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If this is the form god takes I think I can start to understand omnipresence. God is on our kitchen table, carried in lunch boxes to school and work, listening in on our dinner conversations, and there when greed and gluttony call upon us for a midnight snack.

God isn’t the meat in life’s sandwich, god is the sandwich.

Last year some colleagues and I conducted an experiment to see if software product managers are likely to fall victim to biases predicted by prospect theory when deciding what a software product should do. Our results showed they do.

Laurie Santos had much more fun with this topic, conducting behavioural economics experiments based on prospect theory with monkeys. Her aim was to see if our biases are deeply innate, or just bad habits we learn. Her conclusion was that a monkey economy is as irrational as our own. Or, as I prefer to say, that software engineers make the same mistakes as monkeys.

Laurie’s presentation at TED is far more engaging than ours, so I include it here …

Maybe this is why they call me monkey?!

Today Oziel and I are working from Malmö City Library. But given the summers are short in Sweden, people don’t want to waste them inside the library. The library understands this dilemma, and has set up tables, chair and lounges in the library gardens so that you can enjoy the best of both the summer and the library.

For lunch Oziel and I headed to Max Burger. They have new self-service terminals for ordering, much like the self check-in terminals at the airport.

To our surprise, no one else used these terminals while we were eating our lunch – preferring the queue. But it turned out that these were even better than we expected:

• There was no queue for the terminals, while the queues for ordering with a cashier were at least six people deep.
• We could order by picture – meaning the cashier didn’t get confused with our Swedish.
• We were given many more options than we knew existed (eg. swap chips out for salad, carrots, potato gratin, etc …)
• After ordering we went to the express counter to pick up our meal and it was almost ready (fast food in Swedish is not known for being fast).

We give the Max self-service terminals the thumbs up.

My last post dealt with the spambots who love my blog, but I thought it would be interesting to share some of the other statistics that my hosting company collects anonymously. While I write this mainly to keep in contact with people in Australia, only 9% of visitors are coming from the land down-under. By far the majority come from Sweden or the US. I assume the eastern European readership is primarily made up of spambots.

One of the most common ways to stumble across my blog is by people doing image searches for kangaroo meat. The other picture that gets far too many hits is the one below. I can’t help but think those searching for Swedish sluts are disappointed.

In the past month my site has been translated into Chinese 49 times with Google Translate. 你好.

The most popular post from the archives is on how I fixed the sound problems on my HP Mini 2140 after I installed Ubuntu. Most people find this post through various Google searches, and it has been translated into Spanish 16 times in the last month. This pleases me as none of the people I know who regularly read my my blog have one of these computers.

There are also a lot of searches about people learning to drive in Sweden in English. I hope these people have a more positive experience than I had. But ultimately this ended well.

Far too many people use Internet Explorer (and old version at that). I hope this is some anomoly of the spambots, amd that the rest of you have found your way to Chrome or just something other than Internet Explorer.

And for some reason my honours thesis has hundreds of downloads!? Much more than all of my other publications combined. Of all of the things I have written I would have thought this to be one of the less interesting, if for no other reason than it is the longest, and my Euromicro 2006 paper provides an eight page summary.

The comment section of this site is increasingly being attacked by spambots. Vying for your attention, these messages mainly offer links to videos – from latest releases to more scantily clad escapades. The messages I have the greatest trouble rejecting, however, are the ones that say something nice … and just happen to link to some scam site offering viagra, discount software or such. To be honest, I have thought about letting these comments pass, with a quick edit to remove the offending URL.

Almost all of these messages come from eastern Europe. Many are in Russian. The spambots mainly seem to attack a small number of posts with a couple of messages each day. I have played around with some of these posts, and the spambots still try to comment on posts after they have been removed – so they must be automated in some way.

To date I have been using Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam, this is why you had to type in some distorted word in when commenting. While it initially worked well, in the past couple of months it has been letting far too much through. I tried changing the captcha words list, but this was to no avail. Further I had complaints that this raised the barrier to posting legitimate comments to far.

Next I turned on Akismet. I should have done this from the beginning, it has stopped all of the spam and let through all of the real comments. But I still wasn’t happy – the spambots were still sending messages for me to moderate.

Next I thought it would be better if I only allowed comments from authenticated users. Given how much I hate passwords and that people complained about the captcha words, I wanted an OAuth solution, like that used by TripIt.

I found and installed Janrain, which allows people to register with a couple of by authenticating against Google, Facebook, Yahoo or WordPress before commenting. This also allowed me to get rid of the captcha word.

In the hours since setting this up I haven’t had any of the expected spam – but only time will tell how good this solution is. I’ll keep you posted.