At 10:42 PM 7/23/2001 -0400, Aidan Whitehall whined:
>It's not mandatory that people enter pyramid selling operations, either, but
>enough poor suckers do it to make people who can see through your little
>"competition" raise the alarm.
How absurd can you get? Pyramid schemes are about bilking money from a lot
of people for the privilege of joining a club, I am offering one prize for
CF coding excellence. There is no valid comparison and you are a rude boor
for suggesting such.
>OK, answer this simple question.
>
>If it's a legitimate competition and not a scam to get cheap labour, what do
>you intend to do with the resultant code? Are you going to profit from it
>financially?
The problem is, my personal projects suffer because I am far too busy with
contract work, and this relates to a personal project. I have become
interested in 'tracing my roots' and contacting my relatives using the
Internet, and there are many branches to the family tree. Some of my
friends and other family members share the same interest, and I have
already discovered several relatives I didn't know that I had through
online resources. Discovering and recording online family contacts
manually is tedious enough through one iteration, but doing it well
requires repeating the process every so often, I would say at least every
few months or so. The bottom line is, if I don't automate it, it probably
isn't going to get done very well because of time limitations, either for
myself, my friends, or the rest of the branches of my family that I would
like to draw into the process. The subject of the Contest is just one very
important section of the application, but the trickiest part technically;
there are a number of ways to approach the data-gathering problem
algorithmically but probably not many ways to do so well, and I just don't
have time for a lot of experimentation right now.
So, not that it's really any of your nosey business Aidan, but that's what
I intend to do with the resultant code: integrate it into a larger
application for more or less private use (ideally I would like to
ultimately see it used by even my most distant living relatives, of which
there must be thousands). If it turns out well I will invite my friends to
use it too, and perhaps add a module that will send me an email if it turns
out that we have any relatives in common. I have no plans for making a
commercial genealogy site or selling the application to anyone, but if
someone comes along and offers me a pile of money for it of course I'll
think about it! I just don't see that happening though, because
realistically I have a hard time envisioning that many people would care to
pay for the privilege of doing what they could just as well do manually
(albeit tediously). However, if the winner of this Contest or any of the
entrants wants to add the rest of the necessary functionality to their own
code to create a commercial genealogy site, more power to 'em, they aren't
restricted from using their own code and I'm not going to be a competitor,
at least certainly not anytime soon. I'd say the situation is a little bit
similar to a nutritional analysis site that I built when I had more free
time about two years ago (http://mybiochemistry.com), which was basically
an intellectual challenge I have wanted to tackle since well before the
Internet was invented, but only relatively recently did the technologies
and my skills become equal to the task. As a side benefit that I hadn't
anticipated when I started it, that application allowed me to discover how
to best deal with a dietary deficiency I learned I had while I was
developing it (I had a functional deficiency in the amino acid glycine; if
you do a lookup on glycine at mybiochemistry.com you'll find that soy is
very high in it, so now I consume lots of soy products and suffer no
deficiency. It would have been very difficult to learn that important
nugget of information needed to cure my deficiency through diet otherwise,
and it allowed me to stop having to buy and remember to take some rather
nasty-smelling glycine supplements). Actually, it is amazing how many
people walk around with significant dietary deficiencies, and there is an
easy but little-known way to find out if you are deficient in a major
nutrient, but I am getting off-topic here. If anyone is interested in
learning their own functional nutritional status, please contact me
off-list. The point is, if you create and do things that have never been
done before purely for the intellectual satisfaction of it, you will
inevitably find benefits to them that you hadn't anticipated when you
started.
These days I still use mybiochemistry.com sometimes and my family and
friends use it too, but it does not cost anyone anything (except for me to
have it hosted), and it has been online that way for a long while. If
someone one day offers me a million dollars for mybiochemistry.com I will
definitely consider it (wouldn't you?), but that isn't the primary reason I
built it and it isn't the reason I'm interested in my family branches
either. Not everyone is motivated solely by money as a few of the people
on this list seem to be; my experience has been that when money is not
important to me I always have more than I need (and vice versa), so I
prefer to not cultivate great needs for it, or pursue it too singlemindedly.
I suppose that cynical money-grubbers only perceive ulterior motives
everywhere they look, so if you would like some more proof that I am
primarily motivated by intellectual pursuits, please visit
http://auditorybinding.org or http://light.simanonok.com. Neither site
will cost you anything more than maybe a little of your cynicism.
>So how about we move the goalposts and make it a competition to produce,
>say, an Intranet management application instead? If that was the end
>product, all the coders would be more likely to want to use the results of
>their efforts and if it's an endeavour in which you don't stand to gain
>financially, you obviously won't object...
How about 'we' move the goalposts? Buddy, you are free to sponsor any kind
of contest you want, and if somebody comes along trying to butt in and
telling you how you should do it their way, I certainly hope that you would
tell the impertinent ass to bugger off.
Having gotten that off my chest though, I remain open to constructive
suggestions as to how I might improve the genealogy coding contest, which I
will consider seriously so long as any mods at this point wouldn't do
anything to pull the rug out from under anyone who's already planning to
win it. For example, I have already added a hardcopy letter of achievement
and lifetime personal reference of ColdFusion coding excellence to the
prize, which isn't likely to cause any problems. The fundamental goals of
this contest are going to remain the same no matter what, and I will not
add any new requirement midstream unless some extenuating circumstance
arises to make one necessary.
You did provide one good idea however: to sponsor more contests. There are
some different ways they could go; of course I can originate more of my own
ideas and sponsor them solo, but I wouldn't mind pooling resources with
others to offer a much bigger prize for a complete application, like the
intranet management app you suggested. We'd have to agree on the goals,
deadline, etc., but definitely it's a good idea and something to think
about. Is there anyone else reading this thread that would like to
consider co-sponsoring another CF coding contest? Is there anyone who
would enter? :) (as an incurable optimist I think there must be, but I
haven't gotten any positive feedback yet on this one, only a little
negative yammering from naysaying clowns so far). Does anyone have any
coding contest ideas they would like to contribute to this topic?
I think that I should wait a bit to see how this one goes before jumping
too far ahead of myself, though!
Regards,
Karl Simanonok
PS: Four more days remain to compete in the Genealogy Search Coding Contest
at http://strategicbrains.com.
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