Hagrin.com

A while back, I wrote a review on the Nike+ iPod system and identified a lot of pros and cons. One of the cons that I had mentioned was that Nike was trying to force the owner to constantly buy Nike branded running shoes based on the unique design needed to slip the transmitter into the sole of your shoe. However, it seems a lot of people were put off by this idea and hacks/adapters and DIY kits have sprung up to help Nike+ owners use their system with non-Nike shoes.

Instead of endorsing one particular product (because I actually do use Nike running shoes for the road running I do here in New York), I figured I would present you with a list of user contributed options from Digg (definitely read through the comments for more options than just the first link). Hope this info helps people looking to use the Nike+ system with their favorite non-Nike sneaker.

Where I work full-time, I develop applications for a Microsoft shop and I have the need to make sure that my web apps look and interact correctly in Internet Explorer. However, I have been building quite a few outward facing web applications and I needed to make sure that the applications looked the same under all browsers - Internet Explorer, FireFox, Opera, Safari and others. To make my life more complicated, although all the users here are still using IE6, many outside users have already made the upgrade to IE7. As a developer, being able to test both IE6 and IE7 on one machine was a problem and the Internet provided a very answer.

TredoSoft not only provided a solution to my problem, but gave me even more options/power than I originally wanted. TrendoSoft's application allows you to install not only IE6, but previous versions of IE as well (5.5, 5.01, 4.10 and 3.0). The installer is around 10MBs and is very quick and easy to use.

Make sure you install/upgrade to IE7 first and then run the TredoSoft installer. Thank you for a quick fix to an annoying problem. (P.S. - Their Drupal design/template is also pretty unique - definitely a site worth bookmarking).

SEO Egghead posted a great synopsis of Matt Cutts' best SEO Tips of 2006 in a nice, comprehensive list for SEO marketers, designers and enthusiasts to refresh their "straight from Google's mouth" SEO information. I usually don't link to blog spam; however, they really did a great job compiling, shortening and organizing the best tips offered by Matt throughout the year on his blog. So what are some of the better tips that Matt stated web developers/designers should incorporate into their sites?

• Use dashes instead of underscores in the URL for a page.
• Make sure that Googlebot can crawl all the content you want indexed. Content behind secured pages aren't crawled and you should offer free versions of valuable content so that it can be indexed.
• "Assign unique, descriptive title tags and headings to every page" (direct quote from SEO Egg Heads)
• URLS with descriptive document names will rank better than non-descript URLS (i.e. windows-vista.php vs. 2006-12-08article.php)

Most of the other tips are generally useful, but found the above tips highly useful when thinking about my own sites. Thanks Matt and SEO Egg Heads for the great information and organization.

Although 2006 isn't over yet, Yahoo! has released their top search terms of 2006 in an attempt to steal some of Google's Zeitgeist's thunder (although remember, with the release of Google Trends, you could potentially pull much of this information at any time you wanted using any timeframe you wanted). There isn't much that is groundbreaking here when you look at top search terms, but I'll reaffirm the conclusions you could draw from this data (as well as data from previous years):

• Young, Hot Female Celebrities Rule - Ah, nothing says the Internet like guys searching for hot, young women. Entertainment searches still dominate the Top 10 overall searches with the likes of Spears, Hilton, Lohan and Simpson dominating the Top 10 overall search terms. Sex still sells big on the Internet.
• Soccer is the world's sport, Basketball and Hockey ... not so much - Although not a major sport here in the United States, 3 international soccer teams round out the Top 10 showing the true power and interest of football around the world. Meanwhile, the NBA, who has tried to internationalize their sport with trips over to Japan, the signing of Yao Ming, etc. doesn't have a single team in the Top 10 searches. As for professional hockey, there's no sight of them either. Baseball and American Football are the other two sports which dominate sports related searches.
• Comic Books ruled the Big Screen - Of all the widely searched movies of 2006, comic book characters and story lines took almost half of the spots in the Top 10 Movie searches for 2006. Also, even though Borat was released later in the year and is currently still in movie theaters, Borat snuck into the Top 10 in last place showing the power of viral marketing over the Internet since much of the great Borat press stemmed from blogs, social news sites, etc.

You're probably asking yourself - how can I use this data to drive more data to my website. In most cases, you probably can't - especially if your site's niche isn't one of the categories Yahoo! released search data for, but you can draw conclusions that should help you some. First, remember that Yahoo! search is seen by many to be the search engine used by many non-technical users; however, Yahoo! does have a very strong international user base to consider as well. Make sure your content can be consumed and understood on an international basis. Second, when you see the success of a recent movie like Borat, remember to be proactive and not reactive when providing users new content. If you're first to the market, your information will be found first, linked to first and these links should help make your page stand out as an authoritative source to search engines. Lastly, even in the Top 10, you can see a diverse range of searched terms; therefore, make sure that your site is diverse enough to grab traffic from many areas, but not too diverse as to be too cluttered or difficult to find information.

I'll be curious to see how Google's 2006 data stacks up against Yahoo!'s.

The Kansas Jayhawks went into Las Vegas and beat a very game, defending national champion Florida Gator team that has more experience. Sandwiched in between that great win was a loss at home to Oral Roberts and a loss on the road to Depaul where they let a very weak Depaul team run off 14 points in a row to closeout the game. So the question is - which Kansas Jayhawks team will you get come March?

Tonight, they beat a young USC Trojan team at home, but didn't look pretty doing so. Rush was erratic, Chalmers was inconsistent on the offensive end (great on the defensive side though) and the young twin towers of Arthur and Wright weren't as forceful as I witnessed in the Florida game. Rush, who might be their best player, isn't aggressive enough by nature to be the star to carry this team deep into March so look for them to make another early exit if they play a team that can handle Kansas' defensive pressure. As for USC, they will be a good team this year, but too young to do anything significant. Look for them to make an appearance in the NIT this year and, with OJ Mayo coming next year, making the Tournament.

One note to make mention of - even though this was a Kansas home game, the game was reffed by Pac-10 officials. Out-of-conference officials doing home games of teams not in their conference might be a good measuring stick when looking at home teams covering large lines.

In the second biggest matchup of the early college basketball year (Florida v. Kansas was probably a bigger game), Ohio State travelled into Chapel Hill and gave North Carolina a really good run for 20 minutes before losing by 9 points last night. However, even in losing, Ohio State proved itself as a legitimate contender come March by playing at Carolina's level in their building and without the best freshman in the nation. Greg Oden sat and watched as his team rained three pointer after three pointer in the 1st half - a shooting display that I haven't seen in any basketball game (college or pros) in a very long time. Although Ohio State is young and they lost Terence Dials from last year, the Buckeyes showed that they have an extremely high level of athleticism that allows them to breakdown opposing defenses off the dribble, drive to the hoop, get after it on the glass and stroke the three ball.

And with all that said, North Carolina still won the game by 9.

North Carolina might be the deepest team in the country. Roy Williams ran two waves of players out on the court last night and at no point was any one unit overmatched by OSU's main weapons. Although all the hype goes to Tyler "The Golden Boy" Hansbrough, the Tar Heels received major contributions from Ellington, Lawson and Wright - all freshmen. In addition, Bobby Frasor, who might see his playing time decrease dramatically with the rise of Lawson, hit two huge threes to give UNC a tremendous push when OSU was still stroking their outside shots with great consistency.

So what can we take away from this game?

• The pace that UNC plays at and their depth will give lesser teams major problems on Day Two of the tournament in March. However, if they run into a team like Butler who slows it down and has capable guard play to handle the pressure, UNC might have difficulties. Teams that play fast almost always will lose because teams that play slow have a much easier time dictating the pace
• Both OSU and UNC will be very difficult to zone - they both knock down the open, outside jump shot with relative ease plus OSU's shooters have range for days.
• How will OSU's pace and tempo change with Oden, a 7 footer, on the court? Will they slow the pace down? If they do, it might actually hinder the OSU offense which looks tremendous in transition.
• Both of these teams could play with Kansas and Florida; however, the inside guys for the Jayhawks (Wright, Arthur and Kahn) and Gators play a much higher brand of defense than the two teams we saw last night.
• With the new NBA age restriction, the level of play at the more prominent schools has been raised significantly and the rule's effect is evident on the college game.

College basketball is in full swing - expect a lot more posts for the next 4 months.

Since my SEO Tool has been successfully collecting data and I haven't decided how to display the information, I decided to start collecting data for another project. I remember reading that there was a discussion over the public domain of sports statistics and I personally believe that the data should be free and available to download. However, since it is not and data distribution sites want big money for such information, I did what any good programmer would do - develop a web scraper to parse available data, restucture it and hopefully release it freely to the public (this last statement is probably a no go, but I'll do the necessary research to figure out the potential copyright issues).

So, one would probably ask, once you have the data what do you plan on doing with it? To be honest, the only real use I see outside of eay-to-use public distribution would be to provide the public a "system" for handicapping future contests. Many sites like covers.com that post trends post statistics on an average basis which really misleads someone looking at the matchups. I believe that stronger trends exist when evaluating other factors not necessarily measured or taken into account as well as looking at standard deviations of data and potentially the median of such data.

I actually set myself a deadline for this one - January 1, 2007 so I would check back around then for the SQL scripts needed and hopefully the web interface that allows people to evaluate certain matchups (although as I write that, I'm thinking that it might just be better to automatically evaluate all the games for a day and then rank them - no need for user intervention). Obviously, I could track the accuracy of my predictions and tweak the formula as I see certain trends to improve the accuracy.

November 17th, 2006 has come and gone and the PlayStation 3 madness has started.

Ars Technica has posted their PS3 review and I definitely found a lot of their comments very interesting. Primarily, although the PS3 is rather large in size, it's freakishly quiet and definitely outshines the Xbox 360 in this department. Second, there was little innovation in the controller except for a complete Wii ripoff of motion sensing movement and gameplay (which they describe as "gimmicky" at best). Ars sums it all up best by saying "This is starting to be a theme for the PS3: some great features that are hindered by poor software support". Ouch.

Ars ended up giving the PS3 a 6/10 as an overall score.

Other reviews are out there and around, but this is the best review on the entire Internet. Trust me, I read almost all of them. I bet those who paid $3000 for a PS3 on Ebay opening day are wishing they had waited now.

On the heels of my last story, Joystiq is announcing that GameStop has given the bad news that they will not be able to fulfill their Playstation 3 pre-orders. As Joystiq accurately reported, even if you were one of the lucky 8-12 people who had their $100 accepted and received a pre-order receipt for a PS3, GameStop may not be able to honor your PlayStation 3 pre-order due to lower than expected initial unit numbers.

GameStop, in attempts to perform damage control, will call all pre-order holders and for thos unlucky enough to not get a console on release day, they will give you a free game or DVD (less than $20 in value however). Although JoyStiq is unwilling to place the blame (and probably rightly so as we don't have all the facts), I put the blame squarely on Sony overpromising retail stores and then lowering initial release numbers when they realized they couldn't meet their own expectations. Do you really need any more reasons to boycott Sony at this point?

Initial Playstation 3 shipments are being halved as Sony cannot meet their forceasted shipment predictions. This news comes right before their launch date, right before Thanksgiving and right before the lead-in for the holiday buying season. As Neowin reported, such major retail chains such as Best Buy have had to dramatically shift their marketing strategy to make up for the lack of PS3 inventory by pushing the Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii to its customers. As many have heard me say, this announcement comes as no surprise to me as Sony has been disappointing in all business areas this last year - enoughso that I have officially stopped purchasing Sony products.

However, Ebay sellers are rejoicing today. As you can imagine, with shorter supplies higher prices follow and those who have their pre-orders filled will be able to turn around and sell the console for a hefty markup. If you're lucky enough to get a launch date PS3, sell it - you'd be fiscally irresponsible not to sell.