mgroves

Archive for May, 2007

It was quite a busy time for your pal mgroves, so sorry that it’s a bit late, but here’s the latest Tuesday Tube.

Missed the last Tuesday Tube? Head over to the tag search for ‘tuesday tube’ and browse through the archives.

Just a standard hodge-podge of videos this week, I hope you enjoy them.

Who would win in a fight between Ryu from Street Fighter and Scorpion from Mortal Kombat?

Why, Akuma, of course!

You know what I really hate? Those ridiculous ringtone/cellphone game commercials that you just know are bilking people (parents, most likely) out of gobs of money. The only reason I bring this up is the awful “remix” of Axel F featuring “Crazy Frog.” Look what it hath spawned:

I love one of the comments on YouTube: “There’s something about them that just wanna makes you punch their faces”. I couldn’t agree more, ffccyuke31.

And finally, if you drive like this during your road test, you probably won’t pass.

DVRs are destroying TV commercials. Why watch a commercial when you can fast forward to the content? The catch-22 is, of course, why buy a commercial spot if no one is watching it? And then, why provide content if no one is paying for it?

Well, it becomes a real conundrum when the fact that DVR usage is only going to go up is factored in. Sure, there’s still lots of people now with “regular” TV–enough to subsidize us DVR users, but that certainly will change.

I don’t have any perfect answer, but I think that all TV viewers understand how it works: either I pay, or the sponsor pays–there is no free lunch. That being said, here are some general observations:

• The key feature of DVR isn’t necessarily commercial skipping, it’s convenience. I don’t have to be in front of my TV at a set time just to watch a show.
• People don’t DVR live sports events, or do so very rarely. They use DVRs to pause or do their own replays, but for the most part they watch them live.
• If the total amount of commercials were 30 seconds or less, I would be less likely to bother with fast forwarding.
• Fast forwarding does take some time! Why not use that time to show a banner ad or something?
• TV networks can’t really touch TiVo, but they could tap the cable companies for a little extra dough. A DVR tax, if you will.
• Too much product placement, or ads during the program are extremely annoying. Spike, G4, and USA are incredibly bothersome with promos for other shows during the show you want to watch. Ads on a crawler might fly if a crawler already exists: ESPN or E! for instance. Splitting the screen for ads would be awful.

I don’t think TV watching will go to an “a la carte” format either: TV would become more homogenous and limited than it already is, and I just don’t think people like micropayments, or even a point-based monthly system or anything like that.

Submit your solution to the problem in 100 words or less in the below comment section.

How sick am I? Let’s just say that if there were any of the below creatures in my general vicinity, their ears would be safe.

(It’s a Gundark. From Star Wars.)

So while I recover, watch this clip from Empire:

Now don’t get all mushy on me…

I recently decided to move all my future freelance and personal web sites to PHP and MySQL. I’ve never had any formal education in programming but have been using Classic ASP and MS SQL since 1999. I’d say I know my way around it pretty well by now. But Classic ASP is a sinking ship. I don’t want to be like one of those weirdoes that still develops Atari Jaguar games.

I chose PHP over ASP.NET because of two things: hosting costs and ease-of-use. My current Windows host charges $250/year for 1 domain and 1 MS SQL database. My new Apache host (Dreamhost) is charging me a little more than a quarter that price for unlimited domains and MySQL databases. Not too shabby. And the nice thing too, for a knows-only-enough-to-be-dangerous programmer like myself, there’s almost a one-to-one relationship between built in functions and operations from Classic to PHP. Design215 has a nice resource on those parallels.

I could have gone with Ruby On Rails but it turns out I’m not cool enough.

So, here are some of my observations as I start to learn PHP.

Functions

In Classic ASP, if you declare a function and call the same function on the same page, variables can be used between them. For example:

varFoo = 1

Response.write (Bar())

This would return 2. But in PHP…

$varFoo = 1;

Echo Bar();

This would return 1. Does this have something to do with heretofore theoretical scope? I’m sure Matt Groves can offer an explanation.

URL Rewriting

This is really nice. If you wanted “friendly urls” in Classic ASP with IIS, you needed to configure a custom 404 page that did the heavy lifting, and replace the request variables with session variables. With Apache, you just add a couple conditions to a “.htaccess” file and drop it into a directory. It can even be used to prevent image hotlinking.

Corz.org told me everything I needed to know.

Sessions

In Classic ASP, if you set a session variable on page x, and write it on page y, it goes something like this:

Page X

Session("foo") = "bar"

Page Y

Response.write(session("foo"))

Easy as pie. PHP requires a “session_start();” on every page that uses the session.

Page X

session_start();
$_SESSION["foo"] = "bar";

Page Y

session_start();
echo $_SESSION["foo"];

One hurdle I’ve encountered is with Dreamhost’s default PHP configuration (php.ini). Sessions are apparently set to never expire! I’m still trying to figure out if I can change it.

More to come…

Price Discrimination may sound like something those evil corporations do to screw you out of your hard earned American dollars, but despite its unfortunate name, it is no such thing.

Price discrimination is simply the act of selling identical goods at two different price points. For instance, selling Lucky Charms for $4.00 a box to 10 people and sold it at $2.00 a box to 5 other people. Now, why on earth would I want to do that?

Lots of reasons. If you are familiar with the concept of supply and demand, just picture a typical X-diagram. If the price is at equilibrium, that’s great, but there’s a whole bunch of people who are willing to pay more for it. How do you capture that segment without pricing out the people who aren’t (or vice versa)? Price discrimination, that’s how.

Let’s go back to Lucky Charms. Normally I sell it for $4 a box. However, Sally S. Homemaker doesn’t see $4 worth of value. She would happily pay $2 for it, though. Well, you can’t very well put a $4 box and a $2 box next to each other and say “pick one”, now can you? So instead, General Mills sells Lucky Charms to Kroger’s, who then packages them as “Fortunate Baubles” or whatever and sells them at $2. General Mills doesn’t make as much money, but as long as they at least break even, they are increasing revenue and/or profits. And remember that if they didn’t sell to Kroger’s, Sally would still buy the generic brand and still wouldn’t buy Lucky Charms anyway.

Here’s another example: unsold seats at Dodger stadium. The Dodgers can’t sell these seats, so they price them with a little bonus: all you can eat food! This is a brilliant idea because it will bring people to the ballpark who otherwise found it too expensive or undesirable to attend otherwise. The tickets are priced at $40 instead of the usual $6-$8. Not exactly family priced, but certainly in the cheap-date or group-of-buddies price. The worst thing that could happen is no profit or no interest, which is the status quo anyway. Seems to be working: the seats sold out for the first 18 games.

Here’s another sentence you hope to hear only once (or less)…from your father:

• I got your nine inch pizza RIGHT HERE

Is this really the best use of your advertising dollars, John Q. Locksmith? It seems that if you’re locked out, you probably wouldn’t be browsing Lost Easter eggs hoping that a locksmith site would present itself.

And finally, In case your cell phone battery is dead and all you have to communicate with is a Wireless Broadband card, may I suggest SMS Everywhere to send text messages for free?

Project 86 is coming to the Al Rosa Villa in Columbus, Ohio.

And I’m going. See you there?

My brother’s family is really nice and they have a really nice house / farm.

My dad is still quite…interesting…after a few beers.

Here’s a sentence that I will add to my list of Things That I Hope to Only Hear One Time or Less in My Lifetime:

• Oh yeah, I’d love to castrate some pigs!

This concludes today’s addition to the Things That I Hope to Only Hear One Time or Less in My Lifetime list.

Joe was kind enough to lend me his Sprint Wireless Broadband USB modem for my trip to Michigan for my brother’s wedding.

This is so amazingly awesome that I’m rethinking my policy about road trips.

Just for an example, here’s where I’m writing this blog post from:

I VPN’ed into my work network to check a few emails and check out some bugs. I checked my bank account and balanced my checkbook. I’m moderating spam comments on mgroves.com and soon I’ll play some Desktop Tower Defense. All from the back seat of my car!

These things are a little pricey though, especially if I’m going to use it infrequently. Maybe Sprint could rent them?

I will be out of town from Wednesday to Sunday to attend my brother’s wedding.

In the meantime, there will probably not be any posts to mgroves.com.

Even though I have 3 additional bloggers, I don’t trust any of those jokers enough to give them carte blanche with posting whatever rape-based comedy and/or slasher art that they are chomping at the bit to post.

During this brief hiatus, I recommend the fantastic blog, The Daily Priapism and 50 Pixels of Evil, especially if you enjoy miniature gaming. And, now is a great time to catch up on the DO NOT WANT podcast.

Here’s a some other cool sites to check out as well:

• Wobbleshaft: The comic for the working person
• Astromance: put your date in the hands of fate
• Honest Ape – one of the top 3 ape-based sites on the net!