As I explained a few posts ago, one of the reasons I’m firing this site back up is to help fellow developers, programmers and fermentors find answers to their questions.  I spend a good chunk of my day both at home and work Google-ing how to do this or that.

This quick post is to give a little shout out to TJS over at dewpoint.snagdata.com.  In particular, their post titled, Drawing a Grid in a UITableView.  I had a similar experience to the author when I started trying to figure out how to display tabular data within a UITableView.  It seemed like a grid system should be built in, but alas, it was not.  I tried inserting tabs, messing with alignments but nothing really worked.  I considered inserting individual labels into the cell, but I wasn’t sure how to go about it.

After searching for what seemed like an hour, I couldn’t find anything.  Finally, I happened upon TJS’s solution and immediately knew I had found what I was looking for.  After tweaking the label’s size, font color and setting the background color to ‘clear’, I was in business.

So, besides keeping the authors info intact in the file headers, I wanted to give an internet high five and maybe in doing so, help the post get a better positioning in the Googles.  If anyone is having any issues with their Objective C code, feel free to hit me up on Twitter, @mhokie.  I’m by no means an expert, but I’ve learned a few things in the last year or so.

Tags: grids, iphone, sdk, tabular data, UITableView
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In a blog post from Google, released yesterday, the company explains that they have implemented the new plan regarding how they will deal with China. In January of 2010, they made the announcement that they had to develop ‘a new approach to China’.  This new approach was necessitated when Google detected highly sophisticated attacks on their networks.  After some research, they determined it was indeed originating from China, and were generally, but not exclusively, targeting the GMail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.

Basically, the new plan is to reroute requests for google.cn to google.hk.  The Hong Kong version of Google has simple Chinese implemented and, most importantly, is uncensored.  If you’ve followed any of the news surrounding Google’s relationship with the Chinese government, you know it has focused almost solely on censorship.  Google wants the Chinese traffic and business, but the not-so-democratic Chinese government isn’t cool with an open internet.

I, personally, applaud the efforts of Google in working with China.  While I realize it isn’t entirely altruistic (ad revenue, etc.), I can only imagine how hard it must be to censor what is already a highly complex database. Furthermore, they’ve taken a ton of flack for bending to the demands of the Chinese government.  But really, I think it’s better that the Chinese people have censored access to Google than no access at all.

As a side note, Google has created a page to allow everyone to see what services are currently allowed in China. Check it out here.

What are your thoughts?  Please let me know in the comments!

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I’m not sure I remember being this excited about a piece of open source code.  While the premise is fairly simple, the algorithms at play and the potential uses are vast.  Before I get too far ahead of myself, please let me clarify.  I’m talking about a piece of software called Genetify.

The code, in a nutshell, allows for the real time testing of variations on aspects of a website.  These aspects range from html elements to css styles to javascript variables.  With a few small lines of javascript and a several variations in the code, you can let ‘genetics’ take care of the rest.  For more information on how the software works, check out the usage section of the Github page.

I first read of this code being used on shoemoney.com.  In the post titled, ‘Split Testing with a Genetic Algorithm’, the company’s CTO explained how he used Genetify to split test several lines of text, colors of buttons and various call to action arrow configurations.  Over several thousand page views, the algorithms eventually determined which combination of elements resulted in the highest success rate.  Read more about how the use of genetic algorithms increased their sales figures in the article.

After poking around a bit, I learned that the software has been around in some form for a while now.  It was set to the back burner for some time while the creators explored a more lucrative version of the concept, SnapAds.  In a November 2008 post, John Resig talks about being very excited about the rumor of the Genetify code being open sourced.  A quick look in the Github history of the project shows that less than one month later, author gregdingle committed the first version.  A year later, we have the most current commit, which is what I’ve been experimenting with.

The most obvious use for this code seems to be for advertisement landing pages and product sales pages.  That being said, I’d love to find a use for it in my freelancing.  Being a web developer first, and barely a designer second, it’s a very intriguing to think that I could allow a site’s user base to determine a very important design decision.  I’d be very interested to know what web designers think of this use of genetic algorithms.

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