20 lines of code that will beat A/B testing every time

A/B testing is used far too often, for something that performs so badly. It is defective by design: Segment users into two groups. Show the A group the old, tried and true stuff. Show the B group the new whiz-bang design with the bigger buttons and slightly different copy. After a while, take a look at the stats and figure out which group presses the button more often. Sounds good, right? The problem is staring you in the face. It is the same dilemma faced by researchers administering drug studies. During drug trials, you can only give half the patients the life saving treatment. The others get sugar water. If the treatment works, group B lost out. This sacrifice is made to get good data. But it doesn't have to be this way.

UMA Questions Answered

A bunch of questions answered about UMA wireless technology.

Copy a cairo surface to the windows clipboard

I just spent several hours debugging clipboard copy of a DIB image. I could copy from my application, and paste into Paint. I could paste into Word. But if I pasted into WordPad, nothing showed up. If I pasted into GIMP, it crashed.

Asking users for steps to reproduce bugs, and other dumb ideas

You can fix impossible bugs, if you really try.

The PenIsland Problem: Text-to-speech for domain names

Recently, I was contracted to run a list of domain names through the custom-built pronunciation engine that powers my rhyming web site. On the first attempt, I found that the results were embarrassingly bad. A quick inspection revealed the problem: most domain names are severalwordsstucktogether.

5 Ways PowToon Made Me Want to Buy Their Software

Even though I saw through their tricks at every step along the way, I am now a customer and proud of it. It is worthwhile to look at what they did, because these are simple things that you can do to improve your software business.

Free, Raw Stock Data

Scraping financial information is easy with my friend, python.

Bending over: How to sell your software to large companies

For a micro-ISV, selling to businesses can be more lucrative than selling to consumers. Instead of making a few dollars per sale and hoping for thousands of sales, you sell to only a few customers, and charge much higher rates. But the rates are high for a reason. It takes more time and money to sell to businesses.

Is 2009 the year of Linux malware?

Is 2009 the year of the linux desktop malware? How long until we see headlines like, "Researchers find massive botnet based on linux 2.30"?

cairo blur image surface

This really should have been included in cairo. Instead, everyone that wants to have shadows has to roll their own blur function. Here's my take on it. I'll even release this into the public domain.