Blog archives for March, 2007

Of all the dating sites Conru has launched–ones for Latinos, seniors, Asians, Jews, churchgoers–the biggest by far is AdultFriendFinder, which accounts for more than 60 percent of Various’s revenue. Conru says his privately held, 450-person company brings in well over $200 million in annual revenue, averaging 40 percent growth for the past nine years. With more than 35 million visitors in 2006 and 75,000 new users registering each day, AFF ranks among the 100 most popular sites in the United States.

The simplest implementations of Life use a pair of two-dimensional arrays representing the state of a finite portion of the universe. In every generation, the neighbors of a cell in the old array are counted to calculate the state of that cell in the new array, then the arrays are swapped and the screen is updated. This approach has a number of frustrating aspects: The larger the universe, the slower the program runs; yet, a smaller universe bounds the growth of patterns, constraining them artificially. My first improvement to the basic algorithm is to replace this finite universe with an unbounded one; at any given time it is finite, but you can increase its size as necessary. I use a simple tree representation, called a “quadtree” (Figure 2).

Picasa Web Albums allows client applications to view and update albums, photos, and comments in the form of Google data API (”GData”) feeds. Your client application can use the Picasa Web Albums data API to create new albums, upload photos, add comments, edit or delete existing albums, photos, and comments, and query for items that match particular criteria.