Superficial Intelligence

I just got back from the Bahamas yesterday, so it's back to a more regular blogging schedule. I am still starting to work myself into online communities, but at least on Facebook I'm not doing too bad. I just reached 500 friends. And I am proud to say that there are only 6 of them that I do not know personally. Not too bad for a geek such as myself! I hope I can say that someday about the number of daily readers of my blog! Thanks for reading and stay tuned for a themed week coming up soon.

Posted by Fernando Torre at 10:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

This weekend I will not be making any posts. Actually, I probably won't write anything until next Wednesday or Thursday. The reason for this? I am celebrating my one-year wedding anniversary in the Bahamas! It will be nice to go back to a tropical island setting at least for a little while. Meanwhile, if you're new to the site, I recommend you browse through the archives. The 100th post on April 30th also has a good list of old posts to read. Thanks to all of those who read my blog and I hope to bring new content sometime next week.

Posted by Fernando Torre at 1:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I mentioned in my Minnebar Report a conference by Curt Prins that I really enjoyed. He talked about seven mistakes that startups tend to make during their early marketing stages. Here are, according to Curt's presentation, the seven deadly sins of startup marketing and what I interpreted from each of them:

1. Target Market Greed
Some people just want to market to everyone. They believe their project is for everyone. And even though this can be a long-term goal, you should probably start with a smaller target group. Focus your project. You will be able to get to more people when you concentrate on a certain audience than when you try to market to all of them.

2. Prospect Gluttony
Even within a target group, trying to market to all of them may be detrimental. It is a better use of resources to focus on a smaller subset of that target group. Remember, even if your product is meant for everybody, you have to start by convincing somebody.

3. Product Pride
Developers just love their software. We love all the neat little features we put in it and just how cool it is. Customers don't really care about your product. They care about themselves. Don't let your product pride get to your head. If your customer doesn't like it, it won't sell.

4. Branding Pride
When starting out, try to build sales, not brands. Bigger companies, many of which have too many products to identify themselves with, can sell brands. Nike can do that. So can Google. But probably not you. At least not at first. Focus on your products. Brands are byproducts. They will grow on their own.

5. Sales Sloth
This one is simple. Do not get lazy about sales. Marketing alone is not enough to keep your company going. Money has to come in somewhere.

6. Impatience
You probably won't be getting in profits what you spent in marketing in one week. It can take months. Usually, it can take a startup from 10 to 18 months to actually start making profits. Meanwhile, don't get impatient.

7. Budget Frugality
Spend neither $1 nor $1M. Spend too little on marketing and nobody will notice your product. Spend too much and run out of money.

Keep these tips in mind if you are working with a startup. They may help save your company from the deadpool!

Posted by Fernando Torre at 10:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Unfortunately, I did not make it to the third round of Imagine Cup's Algorithm Competition. I must admit, I did not dedicate as much time to it as I would have wanted (mostly due to my HCI project). But still, I tried and I had fun. Hopefully next year I will do better. I certainly did a lot better this year than last year. And now that I have taken an advanced algorithms class, I will feel a lot more prepared.

Going a little off-topic, some comments have been getting tagged automatically as junk comments. I have no idea why this has happened with comments that seem normal enough and from people who have commented many times before. So I'm sorry if your comment did not appear right after you submitted it. I will be on the lookout for any other comments that get sent to the junk folder.

Posted by Fernando Torre at 11:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I had planned to write a post yesterday night, but a pleasant surprise kept me from doing so. I was invited by a neighbor to play a little Rock Band (which was very fun!). My wife then calls me on the phone due to a supposed emergency. When I get back home, there were a bunch of my friends ready to sing Happy Birthday.

I really had a great time. If I remember right, it's my first surprise birthday party. The funny thing is that, besides my wife, every other friend there I've made over the past year. So I want to take this blog post to just say that I am grateful to God for the friends I've been making here in Minnesota. I really enjoy their international flavor too. I've made friends from Japan, China, India, Mexico, Argentina, Puerto Rico (my home country), and from of course, here in the US. It's not very often that you meet such a great group of people. Thanks to all of you, those who were able to attend and enjoy the good food and those weren't able to attend but still wished me a happy birthday.

I can't forget to thank my family too! Although they are very far away, they also conspired to get me something I've been wanting for some time: a Nintendo DS! It seems like I will be having a fun summer.

Posted by Fernando Torre at 1:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Today, aside from celebrating the second most awesome day of the year (I have to put the wedding anniversary before my birthday now), I had the opportunity to go to Minnebar. What is Minnebar you ask? Minnebar is part of Barcamp, which defines its gatherings as "an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from participants". It is what some people call an "unconference". Basically anyone can sign up to lead a discussion in whatever topic the see fit (as long as they are technology and design oriented). So, here are my impressions of my first Minnebar.

I have to admit, I was actually late. Being my birthday today, I had no reason to wake up early, so I got there for the afternoon sessions. The first session I attended was my favorite. Since I have been exploring the startup company option for a while, I decided to go to a session oriented at startups. It was called "7 Deadly Sins of Startup Marketing" and was lead by, I believe a marketing consultant, Curt Prins. Very good advice for when your company is just starting out. I'll probably write another post about it later this week.

I went to two other sessions. One was about Adobe Illustrator. Basically some tips on how to do some neat effects, although it was hard to see some of the commands he was using from where I was (just three rows back). The third one was about CSS frameworks. Most of the people in those two sessions were design people, specializing in art and graphic design. I guess I realized there that this is one area I also enjoy. (I had a lot of fun working on the design for this blog!).

As I was leaving, I stopped by the demo session that was still going on in another room. If I had more time, I would have spent the rest of the afternoon there. There were some really fun demos (one called Scribbles, which had people drawing and mixing other drawings in some fun ways). There was also some attention given to iPhone development (which I think has been taking off after the SDK being released).

Overall, there were many sessions of very good quality (I'm sure I missed a lot of these). There were some sessions that looked more like student presentations or tutorials, but I don't think this lowered the value of the experience at all. The gathering factor is really great too. There are people exchanging ideas (and business cards) everywhere. But best of all, Minnebar is free! Free sessions, free food, and even free t-shirts. I really enjoyed it and hope to be able to go again next year.

Posted by Fernando Torre at 9:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This week's last easter egg can be found in my favorite web browser: Firefox. From the Firefox browser, simply enter "about:mozilla" into the address bar. You will get a quote that says:

"And so at last the beast fell and the unbelievers rejoiced. But all was not lost, for from the ash rose a great bird. The bird gazed down upon the unbelievers and cast fire and thunder upon them. For the beast had been reborn with its strength renewed, and the followers of Mammon cowered in horror.
From The Book of Mozilla, 7:15 "

In Firefox's quote, "Mammon" actually refers to Internet Explorer and the great bird refers to Mozilla. You can find more information about the analogies and more quotes from the Book of Mozilla in Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Mozilla.

I hope you have enjoyed this week of easter eggs. If you have any favorites that I didn't mention, be sure to leave them in the comments!

Posted by Fernando Torre at 10:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Today's easter egg is a simple, albeit funny, one. To see this easter egg, all you need is Notepad. Open an empty Notepad file and write "Bush hid the facts" (without the quotes). Save it with any name as a .txt file. Then, close it and finally reopen it again. The facts are clearly hidden!

Posted by Fernando Torre at 10:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Mahalo is a website that offers a human-powered search engine. I don't really use it much, but I sometimes enjoy watching their daily video blog (or Vlog), Mahalo Daily. Their host, Veronica Belmont was awesome. Unfortunately for them, Veronica has moved on to new projects (watch her at Tekzilla). Still, I think they have done a great job of dealing with this loss.

The team of Mahalo has been hosting a competition they call "Mahalo Vlog Idol". In a way similar to American Idol, they have been holding auditions for interviewer-wannabes. It's really entertaining to watch all the potential hosts auditioning and watch as the CEO and two other judges decide whether they're good enough. Go take a look at today's episode (the last batch of the first round) and start rooting for someone at http://daily.mahalo.com/.

Posted by Fernando Torre at 12:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

That's right. Matlab has a toilet simulation. If you have ever wondered how the flow of water behaves mathematically in a toilet, this is the easter egg for you. Just type "toilet" from the Matlab command line. It comes with various neat graphs and plots. Enjoy!

Posted by Fernando Torre at 12:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

These may classify more as cheats than easter eggs, but they're still undocumented and fun to try.

In Windows Solitaire, you can press ALT + SHIFT + 2 to immediately win the game. Similarly, in Freecell, you can press CTRL + SHIFT + F10. A dialog will pop up telling you to abort to win, retry to lose, or ignore to cancel. With this cheat, you can make sure to lose every time if you want! Freecell also has two secret, and I believe impossible, games. In the select game option, type in "-1" or "-2" to try these games out.

Minesweeper also has a very neat cheat, although I'm not sure if it works on every system (works on mine!). When you open Minesweeper, just type "xyzzy" and then hold SHIFT for at least three seconds. Afterwards, whenever you hover the mouse over any of the tiles, the pixel on the upper-left corner of the screen will change to white if there is not a mine and to black if there is. Great way to impress your friends (at least those who are nerdy enough to be impressed by such an act)!

Posted by Fernando Torre at 11:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

This is an audio easter egg. When using Matlab, you can input the following two commands:

- "load handel"
- "sound(y,Fs)"

This will play a short clip of Handel's Hallelujah chorus. This is the sort of easter egg I would put in my application after solving a very nasty bug. Enjoy (if you have Matlab).

Posted by Fernando Torre at 12:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Today's easter egg is found in the very popular Photoshop. To see it you have to open either the Layers, Channels or Paths Window. When I tried it, I did it from the Layers window. Next, you press and hold down the ALT key. With this key held down, click on the options menu button at the top-right of the Layers window. It should look like this:

With the ALT key and the mouse button still pressed down, move over to where it says "Palette Options..." and let go of the mouse button. Behold! Merlin has appeared!

I have no idea what the story is behind this easter egg, but I believe it also appeared in some previous versions of Photoshop.

I was also playing today with yesterday's easter egg, the "why" command in Matlab. My favorite response was "why not?". A deep answer indeed. Tomorrow, we go back to Matlab for another easter egg!

Posted by Fernando Torre at 10:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

No, I'm not talking about the colored eggs associated with the Easter bunny. Although these eggs I'm referring to are also hidden. This week I want to share a few easter eggs found in some popular software applications. Easter eggs are usually hidden features usually put into the application by the programmers. They tend to be undocumented, non-malicious, and humorous. This week I'll show you some that I like. There are hundreds of easter eggs, so if you're really interested in finding out more, check this easter egg archive at www.eeggs.com.

I'll start today with a personal favorite. If you have ever used Matlab, try writing "why" in the command line. You will get all sorts of random answers to this question, such as "Because Jim told me to" and "Because the programmer wanted it". I bet the programmers asked themselves this question everyday that they went to work.

On a side note, I want to thank everyone for the great feedback on the new design. I more than doubled my record number of daily visits to the blog. I just hope it's not a one-time spike!

Posted by Fernando Torre at 12:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)