ARCHIVE February, 2010

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Jackpot Rewards Pays

April 14, 2008

A few weeks ago I mentioned that I had joined Jackpot Rewards, the online lottery and cash-back shopping site with a weekly $1 million sweepstakes. It’s still the best odds anywhere for winning a million dollars, and you get extra tickets when any of your friends have two matching numbers in the jackpot drawing that [...]

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FeedBurner Stops Reporting Reach

April 14, 2008

It looks like FeedBurner’s API has moved in with Google at Google Code. Without an e-mail or a blog post, they made a few changes that broke W3Counter’s slurping of feed stats. Notably, they are no longer reporting the “reach” metric for some feeds, and it’s disappeared from the API reference… perhaps it was harder [...]

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Picking a Graduate Program

April 14, 2008

As of this week, I’ve been accepted to masters programs to study computer science at University of Pennsylvania, University of Delaware, Lehigh University and Drexel University. Now I have to decide where I want to go.

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My First Ray Tracer

April 13, 2008

Quite tangential to everything else I’ve been doing recently, I wrote my first ray tracer in C++ today. It can render arbitrary triangle meshes defined in SMF format. Next weekend I’ll teach myself shading.

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Tagging Large Post Archives Automatically

April 11, 2008

First, I wrote a PHP class for passing content to Open Calais and getting back tags. Then, a WordPress plugin for tagging posts as you write them. Now, taking it one step further again, here’s a plugin for automatic tagging of your post archives.
I tried tagging for a while last year, but wasn’t consistent in [...]

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WP Calais Auto Tagger: Automatic Tag Suggestion For Your Posts

April 10, 2008

I just completed the WP Calais Auto Tagger plugin, the obvious first use of my Open Calais Tags class. It adds a tag suggestion box to your WordPress post writing screen which suggests tags based on your post content using the Open Calais API. The suggestions can be added to the post’s tag list with [...]

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Blog Stats Plugin for WordPress

April 9, 2008

In addition to a visual overhaul, WordPress 2.5 added several new plugin hooks, including a widgetized dashboard. The new Blog Stats Plugin for WordPress adds blog stats to the dashboard, and makes integrating the tracking code into a theme simple.
It’s also the first use of W3Counter’s “visitor labeling” I previewed in October (spooky visitor [...]

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Auto-Tagging Content with Open Calais

April 7, 2008

Calais is a free web service from Clearforest, a Reuters company, that can perform semantic analysis on any English text. It uses natural language processing to extract concepts and relationships from the text. It’s been around for a few months, but there’s been very little developer activity around it, and even fewer completed applications using [...]

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W3Counter Updated Thanks to CNET

April 3, 2008

Some time this morning someone submitted W3Counter’s Global Stats report to Digg with a headline about the increase in Linux market share. The story crossed the threshold for a front page listing but was auto-buried… perhaps because that page has already been on the front page at least 4 times this year.
A CNET blogger wrote [...]