There was an interesting article in the New York Times regarding the surprisingly large impact that the farm bill has on many aspects of life in the US and abroad. A pithy excerpt:
Compared with a bunch of carrots, a package of Twinkies, to take one iconic processed foodlike substance as an example, is a highly complicated, high-tech piece of manufacture, involving no fewer than 39 ingredients, many themselves elaborately manufactured, as well as the packaging and a hefty marketing budget. So how can the supermarket possibly sell a pair of these synthetic cream-filled pseudocakes for less than a bunch of roots? Continue reading ‘Why does a twinkie cost less than a carrot?’
Since I recently got into this whole blogging thing, and I’m someone who tends to exhaustively research anything I’m interested in ( I guess that’s why I like my job), I wanted to share a few tips for WordPress that I’ve worked out that may help others. One of those is determining exactly what is the right robots.txt file to use for your WordPress site. The goal is not so much SEO (search engine optimization) as it is to make sure the right content is being indexed by sites like Google, and the wrong stuff isn’t. I’ll break this down into somewhat basic terms for people who may be new to the process. There are a variety of blog posts on the subject, and I think I’ve compiled my own spin on the issue. The key is that you don’t want to block too much, so try to only block things that are meaningless to readers (like script files).
The root folder of your site can have a text file in it named robots.txt. This file contains some rules that you set that determine what files and folders you want to allow search engines to find, and which ones you want to label as being off-limits. Google has a bad rap for ignoring robots.txt files, but I believe that is coming from some confusion as far as how Google interprets this file. By playing with their robots.txt analysis tool I found something that I think many neophytes are missing.
First, a general primer. Below are the first few lines from my robots.txt file.
User-agent: *
# disallow all files in these directories
Disallow: /blog/wp-*
Continue reading ‘A robots.txt for WordPress’
I’ve been using a new in-car GPS for about 2 months now, and I wanted to share my thoughts in case other people are on the fence. I think these units have come a long way since the last time I seriously looked at them, and they’re pretty effective at getting you to where you are going.
I’ll write this from the perspective that you haven’t taken a serious look at what a recent unit can do, so I’ll list out what I think are the key features.
- A flexible route-generation algorithm. Stuck in traffic? Click the “detour” button and have it route you around the area you are currently entering. Take a wrong turn and it can generate a new route for you in a few seconds.
- A large, searchable index of locations, stores, parks, restaurants, museums etc. It can be searchable both near where you are, near your destination, or find matches along your current route. As an example, my wife and I were just out running errands and remembered that we needed to buy a new bed frame. I typed “mattress” into the GPS and it pulled up the name, address and phone number of half a dozen nearby stores.
- A map that you can scroll through by touch-screen. Drag your finger on the screen and the map drags with you to allow you to see nearby map areas without zooming out.
I found that pretty much all of the units I looked at had the same features listed regardless of price, but when I actually used them in the store there were huge differences in the implementation of those features.
Continue reading ‘Thoughts on Car Navigation Systems’
Last night we hit Joy Sushi in downtown San Mateo. It was recommended to us as being good quality and inexpensive. The restaurant itself was nice, with a clean, though non-asian atmosphere and the service was good.
The food itself was just “good,” with no real stand out items. The most notable fact is that the portions are very large. A single piece of nigiri here is maybe 50% larger than what I’m used to at other restaurants.
We split a nigiri mix plate (10 peices) and 2 specialty rolls and came out at $31. I’d say if you are looking for decent every-day sushi this place is pretty good.
Yelp reviews of Joy Sushi.
Regarding the mysterious bee die-off
Since October 2006, 35 per cent or more of the United States’ population of the Western honey bee (Apis mellifera) – billions of individual bees – simply flew from their hive homes and disappeared.
It’s an interesting situation, and not to trivialize it but it sounds like paraphrasing Douglas Adams. “So Long and Thanks for All the Pollen.”
There have been many articles written about how terrible the default charts are in Excel. They are full of details that detract from the actual information that you are trying to convey. I recently discovered a few great tips for easily improving the quality of your charts. It doesn’t take much effort to set up, and it very easy to apply once you are done.
The easiest thing to do is to install the free Clean Charts Excel plugin by Juicy Analytics. This very nifty macro just finds all of the charts in your open worksheet and gives you the option of applying some more sane formatting to them. For example:
- The axis labels will all have the same number of significant digits (no more 1 1.5 2 2.5, instead 1.0 1.5 2.0 2.5).
- Axis labels are changed so that they are most meaningful (100,000 becomes 100k so you have less digits that aren’t telling you anything).
- Line and bar colors are changed to be high contrast and distinct from each other.
- The gray background is eliminated. It only reduces contrast to the chart contents.
- Superfluous lines and boxes are eliminated. You are trying to present data, so all elements should contribute to that presentation. Continue reading ‘Make Excel charts less terrible’
Papers is another “iTunes for PDFs” program, only it seems to be dripping with 10.4 programming magic. It’s aimed at mac using researchers (and the pre-release features are geared toward PubMed users), so the general audience won’t care, but for a small subset of people it’s really fantastic.
I think this thing incredible, but I’ll go ahead and start with the caveats:
- It’s a “preview release,” which means it’s far from done.
- It crashes periodically.
- The preference pane is completely empty.
- It only supports PubMed right now (but has a plugin architecture which will eventually allow for many search engines).
Now, even given the above, I still plan on using it as my main journal article program because it gets so much else so right.
Continue reading ‘Papers – iTunes for research articles’
As I set up my blog I want to post my minireviews of different components that I find useful. After a brief stint with Google Analytics I’ve convinced myself to buy Mint.
First, a word about how web analytics works. There are really two different classes:
- Log parsers. Your site keeps logs of visitor information in standard log files. There are many packages out there which read those logs and prepare reports. The information they can extract is limited by the kind of data that happens to be logged. A popular example would be AWStats.
- Javascript triggered loggers which interrogate the visitor for additional information and save those data to a SQL database. Examples here would be Google Analytics and reinvigorate. Generally this second option provides you with much more information than the first, but the data are all collected by (for example) Google, stored and analyzed by google, and presented back to you by Google. The examples listed are free to the web site owner, but have a cost in that you are essentially trading away your user’s browsing habit information. This may or may not be a concern for you.
Now back to Mint. Functionally, Mint falls into the second category in that it collects additional information from your users and stores it in a SQL database but with two key differences. First, Mint is a PHP software package that you buy for a one-time price of $30 per domain (sub-domains are included in the main domain license) and install it on your hosting in the /mint subdirectory. So it is running on your own server, and you own the data. Note that you also need to provide it with a SQL database to store data, but for most hosting companies this is a 10 second process to set up a new database, and it will happily coexist on an existing database if you prefer not to create another.
Continue reading ‘Mint web statistics’
Tonight we went to a place in Foster City, CA called “The Fish Market.” There are a few of them around, and their thing is that the menu changes daily to reflect the currently available seafood and market prices.
I had a ginger crusted halibut which was actually very tasty, and I don’t normally like fish. My wife had a tilapia dish which was pretty bland, but then, it’s tilapia. We had oysters rockafeller as an appetizer and 3 drinks between us and came out at $90. Most entrees are around $17-25.
There was a 45 minute wait at 7PM on a Friday. The food was good, but it wasn’t steller. Overall verdict: meh.
I came across this pretty neat site that compares search terms across two search engines, Yahoo and Google.
Enter a search term and the row of dots indicate the order in which results appear (e.g. the far left result is the first result for each search engine). The blue dots are results which occur in both Yahoo and Google, and they have a blue line connecting the matching results. This is a away to visually see whether Google and Yahoo have similar rankings for pages on a topic.