Ezra

arzE

Ezra is a weird name. Reversing the letters does not really make it more or less weird.

Ezra vs Arze

There is a famous musician named Ezra Koenig (from Vampire Weekend). His Twitter account is @arzE.

His use of this name suggests to me he did the same thing as me, possibly also in his teens, of using arzE. I played around with it starting around eleven through high school. Also, playing D&D, I played around with names, including even a code to convert normal names into fantasy ones.

Wonder if people with other names reverse it?

Koenig also joined Twitter well after I did. I went with my usuals (first sneezypb and later ezrasf). Pretty sure if I’d not moved on, I might have registered that username before him.

P.S. I briefly made the title @arze which when the WordPress Jetpack posts it to Twitter probably would trigger the mention feature to alert him to this post. So, yeah, I am a chicken for not bringing it to his attention to get a response.

Book of Ezra Length

Living in the Bible Belt, sometimes the only association people have with my name is the book in the Bible. Which is fine. I mean who would honestly recognize…

  • Ezra Klein
  • Ezra Koenig
  • Ezra Miller
  • Ezra Cornell
  • Ezra Pound
  • Ezra Taft Benson

before the book?

Recently I did get a rather weird question.

Ezra is the shortest book, right?

Uh. What? Apparently someone counted the words in each KJV book and placed Ezra at 30th out of 66 with an unimpressive 7K words. (10 chapters, 280 verses)

3 John has 1 chapter, 14 verses, and 294 words. It has fewer words than my rounding 7,440 to 7K above.

TED Talk: What we learned from 5 million books

Google Labs’ Ngram Viewer lets us look at the use of phrases over time. For example, my name, Ezra, appears to have been most popular usage peaks back in the 1600s and 1700s, but has been more consistently used since the 1800s. This kind of thing can get me lost for hours at a time. Ezra+Persia+Cyrus

Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel have some more interesting lessons learned.

If the below video does not work, then try What we learned from 5 million books.

I found this on a blog post where a TED intern picked her favorite TED Talks.

Me Social Media

Dan Schultz doesn’t like Facebook or Twitter because they are too focussed on individual expression rather than the community.

That may be because he is using them wrong. I liked photography as a kid, but I didn’t know any photographers. Flickr happened to come into my life just after I bought my first digital camera. My participation in photography exploded. Not because I had a way to post my photos but because I had a way to find other local photographers for mutual encouragement. Even better was forming local groups to encourage people to meet. The value of Flickr is developing the community.

Worldwide Photowalk Panorama

Similarly, I got into Twitter because my community, peers at other universities running the same software as myself, were seeking help there. Any place with answers to the problems we face, which is where people with the answers are watching, is where we go. Twitter was the place to get the attention of the right people not a forum like phpBB. (There are already lots of email lists.) My other community, people using the software I run are also on Twitter. I’ve resolved issues for many clients by finding their public complaints and offering solutions. When my focus changed away from using Twitter for the community is when I stopped liking Twitter.

Personally, I have yet to find much sense of community in the phpBB, Google Wave, and Ning. So I find it strange these are the exemplars of community applications. They seem fractured so one finds dozens of groups to covering the same interest. Sometimes this is because some moderator upset a portion of the community with draconian behavior causing people to form an alternative community. Bad blood exists for a while. Other times people set up a new community unaware others exist.

Asterisks in the sky


Happy (Con)trails

Originally uploaded by Ezra S F

Flickr member Zack Sheppard did me a huge favor yesterday picking this picture for a Flickr blog about Asterisks in the sky. So in one day this picture was exposed to 5,931 people.

Several of those looked at the adjacent picture and others for a total of 10,640 hits yesterday. Lots of comments on many of my photos.

Wow. Just wow.

Useful User Agents

Rather than depend on end users to accurately report the browser used, I look for the user-agent in the web server logs. (Yes, I know it can be spoofed. Power users would be trying different things to resolve their own issues not coming to us.)

Followers of this blog may recall I changed the Weblogic config.xml to record user agents to the webserver.log.

One trick I use is the double quotes in awk to identify just the user agent. This information is then sorting by name to count (uniq -c) how many of each is present. Finally, I sort again by number with the largest at the top to see which are the most common.

grep <term> webserver.log | awk -F\” ‘{print $2}’ | sort | uniq -c | sort -n -r

This is what I will use looking for a specific user. If I am looking at a wider range, such as the user age for hits on a page, then I probably will use the head command to look at the top 20.

A “feature” of this is getting the build (Firefox 3.011) rather than just the version (Firefox 3). For getting the version, I tend to use something more like this to count the found version out of the log.

grep <term> webserver.log | awk -F\” ‘{print $2}’ | grep -c ‘<version>’

I have yet to see many CE/Vista URIs with the names of web browsers. So these are the most common versions one would likely find (what to grep – name – notes):

  1. MSIE # – Microsoft Internet Explorer – I’ve seen 5 through 8 in the last few months.
  2. Firefox # – Mozilla Firefox – I’ve seen 2 through 3.5. There is enough difference between 3 and 3.5 (also 2 and 2.5) I would count them separately.
  3. Safari – Apple/WebKit – In searching for this one, I would add to the search a ‘grep -v Chrome’ or to eliminate Google Chrome user agents.
  4. Chrome # – Google Chrome – Only versions 1 and 2.

Naturally there many, many others. It surprised me to see iPhone and Android on the list.