王朋 - Filed under 'algorithms'

Essay #3: Two Years of 2.0

blog post header: a garbage piles of bookmarks

I started seriously following web trends a few months before 2008. Now 2+ years later, I’ve deleted 500 bookmarks from my Delicious, almost a couple hundred+ tagged items from my main Reader account, and another couple hundred labeled as TODO from my browser bookmarks, stored by XMarks. Now, hours later, I still have another couple hundred items in my ReadItLater list, although somewhat sanely manageable and accessible. And I’m fanning the flame by writing a long review, hoping some upstart doing websites out there will find use in it.

Overall, I feel like all web news, lessons, and exhibitions was useful. I learned lots stuff good. But I spent much time and still missed some golden opportunities. On several occasions mostly in Delicious, I had duplicated entries perhaps only months apart. A number of the items I had as TODO were horrible write-ups on WordPress and jQuery “tricks” that were (in terms of screen estate) 20% awful UI, 40% yes-men comments, 30% ads, and 10% content. Only now do I realize how shallow those authors’ knowledge were, as I eventually outgrew the usefulness of my gathered resources. So yes, I should have organized better (more on that), but there is a definitely content quality issue with sites out there. Oh, and I’m also pissed FFFFound has no RSS feed.

Seems like posters of late don’t take the time to write and grow content but instead just put up link bait to worsen the quality of RSS feeds. Delicious Popular, back in 2007, did not look as it does today. Back then, since the web was less spammed up by WordPress strip malls, the content gathered by (what I’m assuming is and has been) an automatically ranked feed of popular pages on Delicious based on times bookmarked. As a result, the content was quite good, and I learned a lot about mashups, and startups, and CSS standards, and even design patterns and separation of concerns. Back then, there were no Noupe, Cats Who Code, etc., and point is, now my attention has shifted to Hacker News and a selected group of consistently good ~~bloggers~~ writers. Still, little by little the WordPress spammers are creeping in. I really don’t know how they do it, and I don’t think HN is very automated…

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Sketches #6

(download)

I saw this image on brysonian’s tumblr post. I had to try to replicate it, and I definitely have a long way to go. Going to post it regardless. Besides, it was good fun working with peon’s processing textmate bundle. It really makes me not miss the original ide at all. Very well thought out and implemented, alas unlike this sketch.

// edit

It’s been a good week. I started off implementing my own autonomous steering behaviors using this article as demo and specification. I also played around with making the methods in my PApplet subclasses chainable:

Chaining

pen.update()
   .prepareCable()
   .trace()
   .cable();

And I started a Stage singleton abstract the Processing functions into something more reusable and flexible, though one of my doubts is I’m just undoing the benefits of Processing in order to fight its detriments. I’ve still got much to resolve to get to drawing technique from the original picture, but I did manage to implement the ‘cable’ effect I mentioned a few months ago.

Strangely, I’ve used Processing for 4+ years but it was only until recent years I looked more into Java…

I’ve started a Github repo for this project Plans to salvage all the crap Processing code I’ve written will be underway soon as well.

Tags

algorithms

Essay #3: Two Years of 2.0

Sketches #6

Chaining