» How to answer physics questions.
(23:59:20) gabriel - pax americana: IB physics higher is tough
(23:59:29) Alvaro: it is not
(23:59:31) Alvaro: just write
(23:59:33) Alvaro: the answer is god
April 16, 2007
October 6, 2006
» The true social effect of being digged.
Everyone knows that the digg effect is very strong, bringing down websites. What amazing is not just the actual traffic that one gets directly from digg, which is a large amount, but the popularity and publicity that comes from being digged, pushing up in traffic charts everywhere. This is not about the charts or load that I got from digg, but from the effect that that has had in my site.
The digg effect pushed me up in my country’s blog chart, putting me in the 9th most visited blog in the last two weeks, and giving me the top visited post of the whole continent. Not only that, but I showed up on the frontpage of the Peruvian blogs’ site, something that had never happened to me.
The actual traffic was staggering. While I was on the frontpage, the traffic went from 68 at 3 pm, to 1,700 at 4 pm to 5,246 one hour later, at 5. It then went gradually down to 3,221 at 6 pm, at then stabilised at 7, when it was at 1779. It stayed in the 1000-2000 range for a couple of hours. At 5 am of today, sixth of October, it went to its lowest, which is something to be expected since everyone is asleep. It appears to now be going up again, as I’m now on LinuxToday.
The traffic source has also changed substancially. After going off the frontpage of digg, the percentage of traffic from digg has gone down, from being 80% of my total traffic to being 40%, as the direct links from other pages go up. This doesn’t only come from the fact that I’m not the at the frontpage anymore, but also is helped by the fact that I’ve been linked by many blogs, as shown here on Technorati.
My feed’s subscribers number has skyrocketed. Right now, I have 1,202 subscribers, of which 87% use Firefox Live Bookmarks. Amazingly, 67 people use Flock to subscribe to the feed. However, I think that will go down in recent days, as people realise I am not as cool as they think I am.
The best part of having been digged wasn’t the traffic, but the popularity. One of my old articles on Epiphany was added to LinuxToday, something I would never have thought possible before. I was even link from a Reuters Blog. Now, I only need to be linked from a blog I have on my RSS reader to be really amazed about how digg really puts you out there.
October 5, 2006
» Fucks per programing language and license.
It’s known that programmers swear a lot. There’s always fucks, shits, cunts, bitches, crap. There’s the kernel fuck count, for example, which shows the number of findings of “fuck” and “love” in the Linux kernel, over different versions of the kernel.
Google recently released the Google Code search (beta, of course), which searches through open source tarballs and zips, and tries to find the number of occurences of a specific query, and then showing them. So, nothing more than a Google which searches through code. Of course, what other use could there be than searching the number of occurences of fuck. In different languages.
So, what language is the most sweared one? I used Python, Perl, PHP, C++, C and C#, to get a wide range of programmers. I recorded the number of found and also the number of entries found without anything, to have a rough view of how many packages in a specific language there are, as Google might not have indexed all, and there may be more packages of C than of C# and others. Of course, there will be more fucks in 4′520,000 results I got for C than the 62,800 that the search returned when searching for C#.
Now, the results.
Here, we can see that, while the number of fucks never even gets to 1% of the results, in the highest one, PHP, 0.5% of all the packages found by Google code contain the word fuck, or any of its derivatives, such as fucker, etc. Furthermore, after PHP, which is the language with most occurences of fuck, almost doubling the other two which compete for the second place, those being C and Perl, something not unexpected. The lowest ones, which is no surprise, are C# and Python, Python probably being the cleanest programming language of the ones sorted here.
Update: Surprisingly, Java is down there with C# and Python in the cleanest languages.
Now, the results for fucks by license.
It can be clearly seen that LGPL makes people swear, while GPL and BSD still do, but in a reduced manner.
October 2, 2006
» Asimov
Asimov on the future of humanity
It is amazing how many things there still apply to today. He got to the conclusion that
Major Premise: The volume of coal and oil are finite.
Minor Premise: We are burning some every day.
Conclusion: We will use it all up eventually.
Still, we still have some people who have not reached this conclusion yet.
