I was inspired by Rob Spectre’s Laugh-o-tron and made a telephony extension to my Twitter Bots.
Try it out. Call 646-480-6046 to talk to various TV show characters. Right now the vast majority of the quotes are spoken by a text-to-speech program because I have to find, crop, and upload audio files for each one. But McNulty from The Wire (choice #1) has a few real audio clips. Let me know how I can improve it… more...
I’m reading Tim Berners-Lee’s book Weaving the Web
For a long time I never really got the distinction between the “Internet” and the “world wide web.” To me they were the same thing, and they might be for many other folks too. But in hindsight this is just a testament to how successful Berners-Lee’s creation is.
Most people’s perceptible interaction with the Internet is through a browser where they visit a website. The Internet is simply a… more...
So what exactly happens when you type “davidxia.com” into your browser’s address field and hit “Enter”?
A website is simply a collection of online content ranging from text documents to images to video. All this content lives in physical machines called servers. Servers listen for incoming calls or requests from web browsers or applications and respond with the appropriate content.
Think of the Internet as having a giant Yellowpages phone book
So how does this content get from a machine that could be halfway around the world to your computer? Every machine that’s connected to the Internet… more...
I prefer to write code for backend. The plumbing, infrastructure, functionality of a product. Backend developers want the computer to spit out all the relevant data for a page as fast as possible. Their primary concern isn’t how it looks, just that it gets there efficiently.
But I’ve learned that functionality is necessary but not sufficient. Form that only fits function fails to attract users. A well-crafted web app must also have good design. This is why UX and UI are increasingly more important. In the early days of the Internet when only hardcore hackers and geeks were online… more...
I attended Chris Dixon’s Skillshare class “How to Raise Your First Round” earlier this week. It was my first time meeting the entrepreneur and investor. I learned a lot from his class. Here’s a summary.
Whether to Raise Money
Avoid taking money if you can. Some businesses are not suitable for VC funding. This includes mom and pop stores and companies that can’t scale up to have revenue in at least the hundreds of millions.
I asked whether our current culture of celebrating fundraising as a mark of success is a recent… more...
I received a strange email a few days ago from a man named John. He told me
Dear Manager,
(If you are not the person who is in charge of this, please forward this to your CEO,Thanks)
This email is from China domain name registration center, which mainly deal with the domain name registration and dispute internationally in China and Asia.
On September 19th 2011, We received Tianhua Ltd’s application that they are registering the name ” davidxia ” as their Internet Keyword and ” davidxia .cn “、” davidxia .com.cn ” 、” davidxia .asia “domain names… more...
For quite a while now I’ve logged onto Facebook only to close the tab five minutes later feeling unsatisfied. But until recently I couldn’t put my finger on why I consistently had an unpleasant experience. I slowly began to realize that one of the primary reasons was the Law of Internet Entropy.
The Law of Internet Entropy states, as my friend friend once told me, “Websites eventually become Craigslist.” There are many examples of online communities and websites losing their niche and eventually catering to broad interests. It takes energy to maintain a focused service and well-defined… more...
I did a frequency analysis on the tags of all 251,287 Wikileaks diplomatic cables and created a Wordle word cloud. Size is positively related to frequency. You can download the basic data set from The Guardian (sorry, no text included) here, and create your own Wordle here. The meanings of the tags are here.
The Economist‘s special report on smart systems in their November 4, 2010 edition has inspired me to read and learn about this fascinating movement. I’ve compiled a list of all the thought-provoking articles, gagdets, and business ventures I’ve seen – a snapshot of the flurry of ideas bouncing around in my head right now.
It’s interesting that the most read page on my blog is the one on creative ways to say happy birthday. There are numerous google searches that direct visitors to that page every month. This is a somewhat related post about how I’m trying to write a computer program that check’s Facebook for my friends’ birthdays and post a happy birthday wish on their wall. I can then schedule this program to run once a day, each time posting a canned response to their wall, and I’ll never have to worry about not saying happy birthday again. more...