Which Wiki? Marvel.com vs Wikipedia
April 25, 2007 | 4 Comments
In Casey’s recent post: “Please, Not Another Wiki”, I felt some serious resonance with an internal debate I’m having. In short, Casey states that in general new wikis are a bad idea. They require an entire community to be successful and why not leverage an existing wiki (like Wikipedia) to accomplish your task.
Specifically, when externally linking to details about a comic book character in the Marvel Universe I find myself unsure whether to link to Marvel.com’s Marvel Universe Wiki or to a specific article on Wikipedia. Marvel’s wiki has a much more structured format. There is always a consistent set of data about each and every hero.
However, it is limited in this structure as well. There are less pictures, no external links, and a lack of information tertiary topics. The tertiary topics I find lacking include publication history, video games, and television appearances, etc. Similarly, Wikipedia has great profiles on the various artists and authors. This can develop insight and detail not available on Marvel.com.
Also, Wikipedia has a larger community who can be more responsive. Yet, Marvel has the expertise in this area and in turn should be able to provide better editing. In the end I still find myself leaning towards Wikipedia, however, I remain torn as Marvel has develop a fairly competitive alternative. I’ve pulled a couple side-by side examples so you can compare yourself.
| Carol Danvers/Ms Marvel | Wikipedia | Marvel |
| Jessica Jones | Wikipedia | Marvel |
| Peter Parker/Spider-Man | Wikipedia | Marvel |
| Sandman/William Baker | Wikipedia | Marvel |
I am left wondering if Marvel had just invested their initial time and resources into working with Wikipedia, wouldn’t contributors, consumers, and fans have benefited more?
Tags: carol danvers, comics, jessica jones, marvel, marvel universe, ms marvel, peter parker, Sandman, spider-man, spiderman, wiki, wikipedia, wikis, william baker
Wikipedia Has a Sense of Humor
April 7, 2007 | 2 Comments
Every once in awhile someone adds a bit of bunk to an article, or creates an article on a crazy topic in Wikipedia. I had always assumed these things were quietly giggled at by the creator and whichever editor stumbled upon the entry. However, these entries are diligently cataloged and saved in the Wikipedia page: And now for something completely different… Bad Jokes and Other Deleted Nonsense.
Here is a sampling of my favorites:
From God:
The Biblical God’s full name is usually given as Ronald God, and he is usually characterized as being married to Thomas the Nun, an 80-year-old holy woman. Together they are said by some manuscripts to have one son, Zeke, but some scholars argue that Zeke God is intended as a symbolic character rather than a concrete personage.
From chicken
I eat chicken poop for dinner because it is part of my medicine i need to take for my disease
From “WikiVandal”
a “WikiVandal” is someone who goes into Wikipedia and edits articles in a purposefully destructive manner.
Phrase Coined by a bored University of Washington student who decided to try editing The Pope’s article to say “Being gay is totally awesome. it is not a sin. people who think it is are SO taking what my dad said WAY too literally.” however, this is not a new concept. people have been malevolently altering articles to say things of this nature on a near-endless basis, and are the bane of wikipedia. most are immature children with nothing better to do, or drunken college students who are bored out of their booze-addled skull.
From Old People
Old people are people who are old. Old people often retire from their jobs.
From Peke
A peke is a small yellow creture that lives in homes.(Not your home.) Pekes can talk and walk just like a human. Pekes like warm places. Pekes worship ketchup. A peke has no brain. All that is inside a peke’s head is a wind-up monkey bashing simbols together and possibly a few tumble weeds. Beware:Pekes are deadly beasts that like violence and things that go boom! Cation:Peke may explode!
From Mikey chait
A large, semi-useless person with an athletic build. He enjoys long walks on the beach and attending to his mother. He likes ice cream, especially chocolate. It tastes like chicken to him, because he has four tongues. If you see Mikey Chait, report it to the police immediately and run for your life. When you get home, eat three pies and spin around fourteen times while holding your left fourth finger on your nose.
From Hobophobe
The irrational fear that gangs of hobos could decend from the nearest train yard and take over your town, much like zombies in the living dead movies. The smell of cheap alcohol, the sight of a barrel fire and even old beat up tan coats have been known to send Hobophobes into a state of panic. Hobophobes aren’t able to control this all encompassing fear of the more transient element of society and have even been known to move to places where there are not railroad lines for hundreds of miles in order to feel safe.
There are hundreds of other funny postings here, many to long to quote, specifically, go read these: Mallpunk, Auburn Junior High School, Hot Dogs and Incest, Dizzytron, Bedworth, peanut balancing, or Suv tipping.
This entry is hours of fun, have at it.
Tags: Auburn Junior High School, Bedworth, chicken, crazy, Dizzytron, funny, god, Hobophobe, Hot Dogs and Incest, humor, Mallpunk, Mikey chait, Old People, peanut balancing, Peke, Suv tipping, wikipedia
MySQL Performance Blogs
March 7, 2007 | 2 Comments
I’ve recently been doing a lot of work with performance tuning in MySQL. Here are a few blogs that I have found highly useful by people who are involved in some of the most serious MySQL based projects on the internet.
Peter Zaitsev and Vadim Tkachenko: MySQL Performance Blog
Zaitsev used to work as manager of High Performance Group at MySQL. Now he and Tkachenko run a consultant business specializing in high performance MySQL. He is common on the presentation circuit and has made his presentations all available. Tkachenko worked as a performance and scalability engineer under Zaitsev at MySQL. This blog contains great benchmarking and deep understanding of the MySQL infrastructure.
Domas Mituzas: Vaporware, Inc
Mituzas currently works for MySQL and is responsible for much of the scaling and performance tuning for Wikipedia. He also worked to make WordPress much more efficient in the latest versions. His blog has some examples and tips for scaling and performance tuning. Since he has such solid real world experience with Wikipedia, these examples and explanations are truly invaluable to understanding how to work with MySQL in amazingly efficient ways.
Jeremy Zawodny: Jeremy Zawodny’s blog
Zawodny works at Yahoo and is responsible for the amazing MySQL administration tool mytop. When it comes to MySQL, Zawodny is likely the best recognized name. He also wrote the O’Reilly book, High Performance MySQL. He also has some informative presentations available, but they are definitely starting to become dated.
If anyone else knows of great MySQL blogs, specifically that apply to performance tuning, scaling, and optimization, please let me know.
Tags: blog, blogs, Domas Mituzas, jeremy zawodny, mituzas, mysql, mytop, O'Reilly, performance, performance blog, Peter Zaitsev, presentations, scalability, scaling, tuning, Vadim Tkachenko, vaporware, wikipedia, yahoo, zawodny
World’s Largest Railroad Viaduct
July 31, 2006 | 9 Comments
I was recently contacted by Mary Everett of Greene County, Indiana who wondered about the Greene County Railroad Viaduct. She informed me of area claims which state that the 700m (2,295ft) long, 48m (157ft) high railroad viaduct is the “third largest such structure in the world”. She asked if I was aware of any evidence to support or refute that claim.
To define largest is always somewhat complicated. We could assume this means longest, but that ignores the height. Which of those should we give greater precedence to? To be larger does it need to defeat both or just one? It’s my opinion that beating both makes an obvious winner, but substantially beating in either still makes it “larger”. Additional complexity comes in deciding whether or not to consider width or spans. Finally, what is meant exactly by “such structure.” I assume we are only talking about viaducts used to carry rail. However, what is the difference between a bridge and a viaduct? As far as I can tell, a viaduct is a type of bridge that is multi-span and has to carry vehicles.
With those decision criteria established, I decided to use Wikipedia’s List of Bridges By Length as a starting point. Here is what I found…
The Binhai Mass Transit, Bridge No. 1 in China is 25,800m (84,645ft) long. They do not state how high this bridge is, yet it is without a doubt the longest bridge in the world that carries rail. Finally, the bridge carries two-way commuter rail.
China also has the second longest bridge. The Kam Sheung Road-Tuen Mun viaduct which is part of KCR West Rail in Hong Kong is 13,400m (43,963ft) long. Again, the height of this bridge was not stated. This bridge also carries two-way commuter rail.
To find the third longest rail bridge you need to travel to either Denmark or Sweden as the Oresund Bridge connects these two countries with a length of 7,845m (25,732ft). The only height measurement of the Oresund Bridge given is to say the highest pillar is 204m (669ft). This measurement is not extraordinarily useful in making a judgement since standard traffic runs on an upper level while trains run on a lower deck.
Finally we reach the largest rail bridge in the United States with the Huey P. Long Bridge in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana measuring in at 7,003m (22,996ft) and 41m (135ft) high. This is also a bridge that combines rail and standard traffic. The rail viaduct is much longer and extends elevated into the city of New Orleans.
The list continues on Wikipedia, but at this point it seems clear that the Greene County Railroad Viaduct is stretching to claim third largest such structure. In fact, I’m left wondering which three they specifically are claiming rank above them…
One other bridge you may find from a simple Google search for world’s largest railroad viaduct”. The Tunkhannock Creek Viaduct or Nicholson Bridge is 724m (2,375 ft) in length and 73m (240ft) high. This bridge makes claim to be the World’s Largest Concrete Railroad Bridge. I wasn’t prepared to disprove this as it seems pretty specific.
The Greene County Railroad Viaduct is still a very unique and amazing structure. I was sorry to have to disprove it’s status as the people in the region seem very proud of it. Thanks again to Mary for piquing my curiosities and for sending me along some great pictures of the viaduct.
Tags: Binhai Mass Transit, bridge, bridges, china, denmark, google, greene county, hong kong, Huey P. Long Bridge, indiana, Jefferson Parish, Kam Sheung Road-Tuen Mun viaduct, KCR West Rail, largest rail bridge, largest railroad viaduct, longest railroad bridge, longest railroad viaduct, Louisiana, mary everett, New Orleans, oresund, Oresund Bridge, rail,Greene County Railroad Viaduct, railroad, railroad bridge, railroad viaduct, sweden, Tunkhannock Creek Viaduct, Tunkhannock Viaduct, viaduct, viaducts, wikipedia, World's Largest Concrete Railroad Bridge
Web 2.0 and the Long Tail
October 9, 2005 | 4 Comments
Casey started spouting to me weeks ago about “The Long Tail”, and it’s significance in our changing online world. I read a bit, was admittedly intrigued, but haven’t thought too much about it until recently.
After noticing Web 2.0 being listed as a top search term on Technorati for the last few weeks I began looking into what this term actually means. Apparently Tim O’Reilly and others have begun talking about the next phase of the Internet. Where are we going, what is successful, and why? Obviously Google is a key part of all of this, but I was somewhat surprised to find discussion also tying back to the long tail.
At this point I realized I needed to know a bit more about this now too, so stumbled into Chris Anderson’s blog, longtail.typepad.com. Anderson discusses at great length Legos, digital music, BitTorrent, software and more. He cites intriguing examples of and detail about how companies are taking advantage of the long tail to make money in ways no one could ever imagine without the Internet and it’s grand reach. Go read his site, learn about this, it is very important.
Not surprisingly, as I began to grasp his concepts I was led right back to O’Reilly and conveniently his “What is Web 2.0?” article. This is also a must read. Let me quickly quote a brainstorm list of services that have transitioned from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0:
Web 1.0 Web 2.0
DoubleClick –> Google AdSense
Ofoto –> Flickr
Akamai –> BitTorrent
mp3.com –> Napster
Britannica Online –> Wikipedia
personal websites –> blogging
evite –> upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation –> search engine optimization
page views –> cost per click
screen scraping –> web services
publishing –> participation
content management systems –> wikis
directories (taxonomy) –> tagging (”folksonomy”)
stickiness –> syndication
Somehow that list really made the Web 2.0 concepts become much clearer. Reading deeper I came upon a comparison that was most clear to me, an ex-advertising programmer:
Overture and Google’s success came from an understanding of what Chris Anderson refers to as “the long tail,” the collective power of the small sites that make up the bulk of the web’s content. DoubleClick’s offerings require a formal sales contract, limiting their market to the few thousand largest web sites. Overture and Google figured out how to enable ad placement on virtually any web page. What’s more, they eschewed publisher/ad-agency friendly advertising formats such as banner ads and popups in favor of minimally intrusive, context-sensitive, consumer-friendly text advertising.
This was a fantastic hell yeah moment for me, linking back long tail notions to these Web 2.0 ideas.
The next major point he makes is “Harnessing Collective Intelligence” which I compare to the infinite monkey theorem and is my reason why people should blog. He cites the success of Wikipedia, Flikr, open source web development, and more.
A point I find myself arguing at work constantly but didn’t have words for yet is also addressed: “End of the Software Release Cycle”. Read that section, for software developers this is a complete change in mind set, but more importantly, trainers and managers are going to need to get on board or fear missing the boat.
There is a ton of detail to absorb here, I could keep pulling at my favorite gems, but I’ll let you read up yourself. What I will do however is leave you with this final list of core Web 2.0 competencies from the article:
- Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability
- Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them
- Trusting users as co-developers
- Harnessing collective intelligence
- Leveraging the long tail through customer self-service
- Software above the level of a single device
- Lightweight user interfaces, development models, AND business models
Tags: Anderson, blog, Chris Anderson, collective intelligence, flickr, long tail, napster, O'Reilly, scalability, self service, software development, Tim O'Reilly, web, web 2.0, web development, wikipedia
World’s Tallest Bridges
August 30, 2005 | 33 Comments
When I had an incoming search for “World’s Tallest Bridge” I was excited at the prospect of doing some research on bridges. For years I have been fascinated with all shapes and sizes of bridge, a definite side effect of living in Pittsburgh, PA. There are enough bridges in that city and county that they have a whole website dedicated to them. According to that website:
Pittsburgh has 30 river bridges with an additional 29 river bridges within Allegheny County for a total of 59. Then you may start to add the many others which cross streams, ravines, roads, railroads, etc. The typically cited a figure of over 2,000 in Allegheny County apparently doesn’t include railroad bridges owned by the railroads, and only includes those over 8 feet in length.
By some counts they have the most bridges in the world, but apparently Paris might have more or less depending on how you cont. While I’m still on that topic, here are my Pittsburgh favorites:
- Fort Duquesne Bridge, nicknamed “The Bridge to Nowhere” because from 1969 to 1986 one end hung in mid-air due to complexities in attaching it to neighboring expressways and bridges.
- Roberto Clemente Memorial Bridge, Seventh Street, and Ninth Street bridges nicknamed the “Three Sisters Bridges” (more pictures)
- Smithfield Bridge
- Homestead High Level Bridge
OK, moving on from PIttsburgh to the main event, the world’s tallest bridges.
The world’s tallest bridge is France’s Millau Viaduct spanning the River Tarn. The bridge stands at an impressive 341m tall and 2,460m long. This is in fact 30m taller than the Eiffel Tower. Construction completed in late 2004. Also, the roadway of the bridge is only at 270m, while the Royal Gorge Bridge in Colorado has a deck at 321m.
Although, it seems this is in fact only the world’s tallest vehicular bridge, I cannot find any sources naming any other sort of bridge that is in fact taller. If someone knows, I’m dying to find out.
More on the Millau Viaduct:
Official Site
BBC: France shows off tallest bridge
MSNBC: World’s Tallest Bridge
According to Wikipedia, the Akashi-Kaikyo Bridge (1,991m) in Japan is the world’s largest suspension bridge and this is also the longest bridge span. It seems the Millau Viaduct is longer, so I’m not sure why they haven’t updated. The Messina bridge in Italy is supposed to be completed in 2011 and will have a span of 3,300m, blowing this record clean out of the water.
But what about longer bridges that aren’t suspension? Well the Second Lake Pontchartrain Causeway in Louisiana is 38,422m long and crosses Lake Pontchartrain. That’s a lot longer… but doesn’t have much height.
To add one more level of complexity, the Tsing Ma Bridge in Hong Kong is the bridge with the largest rail carrying span (1,377m). So this one is really big and can handle lots of weight.
Finally, being from New England I must touch on covered bridges. The longest covered bridge crosses the St. John River in New Brunswick, Canada and is 390m. Plymouth, NH claims to have the world’s strongest bridge, Smith Covered Bridge, but I think they just made the claim and no one has challenged it…
More bridge resources:
The World’s Greatest Bridges
BridgePros
HowStuffWorks.com “How Bridges Work”
A couple other bridges I can’t resist:
- San Diego’s Coronado Bridge - I love it because it is big, high, and has a huge curve in it.
- Prince Edward Island’s Confederation Bridge (Official Site)
- Boston’s Charles River Bridge
- Plymouth, NH’s New Bridge (unnamed to the best of my knowledge) This brige is still under contruction/destruction, but will significantly change the initial view of Plymouth.
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