Oliver Steele

Uh oh! I overthought fizzbuzz:

Continue reading…

For years now, I’ve been a great fan of TinyURL.com. That web site allows you to create a short representation of a longer URL, for use in email.

One of the problems with those URLs, though, and with URLs in general, is that they’re misleadingly short. A particular web page may have a lot of significance, but if it doesn’t take up much of your message, there’s just no way for the recipient to see this at a glance.

WideURL.com fixes this. It creates an URL with more visual impact.

For example, here’s the WideURL for this post: http://wideurl.com/aitch-tee-tee-pea-colon-double-slash-oh-ess-tee-double-ee-ell-ee-dot-see-oh-em-slash-aye-are-see-aitch-eye-vee-ee-ess-slash-two-double-zero-six-slash-zero-four-slash-doubleyou-eye-dee-ee-you-are-ell. That’s much more significant-looking than simply http://osteele.com/archives/2006/04/wideurl, I think you can agree.

Even my friends who aren’t into functional programming find something curously relaxing about this. (And the companion site here.)

I bought foldr.com a year ago when I thought I might do something like Flickr for other types of information. I didn’t realize until last week what I was sitting on.

Update: The use of the infinity symbol sparked a lively discussion on LtU.

Jim Grandy wrote:

From: jgrandy

Subject: stupid Google game

Date: January 7, 2006 6:17:58 PM EST

Google for "unfortunately, yournamehere":

Lots of fun hits for "unfortunately, jim":

• unfortunately Jim’s orange dry suit made him look like a carrot
  
• Unfortunately Jim is no longer with us as he died of a brain tumor in 1993.
  
• Unfortunately, Jim did not respond. He disbelieved that it was an angel.
  
• Unfortunately, Jim is only one person with a limited amount of time available to
  help Jane find answers to her questions.
  

I’ve turned this into a web page here.

I prototyped it with a screen scraper for Google, but I didn’t want to deploy a screen scraper.

Fortunately, Google has a Search API.

Unfortunately, Google’s API uses SOAP.

Fortunately, Ruby has a SOAP library.

Unfortunately, the Ruby SOAP library doesn’t work on Dreamhost.

Fortunately, the Yahoo Web Search API uses REST.

Unfortunately, Yahoo’s summaries don’t include enough right-hand context, so it’s harder to extract decent sentences from them.

Maybe I’ll go back to screen-scraping after all.

Update: Jim tells me he got the idea from Jorg Brown at Google.

“Aargh!” But how do you spell it?

(Click here to skip straight to the visualization.)

In the late nineties, I tried using internet search as a spelling corrector. (I think I was using AltaVista at the time. It was the latest and greatest search engine, supplanting — was it Lycos?)

At the time, for the words I tried, there were about two orders of magnitude between a misspelling and the correct word. A spelling variant, such as “color” and “colour”, were typically less than one order of magnitude.

In 2002 I used Google to figure out the most common spelling for “closable”, for use in the OpenLaszlo API. It had been “closeable”; why use a spelling that most people would guess wrong the first time, I figured. [Update: This paragraph originally said the word was "resizeable", which is a straightforward misspelling.]

Here’s what this looks like today. First, a common misspelling:

And a couple of spelling variants:

(The percentage is the ratio of the page count to the page count of the most common variant, which is the form in bold above it.)

Some other misspellings:

And some other acceptable variants:

(What’s the difference between an acceptable variant, and a misspelling? An interesting topic for another posting. Maybe.)

What got me thinking about this again, was, of all things, thinking about how to spell “aargh!” One ‘a’, two, three…? And how many ‘r’s?

This is an interesting problem, first, because so many repetition counts are attested. There’s not just “mispelling” (1s) and “misspelling” (2s), but “argh”, “aargh”, “aaargh”, etc. And second, because the space is two-dimensional: not just “argh”, “aargh”, “aaargh”, …, but also “argh”, “arrgh”, “arrrgh”, … — and the product, with “aarrgh”, “aaarrrgh”, etc.

It’s clear that a wide range of spellings are acceptable. What’s the most common?

Without further ado, I created this page to help me find the answer.

If everyone in America makes an extra-large Thanksgiving dinner so that they can feed guests the next day, isn’t this a pyramid scheme?

Miles told me about the computers at his elementary school:

They’re running anti-virus software, but they’ve installed a virus! It’s called Novell. It makes the computer boot slowly, it does a lot of stuff while it’s booting, and then you can’t log on.