Tag: Internet

A simple scoring scheme for Wordle

Everyone loves Wordle! The author, Josh Wardle, has created the first true meme of 2022 and it’s conquered the Internet faster than Q. (OK, that’s hyperbole. Wishful thinking on my part).

I think the appeal is partly because it’s just once a day, and because the interface does your homework for you. The real genius in my opinion was making it possible to share your results on social media, without giving away the day’s solution.

I found myself wondering if I could quantify my performance on Wordle. Right now, the emoji grid you get when you copy and paste your results is very visual and even a little confusing to interpret at first. I realized that there’s a way to condense that information into a single, descriptive score instead. Here’s the formula:

sum ( ( (BLACK* 2) + (YELLOW* 1) + (GREEN* 0) ) * row )

For example, here are my results from today’s wordle:

My score is therefore 8 from row 1, 18 from row 2, and 18 from row 3, giving me a total score of 44.

Note that a perfect score – 5 greens on your first try – is zero. The worst possible score is 210, though actually, it’s lower than that in practice. This is because 6 tries of 5 letters each equals 30 guesses, and there are only 26 letters in the alphabet, so it’s impossible in practice to get 6 rows of black squares.

With the score, you can more easily compare performance over time and with your friends. Even if you and someone else both take the same number of tries, there is a potential difference in efficiency.

I have put the formula into a google sheet here that is read-only but which you can easily copy to your own account and use. Just paste your Wordle score into cell A1. The sheet supports dark mode and light mode, too.

If you like this score idea, please share! Here’s a simple URL that redirects to this blog post that you can share when you share your Wordle score: https://tinyurl.com/wordlescore

Thank you! 🙂

UPDATE: I think I’m over posting my score to Facebook on a daily basis, but I am tracking my scores on Google Drive, because I wanted to see how my calculated score correlates with number of tries. Here’s the data as of 1/27/22:

I’ve only scored below 30 twice and both those times were with 3 guesses. However, there’s a lot of overlap in score for 4 tries and 5 tries. In other words, it’s possible to get a lower score in 5 tries than in 4 tries. I think this captures some of the strategy. For example, if there are two solutions after guess #3, then my score only penalizes you for the incorrect letters in your guess. There may be a similar overlap between 3 tries and 4 tries, but I haven’t scored well enough yet to detect any such patterns. I suppose this is easy enough to determine from the formula, but I don’t want to make the effort.

Living through digital history

I graduated from high school in 1991* in the BBS era. The Internet didn’t open up to commercial use until 1992, and didn’t really take off until 1994 when Mosaic was released.

Before email on the internet became a thing, most people used email from one of the Online Providers (mainly Compuserve, AOL, and Prodigy). Email was like an internal direct message on these systems. I don’t remember what year it was, but eventually, gateway services between the Online Providers were established so a Prodigy user could email someone at AOL, etc. Hotmail was the first real internet email that I remember (named because it was HTML-mail), and Microsoft didn’t buy that until 1997, well after I had graduated from college and was already living in Boston at my first job at MIT.

When Mosaic came out, companies started moving away from internal pages at AOL, etc., and started creating their first websites on the Internet. I assume that was a huge loss of revenue for those Online Services and contributed to their downfall. Eventually, the email standards (X400? X something…) improved to where they all upgraded and we had true interoperability, though I don’t recall what year that was, I think it was 1995 (after Mosaic).

When you watch an episode of Friends – keep in mind that historically all of this was happening in the background. Email just wasn’t a thing in the 90s that people used routinely to keep in touch. Arguably we don’t use it today for that either, since social media has supplanted it**.

The bottom line is that I was in college from 1991 to 1995 at the precise moment in time when we went from BBSes and Online Services ruling the world to the dawn of the true Internet era. I don’t think many of my age-peers remember that this history overlapped with ours in this way.

The Wikipedia entry for Online Service Provider is well worth a read, especially if you are in my age cohort. Gen-X FTFW!

*The senior class of 1990 made fun of my HS class by changing our slogan to “We’re the class of 91. We drink no beer and have no fun.” I remember this slogan better than our actual slogan, maybe because it was rather accurate in my case at the time. (actually, our unofficial slogan for ourselves was “from this prison, we will run, we’re the class of ’91” which resonated more with geeky young me). During high school, for me ’87 to ’91, I spent a lot of time dialing in at 14.4K to BBSes.

**much like social media has supplanted blogs, whose history overlaps my grad school years in exactly the same way that the history of email and the web overlaps my college years. I’m old-fashioned enough to have posted this to my blog here. But I’m modern enough to know that all my friends are here on FB and don’t read my blog, which is why I also cross-posted it to Facebook.

Amazon Prime is only $72 – crazy deal

I’m a heavy user of Amazon Prime – just the savings on shipping alone makes it worth it. The original price used to be $75 but Amazon recently raised the price to $99/year – except for today, where it’s discounted to $72. In my opinion, Prime is as essential as Netflix or a cell phone – the Prime subscription includes all the following for free:

Am
Subscribe to Amazon Prime for $72

  • Two-Day Shipping on stuff you buy from Amazon
  • Unlimited streaming on music
  • Instant streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows (Prime Instant Video)
  • Unlimited photo storage (Amazon Cloud Drive)
  • Selected Kindle books each month (Kindle First and the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library)

All of tyhis is frankly worth $99/year to me, which is why I renew my subscription every year. If you’re an existing Prime member like me, this deal doesn’t apply – but for anyone interested in trying Prime out, this is the time. Pull the trigger and try it for yourself.

upgraded to ASUS RT-AC56U router – speed tests

As per my router troubles earlier, I have finally upgraded to the Asus RT-AC56U. I’ve been using an old Linksys WRT54GL as an access point for legacy 802.11g connections, so here is the baseline for comparison, using a desktop machine located two feet away, using built-in wifi antennas:

Linksys WRT54GL, 802.11g, 2.4 Ghz

here’s the result from using the new router:

ASUS RT-AC56U, 802.11n, 2.4 Ghz

here’s the result from using the new router on my main workstation PC in the basement, using a PCI wifi adapter:

Linksys WRT54GL, 802.11g, 2.4 Ghz

and using the new router, with a USB AC-1200 wifi adapter (ASUS USB-AC56):

ASUS RT-AC56U, 802.11ac, 5.0 Ghz

my Netgear WNDR3700 (v1) router’s 5 Ghz network just went missing – bad antenna?

As this is a geekblog, I might as well document my woes here in public. Here is the support ticket I filed with Netgear just now.

Hello,

I purchased a WNDR3700 on 1/11/2011 – serial number 21840B550A390. I have registered the router on my.netgear.com.

this week the 5 Ghz wireless network stopped working entirely. I have updated to latest firmware, and also:

– the 5 Ghz blue light is on
– the settings on the configuration dashboard (192.168.1.1) indicate the 5Ghz network is active
– SSID for 5 Ghz is set to “broadcast SSID name: on”
– the 2.4 Ghz network works fine, computers connected can access internet
– computers attached to the router via ethernet also can also access the internet normally

however no device capable of 5Ghz is able to detect the 5Ghz SSID. the scanning software inSSIDer does not detect any 5Ghz network being broadcast either.

Logically, maybe the antenna or antenna amplifier has burned out, I can think of no other explanation in software for why 5Ghz is missing – the router itself is convinced that 5Ghz is indeed working, but it isnt. That suggests a hardware problem to me.

The router is only 2 1/2 years old and my previous Netgear routers are still going strong at my relatives’ homes after 5-6 years so this is very surprising. I am hoping Netgear support will not disappoint me.

It looks like other users have reported similar issues with the 2.4 Ghz network also mysteriously vanishing, which is why I think my diagnosis of a bad antenna is correct. To be honest I was never enamoured of the speed of this router to begin with, as my initial tests showed.

ASUS RT N66U router

I am skeptical that Netgear will be willing to replace the unit but if they make some kind of gesture that will go a long way towards persuading me to buy a Netgear replacement. I’m not going to bother with a draft 11ac router, all I need is a solid 11abgn machine with some MIMO and I’ll be happy. Unless they make me a good deal, I am very tempted to ditch Netgear. For example, that ASUS RT-N66U “Dark Knight” got a nice review. External antennas, too!

Using Fargo for publishing to WordPress: a great start, some rough edges

I decided to use Fargo.io to write the previous post, since it was a long and complex piece with a lot of hierarchical structure. Lots of lists, etc. Let me preface by saying this is wonderful functionality and I am very excited about it, not least because it provides inherent backup of blog posts to dropbox.

That said, there are various issues that need refining. Here are some of my observations:

Fargo only selects the current heading and subheadings for the post. It will use the current heading as title and subheadings as the post content. This is not optimal; by default, Fargo should use the title of the entire outline as the post title and the entire outline body as the post body. I had to create a redundant heading and demote the entire rest of the outline underneath it to get it to work properly.

Headings and subheadings correctly use LI tags, but they force the CSS attribute “list-style-type” to “none”. In a blog post, you want the natural LI icons to appear and not be suppressed.

When exporting from Fargo to WordPress, adding paragraph tags is redundant, as WordPress renders the post content with them automatically. P tags should be stripped out when publishing to WP.

Likewise, there is no need for any additional class names (liConcord, pConcord, liLevel3, etc). All style is handled by WordPress themes and this CSS clutters the post content. We should not have any default styles added by the composer – clean HTML only, no CSS.

Numbered lists are not recognized by Fargo – I used a 1. 2. prefix but this does not create OL list type at the HTML end. Auto-detection of numbered lists is a must-have feature.

Entering new headings above the current one should be possible by placing the cursor at the start of a heading and pressing Enter. Currently, this opens a new heading below, not above.

Images are not supported. In fact if you add an image via the wordpress interface and then later edit the post again with Fargo, you will lose your images (it will overwrite the edits.)

Finally, it is not possible to copy and paste multiple headings and subheading content from the outliner. You can only select one heading at a time. There should be a plaintext export feature at the very least (with whitespace tabs for the indentation levels).

I don’t want to discourage Dave and the fine folks at Small Picture or seem overly picky. These are however important issues that affect a wordpress blogger’s workflow – I loved composing the post in Fargo but now I will have to re-edit the post after I publish to add images, strip out the CSS, etc. Due to that drawback, there isn’t a net value-add to using Fargo for WP blogging, yet. But there is so much potential here that I am very hopeful.

UPDATE: Dave responded to this post on Twitter:

I am uncertain if Dave understood my critique – I was not asking for changes to Fargo’s user interface, but rather the formatting that is generated when exporting from Fargo to wordpress. I am happy to embrace the Outliner Way when composing, but Fargo imposes metadata on WordPress above and beyond outline structure. That metadata is not central to the user experience of Fargo si Iam baffled by Dave’s insistence that there’s no reason for change.

At any rate, I will certainly keep using Fargo for other purposes, but if the wordpress functionality is frozen at the current state then I cannot recommend Fargo as a WordPress authoring tool. I am still optimistic for Dave’s promise of Evernote support.

a semi-skeptical view of Google Glass

Dave Winer takes a semi-luddite view about Google Glass (which he refers to as Google glasses, minus branding and capital G). He writes,

I think they will make an excellent display device for the obvious reason that they’re mounted in front of your eyes, the organ we use for vision. The idea of moving your fingers to the side of your head, of winking to take a picture, well I don’t like that so much. I admit I might be a luddite here, and am going to keep my eyes and ears open for indications that I’m wrong. It happens, quite a bit when it comes to brand-new tech.

I think they could be a great part of a mobile computing platform. With more computing power and UI in my pocket, in the form of my smart phone, or in a big pocket, in the form of a tablet. They communicate over Bluetooth, and together form a more useful reading and communication device, but probably still not a very good writing tool.

I totally agree with Dave that a mouse/keyboard will be a requirement for any serious content creation, which is why I still prefer a Blackberry (lusting after the Q10, to be precise). But Google Glass is not going to be a content creation device so much as the initial, baby step towards true Augmented Reality. Note that Google describes Glass as having a primarily voice-directed interface, for initiating search queries, taking a picture, or real-time language transcription. The main function of Google Glass is to record video and take pictures (not content creation, but content acquisition), to facilitate access to information, and most importantly to overlay data onto the visual field, such as maps or translations. It’s the latter that is the “augmentation” of reality part, and is very, very crude.

denmo coil 1

A much more sophisticated vision of Augmented Reality is the one in the anime series, Dennou Coil. I’ve written a number of posts reviewing the series, including a review of my favorite episode where digital, virtual lifeforms colonize a character’s bald head (not unlike the Futurama episode Godfellas) and my closing thoughts on the series as a whole. The screenshot at right is from the first episode, which clearly lays out the technology paradigm: people wear special glasses that let them see virtual realities overlaid onto our real, physical world. Sound familiar?

But it’s cooler than that. In the screencap, the main character is using a cell phone that she draws in the air. There’s no need for physical technology anymore like cell phones or PDAs or even ipods or tablets. Literally, the entire world is your canvas and you consume your content through your regular senses. This is a vision that transcends mere augmentation of reality and becomes more akin to and extension of reality itself.

And it’s not limited to tech gadgetry – the concept extends to virtual pets, to virtual homes, even ultimately to evolution of virtual lifeforms that inhabit the same geographic space as we do but are invisible unless your glasses reveal them. I will be astonished if at least someone on the Google Glass team has not seen this series.

So, Google Glass really is a tentative step towards something new, and there is enormous potential in where it might lead. But as a device itself, Glass won’t be very transformative, because as Dave points out it will be an adjunct to our existing devices. And the content that people pay to consume won’t be created on Glass any more than it is created on iPads or Galaxy phones. Every single major technological advance of the past ten years has been in content consumption devices, not creation. Glass will be no different in that regard.

But content creation vs consumption is the old paradigm. The new one has less to do with “content” which is passively consumed and more with “information” which is a dynamic, contextual flow of information.

monetizing is the new thing

Regardless of whether or not you agree with his politics, Andrew Sullivan’s decision to monetize the Daily Dish is an admirable one, which I envy. I’m hardly a blip compared to him, even if you aggregate all my various blogs. Still, I often think about blogging in a meta-sense and the issue of monetization is one that no blogger can avoid for very long. Simply put, blogging costs money and time. There are hosting costs, domain costs, and software costs, as well as the time needed to ensure that you suppress spam, silence trolls, and above all encourage sincere commentors by engaging them in conversation. You *can* run a freeblog on wordpress or blogspot, of course, but you’re limited in your growth.

Here at haibane I started this blog because I was genuinely frustrated with political blogging. Haibane was my refuge, where I write what i want about what I like, and it’s amassed enough of a following that I think it’s been a success. That success largely covers the cost issues; what meager earnings the ads bring in, mostly covers the hosting costs, with just a small deficit. The bigger issue is time, though. Writing for myself and my audience is fun, but not a priority compared to other ways to use my time that bring greater rewards in family time, work, and money. So, ultimately, blogging is a hobby that must be actively accomodated even without the cost issues. And of course, time is money.

The ironic thing is, if I were to increase the income I make from the blog, that would probably be a great motivator to blog more. More revenue would raise the priority of blogging vs other activities to spend my time on. And of course that is a positive feedback loop, because more posts = more traffic = more revenue. Most blogs like mine are in a static phase where traffic and revenue are flat; we have our usual coterie of readers and blog community, but no growth, because the barriers to growth are time and money. There is a point well above where this blog and others like it are, where those barriers get reduced.

I think of those barriers as “cost overhead” to blogging. How does a medium blog reduce that cost overhead? One way is to recruit more bloggers. Here at Haibane I’ve had occasional guest posters on, but recruitment is also a large time investment. A regular blog partner or partners is more reliable and less effort, and allows shared overhead of time.

Another way is to simply monetize. I do have ads, but as the Sullivan example shows there are more direct ways – and for a blog with 100 unique visitors a day, if I could extract $5 from 10% of them a month, then that would triple the revenue for a year. There are more subtle ways of doing this, for example something like what Brooks Review does.

If you monetize of course then you become responsible to the audience. That’s not a bad thing, especially if it increases and motivates more output, on the topics of interest to that audience. (The question is always, what audience do you pursue). I’d certainly be willing to blog more and be responsive to what my readers wanted, if they were paying for it.

rethinking the structure of discussions online

So, here’s a developing conversation by several heavyweights on the social media and technology spheres: Anil Dash argues that the new generation of social discussion tools like Branch, Svbtle and Medium are exclusive, Fred Wilson chimes in with a paean to inclusivity, and Josh Miller says openness is a spectrum. Dave Winer then says the real problem is a lack of innovation in creating systems for Discussion, a problem that Branch, Medium etc are trying to solve but they are constrained by the problem of access and signal to noise that Dash and Miller are taking issue with.

Maybe what we need to do is to throw out the old paradigm of discussion as “post-comment” and instead try to merge those categories. The entire conversation should be more folksonomic (disclosure, folksonomy is one of my Pet Issues, see my manifesto/rant on folksonomy here)

One great example is the P2 theme from WordPress. It upends the blog format by putting a post-entry box at the top of the theme (no more Dashboard, that talismanic secret niche from which only the Initiated may create content). Comments appear on the front page indented to the main post in real time, instead of being hidden under a link and requiring a page refresh. As is usual with WordPress, only registered users may post, but now the comment field is more transparent and included on the main page at the same stature as the parent post itself. This serves to demote a post and promote the comments. We used this format for amazing discussions at Talk Islam for years (until the site waned due to lack of participation and other priorities).

I’ve also argued that structurally, posts-comments on blogs represent a single “node” in exactly the same way that a forum thread represents a single node. In fact, forums map precisely onto blogs; no one has yet created a WordPress theme that represents posts as threads, but it could easily be done (I was disappointed with BBpress for its failure to recognize this duality).

P2 is a great start but it needs to go further. Blog systems allow the public to comment on a post, but they don’t fully embrace folksonomy (allowing the public to tag a post or add meta data), and they certainly don’t allow the public to make posts. Of course, spam is always a concern, but here is an area ripe for innovation rather than relying on captchas and user roles. For example, what about using social media to weed out spammers from real users? I am user azizhp on almost all social media profiles, for example; a smart spam detection system could cross-ref my email address and username across those systems to establish my bona fides transparently. Also note that existing anti-spam services like Akismet inherently assume the post-comment model exists; Akismet doesn’t scan your posts to see if they are spam. Imagine if it could! With that capability, WordPress could immediately take the concept of P2 even further by allowing unregistered users to post to a blog.

Ultimately, Discussions online aren’t as complicated as Branch, Medium, etc make it out to be. Someone says something; others respond. The only question is, Who? Who speaks first? Who speaks next? Who gets to categorize/tag the debate? Who can add value? Right now, there’s no way to answer all of these questions with, “anyone, that’s who”. Instead of reiterating the old post-comment model we need to turn to folksonomy as an alternative and then start trying to craft technological solutions to the inevitable new set of problems that will involve. I think those problems can be solved, and we have most of those tools already, though there’s lots of room for innovation. And the result will be something both open and inclusive, far more so than anything we have right now.