blog [mike atlas]

It takes 1 click to download Firefox from GetFirefox, a website with big words and very little text, but it takes 4 or more clicks to get OpenOffice from OOo’s website after being presented with a barrage of information and donation requests.

This is definitely an indication of how to make open source software succeed en masse: Make it brain dead simple to acquire and use for the average user.

Recently, the giant billboard outside my window that sits atop Jillian’s was changed to something new:

I thought, “What the hell is this advertisement talking about?” But, sure enough, the “Beer Ape” video appeared on YouTube that same day.

What a dumb commercial. Seriously.

It’s hardly even controversial, and it’s unlikely that it would have even been “banned” from TV.

The video claims to have come from Friends of Rolling Rock, a blog-looking site that appears to be “followers of the rock”. Too bad the website states right at the bottom “© 2006 Latrobe Brewing Co., Rolling Rock® Beer, St. Louis, MO”. The domain is registered to Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, a marketing company with clients like Anheuser Busch and Comcast.

What is really embarrassing, though, is the all the dummy YouTube accounts they created to post positive reviews of the video. Some of these have already been deleted, and comments I tried to post on the video were also deleted.

stobosky Funny! Too bad it was banned.
Videos Watched: 0

ccostelnock Love the Beer Ape!
Member Since: 1 day ago, Videos Watched: 2

sdildarian funniest thing i’ve ever seen in my life.
Videos Watched: 2

ebrockbeer Ron Stablehorn should be fired [...]
Member Since: 13 hours ago, Videos Watched: 0

rossi1262 Whoever designed this ad is an absolute pioneer to the marketing world [...]
Member Since: 5 hours ago, Videos Watched: 0

zachsoccer12 Wow! Simply amazing! I am glad I took the time out of my [...]
Member Since: 4 hours ago, Videos Watched: 1

If it weren’t for strict time management, I’d be in over my head right now more than I could imagine.

For the majority of students going on coop in January, every October means suffering through one of the most hectic times of the entire year. We are overloaded with academic assignments, midterms, coop interviews, part time jobs, and the occasional desire to sleep a few hours. For example, this week I worked 15 hours on my part time job, I attended all my classes, I had two midterm exams, a 1000 word essay to write, and three interviews for coop positions (two of which were out of town and one was over the phone). I am surviving, but my grades are suffering since the amount of studying I do is the only rational thing I can cut time out of. Getting the best coop position possible is the one addition to my overbooked schedule that has eaten away on my ability to focus on my schoolwork.

As I go into my third coop experience, I am wondering why there isn’t more communication between the coop and academic departments. Why can’t the professors slow down their courses for two weeks while students are out on interviews? They could then easily pick up a faster pace afterward to stay on track with their syllabi. Perhaps then, students like myself would be able to obtain optimal coop positions while preventing our grades from slipping.

If you are writing an XSL for some particular XML data you have to be outputted into HTML, you may run into a problem when you view your XML data with your XSL transformation applied to it in Firefox. The reason for this is because the Firefox developers have chosen not to implement part of the XSLT specification for disable-output-escape (DOEY).

To get around this, one must make quite a bit of changes to their XSL to accomodate Firefox. This smells alot like what alot of people have to do often for MSIE, except with Firefox being the ugly one this time.

Click to see my example XSL sheet below for a rough reference on how this can be achieved.

Read the rest of this entry »

Some great publicity about the organization for which I am the director of Promotions/Internet Relations, Massachusetts USA Wrestling, had a nice article in the Worcester Pulse the other day. Check it out.

Back in the day I used to skateboard. I had one and only one skate video on VHS that I watched a million times. It’s like it’s 1998 again, watching this video, “Fulfill the Dream“. The soundtrack still is pretty sweet.

Rounded, approximate numbers

Site’s constituency (guesstimated max unique visitors interested at any given time):
19,000
Most unique visitors ever in a given month (Feb 2006):
16,500
Registered users:
3200
Users who have posted something in the forums:
1500
Total forum posts:
20,000
Users who have more than 150+ forum posts:
15
Users who have more than 100-150 forum posts:
15
Users who have more than 25-100 forum posts:
70

That means approximately 2+ % of the site’s registered users do 1/4 of all the talking on the forums.

That means approximately .1% of the site’s constituency have ever talked in the forums (even once).

And these numbers generally reflect what is now well known about socially driven websites - a tiny percentage of the users do a huge percentage of the contribution for little or no pay while the masses simply lurk and do not interact with these people doing all the talking (example: Wikipedia, where fewer than two per cent—are responsible for seventy per cent of the work).

More:
Understanding the 1% and also here.

Here are the steps you need to take to get a copy of a Drupal website onto your local computer for development purposes, using the XAMPP stack and a variety of tools. Many of the steps taken here have been made so that you can keep your PHP files outside the standard htdocs DocumentRoot directory of the Apache server while maintaining whatever else you have running on your XAMPP installation.

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I spent a good (read: probably too much) amount of time getting the spellchecker in TinyMCE to work on my Tomcat (JSP) application. The problem with this plugin is that it’s source code runs on PHP - which Tomcat can’t interpret on it’s own.

Instead, I happen to have another web server daemon (lighttpd/php) running on port 81 already to support a phpMyAdmin installation. Unfortunately, I had previously compiled PHP without XML support, so this involved some hacking.

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I’ve been asked before why I’m not wrestling in college. I wrote this before I graduated high school and it’s probably good to have this in my blog despite the fact that I wrote this in April 2003.

Yeah, hm, one would think colleges would be banging on my door. But several factors make up the reasons why I didn’t wrestling in college.

1) The minimum weight class in college is 125, where the guys there are like 135-140 cutting weight to get to that weight class. I’ll never be as big as any of them. They are that big even in D3 college wrestling. I’m just not big enough (i could lift more) to wrestle 125 in college.

2) I achieved everything one can acheive as a high school wrestler. I don’t really have dreams of wrestling college. When I look back at high school, the first thing and the most important thing I will always remember is wrestling. I don’t want to do the same for college. I want to look back on college as the years where I learned how to be a successful adult in society, having fun, and studying my fucking ass off. College wrestling is a huge committment which I don’t really want to committ to. It won’t get me anywhere closer to my degree.

3) Only two of the 5 schools I applied to have wrestling teams - Rennselaer Polytech and Worcester Polytech, both division 3 programs. On the national college level, I’m actually not that good a wrestler. The competition in college is unreal, even at division 3.

4) Division 3 programs can’t (afford to) offer me scholarship money for wrestling.
5) Despite my accomplishments, division 1 and 2 wrestling programs across the country don’t generally recruit wrestlers from New England. They prefer to recruit kids from PA, IA, OH, MN, NJ, and CA, states where wrestling dominates winter sports, where the competition down there would kill any wrestler from new england. Bigger/better wrestlign programs jsut aren’t interested in me.

6) I got offered a very nice academic scholarship to Northeastern University. I have a 3.65 gpa and stuff, so I wasn’t depending on my wrestling alone to get me into/through college.

From here on out, I no longer compete, I’m a college student and a high school All-American in wrestling

Thanks for asking.