I think I realized something today concerning workplace culture. The birthday paradox is a cool mathematical phenomenon. If you take a group of people, the chances that there are two people that share the same birthday is much higher than one would expect. Here’s the Wikipedia article explaining the birthday paradox. For example, in a [...]
November 27th, 2010
Sports Video Game Criticism
A response to Ian Bogost talk in Vienna: http://www.arimba.at/frog/1 Ian, I had trouble loading some of the video (first few minutes played with some audio issues, then it went black). I think the fact “Kids who play sports games are more likely to play sports” could be written “Kids who play sports are more likely to [...]
August 19th, 2010
Wired’s Article on the “Web is Dead”
I had to concur with Wired’s article about the web dying posted a couple of days ago. After reading “both sides” as well as some of the comments, I wanted to offer my brief thoughts regarding the web, open standards, and the paradigm shift to mobile. While I think HTML is and has always been a markup that [...]
April 29th, 2010
My opinion on Steve Job’s Adobe Attack
So since some people have asked me about Steve Job’s letter against Flash, this is what I think. I have always said that Apple doesn’t want to risk buggy system and battery life (valid reasons. and I think Apple has a right to refuse Flash until Adobe fixes problems and proves Flash Lite can work [...]
March 19th, 2010
My newest game: PassTheGun.com
It’s been out a few weeks already, but I thought I would make a blog post about it. Pass the Gun is my latest game. The entire game is played on Twitter. Users shoot and/or pass a virtual “gun” to friends on twitter. Users can earn virtual money by pulling the trigger on the gun [...]
March 4th, 2010
Faster Way to Get a Random Row MySQL
So doing order by RAND() limit 0,1 is pretty slow for big tables. So I came up with the following. Basically it uses the ID column to find a random id number between the lowest id in the table (usually it will be 1 since that’s where auto increment start; however, I lots of times [...]