windows xp and vista. Both of these options ‘worked’, but the playback was so choppy the movies were unwatchable. Fortunately I found some other virtualization software and Virtualbox(the first one that I tried), worked smoothly. It also provided better windowed integration into Ubuntu as well a full screen mode that worked better on my dual monitor set up. This should hold me over until there is some proper linux support.

Reddit RSS Feeds

kbrower — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 22:57:05 +0000

I frequently visit reddit.com and am a big fan of the site. While you can append .rss to nearly any page on reddit and get an rss feed, many of the feeds have the same order of the page itself and are not ordered by date. They do offer this feed which shows some of the top links ordered by date, but the feed does not get a large number of stories posted to it. So I put together a simple script that loads reddit every few minutes and if certain requirements are met, it adds it to the feed.

Check out these two feeds:
Reddit stories organized the by date and time they reach 500 points(not including any stories about reddit.com)
Reddit stories organized by the time they reach 100 points

Some 2960 by 1050 backgrounds

kbrower — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 19:23:29 +0000

I just got a extra screen that makes my desktop this size, and there are not very many backgrounds available. Here are a few I created using the Hugin panorama generator and photos I took in australia. I would have a lot more high quality panoramas if I read this.

[Show as slideshow]

Here are some large panoramas as well.

[Show as slideshow]

Playing around with Actionscript 3.0

kbrower — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 01:01:19 +0000

So every once in awhile I have a pang to write a simple flash game. I ended up starting to build the exact same game I made back when Macromedia was its own company. That game was riddled with bugs and I wanted to make something stable. I assumed this would involve loading up vmware and installing the latest version of flash that my school provides, but this time I learned that there was a free alpha linux version of the adobe flex builder! These instructions worked well for installing the flex builder(you need eclipse 3.3).

Once I got everything installed I got to dig into some actionscript 3.0. What an improvement over the previous version of actionscript I used! Everything is object oriented and flex builder allows easy for all of the objects that you might want to use. Type checking is there if you choose to assign types to your variables. Some of the cooler things that I came across were the iterators and the event handling. The only hiccup was trying to import Kongregate’s library(Kongregate is a great way to get feedback and to implement High Scores easily). I had to add this to the “additional compiler arguments” under in the project properties:

-include-libraries “/path/to/KongregateAPI.swc”

Anyway check out the magnetized avoider game I made.

Some things that were helpful in making this really simple game were the moving circle AS3 class, obfuscating high scores to prevent cheaters, and realizing that Event.MOUSE_LEAVE is not infallible and you should check the x and y coordinates of the mouse.

What to do when you lose your cell phone?

kbrower — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 01:00:12 +0000

So you’ve lost your cell phone again, and you didn’t have the foresight to back up all of your phone numbers. What do you do? Well if you are on facebook you may know that people have created thousands of groups requesting numbers after such an event. Now there is an application to end the nonsense. Need numbers allows you to recover your numbers more easily, by allowing you to download your friends numbers in a phone importable CSV. I just finished up the privacy settings today, so your facebook friends that are not really your friends can’t get your number.

Check it out

Amazon Filler Item Finder on TV a few more times

kbrower — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 15:22:36 +0000

I have had a web site be on TV before, but never in the USA. My site was recently on MyFox Philly briefly in a segment about Cyber Monday and saving money online. Here is a link to the page that has the article and the video clip!

Update: It was on TV again! Also Terri’s consumer blog mentioned that my website was in Consumer Report’s Shop smart January ‘08 magazine(page 23).

Wow…down for a month and didn’t even notice

kbrower — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 18:01:59 +0000

So the site has been down since the 8th due to some sort of caching problem, but the problem has now been fixed by updating to the newest version of wordpress.

I wanted to post about google’s cool spreadsheet feature, but I am out of time. Here is an example spreadsheet I made.

Facebook Apps: PHP Invite Code

kbrower — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 12:51:35 +0000

One thing I needed when making my second facebook application is a simple way for users to invite your friends. I found a few examples, but none of them were really what I was looking for. This code uses the ajax multiple friend select box() for inviting friends instead of a long list or a random list of all your friends. You will need facebook.php and facebookapi_php5_restlib.php from facebook_client.tar.gz. If you want to see this invite code in action add the need numbers application. Here is the code:

/////////////////////////////////////////////
// These are the variables you need to change
/////////////////////////////////////////////

// your app api key
$appapikey = ‘changeme’;
// your app secret
$appsecret = ‘changeme’;
// your callback url
$appcallbackurl = ‘http://website.tld/’;
// your facebook url of this page
$inviteurl = ‘http://app.facebook.com/app/invite.php’;

/////////////////////////////////////////////
// This is the beginning of the section which includes and set up the php5 rest lib
/////////////////////////////////////////////

require_once ‘facebook.php’;

$facebook = new Facebook($appapikey, $appsecret);
$user = $facebook->require_login();

//catch the exception that gets thrown if the cookie has an invalid session_key in it
try {
if (!$facebook->api_client->users_isAppAdded()) {
$facebook->redirect($facebook->get_add_url());
}
} catch (Exception $ex) {
//this will clear cookies for your application and redirect them to a login prompt
$facebook->set_user(null, null);
$facebook->redirect($appcallbackurl);
}

/////////////////////////////////////////////
// These are the variables may want to change
/////////////////////////////////////////////
// The title of your Invite message
$title = ‘You have been invited’;
// The body of your Invite message
$text = ‘ invited you to join this app. wants you to join.get_add_url().’” label=”Add it” />’;
// The logo associated with your invite message
$logo = ‘http://website.com/logo.gif’;
// Success message for when invites succeeded
$iworked = ‘Your invitations have been sent’;
// Error message for when all invites have been used
$ierror = ‘You are out of invites, try again tomorrow’;

/////////////////////////////////////////////
// This is the beginning of the section that processes the invites
/////////////////////////////////////////////
if ($_POST[’ids’]) {
// Invite the friends that were selected.
$friends = array();
foreach ($_POST[’ids’] as $value) {
if (count($friends) < 10) {
$friends[count($friends)] = $value;
}
}
$tail = ‘&canvas’;
$url = $facebook->api_client->notifications_sendRequest($friends, $title, $text, $logo, true);

if(!$url){
// If the maximum number of invites has been reached
$facebook->redirect($inviteurl.”?i=1″);
exit;
}else{
$facebook->redirect($url.$tail);
exit;
}
}

if ($_GET[’sent’] == 1) {
// Display a message letting the user know invitations have been successfully sent.
echo $iworked;
}

if($i==”1″){
// Error message for when all invites have been used
echo $ierror;
}

/////////////////////////////////////////////
// This is the beginning of the actual invite form
/////////////////////////////////////////////
echo ‘

Invite some Friends

’;

?>

Why Reddit is better than Digg for normal people submitting articles

kbrower — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 08:14:33 +0000

So Henry Social Network User has written a brilliant article on his blog. The problem is that no one goes to his blog, and no one will read his article. Henry has a plan. He is a regular user of a few social networks and goes out and submits his to the two he uses the most, digg and reddit. With Digg and Reddit his site thrown in with many other bad, useless, and spammy submissions. In both cases there are users scanning the new submissions.

On Digg people dutifully mark the spam as spam and digg up his article. He gets a few diggs, but unfortunately everyone who dugg his article is just a normal person. What he really needed was a digg from a power users that help get most of the submissions upgraded to the front page. Instead of reaching thousands of people, his page is lost below the spam with a few diggs and a few hits. People can sort the new section by total diggs, but there are pages in pages of bot/spammer dugg crap. What he really should have done was waited until he saw one of the top users digging up new submissions and then submitted it.(ugh) The second option is to just submit to reddit, wait til it reaches the front page, then realize he is also on digg’s front page.

When he submits to reddit he has a better shot. The one obstacle is the intial mod up/down. As long as a bot isn’t modding down all new submissions except the bots submissions, chances are he will get enough users to read his article to make sure his site stays in the positives. As long as his site stays above 0 it will appear in the new section. Luckily more people like his article than dislike it and it makes a slow climb. His article only gets upmodded to about 15, but a good number of people see it and he is happy. At least reddit gave Henry a chance.

Neither site does it perfectly but reddit does submissions far better.

In the last few weeks I have submitted a few things to reddit and digg. The submissions to digg got a few diggs at best and very little traffic in every case(less than 5). The submissions to reddit were varied. One submission was upmodded to 15 and recieved about 100 unique visitors. One stayed at 1 and recieved 100 visitors. One was downmodded to 0 but still recieved 15 visitors.

Things that could kill you but probably won’t

kbrower — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 21:07:32 +0000

Golden Poison Frog

“Its alkaloid poison, batrachotoxin, prevents nerves from transmitting impulses, leaving the muscles in an inactive state of contraction. This can lead to heart failure or fibrillation. It also lasts long after the frog has left the area; chickens and dogs have died from contact with a paper towel on which a frog had walked.[citation needed] One wild adult terribilis (meaning, ‘the terrible’) has enough poison to kill up to 100 adult humans, or up to 20,000 mice [1]. However, this poison is lost in captive-bred and raised frogs due to a lack of certain items in its diet, currently unknown, although new research has hinted that a beetle from the family Melyridae may be the key ingredient responsible for the frog’s lethal poison.” (source)

Electric Eel

“Electric eel have three abdominal pairs of organs that produce electricity. They are the Main Organ, the Hunter’s Organ, and the Sachs’ Organ. These organs take up 4/5 of its body. Only the front 1/5 contains the vital organs.[citation needed] These organs are made of electrocytes lined up in series. The electrocytes are lined up so the current flows through them and produces an electrical charge. When the eel locates its prey, the brain sends a signal through the nervous system to the electric cells. This opens the ion channel, allowing positively-charged sodium to flow through, reversing the charges momentarily. By doing that it creates electricity, and fires it at its prey. The electric eel generates its characteristic electrical pulse in a manner similar to a battery, in which stacked plates produce an electrical charge. In the electric eel, some 5,000 to 6,000 stacked electroplaques are capable of producing a shock at up to 500 volts and 1 ampere of current (500 watts). The organs give the electric eel the ability to generate two types of electric organ discharges (EODs), low voltage and high voltage. The shock is deadly for an adult human and a large electric eel can shock a horse to death.” (source)

Alligator

There were 351 known alligator attacks from 1948 - 2005 in Florida of which 16 were fatal. (source)

Cassowary

“The 2004 edition of the Guinness World Records lists the cassowary as the world’s most dangerous bird. Normally cassowaries are very shy but when disturbed can lash out dangerously with their powerful legs. During World War II American and Australian troops stationed in New Guinea were warned to steer clear of the birds. They are capable of inflicting fatal injuries to an adult human. Usually, attacks are the result of provocation. Wounded or cornered birds are particularly dangerous. Cassowaries, deftly using their surroundings to conceal their movements, have been known to out-flank organized groups of human predators. Cassowaries are considered to be one of the most dangerous animals to keep in zoos, based on the frequency and severity of injuries incurred by zookeepers.” (source)

Bears

“There were about 52 recorded deaths due to black bears between 1900 and 2003 and about 50 deaths due to brown bears and about 5 due to polar bears in the same period. The most recent data is the most reliable and complete, but does not necessarily include all of the fatal attacks that have occurred in North America.” (source)

Cone Snail

“The bright colours and patterns of cone snails have led inquisitive people to pick them up and hold them in their hand for a while. This is not a safe thing to do, because the snail may fire its harpoon in self-defense. The “sting” of many of the smaller cone species is no worse than that of a bee or hornet sting, but in the case of a few of the larger tropical species, handling the snail can have tragic consequences. About 30 human deaths have been recorded from cone snail envenomation. One species, the Geography cone, Conus geographus, is also known colloquially as the “cigarette snail,” in the belief that the victim will have only enough time to smoke a cigarette before perishing. Especially in the case of these larger species of cone snail, the harpoon can penetrate gloves or even wetsuits.” (source)

Lightning

“In the United States from 1980 through 1995, a total of 1318 deaths were attributed to lightning, (average: 82 deaths per year {range: 53-100 deaths}). Of the 1318 persons who died, 1125 (85%) were male, and 896 (68%) were aged 15-44 years. The annual death rate from lightning was highest among persons aged 15-19 years (6 deaths per 10,000,000 population; crude rate: 3 per 10,000,000). The greatest number of deaths attributable to lightning occurred in Florida and Texas (145 and 91, respectively), but New Mexico, Arizona, Arkansas, and Mississippi had the highest rates (10.0, 9.0, 9.0, and 9.0, respectively).” (source)

Dendrocnide moroides

“Contact with the leaves or twigs causes the hollow silica-tipped hairs to penetrate the skin. The sting causes a painful stinging sensation which can last for days or even months and the injured area becomes covered with small red spots joining together to form a red, swollen mass. The sting is known to have killed one human, and it can also kill dogs and horses.” (source)

Sharks

From 1990 to 2006 there have been 936 shark attacks worldwide of which 98 have been fatal. That is 58.5 attacks a year and 6.125 fatal attacks a year.(source)

Box Jellyfish

“Chironex fleckeri appear to avoid human beings when they are close to them and so can be said to avoid stinging humans. Their sting is incredibly powerful and extensive stings can be rapidly fatal. The sting produces excruciating pain accompanied by an intense burning sensation (one victim famously described the pain as “like having a bucket of fire poured over you”[citation needed]), and the venom has multiple effects attacking the nervous system, heart and skin at the same time. While an appreciable amount of venom (about ten feet or three metres of tentacle) needs to be delivered in order to have a fatal effect on an adult human, the potently neurotoxic venom is extremely quick to act. Fatalities have been observed as little as four minutes after envenomation, notably quicker than any snake, insect or spider and prompting its description as the world’s deadliest venomous animal. Although an antivenom exists, treating a patient in time can be difficult or impossible.”(source)

For some more information you might want to check out the following links:

Selling old Legos on eBay

kbrower — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 17:12:51 +0000

Updated 11/23: 20 more lego sets posted and many more to come.

So my family have about 80lbs of legos sitting around with all of the manuals so we decided to build them and sell them all on ebay. Check this post for updates. See this flickr page for pictures.

10 Things the USA does better than Australia

kbrower — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 16:30:03 +0000

I thought I would do a follow up post to 9 things Australia does better than the USA. These are a few things I noticed after spending a semester in Australia.

10. No legal Prostitution
9. We don’t have a government sponsored internet filter yet
8. Food(Vegemite, meat pies, sausage rolls, …. yum?)
7. Television(Neighbors…)
6. School uniforms are not required in public K-12 schools
5. The jellyfish here don’t kill you
4. The police need a reason to stop and test you for drugs/alcohol
3. Alcohol is cheap(the cheapest handle of liquor or a case of beer is ~$10 here and ~$30 in Australia)
2. Gambling is not ubiquitous
1. No Water Restrictions(drought is not an excuse)

Website Updates

kbrower — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 15:45:32 +0000

I just updated and fixed a few websites. The buy.com filler item finder was not working, but not it is. The problem was that the location of the datafee changed. This was all I had to do to fix the problem:

Find export.buyservices.com/DataFeed and replace with affiliate.datafeed.buyservices.com

I also updated the ebay sort by total price so that you can select whatever country you like. I am not sure if unicode will work in the search yet though. Anything that can be encoded in a url should work.

Amazon.co.uk Associates Honorable Mention

kbrower — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 03:19:15 +0000

I was excited to find out that a story I submitted to the Amazon.co.uk Associate success story contest won an honorable(honourable) mention. You can read about it on their blog. My site is filleritem.com. I recieved a gift certificate for 50 pounds in my email(the contest said it was going to be 75). I sent them a quick email to see what was up this is how it reads:

I am really excited to have received an Honorable Mention in the contest. I hate to be a bother but both the contest post and the results post mention 75 pounds as opposed to the 50 I received. Can you please clarify.

http://affiliate-blog.amazon.co.uk/2007/06/earn_up_to_250_.html
http://affiliate-blog.amazon.co.uk/2007/07/amazoncouk-asso.html

thanks,
kris

We will see what happens. I feel awkward complaining about not recieving the correct prize.

update: I recieved the full 75 pounds. Thanks!

Get the Best Price on eBay

kbrower — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 14:24:43 +0000

The other day I was trying to buy a usb cable for my new lg env phone. After going to the verizon store and realizing they wanted to charge me $30 I got on ebay. A quick search yielded some good deals, but I wanted the best deal. The problem was that the sellers shipping costs were not factored into the sort by price, so the best deal was not necessarily on the top. I couldn’t find anything other than a firefox extension to do this for me, so I decided to write some quick code using the eBay API to sort by total price(w/ shipping included). The result is the eBay Sort by Total Price Search.

9 Things Australia does better than the USA

kbrower — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 14:27:36 +0000

After spending six months in Australia these are some things I noticed that Australia does that I wish the USA did

9. All alcoholic beverages at the bottle shop(liquor store) are labeled with how many standard drinks it contains
8. You do not need to pay 40k a year to go to the best University in Australia
7. Tips are built in to the price
6. Gun control laws are more strict
5. The ubiquitous beer does not taste like piss
4. They operate on a trade surplus
3. Sweet Chilli Sauce
2. It does not cost money to receive calls/texts on a cell phone
1. They round to the nearest 5 cents(no pennies)

Apple Iphone Store Models

kbrower — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 15:28:57 +0000

I had some downtime and I decided to head over to my local Apple Store in Ardmore, PA. They had about a dozen Iphones sitting out for anyone to play with. The Iphone did not disappoint, but I would not buy it for any more than $200. The interesting part of the experience was that the phone was fully functional. There were pictures and phone numbers that were a mere email away from potential stalkers and pranksters. I am tempted to publish the number of the Iphone I tried out, but I am a paranoid. Imagine the fun that could be had by calling the people in the Apple Store. All I know is the next time I am going to make a long distance call, I am going to the Apple Store.

Create your very own custom Fabric Belt

kbrower — Tue, 08 May 2007 03:15:04 +0000

So my sister is back from school and looking to make some money. Luckily she knows how to make fabric belts and she has a brother(me) that knows how to make websites. So head over to DesignYourBelt.com to have my sister make you a unique custom fabric belt.

How many backlinks does getting Dugg get you?

kbrower — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 04:52:15 +0000

Two days ago Google released a new feature in their webmaster tools which display who is linking to your website. It was interesting to see that two of my posts which were recently on digg.com had several times more backlinks than my home page.

Home Page - 0 diggs - 531 backlinks
Top 100 Duplicate Digg Comments - 1931 diggs - 4478 backlinks
Digg User Comment Statistics - 1180 diggs - 2416 backlinks

From my very limited data set it seems like you get over as twice as many backlinks as there are diggs. I am willing to bet this is on the low side because these posts were very digg specific and not to as much interest to non-digg users. If anyone has any else has a page that got dugg recently(and didn’t have a series-of-tubes-load of backlinks beforehand) please let me know and I will post the data here.