ankur.org

Send email as a text message to your iphone

admin — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 07:39:09 +0000

If you want to email your phone and have it received as a text message, simple send an email to:

[10 digit iphone number]@txt.att.net

This will work for any iphone, or att customer.

This is useful if you want to have email alerts (like when the DOW goes below 8000) sent to your phone.

MySpace still more fun than Facebook

admin — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 19:36:36 +0000

Full disclosure: I work at MySpace as a consultant on the MDP (MySpace Developer Platform) team.

I now use both social networks on a daily basis. And these are my observations:

Bulletins on myspace are funnier than posted items on Facebook. On MySpace, the bulletins tend to be funny, irreverant videos and images. On facebook, the posted items tend to be less funny images and reposts of New York Times repetititive and whiny op-ed columns. If I want the news, I’ll *read* the news.
MySpace has less of your coworkers and so users feel more at ease to be themselves. Case in point: I have friend profiles on myspace that are public, but private on facebook.
It’s still about the music. iLike is arguably Facebook’s de-facto music application. It’s a great app but it still doesn’t compare to the complete integration of music that MySpace has achieved. Being a musician and music-lover, this is what I care most about. I can listen to *full* songs, add them to playlists, listen to my friends playlists. It’s now a full-on personal and social radio station with whatever music I want. On facebook not everyone has the iLike app installed and I don’t always see the music notifications in my news feed. On MySpace, music is a first-class citizen. On Facebook, it’s a second-class citizen. Until this changes, MySpace will continue to be the social-network of choice for bands and music fans.
The chicks are cuter on myspace. It’s just true.

I think that these observations are largely dependent on the demographic of friends you have on each social network. On MySpace, I definitely have more artsy, musically-inclined friends. The profile customization and freedom on MySpace attracts these freer individuals. On Facebook, I have a more heterogenous set that includes friends, family, coworkers, school friends, etc.

The end result is that I end up going to Facebook to learn and see what my friends are doing. But I go to MySpace to get a laugh, listen to some tunes and have a good time. Each network has it’s place and we should accept that they can live in harmony, serving a different need in the ecosystem of internet social interactions.

Testing windows live writer

admin — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 19:29:03 +0000

Hello world! Some changes here.

Swapping CTRL and CAPS LOCK in Mac OS X

admin — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 07:41:25 +0000

The CAPS LOCK key is useless. How many times during your typing career have you actually used it? Your hands will be much happier using it as an additional ctrl or command key.

To change the functionality (mapping) of this key, go to System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Modifier Keys. Below is a screenshot.

Optimizing bus routes to improve traffic flow

admin — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 00:50:08 +0000

Problem

Everyone knows that traffic sucks in LA - too many cars, and too few public transportation options. There are currently a few proposals to alleviate traffic woes and prepare LA for growth:

Increase the Metro coverage area with new lines (Los Angeles’ subway system. Yes, LA has a subway system)
Convert more streets to one-way streets, e.g. Olympic, Pico. This improves flow by increasing the number of lanes of flow traffic and reducing the opposite-direction turning lanes. Basically, you can get rid of the middle turning lane and assign it to one-way non-interrupted flow traffic.

Both of these options are a few years out. By and large, LA’s current public transportation strategy revolves around bus routes. This is a double-edge sword. While it does provide public transport, it slows down already congested streets because the buses are big and slow, make frequent stops, and often have to cross multiple lanes of traffic for turns. In the general sense, public transportation is an attempt to improve city-wide travel efficiency, mainly by reducing traffic. In LA’s case, the bus strategy can often aggravate traffic.

Solution

So the question is, how can we keep the buses without having them harm existing traffic flow? I think part of the answer is optimizing existing bus routes. It’s pretty clear to me that LA bus routes are inefficient. There are too many buses with too few people riding them. It is a gross inefficiency to have the largest vehicles on the road carrying the least number of passengers. I frequently see double-car buses carrying only a handful of people. This is like having 4 SUVs, each with just one rider.

I think LA should introduce passenger vans for many routes, or introduce some type of mini-bus. Let’s get rid of the big, ponderous, awkwardly large buses and replace them with nimbler, faster rides. This has several advantages:

increased fulfillment percentage: In an ideal world, buses are full or nearly full a majority of the time
faster vehicles: Even if the smaller vehicles have to make the same stops, smaller vehicles have better acceleration and get to their top speed quicker
environmentally friendly: air-conditioning large, unoccupied spaces wastes energy and this exactly what large buses do

Implementation

The main hurdle with a mini-bus or optimized bus strategy is that it’s hard (read: costly) to know what routes are inefficient. So, the LA bus system takes the easy way out and they just use the large capacity buses for all routes. But there are a few simple techniques we could use today without having to compute the inefficiency weight on each route.

On non-peak hours, have all routes only use the mini-buses. This one is easy - buses on non-peak hours have very few people on them, just start using the smaller buses.
During peak hours, every other bus (or every third bus) is a mini-bus.
Poll the bus drivers to figure out which routes could benefit from a bus size reduction. I think the bus drivers opinions would rival any computer model - they’ll have an intuition about the congestion because they’ve driven the route many times before.

Conclusion

There’s no reason why we have to wait until the new subway lines before we can reduce traffic in LA. Buses are a big pain in the butt on major streets like Wilshire and anything we can do to reduce the number of buses or make them smaller would go a long way towards mitigating congestion.

LinkedIn confuses me

admin — Sat, 31 May 2008 21:47:54 +0000

Is anyone else confused by LinkedIn’s messaging metaphors? Not only do I have an inbox, I have all of these:

Inbox
Messages
InMail

Sometimes I get messages, sometimes I get InMail and sometimes I get mail in my InBox. But it goes on: I also have these:

Invitations
Introductions

I really just want one central Inbox with labels, gmail style.

Installing JRuby on Mac OS X Leopard

admin — Thu, 29 May 2008 07:45:02 +0000

1. Get a copy of JRuby. I got the 1.1.2 (latest as of this writing) from http://dist.codehaus.org/jruby/
2. unzip it and put it somewhere. I put it in /Applications/jruby-1.1.2/
3. configure your shell environment. Edit your .bashrc and add JRUBY_HOME=/Applications/jruby-1.1.2 and then add JRUBY_HOME/bin to your path. This will end up looking something like this:
JRUBY_HOME=/Applications/jruby-1.1.2 export PATH="$PATH:$JRUBY_HOME/bin"
4. open up a terminal. Now that jruby is on your path, you should be able to do issue a “jruby –version” to tell you the version - this is a sanity check.

That’s it - pretty much just like installing any java jar.

Recursively delete all .svn directories

admin — Mon, 26 May 2008 03:42:52 +0000

Sometimes those .svn files just get in the way, especially when you want to ship your code off to someone else. Here’s a quick way to delete all of them from the command line. We’ll use the find command to locate all the .svn directories and then pass them to xargs, which will execute the “rm -rf” command for every line of output from the find results.

find . -name *.svn | xargs rm -rf

Measuring speed in terms of relative flow instead of miles per hour

admin — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 07:58:23 +0000

One of the big causes of traffic is that cars and trucks are travelling at different speeds relative to each other. This creates minor slowdowns that have consequences for cars up to a mile behind. How can we get people to get on the same page and travel at the same speed? I think the solution is a in-dash guage like a speedometer that measures your relative speed to cars around you. It would basically be like the temperature guage - you can see how much “hotter” or “cooler” you are compared to drivers around you. The “hotter” your guage, the faster you’re driving compared to your neighbors. The “cooler” your guage, the slower you’re driving relative to the flow of traffic. This would help slow and elderly drivers be more mindful of staying in sync with the adjacent traffic flow. It would also subconsciously influence more aggressive drivers to stay in harmony.

I think this would improve traffic flow and reduce accidents because there would be less surprising speed changes. And this has a positive-feedback element - the less accidents, the better the flow of traffic.

Or maybe I’m just tired from rehearsal and need some sugar. I can’t tell if this is asinine or brilliant.

Adding a blank / default item to an ASP.Net dropdown list and making it required

admin — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 20:44:29 +0000

Here’s the declarative way to add a default first item to an ASP.Net drop down list:

Notice the important attribute: AppendDataBoundItems. This just tells ASP.Net to add your dynamically data-driven list items after any declarative markup items.

Now to make it required, you can just add a Required Field Validator:

ControlToValidate="ddCategory1" Text="* required">

Note, you just have to set your initial value to the value of your declarative first list item in the drop down. This tells the required field validator that this value doesn’t count and that the user haven’t selected an item yet.

Declarative markup is easy!