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Paragliding Sierra de Lijar

May 27th, 2010 SkyHorse

Because ideas don’t come when you’re sitting in the office, thermaling the Sierra de Lijar on a truly magical day:

Thermaling Lijar from Paulo Cunha on Vimeo.

Tags: paragliding

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How does your website look like under Dillo 0.8 on a FreeBSD?

November 11th, 2008 SkyHorse

Ever wondered how your web site looks like under Epiphany 2.22 running on FreeBSD 7.0? Ok a bit too obscure, how about on FireFox 3.0.3 under the now ubiquitous Ubuntu 8.04 without installing neither of them? Browsershots.org can help.

This free service produces screen shots of any web site URL as it is rendered using a multitude of operating systems and browser combinations, from the common Windows IE7 to the Dillo 0.8 on FreeBSD which only one nerd in a bunker knows about.

Check it out at http://www.browsershots.org

Tags: Web Design

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Advertisers pulling out of Facebook: Reaction reaction reaction

August 18th, 2007 SkyHorse

It was going to happen sooner or later. After BBC’s Panorama report on the people, sites and advertisers behind some of the worst ‘user-generated’ content on the UK web space it took just a few days for the fire to spread to the marketing director’s desk and for him to call off any ads placed next to questionable content. I can imagine the 7 year old kids (that’s how young on-line media buyers start working these days, according to industry veterans) frantically searching for all the ‘bad’ pages before the journalists or competitors had the chance to find them.
They missed the BNP group page on Facebook. So, advertisers pulled out of the entire site. I remember that day, the day I opened several pages on Facebook and I managed to not have a single ad being displayed. I immediately shouted “overreaction”, to which Mr. T. who I was next to me retorted that marketing directors couldn’t care less and all they probably did was pick up the phone and hail “STOP” out loud. That’s how it works in media, reaction reaction reaction.

But I don’t think online media is the same as regular media. A web page is not an outdoor, in the sense that it does not exist per se, it is only ‘created’ when someone visits it. When you say ‘RBS ads were seen on the BNP page on Facebook’ its not like someone happened to walk nearby and saw that ad next to BNP supporting material. What you really mean is ’someone opened the BNP group page on Facebook and they got an RBS ad at the same time’. The small difference is that someone went to that page, on purpose. We could criticize the BNP itself, or defend it, but that is not the point here, as it seems to be in the general discussion about this topic. The point is RBS was advertising a service, not to benefit the BNP financially (no one gets financial gains from the advertising on Facebook but Facebook themselves, at least for now) but to reach an audience that could be -or not- supportive of that political viewpoint. Is this wrong? I don’t think so. To me it is analogous to putting up an outdoor near a community that support the BNP: would you even think twice about it? Since the ads do not benefit the political group but only Facebook I honestly don’t know what the whole fuss is about. But maybe that’s because I’m a techie…

Tags: ads, advertisers, BNP, facebook, marketing, online media, page, politics, RBS, social-networking, user-generated-content, Web Design, web-2.0, web-marketing

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Zonbu – The Zen of computers, or is it?

July 24th, 2007 SkyHorse

Zonbu is what I call a YAW2.0C (yet another web 2.0 company).

Take a product (computer), hype it up a bit with new-age marketing bullshit (“low carbon footprint”, “silent”, “under $99″) and sell it not as a product but as a service ($12 a month). There you go, your KDE-based linux mini-box with 4gb flash-drive and a lot of usb connectors. Oh and don’t forget the eye-candy website and a funny name that reminds people of Star Wars characters.

Funny they never mention the lack of monitor, keyboard or mouse, but hey that would be so 1.0…

Tags: Computing, GNU/Linux, Ideas, marketing, startups, technology, web-2.0

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Advance in AI may bring ‘bluffer’ type bots to online poker

June 6th, 2007 SkyHorse

new poker AI bot in the making…

from http://www.newscientisttech.com/channel/tech/mg19426066.600-software-learns-when-it-pays-to-deceive.html

Hurwitz and Tshilidzi Marwala, also at Witwatersrand, have developed a virtual player that has taught itself to bluff at a card game called lerpa. Their artificial intelligence bot, named Aiden, is based on a neural network algorithm that usually forecasts stock market fluctuations.

Crucially, Aiden was not pre-programmed with the rules of lerpa. Instead, Hurwitz and Marwala allowed Aiden to play against three “dumb” virtual players that made choices entirely at random. Aiden was dealt his cards and told which of these could legally be played for each hand. At first he was almost too smart for the task. For the first 40 hands he wouldn’t play, then he tried one hand and lost. This proved so much of a setback that he refused to play again.

Hurwitz then changed tactics, giving Aiden no choice but to play the first 200 hands. Aiden then began to infer the rules of lerpa by treating his cards, his opponents’ actions and his own win-lose history as parameters to learn from. At this stage, though, he still wouldn’t bluff.

Then the researchers decided to play Aiden against three other similarly trained bots to see what would happen. “They began to develop their own personalities – either aggressive or conservative – depending on their past successes,” Hurwitz says. After a streak of being dealt bad hands and consistently folding, one of the more aggressive players, Randy, suddenly changed tactics and began to play even when he had poor cards – he began to bluff. Aiden, a more cautious player, responded by tending to fold even when he held a relatively strong hand (www.arxiv.org/abs/0705.0693).
“Randy suddenly changed tactics and played poor cards. He began to bluff”

“This demonstrates that computers can learn this peculiarly human behaviour,” says Philippe de Wilde, a computer scientist at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, UK. “They generate the strategy from play, which is a very human way of learning.”

brilliant ;)

Tags: AI, Games, poker, Visionarism

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