Category: web

please, use this bookmarklet!

Published January 21, 2008 by lievenlb

Great! You’ve finally managed to arXiv your paper after months of laborious research, and now, you’re eagerly awaiting response…

The odds are you’ll be disappointed, if not frustrated. Chances are high that if you get any response at all it is only to clarify that someone else (usually the person emailing you) proved this result a long time ago, or that your result could be generalized enormously, or that you could have shortened your proof tremendously if only you were more educated, or …
Mathematics seems to be more of a pissing contest than anything else, at such moments.

Imagine someone would be kind enough, at that particular moment, to send you an email saying not much more than : “Gee thanks! Ive just browsed through your paper arXived today and you really made my day! Keep up the good work, all the best :: lieven” (change the name to your liking)

Sadly, math-circles are not known for their ‘good-vibes’ generally. Mind you, Ive send similar emails to people posting on the arXiv, but, admittedly, I did it far fewer than I might have. Often I like (even admire) a result but repress the urgent need to communicate that feeling to the author, perhaps my Asperger kicking up…

Now that you may feel some empathy with the situation, let’s get to a similar situation in math-blogging. Sometimes, you spend a lot of time writing a post (( but probably you have to be blogging yourself to appreciate the amount of energy it takes to write a genuine post compared to a link-post or a couple-of-lines-not-going-into-the-specifics post )) , release it to the world, see tons of RSS-bots and genuine hits passing by and then what?… nothing! no reply, no email, no comment, nothing at all!

Personally, I’m not that influenced by this. When I blog I do it because (1) Ive the time, at that particular moment and (2) I like to write about the things I do, at that moment. But sometimes, it comes to us all, that feeling of ‘why am I doing this after all? can’t I spend my time more sensibly doing something else?’ and when you begin to have these doubts it usually marks the beginning of a long silence at your blog (( browse my archive and I can tell you specifically what happened at that particular moment to stop blogging ))

So, here’s an appeal to all you lurkers at math-blogs : give these people, once in a while, something back…. Ive thought for a long time that this lurk-but-no-comment attitude was something typical of mathematicians, but, as often, when researched in more depth, I have to admit that I’m wrong! Read the post Participation Inequality: Encouraging More Users to Contribute by Jakob Nielsen to find out that most blogs act along a 90-9-1 scheme :

User participation often more or less follows a 90-9-1 rule:

90% of users are lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don’t contribute).
9% of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time.
1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions: it can seem as if they don’t have lives because they often post just minutes after whatever event they’re commenting on occurs.

So, the good news is, it’s not that particular to us autistic mathematicians. But, wouldn’t it be even better if you could do something positive about it? Speaking for myself : often I read a post I like, and (being a semi-pro myself) appreciate the work had to be put into producing such a post, but even then I don’t feel the urge to communicate this positive feeling to the blogger in question. Perhaps, we could accelerate things by having a bookmarklet in your bookmarks-bar that does the following : when you like a post, go to the post-page where you are asked to leave a comment. Hit the bookmarklet and it will automatically fill in your name, URL, email adress and a supporting message along the lines of “Nice post! I’m not so much of a commenter, but rather than not replying at all, I found it important to let you know that people actually read and like your post. All the best (and perhaps later I’ll comment more to the point) :: lieven (again, change the name to your liking).

Well, I’ve just done that! So please take a few minutes off your time to read and follow-up the instructions below and have a math-blog-bookmarklet up in your bookmark-bar to tell the blogger in question you really liked her/his post. This may just be enough motivation for them to carry on…

Okay! Here the nitty-gritty (it takes under 2 minutes, so please, do it now!).

part 1 : copy the following text and save it as blogmarklet.html

Download mathblogmarklet.txt and save it into your favorite text-program as bookmarklet.html and change your URL, name, email and custom message (please extend on your compliments…)
Once you saved the file as bookmarklet.html open the file under your favourite browser (Safari or Flock) and drag the link to your bookmark-bar.

part 2 : use it!

Whenever you visit a blog-post you like, go to the page of that post where you can leave a comment. Hit the bookmarklet and your comment-fields are filled (but PLEASE ADD TO THE DEFAULT COMMENT IF YOU FEEL LIKE IT) and press the submit-button!
That’s it!

For example, Ive just changed the layout of this blog. Please leave a specific comment what you think about it.

14 Comments

Top 5 wp-plugins to improve your bounce-rate

Published January 18, 2008 by lievenlb

The bounce rate indicates how many web-visitors leave the site without visiting any other pages before a certain session timeout elapses. That is :

High bounce rate means the site must be horrible to site visitors and most likely they would never return again. They are not even interested to check other content of the site. First impression counts.

After installing google analytics some weeks ago, I noticed a worrying high bounce rate : close to 80%… At first I thought this was due to the fact that all iTouch fans left the moment they saw a mathematical symbol, but further analysis proved me wrong : iTouch fans study posts here a lot longer than the average mathematician. But then, what was the reason? Is this site really so horrible to look at? is the content of such poor quality?

Anyway, I’ve tried out a couple of tricks, with surprising effect. The bounce rate dropped from 80% to under 3% and best of all, it appears to stay that low. Here, the google-analytics bounce-rate evolution of the last 3 weeks

So, what kind of magic voodoo did I perform on january 6th? I’ve installed a couple of WordPress Plugins and changed the upper part of the entry-page. My basic assumption is that people leave a site when they come to it for specific information (for example via a search engine), do not find the info immediately and don’t want to spend too much time looking for it. So, I wanted to have all tools to find content on this site right in front of the potential new-comer. Here are the 5 major changes to the header part and the plugins Ive used.

1 : Rather than having a monthly-archive in the sidebar providing no more info than the number of posts in a particular month, create a proper archive page where visitors can find the titles and links to all posts in reverse chronological ordering. I did use the Smart Archives Plugin.

2 : Even better : have a drop-down archive right under the header-picture so that visitors can scroll down the list of all posts without having to load another page. Ive used the Awsom Archive Plugin.

3 : Let visitors see in a glance what your blog is all about by having a tag cloud under the header. I didnt feel like tagging 300 old posts, so I used the Simple Tags Plugin to do it all for me.

4 : Have a welcome message near the top to aid new visitors (especially when you have, like me, 77.51% of them around). The message disappears after their third visit. It’s a wonderful idea, made possible by the What Would Seth Godin Do-Plugin.

5 : Write series of posts and have links to the other parts available at the top of the new post. Likely, people are going to check out the other parts for more information. Rather than hard-coding the links by hand, Ive used the In Series Plugin.

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quick iTouch links

Published January 16, 2008 by lievenlb

MacBookAir? Is this really the best Apple could come up with? A laptop you can slide under the door or put in an envelop? Yeez… Probably the hot-air-book is about as thick as an iTouch. The first thing I did was to buy a leather case to protect the vulnerable thing, making it as thick as a first generation iPod… (needless to say, when my MacBookPro breaks down, ill replace it with a MacBookAir, clearly!)

Ranting about MacWorlds : Wired has a great article on last year’s event. Steve Job’s iPhone presentation is something that will be part of the collective memory when it comes to 2007-recollections. Few people will have realized that the Apple-team didnt have a working prototype a few weeks before… Here’s The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry. A good read!

If you plug in your jailbroken iTouch, you will be asked wether you want to upgrade to 1.1.3, something we all feared for a long time and so it takes just nanoseconds to hit the cancel-button. But, there is good news! Rupert Gee reports that you can downgrade to 1.1.1 and redo jailbreak. I won’t try it for some time, but still…

In the unlikely event that you come here being a mathematician, here’s what I did with my iTouch today. Ive downloaded the Connes-Marcolli talks on Renormalization and Motives part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7 and part 8 at work. They are in mp4-format so you can load them into iTunes and onto your iTouch!!! Weather is not favorable for outdoor-cycling at the moment, so I used the home-trainer, put the iTouch in front of me and, boy, was I educated…

Majority offers security…

Published January 15, 2008 by lievenlb

What better way to start a series on Web 2.0 & Mathematics than to reflect on the potential dangers of majority-approved sites, such as Google, Wikipedia and META-sites. Bee has written a great essay The Spirits That We Called

Now you can tell me everyone of us should be rational, we should always check sources, doubt unverified reports even if repeated several times. We shouldn’t believe what we read without questioning it. We should seek accuracy and not easy entertainment. We should, we should, we should. But face it, many people don’t. Because they just don’t have the time, or are not interested enough, and the most commonly used criteria in this case is to follow the masses. Read what others read (the posts with the most comments?) go where many people link to, talk what others talk about, pay attention to what many people consider relevant. Majority offers security, Wikipedia is trustworthy, Google has proved useful.

To wet your appetite to take a break, and start reading the full essay (11 printed pages available from this pdf link), her opening paragraph, in which she outlines possible consequences of tempering with social bookmark sites.

MARCH 13th 2008: Until Wednesday, the Presidential candidate [insert name here] scored high in the polls. Then a Google search for his name showed up as first hit a report on an alleged child abuse committed by the candidate, published by Mary S. (name changed) on her personal website. The story was backed up by the following highly ranked hits that indicated two similar events during his youth, though reliable sources were missing. Within less than one hour, the reports were echoed on thousands of weblogs, appeared on digg and reddit, the original websites received 200,000 hits within the first 6 hours, until the server crashed down. Immediate press releases by the candidate’s PR groups did not appear on the Google listing, and could only be accessed by secondary links. It took until the next day that printed newspapers could attempt to clarify the situation.

Another, equally interesting essay, to which Bee points is Digital Maoism by Jaron Lanier,

The Wikipedia is far from being the only online fetish site for foolish collectivism. There’s a frantic race taking place online to become the most “Meta” site, to be the highest level aggregator, subsuming the identity of all other sites.
The race began innocently enough with the notion of creating directories of online destinations, such as the early incarnations of Yahoo. Then came AltaVista, where one could search using an inverted database of the content of the whole Web. Then came Google, which added page rank algorithms. Then came the blogs, which varied greatly in terms of quality and importance. This lead to Meta-blogs such as Boing Boing, run by identified humans, which served to aggregate blogs. In all of these formulations, real people were still in charge. An individual or individuals were presenting a personality and taking responsibility.
…
In the last year or two the trend has been to remove the scent of people, so as to come as close as possible to simulating the appearance of content emerging out of the Web as if it were speaking to us as a supernatural oracle. This is where the use of the Internet crosses the line into delusion.
…
In March, Kelly reviewed a variety of “Consensus Web filters” such as “Digg” and “Reddit” that assemble material every day from all the myriad of other aggregating sites. Such sites intend to be more Meta than the sites they aggregate. There is no person taking responsibility for what appears on them, only an algorithm. The hope seems to be that the most Meta site will become the mother of all bottlenecks and receive infinite funding.

Now, please print out these two essays, turn off your computer for an hour, and read them! Perhaps they change your opinion as to whether or not getting involved into some of these bookmark sites. Being aware of their potential danger is one (important) thing, neglecting them altogether has drawbacks too.

You might want to repeat the experiment I performed last night : type in your favorite technical term (mine was ‘noncommutative’, when this failed to return a hit, I tried ‘geometry’) into bookmark sites such as StumbleUpon, Digg, MyBlogLog, Reddit, blinklist, Magnolia and a dozen other similar ones.

You will discover that there is hardly any mathematics of value to be found there. As more people are using such sites in search of information, an inevitable consequence is that mathematics will become even more marginal, unless we take some action.

In my experiment, there was one noteworthy exception (( delicious was another ok-site )) : CiteUlike which has 427 articles tagged noncommutative, perhaps a result of the action I started 2 years ago. So, there is still hope!

3 Comments

thanks for linking

Published January 11, 2008 by lievenlb

I’ve re-installed the Google analytics plugin on december 22nd, so it is harvesting data for three weeks only. Still, it is an interesting tool to gain insight in the social networking aspect of math-blogging, something I’m still very bad at…

Below the list of all blogs referring at least 10 times over this last three weeks. In brackets are the number of referrals and included are the average time Avg. they spend on this site, as well as the bounce back rate BB. It gives me the opportunity to link back to some of their posts, as a small token of gratitude. I may repeat this in the future, so please keep on linking…

Not Even Wrong (69) : Avg (1.05 min) BB (52.94%)

The most recent post of Peter is an update on the plagiarism scandal on the arXiv.

The n-category cafe (63) : Avg (2.13 min) BB (50%)

The one series I followed at the cafe lately was the Geometric Representation Theory course run by John Baez and James Dolan. They provide downloadable movies as well as notes.

Richard Borcherd’s blog (47) : Avg (1.53 min) BB (53.19%)

It is great to see that Borcherds has taken up blogging again, with a post on the uselessness of set theory.

The Arcadian functor (32) : Avg (3.45 min) BB (34.38 %)

It is clear from the low bounce-back rate and the high average time spend on this site, that Kea’s readers and mine have common interests. Often I feel that Kea and I are talking about the same topics, but that our language is so different, that it is difficult for me to spot the precise connection. I definitely should start (for myself) a translation-project of her M-theory posts.

RupertGee’s iBlog (23) : Avg (6.48 min) BB (34.7 %)

Surprisingly, and contrasting to my previous rant iTouch-people (or at least those coming here from Rupert Gee’s blog) sure take time to read the posts and look for more.

Ars Mathematica (22) : Avg (0:01 min) BB (77,2 %)

Well, the average time and bounce back rate say it all : people coming here from Ars Mathematica are not interested in longer posts…

iTouch Fans Forum (14) : Avg (2:07 min) BB (42.86 %)

Again, better statistics than I would have expected.

Vivatsgasse 7 (13) : Avg (1:51 min) BB (38.46 %)

I hope these guys haven’t completely given up on blogging as it is one of my favourites.

Sixth form mathematics (12) : Avg (1:40 min) BB (25 %)

My few old posts on LaTeXrender still draw referrals…

Strategic Boards (12) : Avg (0:01 min) BB (91.67 %)

People in strategic board games are not really in my game-posts it seems…

The Everything Seminar (11) : Avg (2:04 min) BB (72.73 %)

Greg Muller has been posting a couple of nice posts on chord diagrams, starting here.

Noncommutative Geometry (11) : Avg (3:36 min) BB (27.27 %)

Well, we are interested in the same thing viewed from different angles, so good average times and a low bounce back rate. Maybe, I should make another attempt to have cross-interaction between the two blogs.

7 Comments

iTouch warwalking

Published January 10, 2008 by lievenlb

Four years ago I had a brief fling with wardriving. It went only as far as getting Ethereal to crack the security of our house-network. I simply couldn’t picture myself walking around the neighborhood with my laptop under my arm… However, jogging around with an iPod will attract far less attention.

Starting an iTouch in a network-rich environment you will be asked which network you want to connect to (see for example this wardriving video). However, if you need more information on the networks, there is a port of the OSX-tool iStumbler for the iPhone/iTouch : Stumbler (available also from the Install.app under Network). This morning I flipped open my iTouch in a generic street near the University and was surrounded by 12 wireless networks, 6 of them wide open…

One may then ask : what about less innocent wardriving tools such as Kismet or Ethereal itself? The problem with porting those seems to be that no-one knows whether the iTouch wireless driver can be put into ‘promiscuous mode’ (see for example this thread).

Once you have collected open networks at your favourite places or have passwords to closed networks, it would be nice if the iTouch would auto-detect these and connect to them without you having to remember the particular name or having to type in username/password combinations. Surprisingly, this is possible thanks to the people at devicescape.com. Create a free login, then get Devicescape Connect (available under Network) run it and write down the pincode you are given and follow the instructions to complete the installation. You can then edit your Wi-Fi list of desired hotspot or personal networks, together with all login-data. There is a nice TidBit article describing devicescape in full detail.

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working archive plugin, please!

Published January 8, 2008 by lievenlb

Over the last two weeks Ive ported all old neverendingbooks-post from the last 4 years to a nearly readable format. Some tiny problems remain : a few TeX-heavy old posts are still in $…$ format rather than LaTeXrender-compatible (but Ill fix this soon), a few links may turn out to be dead (still have to check out those), TheLibrary-project links do not exist at the moment (have to decide whether to revive the project or to start a similar idea afresh), some other techie-things such as FoaF-stuff will be updated/expanded soon, et. etc. (and still have to port some 20 odd posts).

Anyway, the good news being that we went from about 40 posts since last july to over 310 posts, all open to the internal Search engine. Having all this stuff online is only useful if one can browse through it easily, so I wanted to install a proper up-to-date archive-plugin…

The current theme Redoable has build-in support for the Extended Live Archives v0.10beta-r18 plugin which would be ideal if I could get it installed… Im not the total newbie in installing WordPress-plugins and Ive read all the documentation and the support-forum and chmodded whathever I felt like chmodding, but still no success… If you know how to kick it into caching the necessary files, please drop a comment!

The next alternative Ive tried was the AWSOM Archive Version 1.2.3 plugin which gave me a pull-down menu just under the title-bar but not much seems to happen when using bloody Safari (Flock was OK though). Maybe Ill give it another go…

UPDATE (jan. 9th) : The AWSOM Archive seems to be working fine with the Redoable theme when custom installed in the footer. So, there is now a pulldown-menu at the bottom of the page.

**UPDATE (jan. 12th) : Ive installed the new version 1.3 of AWSOM Archive and it works from the default position **

At a loss I opted in the end for the simplest (though not the most aesthetic) plugin : Justin Blanton’s Smart Archives. This provides a year-month scheme at the top followed by a reverse ordered list of all months and titles of posts and is available as the arXiv neverendingbooks link available also from the sidebar (up, second link). I hope it will help you not to get too lost on this site…

Suggestions for a working-from-the-box WordPress Archive plugin, anyone???

4 Comments

overloaded iTouch

Published January 5, 2008 by lievenlb

A jailbroken iTouch can do many wonderful tricks : by sarting up an AFDd server one can use it in Disk mode, exactly as an iPodClassic, one can use it as a WebServer by installing Apache and PHP and run a Wiki, one can install OpenSSH and secure shell to the rest of the world, one can even turn the iTouch into a music streamer via the FireFly server, one can …

And all of this on a gadget with only 116Mb RAM and one processor running at 412MHz… is asking for overload problems both on memory and battery. A couple of days ago I wanted to start up the iTouch and was greeted by a bright flickering screen and thought I’d finally bricked it…

Fortunately, there’s a simple lesson to be learned : with every new feature you install, learn how to switch if off and monitor your iTouch using the SysInfo.app (under Utilities) which allows to view basic system info (screenshot below) as well as all active processes.

Here a few tricks to turn on/off the major consumers :

To turn off the Apache-sever, ssh into the iTouch and give a apachectl stop command (you can always restart it with apachectl start.
To control OpenSSH, install the Services.app (under Utilities) which allows to toggle Wifi, Edge, SSH and Bluetooth on or off (screenshot below).
To control APFd, use its control pannel to toggle the Broadcast active feature only when you need your iTouch in Disk mode (it will then appear under Shared in your Finder window, at least under Leopard. For more on this see Mount and use your iPod touch as a Thumb Drive.
To control FireFly, use the UIctl.app (under Multimedia) and scroll down (after staring for about 15 seconds to a white screen) to org.fireflymediaserver.mt-daapd, tap it and start or stop the server.

Another major consumer is the MobileRSS.app (under Productivity). Maybe I should restrict my subscriptions to the hottest blogs only…

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IF on iTouch

Published January 3, 2008 by lievenlb

Interactive Fiction (IF) describes software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives and as computer games. In common usage, the word refers to text adventures, a type of adventure game with text-based input and output. As the text-input is minimal (most commands have 1 letter abbreviations), text-games are ideal to be played on the iTouch.

Luckily, one of the most popular IF-interfaces, Frotz, is ported to the iPhone/iTouch as iPhoneFrotz. The easiest way to install is just to install the Frotz package using Installer.app. Just install the “Community Sources” package, which contains the installer repository (which hosts Frotz as well as other games and utilities), then look for Frotz under the Games section.

A collection of 3 Zork-derivatives (although not the original Infocom titles) is also available in the “Zork Z-Code” package.

There are hundreds of Z-Code games, and no one is likely to package your favorites for easy installation by Installer.app. But the games can be downloaded and copied to the phone without too much trouble.

Z-Code games are typically have filenames ending in .z3, .z4, .z5 or .z8 (depending on version), although game files from original Infocom media end in .dat. These should be copied to the phone’s Frotz/Games folder (under /var/root/Media).

Here is a link to the The IF archive and an archive of all Z-games. Another interesting site is the Inform 7-site

Inform is a design system for interactive fiction, a new medium for writers which began with adventure games in the late 1970s and is now used for everything from literary narrative fiction through to plotless conceptual art, and plenty more adventure games too. Since its introduction in 1993, Inform has become a standard tool.
Three years in the making, Inform 7 is a radical reinvention of the way interactive fiction is designed, guided both by contemporary work in semantics and by the practical experience of some of the world’s best-known writers of IF.

In place of traditional computer programming, the design is built by writing natural English-language sentences:
– Martha is a woman in the Vineyard.
– The cask is either customs sealed, liable to tax or stolen goods.
– The prevailing wind is a direction that varies.
– The Old Ice House overlooks the Garden.
– A container is bursting if the total weight of things in it is greater than its breaking strain.
Inform’s power lie in its ability to describe: to lay down general rules about “closed doors”, or “bursting containers”, or “unmarried men liked by Martha”. At its best, expressing IF in natural language results in source text which is not only quick to write, but very often works first time, and is exceptionally readable.

Inform 7 is available for most platforms and can be downloaded here.

top iTouch hacks

Published December 30, 2007 by lievenlb

So, you did jailbreak your iTouch and did install some fun or useful stuff via the Install.app … but then, suddenly, the next program on your wish-list fails to install ??!! I know you hate to do drastic things to your iTouch, but sooner or later you’ll have to do it, so why not NOW?

Move the Applications Folder

The problem is that there are two disk partitions (a small one, meant only to host the apple-software and a large one to contain all your music, videos and stuff) and Install.app installs programs in the /Apllications folder on the smaller partition. So, we want to move it to the other partition using a symbolic link trick (as in the wiki-hack post). Here a walkthrough, more details can be found on Koos Kasper’s site.

Have BSDsubsystem and OpenSSH installed, so that you can ssh into the iTouch.
verify that the second line of the /etc/fstab file reads as below (or edit it if necessary, in my case it was already ok, perhaps this is done during jailbreak?) and reboot the iTouch (if you had to change it)

/dev/disk0s2 /private/var hfs rw 0 2

ssh into the iTouch and type in the following commands (to move the folder and make the symbolic link)

cd /
cp -pr Applications /var/root
mv Applications Applications.old
ln -s private/var/root/Applications /Applications

reboot the iTouch, ssh into it and remove the old Application-folder to free space

cd /
rm -rf Applications.old

From now on, all (most) new programs are installed on the larger partition. If you reinstall the OpenSSH application (as suggested) make sure to remove on your computer the old key for iTouch.

Stream your Music!

I use the iTouch to read my mail, to read RSS feeds, to administer this blog, to VNC to the home-server and when needed to ssh into the computer at work (running this blog) to restart the apache server. Unless I have to write a lot, there is no need to fire up a computer… But, when someone has a Mac running, I would like to be able to stream the music on my iTouch to hear it loudly. Here’s the procedure, via Rupert Gee’s blog :

Have the Auto-Lock set to “Never” in Settings/General
Install the UIctl applications (under Utilities)
Add a source to Install.app (click on Sources-button lower-right, Edit upper-right and then Add upper-left) http://home.mike.tl/iphone
Relaunch Install.app and install FireFlyMediaServer (under Multimedia).
Write down the address given during installation to change your password and monitor the Firefly-server (the default root password is ‘dottie’ and so the address should be

http://root:dottie@127.0.0.1:3689

Open up UIctl and scoll down to a line saying “org.fireflymediaserver.mt-daapd” and tap on it. Tap on “load-w” and then on “Do It”
Now, at the Mac your iTouch should be vusible under Shared in iTunes, click on it and give the password and your music is available!

2 Comments