Ryan Prins' Blog

I played Solitaire on my iPod yesterday for an hour on my flight back to Seattle and I never won. How sad is that?

If you live in the Seattle metro area and are curious about the crime stats in your area of the city, I urge you to do the following:

1. Go to this site and find what tract you live in.
2. After you find your tract number, go to Seattle Police Dept Crime Stats Page and select a search.

For the search that I did, I selected the current month that they had data for (e.g. September) and then did YTD for the “Part I Index Crimes by Census Tract”.

Also, the difference between Part I and Part II Crimes is defined as the following: “Part I crimes are comprised of serious felonies and Part II crimes are comprised of non serious felonies and misdemeanors. Together these two types of classifications make up the crimes reported in the Uniform Crime Reports.” In addition, make sure to read the SPD guide on things to consider when reading/interpreting the data.

Needless to say, the numbers that I saw for my tract were mind boggling. If you have the time, check it out, and let me know what you find out. Was what you saw higher/lower/on par with what you expected? I know for me it was above what I thought. Guess it puts it all into perspective.

Today I spent some time revamping my classes portion of this site. Yes, all of my class data is still online, but now it is protected by the power of a .htaccess file. So, unless you have my file names memorized, you’re left with the files that I have listed on each of the respective class pages. Not much has really changed, but I cut out all of the little deliverables and exteranous code that doesn’t really provide much academic value. But, I’ve included all lecture notes, assignments, presentations, handouts, etc… What I didn’t include was source code in some situations, all lecutre slides, and any in class handouts. Instructor provided class materials (bascially anything I had zero part in creating/working on) aren’t mine to share and therefore aren’t displayed. We pay tuition for a reason, right? But, if you’re in dire need of code examples or help, use Google. I’m sure an answer can be found there.

Now, there is a caveat that I need to explain. This work was completed by project teams as well as on my own. I don’t mind you looking at it, borrowing ideas, and being nice with it. However, do not plagiarize, steal, copy any of this work. I know that some professors are very diligent on varying up their course material, assignments, and tests yearly, but some don’t. So, you could run along an assignment I did in a class that is exactly like one that you are doing right now. If this happens, please use your better judgement.

I plan to keep all of this online as an archive of my experience in the Information School. So, treat it nicely. Enjoy!

It was a week ago that I read about a bike being taken, so I moved mine to my locker and locked it in there. I’m glad I did. But, it obviously wasn’t enough. Today, my roommate discovered that two snowboards and two pairs of boots were taken from our storage locker. There was no forced entry and the locker was still locked, but there are hand prints on the ceiling and a foot print on my old TV in there. I shouldn’t be upset, nothing of mine was taken, but I feel bad that stuff was taken in the first place. Now that the officer has just left, I’m ready to discuss the security of our garage with our board at our meeting on the 1st. It just sucks that it has taken all of these little crimes to get their complete attention.

Recently on digg.com there have been a couple of links sprouting up about how to block Google Analytics from tracking you if you visit a site that is utilizing this tool. Honestly, I don’t get it. Maybe I’m naive, but online marketing/advertising firms have been doing this for years, with similar technologies, with much more precise data (e.g. click tracking). So, I don’t get why all the sudden there is this uproar over all of this information.

Help me out here, why the freak over Google getting in on it. I know people dislike the fact that Google archives all of this, but how is this going to directly affect you? It probably won’t. I have yet to read of a case where Google’s archived data has caused adverse effects to a person. I’m not talking cached pages in their search either. I’m talking search queries, Gmail, etc… To me this seems like a complete overreaction. I mean, do you need to take steps like this just so Google can’t track you?

Maybe you do, but realize that a lot of top companies utilize similar technologies all the time to increase their revenue and increase conversions. So, to me, this looks like a case to stop it just because Google is doing it. For me, that’s not good enough. If you really mean it, stop all of it, don’t be picky and pick on just Google.

A minor update has been made to my Amazon Wishlist Plugin for WordPress. This update is not necessary for everybody, but here’s the change log:

• Added support for locales in US, UK, DE, JP, FR, CA
• Added support for displaying 1-10 items without navigation or test blurb
• Added ability to hide navigation, blurb, and product images
• Removed 90ms sleep that was used during testing

Also, some users have asked about some various functionality that they’d like to see in the plugin. Some requests have been to display a random item, sort by rating, or to sort by other parameters. I did a little research with the Amazon Web Service and the outlook isn’t so good on these requests. At least from Amazon’s end of things.

For one, I can only get 10 items back at a time from the web service (it’s an Amazon limit). So, I’d have to call each page of your wishlist (which could be up to 30) sort them manually by some criteria (e.g. rating) and then throw them back out at you. However, it gets more difficult than this, since for each item in the list another web service call has to be made to get the list item details. So, as an upper limit you could need to make 300 more web service calls to get the product information (title, urls, images, etc…). That could then, as an upper limit, require 330 web service calls. This is not only slow, but this would also take a lot of time to process on the server side (~1 second in render time per call). If this were to be done, another method would have to be used to store the XML and how I do my caching.

However, with that said, I do read all of your comments and try to add them to the plugin. So, if you have suggestions, please let me know and I’ll look into the feasibility of adding it to the plugin. My initial vision for this plugin has been accomplished, but I like hearing what the users of this plugin have to say. So, keep the comments coming!

The next thing that I am going to look into is calling the plugin for more than one wishlist ID. So, keep your eyes posted for that update. But, it might be a while now with the holiday season coming up as well as the end of the year. Rest assured, when I can find the time to think all of this through, I will.

1. Microsoft releases “Express” versions of C++, C#, J#, SQL Server, and VS IDE. More info can be found here.
2. Don’t forget to vote tomorrow!