Blogging is dead, but have we fixed anything?

Google Reader is shutting down, but most people moved on long ago.

Blogging is dead. To the extent that it lives, it is dominated by professional journalists, writers backed by major organizations, or has transformed into microblogging. The original objective of an amateur form of journalism -- long articles written and published without an organization or editor -- has become archaic.

I have been writing on this blog since 2004. At its peak, this blog had about 10k regular readers. Over a decade, I have watched blogging rise and fall.

Nowadays, my posts here on this blog often get less attention that my tweets on Twitter. 140 characters that take two minutes to spew out sometimes get more attention than an article that takes four hours of thoughtful analysis, careful reading, and tight writing.

There is nothing wrong with people moving on. Professional journalists now use blogs to air early research or analysis that will later make it into a full print article. Companies use blogs to announce changes or new features. Many use microblogging as a useful means of quick communication. That is good.

But there was something charming about so many people trying to be amateur journalists. Journalistic writing is a skill; it emphasizes clear, tight, concise writing. That so many were attempting it and practicing it had a lot of value, both in the the skills bloggers gained and sometimes candid and insightful articles produced.

I find my blogging here to be too useful to me to stop doing it. I have also embraced microblogging in its many forms. Yet I am left wondering if there is something we are all missing, something shorter than blogging and longer than tweets and different than both, that would encourage thoughtful, useful, relevant mass communication.

We are still far from ideal. A few years ago, it used to be that millions of blog and press articles flew past, some of which might pile up in an RSS reader, a few of which might get read. Now, millions of tweets, thousands of Facebook posts, and millions of articles fly past, some of which might be seen in an app, a few of which might get read. Attention is random; being seen is luck of the draw. We are far from ideal.

Attention should flow to relevant and useful writing. I should see writings that are personally relevant and useful to me. When a friend does something I want to know about, when a colleague reads an article I should read too, when a company announces a useful change to a product I use, when a well-written article important for my work is published from a reputable source, when a major event occurs in the world, those should be brought to my attention.

Blogging wasn't that, but neither is microblogging. We need to build something that focuses our attention, improves our communication, and finally solves the problems blogging and microblogging failed to solve.

More quick links

Again, it has been too long, but here you go, what has caught my attention lately:

• "Employees who ate at cafeteria tables designed for 12 were more productive than those at tables for four, thanks to more chance conversations and larger social networks. That, along with things like companywide lunch hours and the cafes Google is so fond of, can boost individual productivity by as much as 25 percent." ([1])


• "Managers avoid dealing with low performers (because they believe the conversation will be difficult), and instead assign work to the employees they enjoy — i.e. high performers ... They end up 'burning out' those same high performers." ([1])


• "Is it really true that using someone else's invention is the actually the same thing as stealing their sheep? If I steal your sheep, you don't have them any more. If I use your idea, you still have the idea, but are less able to profit from using it. The two concepts may be cousins, but they not identical." ([1])


• Clever and simple idea: Attach a little flash memory and a small battery to memory chips ([1] [2])


• Another clever and simple idea: On touchscreens (like your phone), make a knuckle or nail tap like a right mouse click so it does something different ([1] [2] [3])


• Most data visualizations would be more clear done as a simple bar chart ([1])


• When someone comes back to a search result page after hitting the back button, you should add more search results to the bottom of the page ([1])


• For the first time, more smartphone ship than dumbphones, which has big implications, especially for the developing world ([1] [2])


• You can identify people based on just four locations sampled from a mobility trace (cell towers and Wifi nearby) from their cell phone ([1])


• "The problem is that Apple has not been able to sustain its high margin levels" ([1] [2])


• Humor (from The Onion): Weeping Tim Cook spotted screaming for help at Steve Jobs' tombstone ([1])


• Amazingly arrogant executive hired from Apple didn't understand customer base or think he had to, destroyed a major retailer ([1] [2])


• Amazon moves against Google ([1] [2]) and Google moves against Amazon ([1] [2] [3] [4])


• Very soon, only big players -- like Amazon, Facebook, and Google -- will be able to do personalized advertising. A change to third-party cookies will kill off all startups working on personalized advertising, but major websites get an exemption. ([1] [2])


• A new compression library from Google designed for web content, can be decompressed by existing software so no changes required on the client side to use it, just need to recompress the static content on the server to save about 5% in bandwidth ([1])


• eBay successfully moves away from auctions. "Auctions ... are less than 10% of what we do." ([1])


• "At this point, unfortunately, it seems clear that the Windows 8 launch not only failed to provide a positive boost to the PC market, but appears to have slowed the market ... Radical changes to elements like the user interface and higher costs had made PCs less attractive compared with tablets and other devices." ([1] [2])


• A MacBook Pro runs Windows faster than any PC laptop (but only because PCs have so much crapware installed) ([1] [2])


• "Aereo's founders realized that [a court] ruling offered a blueprint for building [an IPTV] service that wouldn't require the permission of broadcasters. In Aereo's server rooms are row after row of tiny antennas mounted on circuit boards. When a user wants to view or record a television program, Aereo assigns him an antenna exclusively for his own use." ([1])


• The vast majority of people have simple taxes, so simple that the IRS could just mail you a tax return, you'd look it over to make sure everything is correct and sign it, and you'd be done. Why don't we have that? Apparently, "it's been opposed for years by the company behind the most popular consumer tax software—Intuit, maker of TurboTax." ([1])


• Why Redfin has been unable to undermine the absurdly high 6% commission when you sell your home ([1] [2])


• "Personal finance courses ... have no effect on financial outcomes ... [but] additional training in mathematics [does]" ([1])


• "Graduate school in the humanities: Just don't go" ([1] [2])


• At least so far, MOOCs (like Coursera and Udacity) seem to only work for people who are already highly motivated, which isn't the group in the most need ([1])


• Seems to be increasing evidence that some autoimmune diseases (including allergies) are rooted in a bored immune system incorrectly prioritizing threats. Almost a parallel with anxiety disorders, your immune system is seeing threats where none exist, incorrectly prioritizing dangers. ([1] [2])


• "Deep waters have absorbed a surprising amount of heat -- and they are doing so at an increasing rate over the last decade" ([1])


• "Resilience -- building systems able to survive unexpected and devastating attacks -- is the best answer we have right now." ([1])


• The web-based version of blackmailing people who have done something embarrassing ([1])


• Little known fact, the second most used web server is something called Allegro RomPager ([1] [2])


• For most people in the US, the vast majority of entertainment time is still spent watching normal, live TV ([1])


• Odd similarities between distributed denial of service attacks and pollution. As Ed Felten writes, misconfigured DNS servers allow massive DDoS attacks, but it's hard to get people to fix it, because "the resulting harm falls mostly on people outside the organization." ([1] [2])

Quick links

It's been a while since I did a Quick Links post, so there's a lot to cover. Here's the latest of what has caught my attention:

• First Netflix wanted to be Blockbuster (DVDs), then a replacement for cable (streaming video), now they want to be HBO (making content). ([1] [2] [3])
  
  
• "For raw bandwidth, the internet will probably never beat SneakerNet" ([1])
  
  
• Data caps are "a strategy for ISPs to increase their revenue per user ... The trend is driven in large part by a woefully uncompetitive market that allows the nation's largest providers to generate enormous profits" ([1])
  
  
• "Maybe it will eventually dawn on [ISPs] that the only way to fight the scourge of cheap, fast broadband is to provide it themselves" ([1] [2])
  
  
• "Too many companies think of their call centers as a cost to minimize ... it's a huge untapped opportunity ... [for] word-of-mouth marketing ... [and] to increase the lifetime value of the customer" ([1])
  
  
• Mary Jo Foley says, "I keep scratching my head over who Microsoft expects to buy the Surface Pro" ([1])
  
  
• "Taking the bitter pill would mean backing off the Surface idea while smoothing over the worst parts of Windows 8. Admit that being different just for the sake of being different is a losing strategy. Go back to software engineering 101. But I don't see Ballmer making that tough decision. It's just not how he rolls. Then it'll be up to the board of directors to hold him responsible when this dogmatic strategy fails." ([1])
  
  
• "Dell outsourced the management of its supply chain, and then the design of its computers themselves. Dell essentially outsourced everything inside its personal-computer business—everything except its brand— to Asus ... Then, in 2005, Asus announced the creation of its own brand of computers. In this Greek-tragedy tale, Asus had taken everything it had learned from Dell and applied it for itself." ([1])
  
  
• "The Dreamliner was supposed to become famous for its revolutionary design. Instead, it’s become an object lesson in how not to build an airplane" ([1] [2])
  
  
• A deal protects Apple, Google, and a few others from being sued by Kodak's patents, but no one else. "Kodak patents may well be popping up in future patent troll suits in the future." ([1])
  
  
• Mark Cuban says, "Dumbass patents are crushing small businesses" ([1])
  
  
• Detailed technical discussion of the Superbowl power outage and what could have been done to prevent it ([1])
  
  
• The book "Thinking Fast and Slow" and implications for artificial intelligence ([1])
  
  
• "We understand the meaning of an object in terms of the meanings of other objects – other chunks of reality to which our brains have assigned certain characteristics. In the brain’s taxonomy, there are no discrete entries or 'files' – just associations that are more strongly or more weakly correlated with other associations ... Might 'meaning' itself simply be another word for 'association?'" ([1])
  
  
• On global warming: "There is only one thing we can do: develop renewable technologies that are substantially cheaper than coal, and give these technologies to the developing countries." ([1])
  
  
• Good summary of a Davos panel on education ([1] [2])
  
  
• Funding at Garfield High School in Seattle is just $5,600/year/student ([1] [2])
  
  
• Fascinating example of novel work in a field (in this case, literature) by blending it with computer science. ([1] [2] [3])
  
  
• Companies should stop talking about "mobile", start splitting out tablets and smartphones separately. ([1])
  
  
• People talk about tablets killing the PC, should be talking about tablets killing the e-reader ([1])
  
  
• Clever optimization idea from Google: "sending a hedging request after a 10ms delay reduces the 99.9th-percentile latency for retrieving all 1,000 values from 1,800ms to 74ms while sending just 2% more requests." ([1] [2])
  
  
• "Any time you access Google, you probably are in a dozen or more experiments" ([1])
  
  
• What could we do in a distributed database if we could rely on all servers having exactly the right time? ([1] [2])
  
  
• Spotify rediscovers what others found a decade ago, social recommendations don't work, that "no matter who you are, someone you don't know has found the coolest stuff." ([1] [2] [3])
  
  
• "Amazon sells things to people at prices that seem impossible because it actually is impossible to make money that way .... Competition is always scary, but competition against a juggernaut that seems to have permission from its shareholders to not turn any profits is really frightening." ([1])
  
  
• Amazon goes after personalized ads: "This platform lets the company retarget its users across the Web based on their browsing and purchase habits on Amazon’s owned-and-operated properties. That could be a game changer ... given Amazon's recommendation engine" ([1])
  
  
• "Consumers want more targeted and humorous ads ... 67 percent of respondents would be willing to be answer a question to make their ads more personalized and enjoyable ... Consumers understand the exchange of free content for advertising, but they want to make sure their time tradeoff of watching ads also benefits them. They found coupons, contests and links as the most positive forms of engagement." ([1])
  
  
• "Advertisements are 182 times as likely to deliver malicious content than pornography" ([1])
  
  
• Dilbert on effective mobile advertising ([1])
  
  
• The future of maps on smartphones: "It'll be like you're a local everywhere you go. You'll know your way through the back alleys and hutongs of Beijing, you'll know your way all around Paris even if you've never been before. Signs will seem to translate themselves for you. This kind of extra-smartness is coming to people." ([1])
  
  
• Shocking to see Acer bragging about Google Chromebook sales while lambasting slow Windows 8 sales ([1])
  
  
• Chromebook is the #1 selling laptop on Amazon.com right now, not Apple, not Microsoft's Windows 8. ([1])
  
  
• Marissa Mayer says, "In the future, you'll be the query" ([1] [2] [3])
  
  
• Recommendation algorithms work by finding things other people loved that you haven't found yet and bringing them to your attention. It's computers helping humans help humans. ([1])
  
  
• A good UX can make people very forgiving of high error rates ([1] [2])
  
  
• Stephen Wolfram says, "If heuristics are done well, with serious computation and knowledge behind them, they actually do work, and people like them very much ... So long as everything 'just works', people never think about the heuristics, never try to deconstruct them, and never notice or get confused by the lack of ultimate consistency." ([1])
  
  
• Google discovered the optimal length of an interview loop is 4 interviews. Any more hits diminishing returns. [1])
  
  
• "Granting mothers five months of leave doesn't cost Google any more money." ([1])
  
  
• "Software development at Google is big and fast. The code base receives 20+ code changes per minute and 50% of the files change every month" ([1])
  
  
• Worth knowing and understanding: Android has 42% market share of computing devices, but only generates 5% of Wikipedia's traffic ([1])
  
  
• "Why the Google+ long game is brilliant" ([1])
  
  
• Snarky: "The real sign of Google Apps making a big dent in the business world will be when its own hiring managers are able to stop treating Microsoft Office as the de facto standard." ([1])
  
  
• "When everything is in flux, predicting what will be hot a year from now -- 'skating to where the puck is going to be,' to quote Steve Jobs quoting Wayne Gretzky -- becomes all but impossible. Samsung's strategy is to put a man at every spot on the ice. Be in enough places and you're bound to catch something no one was predicting -- like, for instance, the world’s bizarre love affair with phablets." ([1])
  
  
• Much lower power consumption on GPS trails on smartphones by offloading processing to the cloud ([1])
  
  
• Clever combination of GPS trails and a game: "The idea of cyclists recording ride data is nothing new ... What Strava did was turn ... [that] into a rigorously measured, database-matched, global community with the sudden ability to turn the most banal ride into a race ... Get that satisfaction without turning up at the starting line, in the rain, on a Saturday morning at 6 a.m." ([1])
  
  
• Interesting theory: "I had a small epiphany. The cyclists were hated because they are [viewed as] cheats. They are getting away with something that car drivers cannot." ([1])
  
  
• I love this idea of a bicycle frame completely covered in reflective paint ([1])
  
  
• Out of control: "The American Civil Liberties Union filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the FBI seeking details of its surveillance policy -- who it spies upon, and how, and under what circumstances. The FBI sent back two 50+ page memos in reply, each of them totally blacked out except for some information on the title page" ([1] [2])
  
  
• On hedge funds: "The S&P 500 has now outperformed its hedge-fund rival for ten straight years, with the exception of 2008 when both fell sharply. A simple-minded investment portfolio—60% of it in shares and the rest in sovereign bonds—has delivered returns of more than 90% over the past decade, compared with a meagre 17% after fees for hedge funds (see chart). As a group, the supposed sorcerers of the financial world have returned less than inflation. Gallingly, the profits passed on to their investors are almost certainly lower than the fees creamed off by the managers themselves." [1])
  
  
• Appears both Vikings and Polynesians reached the Americas around 1000, well before Christopher Columbus ([1] [2])
  
  
• The weight of glaciers during ice ages might cause an increase in volcanic eruptions ([1])
  
  
• Moderate amounts of play of first person shooters (and similar action games) improve vision, attention, and spatial skills ([1])
  
  
• Randall Munroe (author of xkcd): "I've never seen the Icarus story as a lesson about the limitations of humans. I see it as a lesson about the limitations of wax as an adhesive." ([1])
  
  
• An art project with a visible pile of pennies and a crank, that "allows anyone to work for minimum wage for as long as they like." Absolutely brilliant. ([1])

Kids, programming, and doing more

I built Code Monster and Code Maven to get more kids interested in programming. Why is programming important?

Computers are a powerful tool. They let you do things that would be hard or impossible without them.

Trying to find a name that might be misspelled in a million names would take weeks to do by hand, but takes mere moments with a computer program. Computers can run calculations and transformations of data in seconds that would be impossible to do yourself in any amount of time. People can only keep about seven things in their mind at once; computers excel at looking at millions of pieces of data and discovering correlations in them.

Being able to fully use a computer requires programming. If you can program, you can do things others can't. You can do things faster, you can do things that otherwise would be impossible. You are more powerful.

Looking two decades out, when my kids are grown and well into their careers, I expect people who can fully use computers will have a major force multiplier. A blend of computer science and another field -- medicine, microbiology, genetics, economics, astronomy, journalism, business, almost anything -- will enable you to do things others in that field can't.

Already you can see this. Breakthroughs in genetics came from a collaboration between computer science and geneticists working to create new algorithms for massive scale approximate string matching. During the 2012 elections, Nate Silver redefined what it meant to be a journalist (and attracted huge amounts of traffic) by combining computing and large amounts of polling data in a new way. Astronomy is becoming a field of big data, computers analyzing huge amounts of data from a worldwide network of telescopes, pulling out promising patterns, then having humans look over the candidates to find new discoveries. Robotic probes and the massive data streams they produce are not only taking over space exploration, but also making inroads on sea exploration, marine biology, and climatology as well. Already, if you can program, you can do things others cannot, find things others cannot.

Over the coming years, the collaboration between computers and machine is only going to grow. Computers will do what they are good at, large scale data processing, computation, and analysis. Humans will do what they are good at, finding patterns, intuiting promising paths forward despite noise and missing data, and collaborative problem solving. Those who can fully use computers, and especially those who can program computers, will be more productive. Computers are a powerful tool for those who can wield it.

Sadly, many kids today think of programming as hard. As not fun. As not for them. The problem is particularly acute for girls, leading to the awful fact that only 14% of the computer science degrees in the US are awarded to women. So many kids not getting a chance to get excited about programming is not just unfortunate, it's deeply harmful, for their future and for ours.

Code Monster and Code Maven from Crunchzilla are designed to make programming easy. Make it fun. Make programming for everyone. In the couple months since launch, they have been used in schools and been getting rave reviews from both girls and boys. One girl "got totally into it" and "when she came up for air", she asked her parents, "Are there jobs you can get working with computers?" And a teacher who used this in a school told me, "A couple 6th grade girls who were not interested in programmers tore through Code Monster then started on Code Academy. It was unexpected and cool!"

If you get a chance to try your children on Code Monster or Code Maven, or you use either in a school, please let me know what you think.

Google and the right database for the job

I finally got a chance to read "Processing a Trillion Cells per Mouse Click", a paper out of Google presented at the recent VLDB 2012 conference.

It describes the rather cool PowerDrill column-oriented database at Google that is optimized for speed, x10-100 times faster than other column-oriented databases, and several orders of magnitude faster than MapReduce/Hadoop. But, of course, there are tradeoffs to get those speed gains, and the tradeoff PowerDrill makes is that it keeps a lot in memory, so it can only contain a fraction of the data of the other systems.

What is so interesting about this, and what other companies need to learn from this, is the way Google builds so many databases to analyze its massive log data. The goal is to let people find stuff in the logs as fast as possible. That means you need many tools, the right tool for the job.

Hadoop and similar systems allow you to scan massive amounts of log data but, c'mon, all of us know that the vast majority of Hadoop jobs ignore almost all of the data. Every one of these jobs starts by selecting out a couple of the columns, the same columns almost everyone else wants, and dropping everything else. Fire up your job, waste hours of time waiting for almost all the data from a full table scan to be thrown out, and finally you get the result.

Dremel and other column-oriented databases help a lot with this. If almost all log processing jobs only want a couple columns, a column-oriented database is designed to pull out just a few columns quickly, and it's going to be a lot faster.

PowerDrill goes a step further. If almost all log processing jobs only want the most recent logs and only a few of the columns, just create a database with only the most recent logs and a few of the columns. Add in a lot of carefully designed compression, sharding across a medium-sized cluster, and the ability to skip over much of the data when it isn't needed (instead of doing full table scans all the time), and you got yourself the ability to answer most questions people ask of the logs in seconds, not hours.

And that's the point. Build a system that can answer 90% of the questions people ask of the logs in seconds. Build another than can answer 90% of the remaining, harder questions people ask of the logs in minutes. Then have a system that primarily archives all the logs, but also can answer, given enough time and power, much more complicated questions people very rarely ask.

Those Google guys have many databases for asking questions of their logs. Maybe you should too.

Some excerpts from the PowerDrill paper:

The column-store developed as part of PowerDrill is tailored to support a few selected datasets and tuned for speed ... Our column-store relies on having as much data in memory as possible ... PowerDrill can run interactive single queries over more rows than Dremel, however the total amount of data it can serve is much smaller.

Consider a typical use case such as triggering 20 SQL queries with a single click in the UI. In our production system on average these queries process 782 billion cells in 30-40 seconds (under 2 seconds per query) .... Each month it is used by more than 800 users sending out about 4 million SQL queries ... scanning [the equivalent of] 525 trillion cells .... One of our top users ... [in] 6 hours ... [executed about] 12 thousand queries .... Our production system is running on well over 1000 machines, the distributed servers altogether using over 4T of main memory.

[PowerDrill] pushes the "interactivity limit" out significantly ... The majority of queries are fairly discriminative, similar, and uniform ... The store has only a few but often explored tables (as opposed to many tables that are not used very often) ... [For many common queries] our techniques push the limit of interactivity out by one or two orders of magnitude.

Quick links

More of what caught my attention recently:

• Android now has 72.4% of the mobile market, up from 52.5% a year ago ([1])
  
  
• Google's new Nexus 4 smartphone is in high demand and for good reason: "The idea that a Nexus quad-core smartphone is hitting the market ... [at] $300 is simply stunning. Even more so is that it's available without any contract or carrier locks, which means you can use it virtually anywhere in the world. .. The price of freedom has never been more reasonable." ([1] [2] [3])
  
  
• Google and Amazon aim to destroy Apple's high margin business model, selling hardware at cost and making money off content instead ([1])
  
  
• "Amazon is a black hole threatening to devour corporate America" ([1])
  
  
• "The ground is shifting beneath ... tech titans because of a major force: the rise of mobile devices" ([1])
  
  
• Mobile/tablets are being used for about 16% of online sales, but sales from referrals out of Twitter and Facebook are near 0% ([1])
  
  
• Google expects that 50% of traffic to Google.com will come from mobile in 2013. I wonder what that implies for Google, since it almost certainly does not mean 50% of revenue comes from mobile in 2013. ([1])
  
  
• Google's latest Chromebook laptop and Nexus 7 tablet are both in high demand, and Google is "massively ramping production". Meanwhile, Microsoft is cutting production of its Surface hybrid tablet because of low demand. ([1] [2] [3])
  
  
• Tablets mostly are used in the evening and for games and entertainment ([1] [2] [3])
  
  
• Surprising data (at least to me) on browser market share, I thought IE was falling rapidly, but no. Data says IE is steady, Chrome growth is stalled, and Firefox is no longer falling, actually climbing slightly. ([1])
  
  
• "Giving users the choice to view (or not view) may actually increase this advertising effectiveness" ([1])
  
  
• Experimental data is poised to kill off a big chunk of the last three decades of work in theoretical physics ([1])
  
  
• Good overview of current state of autonomous flying robots. Lots of breakthroughs recently. ([1])
  
  
• "It's actually more natural for humans to think logarithmically than linearly" ([1])
  
  
• If you don't need the actual location right away, it's three orders of magnitude cheaper (in energy use) to collect raw GPS data and process it later (in the cloud) than it is to process it immediately on the mobile device ([1])
  
  
• Startups would love to get their hands on Google Fiber (especially the upload speeds) but can't. Cities should be thinking about encouraging Google Fiber (or similar) as a way to encourage startups. ([1])
  
  
• Key question is: "Do patents, in fact, provide a net incentive for innovation in the software industry?" ([1])
  
  
• Crazy data about the incredibly low cost of renting botnets, paying for someone to take out websites with DDoS attacks, sending spam, and buying various types of trojans ([1])
  
  
• "We can't be afraid to let them actually take charge and ship" ([1])
  
  
• "Only a handful of startups that are big successes. What happens along the way that causes such failure? It's like there's a tunnel full of monsters that kill them along the way. I'm going to tell you what these monsters are so you know to avoid them." ([1])
  
  
• "By far the most common mistake startups make is to solve problems no one has" ([1])
  
  
• Dilbert summarizes the advice from most business books ([1])
  
  
• "People with lots of authority tend to behave like neurological patients with a damaged orbito-frontal lobe, a brain area that's crucial for empathy and decision-making" ([1])
  
  
• "Studies of the human brain demonstrate that .... some people seem to think about their future selves in the same way that they think about complete strangers" ([1])
  
  
• On why PC sales are flat: "Norvig's Law: Any technology that surpasses 50% penetration will never double again (in any number of months)." ([1])
  
  
• "To the surprise of pundits, numbers continue to be best system for determining which of two things is larger" ([1])

Code Maven and programming for teens

I recently launched Code Maven from Crunchzilla. It helps teens learn a little about what they can do if they learn more about programming.

A lot of teens are curious about programming these days, but don't end up doing any. And, it's true, if you are a teen who wants to learn programming, you either have to use tutorials, books, and classes made for adults (which have a heavy focus on syntax and are slow to let you do anything) or high level tools that let you build games but teach a specialized programming language you can't use anywhere else. Maybe something else might be useful to help more teens get started and get interested.

Code Maven lets teens learn a little about how to program, starting with basic concepts such as loops then rapidly getting into fractals, animation, physics, and games. In every lesson, all the code is there -- in some cases, a complete physics engine with gravity, frame rate, friction, and other code you can modify -- and it is all live Javascript, so the impact of any change is immediate. It's a fun way to explore what programming can do.

Code Maven is a curious blend of a game and a tutorial. Like a tutorial, it's step-by-step, and there's not-too-big, not-too-small challenges at each step. Like a game, it's fun, addictive, and experimentation can yield exciting (and often very cool) results. I hope you and your friends like it. Please try Code Maven, tell your friends about it, and, if you have suggestions or feedback, please e-mail me at maven@crunchzilla.com

Code Maven builds on Code Monster. Code Monster is for kids ages 9-14 (but many even younger have enjoyed it too, especially with a little help). Code Maven is for teens ages 13-18 (and curious adults too, especially adults who have never programmed before). Because Code Maven is built for older kids, it assumes a longer attention span, and so is a bit harder, has more explanation, and has some additional fun projects. Pick which one you like based on the age of your kids and your interest. You can try them both at crunchzilla.com!

Quick links

What caught my attention recently:

• The latest Google and Microsoft earnings show damage from a tech disruption, a shift to mobile that is impacting both badly but for different reasons. Google needs to crack mobile ads. Microsoft needs to get share in mobile computing. ([1] [2] [3] [4])
  
  
• Now "there are almost as many mobile phone subscriptions in the world as people" ([1] [2] [3])
  
  
• Google is getting aggressive, releasing a $99 tablet and a $250 laptop ([1] [2] [3] [4])
  
  
• Amazon prices their tablet at cost ([1] [2])
  
  
• And decent tablets in the $50 range are already widely available in China ([1])
  
  
• But Microsoft prices its new tablet above the cost of an iPad. ([1] [2])
  
  
• Meg "Whitman liberally mixed metaphors to describe her awakening to just how screwed HP was" ([1])
  
  
• "Prepare for Windows 8 induced user rage" ([1])
  
  
• "The argument that C.E.O.'s will leave if they aren't compensated well, perhaps even lavishly, is bogus" ([1])
  
  
• "FTC puts a bounty on the heads of robo-telemarketers" ([1])
  
  
• On Amazon EC2, testing performance of the instances and rejecting ones with weak performance can make a huge difference ([1] [2])
  
  
• Good article in The Atlantic about the considerable lengths Google is willing to go to increase the quality of Google Maps ([1])
  
  
• "We read Apple's secret Genius Training Manual from cover to cover. It's a penetrating look inside Apple: psychological mastery, banned words, roleplaying—you've never seen anything like it." ([1])
  
  
• Big data is "a process that uses data to refine our thinking. But it doesn't work without some thinking first." ([1])
  
  
• Surprisingly detailed talks on Netflix and LinkedIn's recommender systems ([1] [2] [3])
  
  
• Great talk on A/B testing, especially how to do A/B testing at large companies ([1] [2])
  
  
• Amazing speaker list at a workshop on big data for personalized education, slides from many of the talks are available ([1] [2])
  
  
• Sometimes research just confirms what we already know (or should know), in this case, that simpler websites with familiar themes in the design do better ([1] [2])
  
  
• "Savvy Internet users know that all the great stuff they get from the Internet us for 'free' -- the searches, the social networks, the games, even the news -- isn't really free. It's an exchange, where companies are able to take user data, sell it to advertisers, and make money." ([1] [2])
  
  
• In the US, "80% of teens ... have a game console" ([1] [2])
  
  
• Meanwhile, in Estonia, "a new education program that will have 100 percent of publicly educated students learning to write code" ([1])
  
  
• Xkcd on dinosaurs ([1])
  
  
• Good TED talk on publication bias, which is caused by not publishing negative results ([1])
  
  
• Got willpower depletion? One study claims, if you believe willpower depletion exists, it does, otherwise it doesn't. ([1])
  
  
• "Ever heard of the marshmallow test? The outcome may have more to do with conditioning from a child's environment" ([1])
  
  
• "Is playtesting essential to making a good game? Yes ... [But] playtesting is like an engraved invitation that reads: 'You are cordially invited to tell me why I suck. Bring a friend - Refreshments served.' The whole point of playtesting is to make clear to you that some of the decisions you made ... are completely wrong." ([1])

Code Monster and teaching programming to kids

I recently launched Code Monster from Crunchzilla. It helps parents teach a little programming to their kids.

A lot of parents want their kids to learn a little about programming. But, if you are a parent, there seem to be only two choices out there, either have your kids slog through all the syntax and pain of tutorials and textbooks made for adults, or have them learn a visual programming language made for kids that can't be used for anything else.

Code Monster teaches Javascript, which is a useful and valuable programming language to know. When learning using Code Monster, the code is live, so changes kids make have impact immediately. They learn a bit about how to program, starting with early concepts like parameters, variables, and loops, moving through functions, eventually introducing some of the wonders of fractals, animation, and physics. Code Monster encourages experimentation. It makes programming fun.

Code Monster is an unusual blend of a tutorial and a game. It is not a tutorial or a lesson plan, but it does walk kids through many experiments with a real, useful programming language. It is not a game, but many of the children who have playtested it have found it fun, addictive, and exciting.

If you're a geek like me, there are some techie aspects of Code Monster you may find interesting. For example, Code Monster uses live code so kids see the immediate impact from code changes, no hitting a run or compile button. Code Monster provides useful help messages if the player stops working on the code but has an error. There are several nice but subtle features -- like preventing most accidental infinite loops -- that are harder to do than you might think (if you think you know how to do that in Javascript, try it, I bet your solution doesn't work). It only needs an internet connection when you first go to Code Monster (allowing working on lessons offline) and keeps your progress without saving anything remotely (privacy is important). The lessons eventually introduce quite sophisticated topics -- like fractals, L-grammars, animation, and physics -- that are very fun for kids but not normally taught to beginning programmers. But all of that tech stuff only matters because it makes Code Monster do the right thing; the important thing is that Code Monster fun and enjoyable to use.

Code Monster came out of my interest in online education, especially math and computer science education. I am convinced that, when this generation of children grows up, algorithmic thinking, large scale data analysis, and programming will be a major force multiplier for people working in many fields. People who have these tools will have the power to find breakthroughs in medicine, biology, economics, and many other areas; these tools will let them do things no others have done. I hope Code Monster can be a small piece of many more girls and boys becoming interested in computational thinking.

Please try Code Monster. It's free and it's fun. If you have kids (especially ages 9-14) , please have them try it. If you know people who have kids (or adults who are young at heart and might want to dabble in programming), please tell them about it (and share on Facebook, Google+, and Twitter too). I'd love to get the word out about it, and it's all for a good cause, it's teaching kids to program. Finally, if you have any suggestions or find it useful for your kids, please post a comment here or e-mail me at monster@crunchzilla.com, I'd enjoy knowing how you like it and how I can make it better.

Will tablets replace PCs?

I just bet Professor Daniel Lemire $100 that they won't.

At least, any time soon. The specific terms of the bet are, "In some quarter of 2015, the unit sales of tablets will be at least twice the unit sales of traditional PCs, in the USA." Loser donates $100 USD to the charity of the winner's choice.

How did I get to this point? About a year and a half ago, I wrote a blog post for CACM, "Who needs a tablet?"

The purposely inflammatory title overstates the main point, which is that rather than replace PCs, people are mostly buying tablets in addition to their PC ([1] [2]).

Even so, predictions in the article have already proven wrong. Tablet sales did not "stall around the same level where netbook sales stalled". Netbook sales peaked and stalled around 40M units/year worldwide ([1] [2]). Tablet sales passed 60M units/year worldwide in 2011 and are projected to be twice that this year.

So, tablets show no sign of stalling where netbooks did, but they are still being bought in addition to, not in replacement of, PCs. While many are taking some of the time they would have spent on their PC and spending it on their mobile or tablet instead, they still own and spend time on a laptop or PC.

This bet doesn't quite say what I want to say. What I want to say is that PCs aren't going away any time soon. They definitely are not going away by the end of 2015. Eventually, yes, but the change is not going to happen in less than three years.

What the bet actually says is more about how fast people in the US will buy new tablets in 2015 compared to replacing PCs. Projections I've seen put PC unit sales in the US around 16M units/quarter and mostly flat through 2015, tablet unit sales currently at 7M/quarter in the US and growing rapidly (projections vary from 10-16M/quarter by 2016). Seems unlikely that the projections would be that far off, so I took the bet.

But the more interesting questions are:

1. What will it take to get people to stop using PCs?
2. Will the tablet market continue to be dominated by expensive devices (like the $600 iPad) or convert almost entirely to low priced tablets (currently $200 with the Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire, but probably soon around $100)?
3. Will anything coming in the next five years, including tablets, get people to stop buying and using PCs entirely? Or will people continue to buy and use multiple computing devices?

I've said what I think (breakthroughs in input/output, almost all $100 tablets, no). What do you think?

Quick links

Some of what has caught my attention lately:

• Pump and dump, both at the Facebook and Groupon IPOs. ([1] [2])
  
  
• "The thrilling demise of Groupon's crummy business model" ([1] [2])
  
  
• Dave McClure says, "Returns for venture capital 'absolutely suck' ... even worse ... most VCs are 'insufferable, arrogant, fucking assholes'." ([1])
  
  
• And good advice here, also from Dave McClure: "Don't do a startup, you idiot!" ([1])
  
  
• Remember all the startups in desktop search a few years ago? They all disappeared when Microsoft fixed desktop search in Windows. Likewise, cloud storage is increasingly becoming part of the operating system (in MacOS, Windows, and Ubuntu), and that likely will kill off startups like Dropbox. ([1] [2])
  
  
• This is the end of the customizable home page hype, also a popular startup idea a few years ago ([1])
  
  
• "Once valued at more than $160 million, [Digg] is selling for the deeply discounted price of about $500,000" ([1])
  
  
• I wonder why we don't see engineers leave en masse for another company. Lack of organization? Fear of being sued?([1])
  
  
• After saying "Windows 8 is terrible for desktops", a reviewer goes on to predict, "Windows 7, with its 630 million licenses sold, will remain an incredibly popular OS for the next 10 years -- just like Windows XP." ([1] [2] [3])
  
  
• WinXP amazingly still has 26% market share but, in a bizarre twist on top of that, Microsoft decided not to support IE9 on WinXP; WinXP users have to use Chrome or Firefox if they want a modern browser. ([1] [2])
  
  
• Brutal (and long) Vanity Fair article on Microsoft. To summarize, stack ranking and Ballmer's repeated errors killed confidence, morale, and the company's performance in the last decade. This quote captures the dysfunction: "People responsible for features will openly sabotage other people’s efforts. One of the most valuable things I learned was to give the appearance of being courteous while withholding just enough information from colleagues to ensure they didn't get ahead of me on the rankings." ([1] [2] [3] [4] [5])
  
  
• Microsoft has a decent phone out now, but it's priced so high, no one sees the point of getting it. You can't have a product consumers see as inferior to an Apple product but charge Apple-level prices, people will just get the Apple product. ([1] [2])
  
  
• Others had the same idea as the iPhone, just no one but Apple was willing to piss off the carriers and partners and launch it ([1])
  
  
• A change that may have widespread impact, current smartphones are getting powerful enough that people are waiting longer before replacing them; they're happy with what they already have. A similar thing happened a while ago with PCs, with dramatic impact on that industry, could be just starting for smartphones. ([1])
  
  
• Of course you can sacrifice customer service in the short-term to boost short-term profitability. Customers take a while to learn that the service is not what it once was; you're essentially drawing down from past investment in your brand. After a few years, your brand becomes soiled, retention rates fall, customer acquisition costs rise, and profitability plummets. This has happened many times in the past, and is happening again right now. ([1] [2] [3])
  
  
• A hybrid recommender, using both content and behavior data, wins A/B tests on Forbes.com articles. Why does that sound familiar (cough, Findory, cough)? ([1] [2])
  
  
• Cute idea, default local search results not to where you are, but where you are likely going, based on your current trajectory ([1])
  
  
• Nice example of how better hardware in your database can be faster and cheaper than expanding your caching layer ([1])
  
  
• What we introverts have to go through to act like extroverts ([1])
  
  
• If you have ever worked with software engineers and thought, "Why are they so grumpy?", this article provides insight, understanding, and solutions. ([1])
  
  
• Long article from Steve Yegge, but with some thought-provoking points about liberal (risk embracing) and conservative (risk avoiding) programmers. ([1])
  
  
• A start on personalized education, recommendations for courses ([1])
  
  
• An interesting difference between Coursera and Udacity is that Udacity is sticking mostly to computer science. I think Udacity is right to do so, but also curious how well Coursera manages to do in fields outside of CS. ([1])
  
  
• Love DragonBox, a game that is primarily a fun puzzle game, but also teaches algebra. The math is subtle; the puzzles involve matching and moving things on two sides of the screen that, as it turns out, represent two sides of the equation and all your moves are the same as moving things between two sides of an equation. Great for kids, really fun and addictive to play, love this, more like this please. ([1] [2])
  
  
• Nice example of A/B testing in the physical world ([1])
  
  
• Google App Engine launched at the top of the stack (write code and don't know where or how it is running) and Amazon EC2 at the bottom (just providing virtual machines). It's been interesting to watch both of them move toward each other, Amazon launching more and more features on top of EC2 (like CloudFront and Elastic MapReduce) and Google launching lower level services (like this new move to allow you to run your own virtual machine in Google's cloud). ([1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7])
  
  
• Why read research papers? "These papers often foreshadow where the rest of the world is going." ([1])
  
  
• I like this search quality metric, WTF! @ k. Colorfully useful. ([1])
  
  
• Google Research and their hybrid research model blends research and engineering (to maximize impact and avoid the problematic tech transfer from research) and keeps projects short (but still do long-term research by iterating). ([1])
  
  
• Cow Clicker is a very amusing (and bizarrely successful) deconstructive satire of Zynga games, reduced to just clicking, waiting, and buying your way out of waiting, hilarious. Also worth seeing is Nekogames' Parameters, which breaks down Diablo-like games to their core elements. ([1] [2] [3])
  
  
• NNet guru Geoffrey Hinton says, "The brain is confronted by a buzzing, blooming confusion. It needs to fit many different models and use wisdom of the crowds." He then goes on to show the surprising benefits of massive NNets that drop out hidden units randomly. ([1] [2])
  
  
• "We oversimplify because, simply, there is no other way of getting by in the world" ([1])
  
  
• "It's not that our memory is a glitchy wetware version of computer flash memory; it’s that the computer metaphor just doesn't apply ... We store only bits and pieces of what happened—a smattering of impressions we weave together into feels like a seamless narrative. When we retrieve a memory, we also rewrite it, so that the time next we go to remember it, we don't retrieve the original memory but the last one we recollected." ([1])
  
  
• Amazing technology, a camera fast enough to catch light moving, can see around corners using clever algorithms, well worth watching this short talk ([1])
  
  
• Another amazing technology, very clever algorithms allowing an autonomous plate to fly at high speed in a constrained space. Go robots! Well worth watching this too, also short. ([1])
  
  
• Yet another impressive video, worth watching. Simple idea that breaks an assumption, solves a long standing problem with robot grippers, very effective, clever. ([1])

The computer scientist CEO

Marissa Mayer as CEO of Yahoo may be a test of a new style of executive leadership, the optimizing CEO.

She is not the first computer scientist to lead a major company, but she is the first computer scientist (MSCS or higher) hired in as CEO to a Fortune 500 company. Many computer scientists view everything as an optimization problem. People, work, politics, life, everything is a search (often of a dynamic space) to find a maximum near the global maximum.

Marissa Mayer is an important test of a new style of CEO. She is not a Neutron Jack or Carly Fiorina, the strong military general style of bold decisions, loyalty-first, follow me, right or wrong. She is not going to be a charismatic cheerleading, press-focused CEO, the type that views their job solely as managing the message and marketing and selling the company and themselves. She is not going to be the mad visionary of Steve Jobs, yelling at everyone while single-handedly designing breakthrough products. She is a computer scientist and appears to be leading like one. I suspect she views the company, people at the company, the products, even her own role, all as an optimization process, a search to find the most productive and most useful outcomes.

The most common degree of CEOs hired into Fortune 500 companies is an MBA. Marissa appears to be the first computer scientist. This may be a test of a new style of leadership. Will Marissa Mayer be the start of companies hiring optimizing CEOs?

Puzzling outcomes in A/B testing

A fun upcoming KDD 2012 paper out of Microsoft, "Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments: Five Puzzling Outcomes Explained" (PDF), has a lot of great insights into A/B testing and real issues you hit with A/B testing. It's a light and easy read, definitely worthwhile.

Selected excerpts:

We present ... puzzling outcomes of controlled experiments that we analyzed deeply to understand and explain ... [requiring] months to properly analyze and get to the often surprising root cause ... It [was] not uncommon to see experiments that impact annual revenue by millions of dollars ... Reversing a single incorrect decision based on the results of an experiment can fund a whole team of analysts.

When Bing had a bug in an experiment, which resulted in very poor results being shown to users, two key organizational metrics improved significantly: distinct queries per user went up over 10%, and revenue per user went up over 30%! .... Degrading algorithmic results shown on a search engine result page gives users an obviously worse search experience but causes users to click more on ads, whose relative relevance increases, which increases short-term revenue ... [This shows] it's critical to understand that long-term goals do not always align with short-term metrics.

A piece of code was added, such that when a user clicked on a search result, additional JavaScript was executed ... This slowed down the user experience slightly, yet the experiment showed that users were clicking more! Why would that be? .... The "success" of getting users to click more was not real, but rather an instrumentation difference. Chrome, Firefox, and Safari are aggressive about terminating requests on navigation away from the current page and a non-negligible percentage of clickbeacons never make it to the server. This is especially true for the Safari browser, where losses are sometimes over 50%.

Primacy effect occurs when you change the navigation on a web site, and experienced users may be less efficient until they get used to the new navigation, thus giving an inherent advantage to the Control. Conversely, when a new design or feature is introduced, some users will investigate the new feature, click everywhere, and thus introduce a "novelty" bias that dies quickly if the feature is not truly useful.

For some metrics like Sessions/user, the confidence interval width does not change much over time. When looking for effects on such metrics, we must run the experiments with more users per day in the Treatment and Control.

The statistical theory of controlled experiments is well understood, but the devil is in the details and the difference between theory and practice is greater in practice than in theory ... It's easy to generate p-values and beautiful 3D graphs of trends over time. But the real challenge is in understanding when the results are invalid, not at the sixth decimal place, but before the decimal point, or even at the plus/minus for the percent effect ... Generating numbers is easy; generating numbers you should trust is hard!

Love the example of short-term metrics improving when they accidentally hurt search result quality (which caused people to click on ads rather than search results). That reminds me of a problem we had at Amazon where pop-up ads won A/B tests. Sadly, pop-up ads stayed up for months, until, eventually, we could show that they were hurting long-term customer happiness (and revenue) even if they showed higher revenue in the very short-term, and finally we were able to take pop-up ads down.

The whole paper is a great read. The authors have a lot of experience with A/B testing in practice and all the problems you encounter with A/B testing in practice. Definitely good to learn from their experience.

Quick links

What has caught my attention lately:

• The coming bandwidth explosion, by 2015, a zetabyte per year, "the equivalent of all movies ever made crossing IP networks every four minutes" ([1])


• Googlers (including gurus Jeff Dean and Andrew Ng) train "perhaps one of the largest known networks to date" on 1000 machines for three days, shows it is possible to learn to detect faces without ever labeling any of the data as a face, which has crazy cool implications for how the brain works ([1])


• John Dvorak says, "Windows 8 looks to me to be an unmitigated disaster".  Long-time Microsoft reporter Todd Bishop writes, "Microsoft [uses] 'fast and fluid' to describe Windows 8, but two other words keep popping to my mind: New Coke." A former Palm executive says, "To me, it feels like Microsoft is in a quiet panic. When Apple says the era of the PC has ended, I think Microsoft may believe it even more than Apple does." ([1] [2] [3])


• "Make everyone a manager" aka "why there are no bosses" ([1] [2] [3] [4] [5])


• Usability study shows people ignore social annotations when searching (e.g. one of your friends clicked or liked a web page that is in your search results) and, in the rare cases when searchers pay attention to them, people don't find them useful. Pretty serious implications for Facebook's partnership with Bing and Google's increasingly annoying habit of slopping Google+ all over Google web search. ([1]) 


• Prefetching entire web pages has issues, but a lot of the benefit can be gained just with DNS prefetching and TCP preconnecting.   "If we guess right, the DNS and TCP handshake may complete before we even hit enter."  Lots of clever ideas in Google Chrome, including this one. ([1])


• Chatbot for Facebook and Twitter that basically does Let Me Google That For You, very funny, but also surprisingly effective ([1])


• Retention, morale, productivity, and recruiting have long been wastelands of opinion over data, but here is a very welcome initiative to change that spearheaded by Google. By the way, I love that Google doesn't have Human Resources, they have "People Ops". ([1])


• The time has come to optimize code for energy consumed. Don't miss the table showing how many joules it takes to render the home pages of some popular websites. ([1])


• At least for ambiguous queries like [pizza], Google no longer emphasizes search results, not a bad idea, but quite a change for them ([1])


• Google is now crawling and executing most Javascript on the Web. This has been talked about for years, but first I've heard of it being done routinely at massive scale. ([1])


• For shopping search results, it matters what products you show next to each other.  In particular, people often buy in the middle of the price range, so the mix of prices on the products you show can change what product people buy. ([1])


• Is Google's mission now organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful (but only if you pay to be included)? ([1])


• Clever idea here, using playlists (or wishlists or any kind of publicly available list) for recommendations. ([1])


• A WWW 2012 paper that both quotes Xkcd and contains the sentence "this is quite a sweet ass-abstract for a scientific paper, dude!" in the introduction. Fun paper as well, but I think it's notable for that alone. ([1])


• Remarkable ability to automatically stabilize the camera in YouTube videos. Make sure to look at the two videos. ([1])


• Can't wait for us to have full wall displays controlled by voice and gesture, these are another step closer ([1] [2])


• Udacity and Coursera are getting more explicit about their business model, which appears to be sourcing programmers nicely pre-screened for coding ability to companies. ([1] [2])


• On flipped classrooms: "A control class that received a lecture from a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and an experimental section where students worked with graduate assistants to solve physics problems. Test scores for the experimental group (non-lecture) was nearly double that of the control section (41% to 74%)." ([1])


• Love that robot swarms are practical and starting to be used. Want to see this for space and undersea probes too. ([1])


• A big step toward computers that accept error as normal, yielding large gains in efficiency and performance ([1])


• Talk about geniuses at Facebook ignores the big problem that no one -- not Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, or any of the newspapers -- knows how to solve this problem of making advertising relevant, effective, and lucrative without immediate purchase intent, despite years of work by thousands of brilliant people ([1] [2])


• "The buy, driven entirely by Zuckerberg, was made because Facebook’s CEO was petrified of Instagram becoming a Twitter-owned property. Zuckerberg, we’re told, lives in perpetual anxiety, preoccupied by the fear of Facebook losing its place ... That fear served as the catalyst behind his decision to buy Instagram." ([1] [2])


• Fascinating (but long) talk by Googler Steve Seitz on "the next generation of Google Maps". Also a great survey of work (older work and work currently at Google) using crowdsourced photos to build 3D walkthroughs of cities and interiors for photo tourism. Relevant for Apple launching their own maps, but also amazing and fun, can't wait to see more of this launched. ([1])


• The decline of TV has been greatly exaggerated ([1])


• Ubiquitous Wi-Fi might be back, this time with cell phone-like handoff between hotspots, could be a real game changer ([1])


• One of the better articles on this: "5 Things You Should Know Before Working at a Start-Up" ([1])


• "The average VC fund returns less money to investors than they invested in the first place." ([1] [2])


• Truly random (and fast) number generators by looking at quantum vacuum, possibly soon small and cheap enough to be put on a motherboard. Sounds trivial, I know, but insufficiently random numbers cause security and performance problems, so this really is a pretty useful idea. ([1])


• "Geek" has really changed meaning in the last decade, now almost admired. ([1])

The game Stick Portal

I want to share more of the ideas I've been exploring. First, let me start with this, an early version of a game I'm calling Stick Portal. Click on the image to play:

It's entirely written in Coffescript using HTML5 canvas. Just need a browser to play, works pretty well on mobile devices (add it to your home screen and it'll even go full screen and behave like a free app).

The idea is to create a simplified puzzle game with a level editor where kids could share levels they created. The current version has ten levels that are the tutorials to teach players how to play the game. I've just started on the level editor that will, eventually, allow people to create their own levels easily and share them with others.

The motivation for this came from seeing what Valve did with Portal 2. Portal 2 had a level editor called Hammer that was amazing but incredibly hard to use. Kids were using Hammer to create puzzles for each other that they could play in Portal 2 -- which is great exposure to CAD-like modeling tools and a nice spatial reasoning workout -- but it was really painful. Valve just launched a much easier-to-use editor for Portal 2 that is truly fantastic, highly recommend it.

Stick Portal is free to play, open source (MIT license), and the code is available on GitHub. The source might be useful to people working on similar games as it contains examples of ways to use the Box2Djs physics engine, handling touch and multi-touch (and accelerometer) on mobile devices, how to make your web page look like an app, plenty of examples of working with HTML5 Canvas, crazy things like a way to automatically resize the canvas when the browser window changes or a device rotates, and a lot of other goodies. Won't claim it's the most beautiful code ever, but it is well commented and was fun to write. I hope it is useful.

I plan to keep working on this and extend it to include an editor, but I've been sitting on this long enough so, in the spirit of launch early and often, I'm putting it out now. Please let me know what you think in the comments, and I'd love it if you'd drop me a note if your kids like the game or if the examples in the source turn out to be useful to you.

Update: A couple people have told me they have gotten stuck not being able to guess the controls in the tutorial. It's AWSD or arrow keys for movement and mouse button and mouse movement for the portal gun. On mobile, it's hold down your finger to run toward your finger and hold down above you to jump, tap to aim and fire the portal gun, and second finger (multi-touch) to move the portal gun without firing (like to maneuver a held box).

I also should have said more explicitly that one very cool thing is that the game doesn't use Flash, it's just HTML5. So, it works on all modern browsers without a plug-in, which is neat-o. Also interesting is that it is a fairly complicated HTML5 game running smoothly in the browser on PCs and mobile, almost looking like a native app, but not a native app.

Finally, let me add that I did this game mostly to learn about making games fun. That's a surprisingly hard thing to do. If you're interested in that topic too, nothing like trying to do it yourself, but I'd also recommend the books "A Theory of Fun Game Design" and "The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses". And, if you find Stick Portal fun or don't find it fun, please let me know!

More quick links

More of what has caught my attention recently:

• $1B for Instagram was silly and caused by fear ([1] [2] [3] [4]), but it is impressive the scale Instagram built with just three engineers ([5] [6])
  
  
• Felix Salmon at Reuters writes that Twitter is under revenue pressure and will start doing things that make the site much less pleasant to use. I'd say Facebook is under similar pressure. Both likely will do increasingly aggressive attempts to sell their users to advertisers and may face a backlash. ([1] [2] [3])
  
  
• Google has millions of machines ([1] [2] [3]), so many that "a performance improvement of even 1% can results in millions of dollars saved", which explains why they spend so much time on the details, like how threads run on cores and estimating disk space needed ([4] [5])
  
  
• Great recent talk by Googler Jeff Dean on problems due to hitting occasional latency in large scale distributed systems, some surprising and useful advice here. ([1] [2])
  
  
• While 89% of ad clicks are incremental (visit wouldn't have happened without the ad), only 50% of ad clicks on the top ad are incremental. Is that due to ads on navigational queries? And does Google effectively force companies to buy those ads (so competitors don't get them) even though the ads are not very effective? ([1])
  
  
• "In this two-part blog post, we will open the doors of one of the most valued Netflix assets: our recommendation system." ([1])
  
  
• "Yahoo's Chief Product Officer Blake Irving resigns" over disagreements on strategy, in particular he was "concerned about the massive engineering and research talent exodus of late, especially in Yahoo's vaunted Labs arm." ([1] [2])
  
  
• The field of astronomy appears to be going through a major shift to large scale analysis of truly massive data sets ([1] [2])
  
  
• Amazing to me that Walmart has taken this long to ramp up online against Amazon. Amazon even has been called the "Walmart of the Web"; you going to take that, Walmart? ([1])
  
  
• A clever analysis deduces that Amazon has 450k machines in AWS. ([1] [2])
  
  
• A video out of Microsoft Research shows how different interacting with a tablet would feel if touch response times could be made faster. Very compelling. ([1])
  
  
• Other work out of Microsoft Research demos a Kinect-like gesture interface built using what is essentially echolocation via a laptop's built-in microphone and speaker, no other hardware required. (video [1] and CHI 2012 paper [2])