Hung Truong: The Blog!

Facebook Lexicon: Kinda Fun, But Useful?

Facebook just recently released a fun new thingy called Lexicon. It shows you a graph of the occurrences of certain words or phrases over time on all Facebook walls. Since I do quite a lot of research using Facebook, I thought I’d take a look at it.

Facebook has some suggested phrase pairs that you can use such as “party tonight” and “hungover.” And as expected, the phrases are cyclical and you tend to see a spike in “hungover” the day after “party tonight.” But it’s worth noting that you can’t prove causation by just correlation.

What’s a little strange is that there doesn’t seem to be any growth going on in Facebook. Maybe they’ve normalized the data so you can spot trends, but you’d kind of assume that word counts would trend towards going up since Facebook is still supposedly growing. Or is Lexicon telling us something Facebook doesn’t want us to know about their growth?

Anyway, at least one question of the ages has been put to rest. According to Lexicon, shampoo really is better than conditioner. STOP LOOKING AT ME, SWAN!

Bonus Analysis:

It looks like the word “happy” is used more on holidays like New Year’s Day and Valentine’s Day. But the word “merry” is kind of exclusively used on Christmas. See that strangely unhappy day near the beginning of March? Since it’s a leap year, Feb 29th was included in this graph. And since less people statistically have birthdays on that leap day, the word “happy” was recorded less. Pretty neat stuff, huh? I’m sure there’s other fun stuff to dig out of Lexicon, if you were really inclined to.

Muxtape: Bringing Back The Art of The Mixtape

So I’ve just recently discovered Muxtape. It’s a site that allows you to make a little “mixtape” of songs by uploading and then choosing which order they go in. The interface is pretty easy to figure out. You click on a song (or just the area around the song) and it’ll play automatically. It was working pretty well last night but for some reason the thing is choking in Firefox for me right now (and making Safari crash AND making IE run out of memory), yay for compatibility testing!

Anyway, the site is neat because if you’re as old as I am, you might remember making mix tapes for your friends. There was an art to this. Instead of the crazy-huge capacities of an MP3 player that you have these days, tapes were limited to like, 90 minutes or something. And the order mattered too since tapes didn’t have skip functionality (unless you had a sweet-ass walkman with that feature built-in). Muxtape sort of forces a restriction on you by forcing you to choose only 12 songs, and by different artists (no dupes). Mix tapes were a labor of love and works of art! Muxtape is easier, but it also sorta reminds me of when I made mix tapes way back when.

So a few criticisms. First off, while Muxtape tries to keep it real by limiting you to the number of songs and artists, it’s still probably way illegal. I wonder why the site hasn’t been shut down yet. Not saying I’d like the site to be shut down, but the reality is that it’s totally un-legit. You might say it’s fine because it only lets you stream, but using Firebug, you can pretty easily tell what the address is for the MP3.

Also, lol at the constructed urls of the MP3s (the first get arg is “PLEASE=DO_NOT_STEAL_MUSIC”).

Last.fm also pretty much is THE place to go for finding new music, and they have tons of searchable (which you could argue is kind of important!) tracks available. Though I did try and recreate my mixtape on last.fm and two artists were missing (one is the IBM computer “singing” Daisy Bell) and of the 10 remaining songs, only 6 had the full tracks playable

So at least Muxtape wins as far as playability goes (though I did have to upload them myself)! There are probably some big legal issues that make it impossible for last.fm to do what Muxtape does. That’s probably good, since last.fm makes money for themselves and more importantly, artists, while Muxtape just makes money for themeselves (if you don’t count Amazon MP3 cuts going to artists). Last.fm makes artists money simply by streaming their music; no buying required.

Anyway, if you want to check out my own mix, go here. Hopefully it’s varied enough to be worthy of mixtape status. You must understand, I’m a bit rusty.

Fun Facebook Follies (Bugs)

One nice thing about constantly iterating your code is that you get new code out quickly to your users. The bad part is you probably don’t do enough testing and your users get code before it’s ready.

Facebook gives you a choice to mark notifications that you get as spam. This is for when your friends won’t stop sending you notifications that you’ve been bitten by werewolf them. Apparently, you can also mark any notification as spam. Even, say, Facebook’s own wall feature. Facebook’s. Wall. Feature.

You know what would be cool? If Facebook developers weren’t so zealous that they skip sanity checks in order to get their pushes out sooner. Unless Facebook wants users to be able to mark their walls as spam. Which is actually understandable, now that I think of it…

Firefox 3 RC 5 Impressions

So I installed Firefox 3, RC5 because my old Firefox install was pooping out on downloading .css files for some reason, which left website viewing to be less than desirable.

It seems okay, I guess. I think I’m already used to the new UI that makes the back button bigger than the forward button. Even though I sort of hated it at first, I guess it makes sense since people go back more often than forward (via the buttons, anyway).

So Firefox 3 runs a lot faster, and using a lot less ram. In the past, I have yelled at Firefox like Mel Gibson in Ransom asking for my ram back. I have 5 tabs open right now and I’m only (my expectations aren’t that high) using ~165MB or ram. The whole thing moves a lot faster too. I’m not sure if that’s because of the added side effect of more than half of my plugins not being compatible, though. I can live without most of them, but Firebug is really sort of indispensable. I hope FF3 comes out soon officially so everyone will get their plugins updated. There seems to be something weird going on with Flash 9 as well. Not too sure what.

So far, I’d say Firefox 3 is lookin’ good. I totally skipped getting a Firefox 2 shirt, so I’ll definitely have to get the 3 when it ships!

Final Fantasy IV? On DS!?

So I haven’t really been paying much attention to video game news since I started grad school. Not enough time for video games! BUT, on a cursory stroll to Kotaku, I found out that Final Fantasy IV for DS is on its way for this Summer.

Wait, FFIV for DS? Apparently it’s already out in Japan. That’s how behind on video game news I am. Perhaps it’s good that I don’t follow this stuff, though, because I’m not one to really like waiting for stuff anyway. There’s also a bunch of other neat Square games on DS like Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings and Crystal Chronicles. WTF? How’d I miss this stuff!?

Final Fantasy IV (I want to say Final Fantasy II) was my first FF game, so it’s sort of near and dear to my heart. I just rediscovered my Nintendo DS, and my unfinished copy of Final Fantasy IV Advance! So I played for a couple of hours this weekend. It’s kind of weird playing it now since I’m used to a lot of story being told in FF games. Like, Rydia comes back from the dead and all you get is a simple three sentence explanation. Come on Rydia! We want details! Also, is it wrong to think Rydia is hot since she starts out being a kid in the game, and through some weird game mechanics, gets to be super hot later on?

I must say, I’m a bit worried about the whole transition from old school game to DS 3D treatment. I played Final Fantasy III on DS and it was a bit disappointing. My main beef with these conversions is that they screw up the game mechanics. All of sudden you get the same number of random encounters, but there’s a cost of a few seconds because of fancy panning before the battle and the victory screen after the battle. Everything seems so snappy on the old school version of FFIV that I’m playing right now. Except for those damn vampire bats and their drain attack, whose animation takes FOR-EV-ER!

Man, I sure do sound like a cranky old school gamer. I’ve been wanting to finish FFXII, but I think the time requirements on that one are a bit higher than FFIV. The whole dash thing they built into the game has made it play a lot faster. I remember when I played the original, I rented it for the weekend. So each weekend I would start the game on Friday, and by Sunday when we had to return it I had gotten to the underworld part, basically where you get Edge. Then the next weekend I’d just start over again. How sad, right! But it’s left me with pretty photographic memory of what happens at each step of FFIV. Right now I’m pretty damn far and I have only 9 hours on the game! So hopefully the conversion to DS doesn’t slow things down insanely.