What are people searching for? #
On the navigation bar of my pages, I have a search box for searching all of my pages. It's labeled “Search site:”. The implementation uses Google's Custom Search Engines. Google recently added a statistics page that tells me how many people use the search box each day and what the most popular queries are. Knowing these queries helps me improve the site. I look at the results of each query and determine if I'm missing information that people are looking for.
What are the most popular queries?
myspace.com– 207www.myspace.com— 203http://youring.net– 40
Why would people search for these things on my site? I don't know, but I'm pretty sure it's spam! Especially suspicious is the two variants of myspace having almost the same count. It's as if the spam bot ran one search and then the other. Blogspot doesn't make its logs available to users, so I can't easily see what's going on here. Are the queries from the same IP address? What's the user agent? I don't know.
If your blog has been hit by this extremely weird form of spam, and you have server logs that let you investigate, please let me know what you find!
Weekend project: XEmacs to Emacs #
First, a bit of history.
I started using GNU Emacs in 1990. The latest version at the time was version 18. It had almost no support for menus, the mouse, fonts, colors, dialog boxes, drag & drop, etc. It was basically a text-only application. In these respects it was a step back from the editors I had been using in DOS, Windows, Mac, and OS/2. However, Emacs was what people used at school, and I needed to use it for some of my classes, so I learned it. I found that it was quite powerful, and I learned how to customize it to match my needs better. One of the things I liked best was automatic indentation. When you press Tab it will indent the line correctly based on what you're typing now and what you had typed earlier in the file. I want this on every line. Most of my classmates press Return and then Tab every line. I'm too lazy for that, so I changed Return to do the indentation (for Emacs users among you: (global-set-key "\r" 'reindent-then-newline-and-indent) does the trick). So now whenever I typed normally, it would automatically indent each line properly. A simple change but it made a big difference, and it encouraged me to learn more about Emacs customization.
I was still annoyed by the lack of colors, though. Colors in particular are quite useful when programming, because they can be used to highlight langauge constructs (keywords, punctuation, identifiers, expressions, definitions, etc.). It makes programs easier to read, and you can quickly spot errors as you type them because they show up in the wrong color. My classmates who had never used non-Unix editors had no idea what they were missing, but I did, and I kept looking for a way to have colors in Emacs. It was 1990, after all, six years after the introduction of Macintosh. Why should I be stuck in a black-and-white text-only world with only a single font? Ugh!
Well, Emacs 18 had come out in 1986. The Mac didn't even have color back then (but at least it had multiple fonts, which could have served the same purpose). Where was Emacs 19, I wondered, and would it have the features I wanted? As I looked around I found something intriguing: a version of Emacs called Epoch, maintained by someone named Marc Andreesen. I tried it out and I loved it. It had colors and fonts and supported multiple windows (what a concept!). I finally had a version of Emacs that gave me what I had been looking for. (Side note: Marc went on to write Mosaic, and then started a company called Netscape.)
Meanwhile, a few people were trying to work on Emacs 19, but work was apparently going very slowly, and a company named Lucid had been working on their own version of Emacs 19, called Lucid Emacs 19. Lucid's version progressed much faster than GNU Emacs 19 (thanks to Lucid's uber-hacker, Jamie Zawinski), and this was the beginning of the big split between Emacs and XEmacs. Around 1992 or 1993 I switched from Epoch to Lucid Emacs 19, and it was everything I wanted out of an Emacs system. When GNU Emacs 19 came out, I tried it, but it was missing so much. The menubar didn't match the standard Mac/Windows menubar, the scrollbar acted weird, you couldn't use multiple fonts, and lots of things in the UI seemed wrong to me. My impression was that GNU Emacs 19 had a UI designed for long-time Emacs users, and Lucid Emacs 19 was designed for the rest of us (DOS, Windows, Mac users). I stuck with Lucid Emacs, which later became XEmacs. (Side note: Jamie went on to a company called Netscape.)
While in school I found plenty of ways to procrastinate, and one of them was learning to customize my environment instead of working on my class project. I spent some time trying out and customizing window managers (twm, ctwm, vtwm, mwm, etc.), but most of my time I spent learning and customizing XEmacs. I tried out lots of extension packages and wrote my own customization. My classmates benefited from my procrastination, as I shared the best of what I had learned with them. Some of the Emacs customizations I developed back then are still in use.
Over the years I've continued to do learn, extend, and customize, and I've built up more and more XEmacs customization. A few years ago I tried running GNU Emacs, and my customization didn't work, and it didn't look easy to fix. XEmacs and GNU Emacs have diverged enough that the things I've learned for XEmacs weren't working in GNU Emacs. So I gave up on ever using GNU Emacs again.
The problem is that XEmacs development has slowed quite a bit. The “stable” version, XEmacs 21.4, came out in 2001. Features like anti-aliased fonts, support for the Mac, and UTF-8 are not available in that version. I've been using the development version, 21.5, and it has partial support for those things. One of the developers left XEmacs to work on his own version of Emacs, called SXEmacs (which looks neat). GNU Emacs on the other hand seems to be progressing faster, and is catching up in many ways to XEmacs. The stable version of GNU Emacs is also a few years old, so people who care about features run the development version (GNU Emacs 22).
The other problem is that last year, when I got a Mac, I found that none of the versions of XEmacs available on the Mac were satisfying. I tried out Aquamacs, which is GNU Emacs 22 for the Mac, and I liked it, except that none of my customizations worked. Non-Emacs editors like TextMate seem somewhat limited, and would require me to unlearn 15 years of Emacs. I had a tough choice to make: after 15 years of being on the XEmacs side of the Emacs/XEmacs split, should I switch back? After talking to several people about their experiences with both, I decided that I should at least consider it. GNU Emacs 22 seems like it has caught up with XEmacs in some ways (not all), and it's ahead of it in other ways.
I still love XEmacs. I like that it uses a package system, so you can choose packages, install new ones, and upgrade a package without upgrading XEmacs. The package system in XEmacs is somewhat like packages in popular Linux distributions. For example, I can download a new version of the Python editing package when that package is released, instead of installing it manually or waiting until a new version of Emacs is available. GNU Emacs doesn't seem to have anything like this. I like the XEmacs philosophy for colors/fonts (they are properties of how you look at a file) more than the GNU Emacs philosophy (that they are properties of the file itself). I like that XEmacs has abstract data types like hash tables. I like that XEmacs uses more readable names of key and mouse commands, like [(ctrl x) (alt tab)] instead of "C-x A-\t". I like that the XEmacs colorization package, font-lock, was more capable than the Emacs package, hilit19, although these days GNU Emacs also uses font-lock. I like that XEmacs had a menu structure more like other apps, although GNU Emacs seems to have adopted this too. I like that XEmacs can run as a “server”, where I can connect to it remotely and access all my open files from multiple machines (I've heard that GNU Emacs will get this at some point). I like that default XEmacs packages have historically seemed more advanced than GNU Emacs versions (for example, psgml seems much more advanced than html-helper-mode, and vm was more advanced than rmail). I like that XEmacs came with more packages standard. I like that XEmacs supported proportional fonts and multiple sized fonts in the same document (GNU Emacs seems to do that now, but it took them ten years). I like the XEmacs experiments (embedding XEmacs inside other apps, embedding other apps inside XEmacs, GTK support, incremental garbage collector, ability to run as a window manager, embedding images inside documents). I really like XEmacs. But I want really good Mac support, nice fonts, and UTF-8 support, so I'm going to try out GNU Emacs again.
This weekend's project is to look at GNU Emacs 22 (the Aquamacs version) much more closely. I'll try porting some of my XEmacs customizations to GNU Emacs. I'll look for GNU Emacs packages that do things similar to the XEmacs packages I had been using. And over the next few months I'll use both XEmacs (at work) and GNU Emacs (at home) and see how it goes.
Review: Oggz, Laserpod, Mathmos Color Bubble #
I've been looking for interesting lights to use at night. I wanted something colorful, not too distracting, and ideally, portable. I bought 3 Oggz, a Laserpod, and a Mathmos Color Bubble.
Oggz
Oggz are soft egg-shaped lights that you can hold in your hand. They slowly change colors, from blue to green to red and back (this is not configurable). There's a switch on the bottom to turn them on and off. You can place them on the base to have them run continually, or you can just pick them up and take them with you (the battery lasts 6–8 hours). When you put them back on the base they'll recharge. There are a few downsides of the Oggz:
- You can't adjust the color changing. It would've been nice to have a way to pause it, so that you could keep it at a certain color.
- The switch at the bottom is not easy to turn on in the dark. I used the Oggz as nightlights for a while, and until you turn them on you can't see the switch, which you need for turning them on.
- The red light is much darker than the green and blue. This means the overall brightness changes, not just the color. This is especially unwelcome when you're using it as a nightlight, because your eyes adjust to the blue and green brightness, and then you get plunged into darkness when it cycles to red.
Despite these minor problems, I do like the Oggz.
Laserpod
The Laserpod contains a red laser and blue LEDs, plus a diffraction crystal and a cover. The lights rotate slowly. You can use it in several modes:
- Uncovered, the Laserpod will project lights onto the ceiling. It's not bright enough to see except at night with all the lights off. Covered, the Laserpod will project lights onto a frosted dome (it comes with two, one tall and one short). When covered it's easier to see the patterns.
- Red light only, you will get the laser beam, which is either bright points or laser lines. You can also turn on blue LEDs to add to the ambience, but they don't project any sharp patterns. There is no mode to use the blue LEDs without the red laser.
- Unfiltered, the Laserpod will project its laser as points onto the ceiling or one of the covers. It's more interesting to use the diffraction crystal, which will turn the points into cool patterns. You can also use your own objects; I tried a small crystal I have and was able to split the laser points into lots of dots moving around on the ceiling.
Pictured is the Laserpod with only the red laser on, the diffraction crystal, and the tall cover. That's my favorite of the many ways of using it. Unfortunately the motor can be loud at times, so I can't leave this on at night when going to sleep, and it's dark enough that it's not really useful to leave this on during the day or in the evening with other lights on. So I find that I rarely ever have an occasion to use it. For the high price, the noise, and the lack of brightness, I cannot recommend the Laserpod.
Mathmos Color Bubble
I don't have a picture of this, but you can see one at ThinkGeek. I was hoping for something that addressed the flaws of the Oggz. The Mathmos bubble can be turned on or off with just a squeeze, according to the product literature. However, it's a bit tougher than that because the squeeze has to be on a particular side of the sphere. Given that spheres have no sides, it becomes hard to find the right place when it's dark. It's always blue, not changing colors or brightness, so it's a better nightlight than the Oggz. Unlike the Oggz, which can be recharged simply by putting them down, the Mathmos has to be plugged in with a special cable. The Mathmos has a nice soft feel like the Oggz, but it's significantly heavier. The Oggz are light enough and feel durable enough that I am comfortable throwing them across the room; the Mathmos is heavy enough that I won't play with it the same way.
Conclusion
I like the Oggz most of all. They're much cheaper than the Mathmos and there are three of them, not just one. The egg shape is a little nicer than a sphere. The Laserpod is the most expensive of all, and after the initial coolness wore off, it just hasn't been enjoyable. I recommend the Oggz.
Labels: review
China, the Dollar, and Christmas #
China recently stated that they had too many dollars, and were looking to diversify. China has over half a trillion dollars, and if they start selling them, the dollar will drop. The announcement alone caused the dollar to drop in value.
If the dollar drops in value, China will get less from selling them. It doesn't make sense for China to announce something that will make the dollar drop. They should instead quietly sell dollars.
So why did they announce it? My theory is that they want the dollar to drop but are not intending to sell dollars for a few months, during which the dollar will recover.
If the dollar drops in value, it will take more dollars to buy things from China. Normally, that would mean that fewer goods would be bought. However, it's Christmas shopping season right now, and parents are going to buy toys for their kids no matter what. Furthermore, they're shopping around. That means retail stores (and online stores) have to keep prices low—they can't raise them to reflect the lower value of the dollar (and thus increased cost of goods). With prices staying low and Christmas coming up in a few weeks, demand will remain high.
Since the amount of goods bought will stay the same, the cost paid by retailers has gone up, and the price paid by consumers has stayed the same, the big winner in all of this is China, and the losers are the retailers. A portion of their profits will go to currency exchange. If I were playing the stock market, I'd short the retailers that sell lots of goods from China.
If I were in charge of the Chinese currency, I'd make some announcement right after Thanksgiving about my wanting to get rid of dollars, but I wouldn't actually sell any dollars. That way I can get even more dollars from all the Christmas shoppers than I normally would have. A few months later I'd quietly sell dollars. I certainly wouldn't announce that I'm going to sell dollars right before I sell them. That'd be dumb.
Second Life: Svarga #
If you're in Second Life, you should check out Svarga [SLUrl]. It's an exotic jungle island with pathways, towers, musical instruments, isolation room, fountains, temple compound, secret underground chamber, lookout posts, a second island, and even its own ecosystem (birds, bees, flowers, plants, trees, weather). There are lots of details that are easily missed the first time through. When you get there, be sure to take the guided tour by sitting on the hovering tour chair.
Svarga is my favorite place in Second Life. Unfortunately it may not be around for much longer.
Labels: review