Posts tagged com
What’s my twitter reputation score ?
Dec 4th
Last month, Twitter founder Evan Williams announced during the Web 2.0 summit that Twitter.com internally keeps a record of every users reputation score. This made me wonder how do they calculate each users reputation mathematically. After some thought, I charted out a few parameters based on which they could possibly arrive at a quantitative measure of a users popularity on twitter. Here are some of my conclusions,
Number of followers: This factor contributes heavily to the score. More the followers, more is ones reputation. But its not just the number which decides the reputation. Each follower has his own reputation on twitter which will contribute to the user he follows. If a users reputation was only dependant on his followers, then a recursive algorithm would be required to accurately determine one’s reputation. Again the problem will arise when there are cyclic links, i.e. you are followed by a follower who is being followed by someone whom you are following, which will make it an infinite cycle. So the algorithm should stop the branching process as soon as cyclic links are detected. But most probably twitter.com would decide on the depth of penetration for each calculation beforehand.
Also there are certain users who back follow other users who are following them. Such cases will give rise to high rates of cyclic links and hence should not contribute much to the reputation calculation.
Number of retweets: You are definitely reputed if a significant number of users retweet your tweets regularly. So number of retweets coupled with the individual reputation of the user who is retweeting your tweet will add to your reputation score.
Number of mentions: If someone with a high individual reputation @mentions you, then your reputation score should increase.
mentions, favourites, listings etc….. todo
In the meantime checkout http://www.twitter-reputation.com. It is a small experimental page which I set up for finding out your own twitter reputation score based on the parameters listed above. I used the twitter @anywhere javascript API inspite of its limitations , instead of using the more stable PHP api, just to minimize server side bandwidth being used up for fetching user info.
Incoming search terms:
Video editing / post production / audio mixing
Sep 23rd
These are the 3 parts of the short film made for final year smriti DVD for my engineering department at my college. The camera work, editing and background score stitching was done by me. It was shot with just one camera with each scene being broken up and captured from different angles. Wherever possible , external microphones were used to capture the audio. It started off with no script which can be clearly noticed in the course of the video. A.R.Rahmans background scores from various movies (thanks to rahmanism.com) were used to establish the mood of the scenes. The initial department logo was created by Debananda Sahoo , a friend of mine using 3dsmax. The smriti logo was rendered using After effects and Particles plugin with a 3d camera (thanks to andrew cramer for the tutorials) , although I didnt have time to make it look more professional. The editing was fully made using Cyberlink power director.
The movie has received a very good amount of views on youtube (around 50k in total till now) which clearly establishes the fact that this was the best Smriti branch video made in the history of NITK
Spoilers ahead …
The mood of the short film grows to become very sentimental towards the end
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Kaun banega crorepati game (kbc2) (download the game)
Sep 23rd
Update as of 5th June 2011 : Source code for the game has been published on this page. Now you can change the game as you wish, using Swishmax (www.swishzone.com)
Update as of 20th Dec 2010 : I have been noticing quite a lot of visitors reaching this page through google search. So drop in a comment if you would like me to add any new features onto the game.
This was a simple game I created using SWiSH in 2005. The questions appear randomly with no logic for the levels of difficulty and the “Phone a friend” lifeline is a dummy lifeline with no real purpose. You should check out the game here. The game was hosted on a free domain kbc2.be and also on openflash.be initially which got a decent amount of hits. Those domain names dont exist anymore, so I have published it here. You can download the source code and read the instructions below if you like to edit the game to suite your needs.
Click below to play the game
KBC flash game source code
I have also noticed a few visitors to this blog searching for terms like “kbc game source code”. I am not sure whether anyone want to modify the existing flash game to accomodate new lifelines or game rules.
Anyway, you can download the source code for this game and a sample questions database (20 questions only) using the link below. You will need Swishmax v3 to open the .swi source file and edit program logic. If you just want to edit the questions and answers database, you can edit the core.kbc file in the zip archive.
If you modify the game using this source code and publish it elsewhere, you should retain an always visible text which reads “thekirankumar.com”
Download the game
How to add your own questions or edit the questions in KBC ?
The questions database (core.kbc is included in the KBC.zip package) contents are as follows :
&totques=183&
&ques1=What is capital of India?&
&a1=Bombay&
&b1=Delhi&
&c1=Calcutta&
&d1=Madras&
&ans1=2&
&ques2=Who is known as the father of the nation?&
&a2=Lal Bahadur Sastri&
&b2=Mahatma Gandhi&
&c2=Bal Gangadhar Tilak&
&d2=Rajiv Gandhi&
&ans2=2&
…
The first line &totques=183& in the file can be changed to specify the total number of questions you have in your database. If you plan to put only 20 questions, change the line to &totques=20&
The first question is in a variable called quest1, the second on quest2 and so on…
Similar naming for options . Variables a1,b1,c1,d1 will contain the text for the options for question 1. a2,b2 etc for question no 2
Answer is specified as &ans1=2& where the value 2 says the answer for question number 1 is option b (i.e, the variable b1). Similarly ans1=3 means that the answer is c.
Hence, by editing the core.kbc file using an text editor, you can modify/add new questions to the game.
You can access the source code of the flash game by opening the KBC.swi file using SwishMax. Post the URL of your version of the game as a comment in this page, I would love to see them.
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Textoo : iPhone (and now Android) app to send free SMS using web gateways
Sep 22nd
History of Textoo
It all started back in 2010, when I had written a PHP script to send SMS through different Indian SMS gateways (see blog post on this). I would go around different websites trying to publicize this PHP script so that I would get more hits on my blog as well. In some of the blogs I had noticed different J2ME apps which send free SMS and were quite famous. But none of them had ported their apps to iphone and android platforms. A quick search revealed only the 160by2 official app which can do this.
Then I thought, Why not make a small iPhone app which can provide a client user interface to compose messages and then send the message using my own PHP script which I had already made by then. Since then, I started exploring the Appcelerator Titanium framework which was a vry impressive tool to create iPhone and Android apps using plain Javascript syntax. So I applied for both iOS developer access and Android market access by paying 99$ and 25$ respectively.
Once I got through the membership requirements, I started coding the UI in Titanium. And within a few weeks, the iPhone app was ready. The app would connect to my PHP script which would send the messages through the gateways and then return the result back to the app. The app was quite simple and had only 3 views. “Compose message” where you actually type the message after choosing your contacts from the phone addressbook, the “Outbox” view where you see the sent messages, and the “Settings” view where you add the gateways and account details.
After uploading the finished app to App store and getting it approved, I tried making it a paid app for 0.99$ The first few days I received around 1-5 sales a day. But people started complaining about some bugs in the app. And also there were a few problems with the PHP script. So I decided to make it free after a week of sales, so that I can get myself some time to fix the bugs. Since then it remained free and I spent minimal time of enhancing the app and the app continued to be downloaded for almost 6months with an avergae of 20-50 downloads a day.
I kept myself busy working on some freelancing projects on odesk.com and never actually thought of working on the app itself. But one of the iPhone projects which I had taken up on odesk got scrapped mid way through it. I did receive payment for the effort I had put in, but the app was not complete and the codebase was never used anywhere. Instead of scrapping the whole thing, I planned to use in the next version of the iPhone app and started working on the SMS app again.
But this time there was a big change. The app wouldnt send the SMS through my server/PHP script, but instead will connect directly to the gateway website. This way the load on my server would be minimal, and the gateway website would be happy to see all the HTTP requests coming from different IP addresses instead of my server addresses.
So since then, I spent most of my free time in working on the new version of the app and the new version was named Textoo Pro which can be downloaded here
What does it do ?
Textoo connects to major free SMS websites like way2sms, 160by2 etc and sends your SMS for free. It is a multi-account group-SMS app which can be thought of like a pidgin for SMS websites. You add your account username & password on to your app and instead of you going manually to the website and sending your messages, the app will automate it for you. The main purpose of the app is to give back the native texting experience to the end user even when they wish to use free SMS gateways.
Update: Android app also available.