Cogito ergo sum

The character of modern art

kenshin03 — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 00:16:34 +0000

“It is sometimes forgotten that all art is contemporary at the time it is made, and that the character of modern art is to continually challenge and reinvent the works that came before.”

Same goes for programming, and everything we do in life that is important, I reckon.

Every teardrop is a waterfall

kenshin03 — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 04:46:59 +0000

Not meant to drag on this forever but got to say how Coldplay’s performance at the Celebrating Steve event was really triumphant and uplifting, overcoming (but not withholding) the melancholy and sorrow that hung so heavily in the air. Music touches people’s souls, and at its most intense, takes them on a trip far, far away and back, with the renewed faith that things have been healed a little.

Viva La Vida. Long Live Life.

Fix It. Lights will guide your soul.

Fanboys

kenshin03 — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 15:14:15 +0000

While reading Revolution in the Valley some years back, one of the things that moved me was how Apple evangelists would voluntarily go off to electronics stores and offer to “fix” the retail Apple experience – ensuring software was running properly, answering questions from customers and sales reps, and the like. They were the first generation Apple Geniuses.

At one time or another, each Mac user would undoubtedly come across the chance to do his bit of evangelizing. Mine was about three or four years ago, when our department was still flat-out filled with XP laptops (with the anti-virus kicking in and commanding 99% CPU hourly) and only a handful of folks owned Apple machines. Refused to be issued a Macbook by IT, I sought to bring in my own instead. That sparked a bit of interest among my team mates (and grunt from management), especially those planning to replace their notebooks.

After hearing remarks like how the “Mac OS looks like Windows”, I had an urge to set the record straight and tell the team about the story of Apple and Steve Jobs. I consider it essential knowledge for anyone who works in the field.

Here’re the slides I showed them that afternoon. A fitting end for an unforgettable week I guess.

The legacy of Steve Jobs

kenshin03 — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 08:42:30 +0000

Photo courtesy of turtlemom_nancy @flickr

Like many others I was shocked by the news of Steve Job’s passing away when I woke up this morning. Sure, the writing has been on the wall for quite some time and his publicized resignation more or less paved way for what is to come, but that doesn’t make the news any easier to swallow when it strikes.

The world as we know it will never be the same. For many years to come, people will still be discovering how much they have truly lost, and occasionally pondering how Steve would have done things differently if he is still around.

Most people weigh upon his contributions by the products he helped to create, his innovative visions or business acumens. Those are impressive, but I’m more touched by the more human side of the man. His relentlessness in pursuing true greatness. The drive to create works of wonder that are in harmony with nature, people, the world. His refusal to be let down by the status quo. His eagerness to shine among the flock. And the sense of proudness and satisfaction when he sees people appreciating his work. To that end, this mentality is no different than that of a fourth grader at school striving hard to win the praises of parents and teachers.

Some people singled that out as a fault in Jobs’ character. That his biological parents put him up for adoption created a vacuum in his heart he spent a lifetime trying to reconcile. In my opinion, that aspect was a gift rather than a fault. It was probably one of the greatest source of strength in Steve’s life, and as a result the single most important aspiring quality contributing to the high levels of standard carried forward to most of Apple’s products.

If only could more people in the world retain this child-like innocence and act upon it in everything they do, the human race would benefit from more amazing breakthroughs than an array of new laptops and mobile phones every year. That, would be the greatest legacy that Steve Jobs could have left behind.

steve jobs 1955-2011

To boldly go

kenshin03 — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 16:59:27 +0000

A lot could happen in two months, and a lot had. I remember reading somewhere how there’s no direct relation between the passage of time and growing up, and the latter tends to happen overnight without one’s realization.

The changes were mostly personal ones. At age 33, I took the ever beaming, eccentrically adorable Maggie Chan as bride and finally started my own family. The other change is the decision to leave my birthplace for the third time and move to another country.

The course of events have been long in brewing, yet abrupt in occurrence. I want to take a moment here to thank the friends and family members that have helped me cross through this rite of passage with tremendous support and kindness. I couldn’t have made it that easily without you all.

The Death of You and Me

kenshin03 — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 09:13:27 +0000

Bring on August 21st!

Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds

The Three Pillars of Social Reader Relevancy (I)

kenshin03 — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 15:49:47 +0000

In Web Search, the ranking of results is primarily determined by their freshness, relevancy (in regard to a search query) and content quality. Freshness is indisputable and needs little explanation, relevancy is an approximation of how much data a web site contains that have something to do with the user’s query and content quality is an indication of how “good” the site’s information is, given factors like PageRank, spam scores and so on.

Once crossed the line into the mobile word, however, these three factors lose their usefulness drastically. Text input on mobile devices is largely impractical and traditional web pages don’t render well, so media discovery and consumption on mobile devices is generally inferior compared to the same experience from printed mediums like newspapers and magazines. While big name players attempt to tackle the issue simply by snapping on extra features (Google Mobile Voice Search, Google Instant Preview for Mobile.etc.), the underlying problems remain resolved as its ranking algorithm is the same as its desktop counterpart. Flipboard is so great because, in my opinion, it has found and defined the new three pillars of relevancy for mobile content consumption and they are freshness, social, and readability* – and they work wonderfully.

With this in mind, I put some work to the server components of Cassius. From a simple script that turns a Tweet into a JSON feed, the pipeline now includes saving documents into a transitional store (MongoDB) and a series of quality measurement calculations. While the extra processing means we won’t be able to serve the feed in realtime, the cost should be worthwhile and I hope the results justify that.

How well does your article read?

In Zite or Flipboard, it’s not uncommon to run into articles with summary texts that resemble gibberish (see below). The issue is often a result of incorrect identification of raw HTML elements as meaningful content, and is very hard to avoid. I have seen attempts to solve this problem using NLP and machine learning classification methods, to varying degrees of success. Since those are beyond my capabilities, I opted to use some traditional methods to measure the quality of a piece of writing – by taking its readability metrics. From Wikipedia, readability evaluation refers to “the ease in which text can be read and understood“, and “…various factors to measure readability have been used, such as speed of perception, perceptibility at a distance, perceptibility in peripheral vision, visibility, the reflex blink technique, rate of work, eye movements, and fatigue in reading…“. Readability metrics measurement tools are widely available, and embedded in word processors and email clients.

source: corporategeek.info

results of bad scraping

In a nutshell, the tools apply different statistical formulas on a piece of English writing, and the resulting scores form an impression of its understandability. The formulas typically break text into syntactic components such as words and sentences and count their distribution or frequency in relation to the text being analyzed. The most common readability formulas and descriptions are given below:

I found it more pleasing to read blog posts and articles on Flipboard/Zite that are about a page in length. Contents that span multiple pages are too demanding for casual reads, while short tweets or one liners aren’t worth the two clicks effort to expand and shrink them from the page (yes really). For simplicity, let’s take my reading habits as standard, and use the following thresholds for computation:

Flesch – 50 (Times magazine has a score of about 52)
Flesch-Kincaid – 13 (pre-college level)
Gunning Fog – 12 (texts for wide audience have fog index of less than 12)
SMOG - 13 (pre-college level)
Coleman Liau - 13 (pre-college level)
ARI - 13 (pre-college level)

The gist here takes the readability scores, evaluate their distances from the threshold and combine the scores as a mean. Very straightforward.

In the next post we’ll continue to explore the three pillars, and look at some test results to see whether the additional aspect of readability would help us create a feed that is better optimized for the user’s final reading experience.

Knitting a page

kenshin03 — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 10:18:41 +0000

When set out to build the prototype, there’re many things in the design I considered fundamental, chief among them being a template system flexible enough so that no re-installs or updates are necessary if a new page layout combination is desired.

References on the topic is plentiful, but surprisingly the most useful one I came across was a paper published in 1977 titled “Computer Assisted Layout of Newspapers” by the MIT. You can find the full 184 pages here. The paper is a gem to read and goes into detail on even how ads and pictures layouts could be automatically assigned to a theoretical newspaper page. I shall definitely return to it for more inspiration, but so far I have based the design of the prototype on Chapter 6, A Symbolic Graphics Language For News Layout.

The diagram below lifted from P.84 of the paper tells it all. Pages on Flipboard largely employ a rows/columns layout combination, and the powerful template language described in the paper should be able to cover all variations effortlessly .

a simple yet powerful layout language

Note that I cheated a little and defined my version of the template language in JSON, mainly for easier parsing in Objective-C.

Therefore,
P1 || (S1 = S2) is represented with {"columns": [{"type":"P1"}, {"rows":[{"type":"S1"}, {"type":"S2"}]}]} in my app,

and

S3 || (S4=(S5 || S6 || S7)) becomes {"columns":[{"type":"S3"}, { "rows": [{"type":"S3"}, {"columns":[{"type":"S5"},{"type":"S5"}, {"type":"S7"}]}] }]}.

With a structure like this, we could simply parse the JSON into multi-dimensional arrays (e.g. {“P1″, “{S1, S2}”}), then write classes to traverse the array and return suitable UIViews or collections of UIViews. Only two-level nesting is supported in the code right now.

The UIView generation process itself is just as crude at present. While looping through the array, the type of value stored is examined, and if it’s a definition like “P1″ or “TIA”, a helper class would create the corresponding UIView, with arguments being the article itself and attributes like the size of the array passed in for presentation purposes. All these take place in the PageLayoutManager class. A whole lot more work will be put in around these classes.

I’m hoping that more help from the server-side will be used for both the templates definition and articles selection process. Analysis on word count, images in the article, source authority, social signals and other relevancy factors should already been taken into account by the time these articles and templates arrive at the client app.

Finally, here’s the template used for generating the pages shown in the first video. There are four pages altogether, with pages 1 and 4 being row-based and pages 2 and 3 column-based. These layout designs are quite similar to the ones used heavily on tweets-display pages on Flipboard.


{"pages":[

{"rows":[{"type":"TIA"},{"columns":[{"type":"TIA"},{"type":"TIA"}, {"type":"TIA"}]}]}, {"columns":[{"type":"TIA"},{"rows":[{"type":"TIA"},{"type":"TIA"}]}]},

{"columns":[{"type":"TIA"}]},

{"rows":[{"type":"TIA"}, {"type":"TIA"}]}

]}

The rendering:

page 1 - row 1 is article, row 2 three columns of articles.
page 2 - column 1 is article, column 2 is 2 rows of articles.
page 3 - 1 column, 1 article.
page 4 - 2 rows of articles

Remote or Local?

A colleague pointed out the template definitions must be defined and stored on the client app locally, as the app shouldn’t need to fetch a new template from the server when the device changes orientation. I haven’t thought about that yet. To me, it makes more sense to have the server picking templates that are more suited to the content being served. I’m totally not thinking about how to deal with landscape orientations yet.

Extended Reading:

COMPUTER-ASSISTED LAYOUT OF NEWSPAPERS. Reubtures et al.
Optimization of web newspaper layout in real time. J. Gonzalez et al. / Computer Networks 36

Cassius is on github

kenshin03 — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 10:43:16 +0000

Finally got round to putting together a decent enough client! Although the code is pretty rough now and the app would crash after a while, but at least it’s a start innit?!

Repos:

https://github.com/kenshin03/camus

https://github.com/kenshin03/cassius

The article pages were generated by a custom template that’s defined in JSON, and the image on the cover page is grabbed from Instagram’s API:

Cassius 20110616

View more videos from kenshin03

The iconic page flip effects were lifted straight out from AFKPageFlipper. Thanks again Marco!

Great Presentation Styles

kenshin03 — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 04:52:51 +0000

Recovered from an archive from three years ago. Most of the stuff here remains relevant (if not more so) to this day and worth a share.

I’d strongly recommend anyone who’s not seen the JJ Abrams talk at TED to give it a view. Captivating.

p.s. Has Lost been out for that long already?