Category Archives: Random

May 31 2012
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Random, Visualization

Key Players

In the late 90s Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, and Dennis Rodman of the Chicago Bulls dominated the basketball court. They were the key players of the Chicago Bulls, and dominated the NBA offensively and defensively. When exploring a social network you’ll want to find who the key players are for a variety of reasons:

Disrupt: Who should be removed from the network to disrupt it?
Protect: Who should be protected in order to keep the network functioning?
Influence: Who should be influenced in order to change social opinion?
Learn: Who should be questioned in order to know what is going on?
Redirect: Who should be moved to alter social flows?
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May 09 2012
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Random

Relationships

When working with relational databases, the join tables are sometimes treated as second class citizens. If they are lucky, they’ll get some additional fields, but are often just placeholder tables connecting your main object tables together. It leads you to think about objects first, and relationships second. With graphs, you will want to switch up your thinking. You want to start thinking about how things are connected. Think about the different ways things are connected. Two people can be friends, co-workers, and neighbors all at the same time.
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Mar 20 2012
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Random

MadCoderTV is live on Roku

I’ve had a Roku streaming player for my TV for a few years now and a few months ago I got interested in how it actually worked. I started seeing more channels pop-up and I thought how hard could it be to put one up? So I found their SDK, grabbed their sample application and after a few tweaks, some nice artwork and finding content, it was approved.

Why go through the trouble of doing this to watch videos on my TV when I can just watch them on the laptop? One word… Distraction.

If a video is more than 3 to 5 minutes long, there is a good chance I won’t make it all the way through. It’s hard to sit still when you have the full power of your laptop and the internet at your fingertips. On the TV, as long as there are no commercials, I’m pretty much going to just sit there and watch. Maybe it is some mild form of ADD, maybe it’s normal.
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