Facebook Deals

Facebook plans a deadly new entrant to social buying-and Groupon gets a new competitor. The sequel to “The Social Network” would be good, if they could get Robert De Niro to play Eric Schmidt

Click on screenshot for more details.

http://www.facebook.com/deals

Tips to Play Farmville Really Well

Here are some tips to play Farmville really well-

1) Keep your Farmville friends in a seperate friend list  by creating a list at http://www.facebook.com/friends/edit/

This ensures friendship , work and Farmville dont mess around with each other. You also dont need a lot of friends in Farmville (max 40 actives) unlike Mafia Wars

2) Register at http://rewards.zynga.com/ to get free or double rewards by doing the same work. These rewards can be redeemed in-game

3) Set a time as well as money budget. Like $10 per month and 1 hour on weekends with 15 minutes on weekdays with max 3-4 logins. Continue reading “Tips to Play Farmville Really Well”

Google releases V1.2 of Google Prediction API

Diagram showing overview of cloud computing in...
Image via Wikipedia

To join the preview group, go to the APIs Console and click the Prediction API slider to “ON,” and then sign up for a Google Storage account.

For the past several months, I have been member of a semi-public beta test/group/forum – that is headed by Travis Green of the Google Prediction API Team (not the hockey player). Basically in helping the Google guys more feedback on the feature list for model building via cloud computing. I couldn’t talk about it much , because it was all NDA hush hush.

Anyways- as of today the version 1.2 of Google Prediction API has been launched. What does this do to the ordinary Joe Modeler? Well it helps gives your models -thats right your plain vanilla logistic regression,arima, arimax, models an added ensemble option of using Google’s Machine Learning Continue reading “Google releases V1.2 of Google Prediction API”

Using Color Palettes in R

If you like me, are unable to decide whether blue or brown is a better color for graph- color palettes in R are a big help for aesthetically acceptable alternatives.

Using the same graphs, I choose the 5 main kinds of color palettes, using them is as easy as specifying the col= parameter in graphical display in Base Graphs. And I modified the n parameter for number of colors to be used- you can specify more or less depending how much you want the gradient or difference in colors to be.

> hist(VADeaths,col=heat.colors(7))

> hist(VADeaths,col=terrain.colors(7))

Continue reading “Using Color Palettes in R”

Jim Goodnight for US Senate: Op Ed

Jim Goodnight, Chief Executive Officer, SAS, U...
Image via Wikipedia

This is NOT an April fool joke or a publicity stunt. It is also not meant to provoke discussion for the sake of provocation.

For a time, as I have studied both US and India , in what makes Government work or fail, academia work or fail, or businesses to work or fail- a common thread is the quality of people involved. Someone who is a wasteful businessman, will be a wasteful politician. Someone who is a flamboyant businessman with flair more than substance will continue that in public life.
Accordingly I have created a Facebook cause-

Jim Goodnight for the US Senate

http://www.causes.com/causes/600220-jim-goodnight-for-the-us-senate

If Donald Trump can run for President, I can think of no one who has done more for the American South. Unlike the tech heavy, Stanford dominated boom in California, the Mid West and South have been declining centers of influence. Cities like Austin Texas or Raleigh, North California are the exception rather than norm there. A friend who went to Duke once told me, the worst thing is to be borne a rural white male who is poor in America. There are no groups lobbying for education or internet hi fi blazing speeds for you. Socially you are expected to walk and thrive alone.

The Southern Baptist Church has managed to infiltrate and influence young minds there- the average conservative American seemed better off and happier in his moderated social behaviour. But the Church exacts a 10 % tithe, and it is efficient in stretching every dollar and every cent of church donations. Government works with the best intentions, but spending someone else’s money (your tax money money by a bureaucrat) is always more inefficient than the actual owner spending it alone. Taxes are higher than the 10 % tithe and seem to accomplish much less social change. You would rather go to work or go to war?

Accordingly I find that on the West Coast there are very few tech savvy leaders with a track record of both fiscal pragmatism, educational reform and job creation. Certainly the industry lobbyist is smarter at evading taxes than the average Joe, and campaign financing is still dependent on deep pockets despite the innovations of internet retail fund raising.

Would you like your Senator to be as considerate of creating jobs as entrepreneurs are. Jim Goodnight here is a metaphor for all entrepreneurs who dont believe in reckless hire-fire,outsourcing and long term views on people.

Click here to spread this cause- perhaps it will make existing politicians more efficient just by the threat of new competition.

http://www.causes.com/causes/600220-jim-goodnight-for-the-us-senate?recruiter_id=8347178



Rockmelt: A chromium based browser with a social layer

I kind of liked the latest browser on the block: Rockmelt.

It is based on Chromium open source project, that is primarily lead by Google. In case Facebook wants to buy a browser it can use Rockmelt–provided the mutual powers and angels agree.

I really liked the idea of a social layer- though I am not sure how the analytics embedded within a browser/report should be used.

Basically it re-designs the interface to put your social networks to the margin, thus quite a boon in you have active social media presence on multiple sites or a power reader/surfer. Timely alerts ping you to status/new messages without cluttering your screen and internet experience. Worth atleast a try or first look for the innovator kind of internet customer.

I still prefer the speed of Chrome– because Rockwell interface is still not easy to transition to – it almost adds in 3 dimensions in terms of where your eyeball should be while surfing (to left/right/margin).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

and thats despite the funny fine print in Chrome’s user agreement of “continuing innovation”

type about:terms in your chrome bar to see-

4.3 As part of this continuing innovation, you acknowledge and agree that Google may stop (permanently or temporarily) providing the Services (or any features within the Services) to you or to users generally at Google’s sole discretion, without prior notice to you. You may stop using the Services at any time. You do not need to specifically inform Google when you stop using the Services.

+ 1 your website -updated

how to add the all new plus one button to your own website

just go here.

submit form

wait

https://services.google.com/fb/forms/plusonesignup/

also see https://profiles.google.com/u/0/+1/personalization/

or read the hack here

http://www.yvoschaap.com/weblog/the_google_1_button_discovered

The buttons does exists because there is personalisation option available refering to non-Google sites.

Google claims the button is “coming soon” but I couldn’t wait, so I looked around the code, and looked some more, untill I found the button endpoint hiding from me, obfuscated, in a stray piece of javascript.

Check out these live Google +1 buttons:

at

http://fanity.com/