rfog in Diario de un Programador presents his next project as zxSameGame, a game that often appears under Linux but which he has not seen under Windows except as JawBreaker on the Pocket PC. It will be written in C++/CLI under Visual Studio 20005.
jleyva in Métricas Web continues his series of articles on web metrics with an explanation of Usage Characterization.
This metric models the interaction of the user with the web site, especially user access. Because of this metric there are now adaptive web sites that change their structure in response to the pattern of access by the users. There are four main areas to be considered:
- Access Prediction Problem. The structure of information in a web site can be improved by modeling the access routes by the users taken from the logs and determining how each user enters and navigates through the site.
- Statistical Prediction. Using statistical measures it is possible to predict access to a web over time. As an example the next access to a document, the number of access that will be made over a specified time and the probability of those access can all be predicted.
- Markov Models. These models assume that access to a web page are processes without a memory and depend only on the previous state. A practical outcome of such models is the ability to define a transition matrix for each site and then compare this across other web sites.
- Human Memory Model. Studies on human memory have shown that a thing is memorized according to the number of times it has been seen, the frequency of being seen and the interval since the last time it was seen. Extrapolating to a web site, it is possible to predict future access based on past behaviors. So for example if a user regularly visited a page in the last week, it is very probable that she will visit it again in the next week with a similar frequency.
jleyva in Métricas Web picks out two links that he found interesting in the Harmony project. The first is on Terminology etc. from Steve Blackburn where some terminology and practical issues are defined. The second is [Legal] Requirements for Committers which discusses how the intellectual property of the contributors will be protected. The hot topic in the mailing list is the creation of an interface with which the virtual machine will communicate with the class library.
Alberto Molpeceres in Y si hablamos de... writes that he has now released the web site for his new company, LinkingPaths. On it he offers a few PDFs of the classes that he taught for the Master of Development and Solution Integration last week as an example of what his company offers.
The author of Retrato en Sepia warns of a problem that can occur in Java and other languages if one does not take care about the order in which statement lines are executed. He gives an example of the class Circle that inherits from the abstract class Figure. In his code, everything looks OK, but the Circle is drawn before the Circle is given a size so nothing appears on the screen.
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