There are lies, damn lies, and statistics. It's true. Statistics can be used to pass off the most erroneous things as seemingly factual. Those of us who base our business plans on statistics have to be very careful not to let statistics mislead us. Over the years, I have made statistical analysis a key part of my core competency. I track all manner of statistics and have learned how to mush them together to form reasonably accurate conclusions.

Here are 4 tables.

May-01	DLs
WindOS Soft	911
MSWindowsXP	794
Nascent	703
LunaUIXP V2	570
Gemin	567

Jul-02	DLs
Midnite	1480
Serene II	1407
Industrial Disease	815
Kismet	466
Win2k Extended	403

Feb-03	DLs
XP Prime	2795
C-N Red	2027
Woodworks	1055
Axion_CCOlor	687
Vgreen	568

Nov-03	DLs
Longorn Slate	2121
Atlantek 2	1036
Flooter WB	867
NHA Thy	796
Shadow 2.0	665

So what are these tables you're thinking? These are the top 5 WindowBlinds skin downloads for a particular day in May 2001, July 2002, February 2003, and November 2003. I want to know if the overall user base of WindowBlinds is increasing or decreasing.

As anyone who does statistical analysis can tell you, if you are trying to determine the # of users, you cannot go by the top downloads. Ideally, you would use the mean number of downloads. Unfortunately, that would take too long. And I have found an imperfect mechanism for getting a "rough" user base guestimation.

Throwing out #1 and #2 from each allows us to eliminate skins that might have been highlighted somewhere or been linked by someone or had other extenuating circumstances.  Instead, places 3-5 added together will make our rough estimate but only as the start of our statistical analysis journey:

So, places 3 through 5 for each one:

May-01	1840
Jul-02	1684
Feb-03	2310
Nov-03	2328

Better but there is still a problem. Look at the months. Web site activity varies greatly by time of year. The peek months are usually October through March. The dead time is June and July.  So we have to bias thee results a bit:

Date	DLs	Fudget Factor	Modifed Result
May-01	1840	1	1840
Jul-02	1684	1.1	1852
Feb-03	2310	0.9	2079
Nov-03	2328	0.9	2095

Now we have a better idea. If you saw the original results, the tempting thing to do would be to say "Hey look, November has the highest stats ever, We're kicking ass!" But that would be a delusion, a dangerous one. November is a peek traffic month just like February is.  Whereas the earlier stats were from the Spring and Summer months.  After biasing them, the results don't look quite as impressive but they do show consistent growth.  From July 2002 the WindowBlinds population has increased by around 12%.

Of course, even here there are other issues, such as the day to day availability of skins. Turns out that on average, 1.5 new visual styles are added each day to the world of WindowBlinds. But the quality can vary from week to week. But you make due with what you got.

I've tracked most of the other programs, competitors and unrelated programs alike to look for trends. This technique definitely works well as a basic guide for popularity. Which gets back to my point -- if you want to be an entrepreneur, you have to wear many hats. I attribute much of our success to knowing the market and making projections based on accurate statistical models. Those who ignore the statistics or don't know how to accurately use them are likely to end up bankrupt in the long term.

 

TURN these...

INTO these...

DesktopX Professional enables developers to export DesktopX objects as stand alone programs.

Because DesktopX has been designed to create "desktop widgets" so easily, creating software such as MP3 players, calendars, stock tickers, resource monitoring, messaging, and various "desktop gadgets" can be done in minutes rather than months.

Here is a sample of a few applications created in minutes with DesktopX

The different versions of DesktopX

 

I'm having a lot of fun with making DesktopX objects. Tonight I made a couple of neat ones. I made an animated wallpaper that has snow falling on it. If you already have DesktopX installed you can get that here. It was amazingly easy to create. I just made one snow flake, added 3 lines of VB script and then cloned it a gazillion times with the mouse and voila, falling snow.

My other fun for the night was this soccer game here. You can download that by going to this link. What I did is I combined some DesktopX PNG objects with a DesktopX flash object. It was fairy easy to do.  I'm not going to do this enmasse until I find a better way to promote the people who make these flash games. Right now I just link to them but I want to do more.

This sort of thing though has really re-sparked my interest in creating neat little things. Try it out and see for yourself.

Ever wanted to have snow flakes falling on your desktop? Tonight we put together an animated wallpaper. Snowflakes, fully alpha blended to your desktop falling at different speeds with different sizes. And best of all - it uses almost no CPU.

If you don't have DesktopX yet, GET IT NOW: http://www.desktopx.net

If you want to try out the animated snowflakes, go here: https://www.wincustomize.com/skins.asp?library=31&SkinID=2816

What is it with car manufacturers and REAR-wheel drive? What is particularly ironic about this is that the "Big 3" are located in Detroit Michigan. Which is roughly where I live. They must drive special, magical roads that I don't have access to. Maybe they're Stone-Cutters or something because the roads I drive on have snow on them quite a bit during the year which makes a rear-wheel drive car impractical.

And yet...the cool cars I'm interested in are rear-wheel drive.  For example:

Here is the Cadillac XLR. It has a Corvette engine in it. Looks really cool. It's a two seater but....it's rear wheel drive.

I have a few fairly unusual requirements:

1. Must have Head's Up Display. I am used to it now. My Grand Prix had it, my Bonneville has it. It would be hard to go back to a car that doesn't have it.
2. I really care about how it looks on the outside. I don't really care that much about how fast it is, as long as it's responsive.
3. I want the interior to have an integrated compass. GPS would be nice, and smart cruise control.
4. It would also be nice if it had some sort of map read out that hooks into that GPS.
5. Must be all wheel drive or at least front wheel.

This car above has everything but #5.  I won't be buying (or leasing in my case) for another year so there's time to look around. But it's a bummer to see how many cool cars coming out that are rear wheel drive.

My friend recommended the Volvo S80 to me. The problem I have with that car is the outside styling. It also fails the head's up display and smart cruise control. It does seem to have an option for GPS and a screen for displaying the map and it has an all-wheel drive option but it fails too many of the other options.

 

I have other biases as well. I prefer to buy American cars. In fact, I've never bought anything but American cars.  The last rear wheel drive car I had was 10 years ago -- my Chevette. My options were more limited then. I am hoping to be able to get a cool car before I reach the age where people look at me like I'm having a mid-life crisis...

 

There are basically two types of bloggers. And JoeUser.com is aimed at supporting both of them.

Web Diarists

The first type of blogger is the web diarist. This is a person who wants to be able to share his or her thoughts about their lives in a way that is recorded for the long haul. My wife fits more into this category. Years from now, she wants to be able to look back and be able to show that she did indeed think about things and do things besides change diapers and chase after our little sons.  Diarists are motivated by the desire to record their lives for posterity.

Web Editorialists

The second type of blogger is the indie editorialist. That's what I consider myself. Most of the top bloggers fall into this category because their blogs are designed specifically to be read by others. And in fact, they are designed to be read by as many people as possible. I became a editorialist out of frustration with the media. For one thing, I've done enough media tours over the years to know that many people who write the articles we read on a day to day basis know little about what they are talking. Whether that be politics, technology, software, games, etc. they often have their voice simply because those more knowledgeable than them simply went on to more lucrative pursuits.

To be fair, I don't want to imply that all journalists fall into this category. Most of the top journalists that you read on-line, in magazines, etc. really do know what they're doing. But enough journalists are clueless about the issues they write about (and I've witnessed this first hand) that I wanted to set up a forum that made it easy for people, all people, to have a shot at being able to editorialize.  Which brings me to the second motivation of web editorialists. What gets covered by the mainstream media is often not based on any sense of fairness but rather luck or the journalists personal tastes. 

And so that is where blogging, as an indie editorial movement, has really taken off.  Now anyone can have a voice.  Sure, you end up with a lot of crap. But how is that different than some of the dribble written by professionals?  How is Tucker Carlson's new book written any better than what Steven Den Beste writes? Can someone explain how Michael Moore's views are more well founded than what is written by Sanity from the Left?

Being a good web editorialist

So what about those web editorialists? Those bloggers who write things that they want others to read? Part of my reason to open up JoeUser.com to others was frustration out of my personal blog not getting linked to. I'm sure many of you reading this who have had blogs know that frustration. As an engineer, I want to see the popular blogs be largely based on quality. Not based largely on how long they've been around. Or worse, based on the decision of one person on a popular blog site who chooses, often on a whim, to link to another blog.

That's where JoeUser.com really comes in. If you have Alexa, you may have noticed that with only 2 months of availability to the public to have blogs, JoeUser has climbed to being in the top 20,000 most popular websites in the world. I predict within another month it'll be in the top 15,000 and still be climbing. This is important for bloggers because of the way JoeUser is set up -- the main page of JoeUser is designed for YOU. All blogs written are available from the home page. Popular blogs are highlighted. Top users are highlighted. Top articles are highlighted. Users have the ability to give points to articles they think are particularly well written thus pushing them up. And you can see who is linking to your articles giving users an incentive to go out and get their blogs linked and automatically rewarding those who link to them with a back link.

What gets featured on the home page is still currently handled by me. Eventually, as the site matures and gets more users, articles that get a lot of "Interesting" and "Insightful" ratings will be highlighted to me so that I can feature them quickly (right now I have to read through them). 

The idea isn't to feature articles that provide a certain point of view but rather articles that meet these fairly straight foward critiera:

Which articles tend to get highlighted:

• Good subject matter that interests other people and is coherent.
• Well written articles. Specifically, relatively low on spelling and grammar errors. Have a topic and make a coherent point. Sometimes poorly written articles (I featured one tonight that I wish I hadn't) do make it up if they were provocative but generally quality of the article matters.
• Is visually appealing. That means good formatting. Spaces between paragraphs help. Bullet points. You're not writing a thesis.
• Articles that aren't excessively wordy. Length isn't your friend. If you can make the same point with fewer words, that is good. This is a problem I run into. I tend to use more words than I need because I type 120 words per minute.
• No profanity.
• Has links in the article to sources or other things when possible.

I tend to write my articles in Front Page, then copy the HTML into the clipboard and paste them into JoeUser. It makes it much easier to write articles.

But whether you're writing because you want to add your voice to the world in the form of an indie editorial or you're just sharing your day to day life with those who are interested, I hope you're finding JoeUser an interesting and enjoyable place. We have a lot of other goodies in the works that we think will increase that enjoyment further.

I'm hoping to get JoeUser t-shirts made and send them out to the top users and top bloggers. If you're a regular here without an account, create one as every time you write a comment you get points and if others think what you write is interesting, they can give you more points too!

Happy blogging!

 

If you have DesktopX you can now make use of this cool JoeUser reader object. Just sits on your desktop, updates every 10 minutes with the latest main pages blog entries.

Get it here.

Is it me or is the Internet overall very slow today?

I'm going to write something more in depth once I get a better feel for Panther (10.3).

I like my Mac. It's a fine machine. But Macs, since going to OS X (including 10.3) feel much more sluggish.

I also find them very limited in how much you can change them in how they work. If Apple hasn't thought of it, you're not likely to be able to find a tool, freeware or otherwise, that will let you change its behavior.

I also find the lack of freeware for it to be a major downside. I buy hundreds of dollars in software a year personally but I don't like getting nickled and dimed for every little thing. Sure, freeware exists for the Mac but in much lower quantities, even factoring in the sizes in the markets.

The Mac is excellent at doing specific things with. If your job is doing the kinds of things that the Mac environment excels at (graphics, some types of office work) then I would give the Mac an edge in those areas.

But the further you stray from that, its environment can seem limiting (to me anyway).

It also has to fight against the fact that, like it or not, it has a small market share which means most people are USED to the way Windows (and DOS) work. I spent a lot of time in college working with Unix flavors but I don't have any partiuclar desire to go back to that sort of thing now.

Which is to me, a major downside on the Mac. The basics are done very slickly. If you want to do more powerful stuff, you quickly find yourself imeshed in Unix stuff which I just don't want to deal with. Sharing of printers over a mixed network, accessing network resources of various sorts, etc. can all be quite a pain in the butt, even in 10.3 which is actually worse in some respects in that area.

But if go Mac all the way, it can be a very compelling environment and OS to deal with.

But I don't think it's compelling enough to get a significant percentage of Windows users to switch.

After all, OS/2 had a massive advantag over Windows 10 years ago and we all know how that turned out.

Today I found another really cool use for IconDeveloper. I am in the process of writing up documentation for Object Desktop. As any technical writer will tell you, the useage of icons in a technical document to highlight key points is critical to creating clearly understood directions.

But how to do that? Microsoft Word wouldn't let me. IE won't load them correctly for some reason. The built in Windows XP viewer didn't work.  But...But... IconDeveloper would open them.

So I just double clicked on it and got what you see in that screenshot (click to zoom in). Then I double clicked on one and I have Corel Photopaint set up as my editor. It loaded up Corel Photopaint with the icon already selected. Just copied, and then pasted. Voila. Very useful and time saving.