isnoop.net blog

According to their website, TRI-CELL ENTERPRISES is a leading distributor of high quality electronics geared toward the true audiophile market. They have an interesting range of very high-end electronics and accessories for those with the most exquisite musical tastes.

Okay, fine. Let’s look at some of their products:

High-end Amplifiers:

Seems reasonable. Probably could use a power cleaner to go with it.

 
Quality subs

Nice, nice. Very nice.

 
Top-notch turntables

I have heard that vinyl is one of the best means of reproducing audio. Or something.

 
Magical cones that magically make your music better via means of magic

Wait, what?

 
50LB, 3 Motor, Full Suspension System Mounted Turntable

Okay, now they’re getting out of hand.

 
Cable Supports

Cable lifts/dampeners? Are the shock waves of the Persian cat crossing your sound dampening shag rug really that detrimental to your Journey LP?

 
The “Analog Disk” and “HRS Nimbus” will rescue you from harmful analog interference.

Placing checkers on top of your records and under the feet of your turntable is just so obvious. Why didn’t I think of it?

 
Shakti Electromagnetic Stabilizer

If only I got a nickel for every time I wished I had a hunk of very expensive metal to place on top of each of my electronic components in order to dampen the electromagnetic interference…

 
SpJ and La Luce CS Centoventi


I understand that having a heavy turntable makes for better playback, what with inertial stability and all. However, a 100lb Plexiglass, steel edge weighted turntable is nearly as much overkill as a diesel engine smoothie machine.

 
So, seriously… This site displays a decent array of wholly reasonable products, but there is a disturbingly large number of mindless audio toys that seem to be more snake oil than sound-worthy. Can anyone dispel my misgivings on products such as the Shakti, or perhaps just confirm that the most hard-core audiophiles really are this dumb?

I’m working to revive the Seattle PHP users’ group. If you’re interested in PHP and live in the Seattle area, come to our next users’ group meeting at the new Seattle Northgate library on September 12th.

Details can be found on the SEAPHP wiki:
http://seaphp.net/

Add it to your calendar:

CAPSoff has embarked on a crusade to eliminate the Caps Lock key from standard keyboards. I have used applications such as Toggler for Windows for years to automatically control the Caps Lock key, but the idea of eliminating it altogether seems fairly reasonable. It is true that it causes more headaches than it prevents for most people.

If not eliminated, I would strongly advocate popular operating systems adding an option to delay toggling the Caps Lock key on until it is held for a few seconds. Several applications already include a “smart caps” feature that automatically turns off caps if you begin a sentence holding down the shift key and then type several more letters without it, as you would if you didn’t mean to turn on caps. Enabling these features system wide would prevent the most common problem of inadvertent caps typing.

Another solution would be to remove the Caps Lock key and make a new convention of pressing both shift keys at the same time to trigger lock-shift. It may seem obscure, but Ctrl+Alt+Del was also obscure to you at one time as well.

See: http://capsoff.blogspot.com/

Once again, I have irritated the giant that is Google. It seems that I just can’t get on their good side. I just got this email from Scott in Google’s AdSense team:

Hello Ian,

While reviewing your account, we noticed that you are currently displaying Google ads in a manner that is not compliant with our policies. For instance, we found violations of AdSense policies on pages such as dontclickmyads.com.

Publishers are not permitted to bring unnatural attention to the ads on their sites in any way. We found that the site’s URL and page content directs unnatural attention to these ads.

As a result, we have disabled ad serving to the site.

Your AdSense account remains active. However, we strongly suggest that you take the time to review our program policies (https://www.google.com/adsense/policies) to ensure that all of your remaining pages are in compliance.

Please note that we may disable your account if further violations are found in the future.

Sincerely,

Scott
The Google AdSense Team

As it turns out, the website that I made in jest and then promptly forgot about after a prior AdSense policy reminder has once again gotten me in hot (or at least luke warm) water with Google.

I’m not out to fleece Google by funneling mass traffic to that one-joke site. I’m not even out to make a particularly bold statement about being kept down by the Google man. It sure would be nice if they got the joke, though. I doubt anyone made or lost much money off of the 108 visits I’ve had so far this month. Especially so considering two of the top four user agents were googlebot.

Oh well, I’ll just switch to AdBrite. It doesn’t matter that I’ll earn less per click. A lower percentage of zero doesn’t affect my bottom line much.

Just for the record, I do not condone any clicking of my ads. Don’t click them, don’t click near them, don’t look at them, and don’t think about them. I don’t even have ads!

So there.

If you have a web tool that takes any sort text input for a search, you might find value in intelligently offering alternate spellings.

This technique is best used with an indexed list of proper words where it may be common to misspell based on phonetics. It is not meant to be applied to serial numbers.

First, create a new column in your index table for your alternate spelling key. Then, create a small batch script that fetches every entry from your index and runs the PHP metaphone() function on it. Store the resultant value in the new column you created. Also, make sure you update the code that adds new data to the table to populate your new column.

Now that you have your alternate spelling column populated, simply query the database with a metaphone() of the search term when a search turns up no results. You now have very rudimentary “did you mean” functionality, but it doesn’t stop there.

PHP’s metaphone() is an okay means of getting words similar to one another. In short, it boils the word down to a very basic pronunciation form where “buyh” and “bowwow” are alike. As you can see, metaphone can be far too general. What we need to do next is pick only the most relevant results from the similar words query.

The next step in finding more specific data is to find the words most similar to the one the user originally provided. I use the PHP levenshtein() function which calculates the difference between two strings. Simply ranking the results of the metaphone query by their levenshtein difference will provide you with a reasonable means of emulating the spelling correction/suggestion code used by popular search engines and spell checkers. This final step whittles words similar to “buyh” down to a manageable few, several of which may indeed be what you really meant.

For a demonstration of this type of code in action, check out my Compact Online Dictionary which I built for testing such ideas. The entire application spans only 100 lines of code and includes user-based result relevance ranking.