The Internet Says the Darndest Things

Recently I've been working through the tutorials over at Google's App Inventor with the hopes that eventually I'll use it to make my own quick Android application [although I still have no idea what that app will be].

The App Inventor is really simple to use and in some ways reminds me of MIT's Scratch program due to it's use of puzzle pieces to make programming easier.

When I first heard about App Inventor I thought it could only be used to create pretty simple formulaic applications, much like Google Sites, however as I continued through the tutorials I discovered that you can create some very dynamic and complex applications using their tool suite. App Inventor even allows you to create applications that interact with an online database.

And that's where it gets fun, or at least funny. For the purpose of the tutorials Google created a web DB for use by everyone, that means that anyone can add information to this DB, presumably doing so when the tutorials call for it. However, it being the Internet more than just "hello world" was submitted. Here are some of my favorites:

key: yourcousinstwiceremovedmomma
value: SAD SAD MONKEY TINKERING WITH INTERWEBS
Someone needs to learn that just adding "momma" to something doesn't make it a "your mother" joke.

key: words
value: sex
What does it say about me when my biggest problem with this is that he shouldn't have used a plural if he was only going to write one word?

key:  steven

value: I am not hard but you can make me

Wow, just wow. 

key: white

value: poop

I'm kind of hoping that "white" is a name because otherwise this person should see a doctor. 

key: testnotetw

value: Not now have a headache

Me too buddy, me too.

Now the first time in the tutorial you have to use this DB is when you write a short quiz making application. These are some of the quizes that were made:

questions: "name","age","land","country","alias","girlfriend","job","daddy","power 1","power 2","power 3"

answers: "superman","133","iceberg","north-pole","charles","lois lane","newspaper","jor-l","flying","laser eye","can break any material"

Now correct me if I'm wrong but isn't Superman's alias Clark? 

questions:  "Is Rose beautiful? ","Is Jim nice?","Is Jack black?","Is Stella sweet?","Does it rain in southern California?","Is our house grey?","Am I cool?"
This didn't have answers, which is a shame because I really wanted to know if Jack was black.  

questions: "Who is the Savior?","Who is the Dragon?","Favorite Food","Who is the Savior?"

answers: "Jesus Christ","Satan","Shabu Shabu","Jesus Christ"

Halfway through they forgot who the savior was 

That's only a tiny sample of the 1000 entries which are on the test DB, so until next time I'll leave you with one last pondering from the DB:

questions: "how old am I?","what is my favorite Pokemon? "
answers: "18","ditto "

Gender Differences on Craigslist

Out of boredom, and geek curiosity to see whether I could do it, I decided I wanted to make a visualization to compare the different words used in Craigslist personal ads by men and women. I also wanted to see whether the words used would be different if they were posted on the "seeking" section or the "casual encounters" section.

The first challenge was to write a script that would be able to take all the text from every personal ad on the front page of the four different sections: w4m, m4w, casual encounters w4m, and casual encounters m4w. Surprisingly, I was able to accomplish all this with 22 lines of python code.

relevant xkcd

More surprisingly I didn't really hardcode too much in there, which means you could reuse the script to analyze a different regions craigslist and only have to change three lines [I think]. This is possibly because craigslist has a pattern for their urls:

http://singapore.craigslist.com.sg/stp/2463324417.html

As you can see the general pattern goes:

city.[language.]craigslist.com.[country.]/ad-section/post-id.html

So from this I was able to write a general expression to read through the front page of each ad section and gather all the post URLs.

Each post page is also pretty standard, and very nicely puts the ad text within set sections:

<div id="userbody">Here is the ad text. <!-- START CLTAGS -->

Which meant that I could write another regular expression to extract only the text of the ad and write it to a text file. I then used TextWrangler to remove any extra HTML tags.

To make the different word clouds I used IBM's Many Eyes web service because it's free, helps further clean up the data by removing common words [I also decided to remove the word "looking" from all the data sets], and gives you a lot of different options. After tinkering around with all the settings I was left with my four visualizations [click on the picture to view full size].

w4m

m4w

casual encounters - w4m

casual encounters - m4w

So there you have it. Geek victory and possible conversation starter. Now, as I said at the beginning of this post, I started this more for the tech challenge than analysis of the results so I'm not going to have a Jerry's Thought on this, although I will explain that one of the reasons why the word "nine" is so prominent in the women's casual encounters section is because mobile numbers in Singapore all start with 9, I think.

Review: L.A. Noire

This game is old school

After about a year of hype regarding the revolutionary new facial capture software, Rockstar's newest game, L.A. Noire, is finally upon us. Featuring a main character of Mad Men fame, and more classic cars than you can shake a stick at, I actually pre-ordered this game out of the hype.

Story

You play as Cole Phelps, returning WWII war hero and patrolman. Or at least you start off as a patrolman, but you don't stay dressed in blues for long as you rise up LAPD's ranks and work vice, homicide, and arson. 

The LAPD's tactics haven't changed much in 70 years

The storyline is developed through cases, newspapers you can find in the game, and flashbacks to Phelps' time in the war. Compared to other games, L.A. Noire puts a lot of emphasis on the story and while it's not exactly worthy of an award it's a lot better than the usual "save the world by ______" story, plus it does have a few good twists. 

Gameplay

This is not your typical Rockstar game, or at least not like GTA or Red Dead Redemption. For one, you can only wield your weapon when the game lets you, and you can't run over pedestrians, as they always find a way to move out of harm's way. 

The game is broken up into different cases that involve finding clues, interrogating witnesses, and sometimes shooting or fighting scenes. At the end of each case you are ranked and then moved on to the next case. The game tries to make the biggest point about it's interrogation sequences in which you're supposed to take advantage of the magical face capture to "read" whether a witness is lying. You are given three options after each statement and have to decide whether a witness is telling the truth, lying, or just doubt their statement. 

These choices feel like they are mislabeled sometimes and it seems that Phelps' can only ever be angry when he doubts someone, which is funny sometimes. 

Finding clues is probably the least fun part of the game, as it mostly involves walking around a scene until your controller vibrates and then hitting a button to make Phelps look at something nearby. Although you can disable this "hint" there's no real other way to tell if you've found all the clues for a case. 

Apart from the cases, the game also has "street crimes" side missions which almost always involve chasing down a suspect either on foot or in a car. All of the games actions reward you with experience points which level you up and can offer rewards in the form of intuition points which can help reveal clues or remove answers during an interrogation, new outfits, and rare car locations. 

Presentation

The game looks good, really, really good. 

I recognize this guy from somewhere...

However, it doesn't look good all the time. It is possible to drive so fast that you can beat the textures and one more than one occasion I crashed into a hydrant that hadn't spawned. But the game still does look good enough to be able to pick out specific actors who make an appearance in the game. For example you'll be able to spot half the male cast from Mad Men. 

Sadly, they left the women of Mad Men out

The voice acting also benefits from having actors, although sometimes there are pauses between characters that break up the immersion, however, as these are usually happening during a driving sequence I like to pretend that Phelps is so focused on driving that it takes him a while to respond to his partner. 

Speaking of sounds, the soundtrack, and radio commercials are excellent. You really do feel like you're in L.A. during the late 40s, I was so nostalgic I even drove out to Olvera Street to see if they had the Aztec Dancers performing, sadly they did not. 

Recommendation

This game is tough to judge, there was a big attempt to go the Heavy Rain way and make something different from the tons and tons of war FPS, and in some ways it succeeded doing this as the game was even honored at the Tribeca Film Festival. However, this is a game that feels like it forgets it's supposed to be a game sometimes and feels like a huge quick time event. Still, the pacing is good, the storyline is better than most, and the game play is fluid most of the time. 

I don't think the face software will revolutionize gaming but hopefully it'll encourage more storytelling in gaming. I recommend this game as a break from cover based shooting and constant re-spawning, although if you're expecting to be able to go on some GTA rampage in 40s L.A. you will be disappointed.  You will also be disappointed if you're expecting the female cast of Mad Men. 

maybe DLC?

Don Squeaky

he's watching, always watching

After successfully moving our TV out of the dining table and onto a proper TV shelf thing, we decided the next step to make our flat a home was a pet. Now, since we really aren't the most responsible guys, and we don't really do much in the way of chores, theres an empty beer box in the fridge right now and it's anyone's guess how long it'll be there for, we had to get something low maintenance. 

My first thought was a cat, since they're pretty low maintenance, as in they'll use you as a B&B and scratch you if you try to pull of that whole, "I'm your owner and I want to pet you" noise. However, since some people can be allergic to cats, we decided that it probably isn't a good idea. So then we started thinking small, fish was one option but you have to clean tanks and they don't really feel like a pet as much as a decoration, so we eventually decided on a hamster. 

that's where he does his business

We bought our little hamster, I forgot what type he is, and named him Don Squeaky. We bought the hamster starter pack at the same time which is: cage, a bathroom, bathroom sand [didn't know they used sand], bedding, wheel, food, stone thing for his teeth, water bottle, and of course a hamster ball. It took Don Squeaky a while to get used to the place, a process which was marked by him making noises and running away from us like we were a really big cat or something, but eventually we kind of all settled in and got used to living with each other. It probably also helped that we hooked his house up. 

his house has two floors, that's pretty cool

Don Squeaky is actually pretty smart, when he wants us to take him out of the cage and run around he goes to his little observation ball [which is where we usually let him out of] and he'll begin to pound on the plastic, which I imagine is his way of saying "yo, let me out son", so that's cool. 

He also has a pretty funny habit of storing food in his cheeks and then setting up little food stashes everywhere. We suspect this is because we forgot to fill his bowl once so he knows better than to depend on us. Besides getting a kick out of him running around in the hamster ball like an American Gladiator, his house is another source of entertainment, and a place to throw money at. From the initial house we've added an observation tower and recently, a labyrinth, all pretty cool things. We keep saying that we're going to have his tube things run all along the house, but we realized that this will mean having to disassemble, clean, and re-assemble said pipes so not sure this will actually happen. 

freedom!

So far Don Squeaky has been a pretty good flatmate. He doesn't complain about the noise, stays up late, and is generally as clean as we are [not sure if this is a compliment to him or a put down on myself], now if we can just get him to pay some rent we'd be golden. 

MG XXXG-01D2 Deathscythe Hell

Picture from the Gundam Wikia

I've had a pretty long hiatus from Gundam assembling so this month I picked up two different models, the XXXG-01D2 Deathscythe Hell is the first of the two that I decided to build. I picked this one up from looks alone, because I mean the whole demon-wings thing looks pretty intimidating right?

This model is from the "Endless Waltz"anime from 1997, that's all I really know about it but apparently it is "both a sequel and prequel to the Gundam Wing series"whatever that means. Seriously though, at some point I'll actually watch these things.

he has a really small head for some reason 

Of the two I bought I decided to build this one first because it's mostly dark which means I can mess up on the cutting and and it won't be too noticeable. Also, I usually don't do much lining on darker models since you can't tell, so this one was a nice model to build to get me back on the proverbial horse.

nothing says profesional like a bunch of toys on your desk

Although I wanted an easier model to help me get my groove back, I'm a bit let down by the Deathscythe. It has very little movement compared to the others, the hands don't move independently instead you select one of three separate hands and snap it on, and there's only one real weapon for it, compared to the four or five that come with the other models. Still, the Deathscythe got it's revenge and drew blood from me, so there's that.

there should be a bunch of decals there, but there isn't

Although the build was mediocre I still think the finished product looks nice, although I messed up some of the decals and so I didn't add them to the wings.