good.txt

sample bayesian in c++ design view and free source program

The weather was not so cool during our stay in [[L5279]], but still the people and the scenery was as beautiful as ever, with scary limestone rock formations everywhere you went! but it was nice to be out of the main strips where most tourists and backpackers are!{{DSCF0163.jpg|center}}
Phi Phi Dreams!                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 Still on the Andaman Sea, we arrived on Phi Phi Island ( Tuesday 23rd May) just after midday, and wow, it was beautiful; following the storms of [[L5279]], this was a pleasant arrival to the most stunning beaches we have experienced in [[L215]] so far! 

Phi Phi was the island famously devasted by the tsunami, and though much work still needs to be done, it has rebuilt a solid basic infrastructure that allows you enjoy Phi Phi at its best! The viewpoint photos just say it all, and when you see the island from that point, it is not difficult to see why it was so devasted by the waves.

{{DSCF0173.jpg|center}}
First Inspiration                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               I first got the idea to build this thing back in the summer of 2005, sitting in the coffee shop at Powell's books in Portland, thumbing through a Lonely Planet book on travel writing.  My dreams of a comfortable life as a traveling author were abruptly dashed, but I came across a term that the author had used that stuck with me.  Blog-a-bond.

{{990|right}}I downed the rest of my coffee and headed to the nearest Starbucks to register the domain.  (Yes, it may sound silly to most of you that I would drink coffee in one coffee shop and use another one only for its wireless internet access.  But if you're from Portland, you'll understand.  Coffee is important.)  Anyway, I had the domain even before I knew what I would build.  I figured I'd probably throw up a set of tools that the average Joe could use to build something like I had going at http://www.jasonkester.com/ .  Still, I was in no hurry to go ahead with anything.  I just liked the name.
The Flaky VC                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    So now it's two days later and I'm scanning for consulting gigs on Craigslist in LA.  I've been sort of living in Pasadena for a while, trying to get Expat Software ( http://www.expatsoftware.com/ ) to the point where I can skip the country again with a full load of work.  
 
{{991|right}}There's an overly enthusiastic ad from a guy wanting to build a MySpace clone, so I send off an overly enthusiastic response asking for more info.  It turns out he wants to build a travel site, with maps and itineraries and community spaces and a huge database of everything in the world that a traveler might want to know.  It was actually a pretty cool concept, but it had one fatal flaw.  It would have taken an army of data-entry monkeys a year to compile enough information on cool places and sights to make it a worthwhile place for a traveler to hang out and do research.  
 
The one thing that I brought away from the 2 weeks of proposal writing to this increasingly flaky prospect was a heads up on the existence of the Google Maps API.  Holy Crap!  That's Cool!  I'm gonna build this guy a couple prototypes!
 
I ended up writing the seed that would eventually sprout into the Trip Builder.  Naturally, the money never showed up and the flaky VC evaporated, but now I was inspired enough to keep going.  I figured if the guy ever came back, I'd offer to cut him in on the action (though I'm still convinced there never will be any profit from this thing), and until then I'd just take this on as a hobby, building the site that I wish I'd found back when I was building http://www.jasonkester.com/ .
Usability                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       Things have been moving fast these last few days.  We finally pushed our first build live on Saturday, and have been getting lots of good usability feedback.  

Lesson One: Nobody Reads Instructions!
This was our first real mistake.  Our screens were easy enough to use, but you really needed to read the little block of text up top to know what you were supposed to do.  Even the fact that the "Countries In View" list next to the map could be scrolled off the screen caused a few users to wonder why they couldn't pick [[L215]] off the list when they were zoomed in on Central America.

Lucky for us, the changes we needed to make were pretty minor.  The big explanatory paragraphs are all either gone, or moved down out of the way, in favor of big simple taglines.  Gone are the references to Travel Journals, Trip Reports and Diaries.  Now it's all Travel Blogs and Blog entries.

Lesson Two: If it looks clickable, it better work!
We have big ideas here.  There are plenty of new features on the way, so we mock up all our screens to incorporate those features.  The only problem is that users see a link saying "0 photos", and expect to be able to click on it to get to the page where they can view those zero photos.  It never would have occurred to me to do that!

So this was another easy fix.  We went through and lopped off anything that's not fully built.  And in a few cases, we just cranked overnight and made those features work.  So now, if you click on something, you can be assured you'll go somewhere.
Are there really Mexican cities in Africa?                                                                                                                                                                                                                      We're using a latitude/longitude database put together by the US government.  It has over 2 million populated places in it, and for the most part it's fairly accurate. But not always.  During testing, I kept seeing cities showing up in places they really didn't belong.  And strange things, like [[L74]] showing up as 'in view' no matter where in the world we were looking.

Digging around in the data, I managed to find a dozen or so mistakes, usually where a longitude of -97.115 would end up as 97.115 or 9.7115.  Luckily, most were tiny villages that could simply be plucked off the map and never missed.  We also had to deal with countries like [[L191]], which are far enough North that they actually span most of the globe.

Anyway, most of it is fixed now.  Though just yesterday I got an email wondering why 'Centering' on [[L172]] would show you a blowup of the Indian Ocean.  Slowly, slowly, it's all starting to come together.
Forums go live                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  Cranking out features like this and like that!  Forums went live today, and they've exploded with a whopping ONE post to date.  Yeah!  Taking the world by storm!

Photos are also getting easier to manage by the day.  With luck, we'll have Tagging in place for photos and comments soon.  For now though I'm having to deal with silly things like making the site "search engine friendly", and other minor technical details that keep me away from actually making the site better.

There's also a new design on the way.  Sad news I know for those of you in love with grey boxes and oversized fonts.  But we live in a visual world, my friends.  And looking at the competition it is clear that we simply cannot hang unless we clean the look up a bit.
More wackiness in the City data                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 [[L5121]] is not in the database.  As in, the capital city of the UAE, probably a city we need.  I've noticed a few other standouts that just aren't there in other places too.  This is not good.

We're really going to need a way for users to add their own locations to the map.  And while we're at it, we should probably add the concept of aliases for places we know about.  The town of [[L5029]] shows up right in the center of [[L5121]] if you zoom in on the map.  It would be nice if our application knew they were the same place.

But wait, it gets worse!  [[L5109]] and Alexandria are missing too.  The tiny oasis of [[L5161]] is there, but the two largest cities in the country are just plain gone.  Not acceptable.  We're going to have to find a better dataset.

Oh yeah, I can zoom into my hotel in [[L5109]] and see the name of the neighborhood.  But the city is not there.  And it claims that [[L111]], [[L191]] and the [[L196]] are in view!

Ah ha!  Turns out in my initial import, I neglected to include capital cities!
By travelers, for travelers                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     {{992|center}}
"By travelers, for travelers."

You'll find this claim on just about every travel site out there, but if you dig around you'll also probably find a mailing address in [[L3080]] or some other non-exotic location.  There's an office there, staffed with anywhere between a half dozen and a few hundred people, most of whom have never been outside the [[L233]].  This is not unexpected, since any place that actually hired dirtbag travelers as its staff would have such high turnover that it would never get anything done.

With Blogabond.com, I'm hoping to make that "by travelers" claim a reality.  As I write this, I'm sitting at a guesthouse off Khoa San road in [[L5097]], nursing a Beer Chang and working out the details on how not to get my laptop stolen when I head out to [[L39]] tomorrow.  I'll be on the road for the better part of a year this time around, and with luck I'll find enough time to work this site into presentable shape by the time I'm done.

I just pushed a new build live that addresses a few minor bug fixes and finally adds the ability to comment on other people's trip reports.  In the next few weeks, you can expect to see enhancements to make the Maps a bit more usable, and a new, more elegant design.  So if you're a big fan off grey boxes and photos of cows, best speak up now because they will soon be a thing of the past!
Blogabond Global Headquarters                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   {{995|left}}I spent the winter of 2005/2006 on Tonsai Beach in southern [[L215]].  I seem to spend about every other winter in [[L215]], climbing rocks on the beach.  It's just that good.  This time around I had some client work to keep me busy part time, and with the laptop along it was easy enough to spend the odd afternoon geeking out on Blogabond.

The site had been live for about 3 months at this point, and was finally starting to attract a few actual users.  I'd been intentionally keeping a low profile, and letting people find the place on their own.  As Joel (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/) says, "when you get premature publicity, lots of people check out your thing, and it's not done yet, so now most of the people that tried your thing think it's lame, and now you have two problems: your thing is lame and everybody knows it."

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/02/08.html
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/11/02.html

{{994|right}}So, with a few Real People using the thing, I was able to get some feedback about why Real People think that Blogabond sucks.  I've since fixed a lot of those things, and will hopefully get around to fixing more of them soon.  For now though, there's this climbing route on the beach called Tyrolean Air that's been taking up a bunch of my time.  It will be my first 7c, and I keep taking 20 foot falls from the endurance section above the crux.  Sometimes, work has to take a back seat