Month: February 2008

Ebay Reputation

EBay has been struggling for some time with growing discontent among its members, and it has rolled out a series of new controls and regulations to try to stem the erosion of trust in its market. At the end of last month, it announced sweeping changes to its feedback system, setting up more “non-public” communication channels and, most dramatically, curtailing the ability of sellers to leave negative feedback on buyers. It turns out that feedback ratings were being used as weapons to deter buyers from leaving negative feedback about sellers.

the downfall of the web preeminent reputation system

Socal Wildfires

On Tuesday, we saw a huge increase in traffic on Google Maps. The traffic spike was so large that our servers thought they were being DoS attacked. It turned out that the additional traffic was due to 100Ks of people constantly refreshing maps about the terrible wildfires in Southern California. Several news outlets and individuals had used the My Maps feature to create maps that tracked the spread of the fire and included information on evacuation alerts and evacuation center locations. (For those of you who haven’t been reading US news, these wildfires scorched 2K km2 of land and caused 1M people to be evacuated from their homes)

the wildfires, behind the scenes

Protein Arrays

Existing protein arrays involve the tedious and lengthy process of expressing proteins in living cells followed by purifying, stabilizing, and spotting the samples. This process is a bottleneck in the preparation of the arrays. Moreover, functionally active proteins require careful manipulation, and the less that is needed the better. Our approach to developing a protein array, a Nucleic Acid-Programmable Protein Array (NAPPA), replaces the complex process of spotting purified proteins with the straightforward and much simpler process of spotting plasmid DNA. The system could produce any desired protein from synthesized DNA placed on the chip. It is another step in making protein production and engineering and biotechnology in general faster and cheaper.

Levitating lounger

Hoverit Ltd, introduce ‘The Lounger’, which is the first of their revolutionary magnetic ‘hover’ furniture range. British design, precision engineered and British built by hand. Defying gravity with the use of repelling magnetic forces in both the bed and base this contemporary lounger is comfortable, practical and stylish. Permanent magnets can also help back, muscular problems and headaches, so our furniture not only looks good – it may make you feel good too. The sensation that you feel as you lay back and close your eyes is totally different, like floating on a cloud.

dom-checker

A simple utility to thoroughly validate DOM, XMLHttpRequest, and cookie security restriction handling in modern web browsers. Notable features include exhaustive hierarchy crawling, cross-domain IPC system for blind write verification, page transition

Soul of The Sims

This is the prototype for the soul of The Sims, which Will Wright wrote on January 23, 1997. I had just started working at the Maxis Core Technology Group on “Project X” aka “Dollhouse”, and Will Wright brought this code in one morning, to demonstrate his design for the motives, feedback loop and failure conditions of the simulated people. While going through old papers, I ran across this print-out that I had saved, so I scanned it and cleaned the images up, and got permission from Will to publish it. This code is a interesting example of game design, programming and prototyping techniques. The Sims code has certainly changed a lot since Will wrote this original prototype code. For example, there is no longer any “stress” motive. And the game doesn’t store motives in global variables, of course. My hope is that this code will give you a glimpse of how Will Wright designs games, and what was going on in his head at the time!

Chloe Bancroft

A real life bond girl?

By means of introduction, I’m a postmodern courtesan, a woman with a few lovers that support my independent lifestyle. I provide a glimpse of myself here only because I cannot resist the allure that some wildly compatible stranger I would never meet through the usual routes might come across it. Finding like-minded people is one of the true pleasures of life.

2021-09-19: This has been made into a TV show.