User behavior

Posted by Ian Holsman Mon, 17 Dec 2007 12:54:00 GMT

So a while back I bought a house.

One of the things which happened was that it was passed in and I was the only one who had made a bid. (In Australia, a. the housing market is still hot, b. the person who makes the highest bid as right of first refusal/negotiation rights with the seller).

I think I got a good price on the house, but mainly due to the other bidders (there were 2 other people keen on the house as well) being shut out of the auction. If they would have started bidding I believe the house would have gone for a lot more than I paid.

So how did this occur.

The auctioneer thought he would do what is right, and not what is common place. In Australia an auction usually consists of 3 phases. The starting phase where the auctioneer is usually bidding against himself and possibly one other, and the 2nd phase where the auctioneer goes back inside the property and then continues the auction and the third phase which consists of the auctioneer declaring the “house is on the market” which means the reserve has been met. Most people wait for the 2nd or 3rd phase to happen before they start bidding.

In our auction the auctioneer decided to do the right thing, and skip the 2nd phase. The problem is that the bidders were expecting him to do this, as such they didn’t start bidding, leaving us with the right of first refusal.

So why am I telling you this?

In the last 3-6 months I’ve been asked to review various startups who all claim they do a better search than google. and they start going into a demo where they type in a search and they do in fact produce a great result.

The problem is the way they type the search in. No one would ever type in a query phrase like they expect their users to do. Google has trained people to do search in a particular way. These companies expect they can re-train people to do search in their way.

I think thats a losing proposition from the get go.

Unless you are the leader in your area by a large margin, you should not and can not get people to change their behavior to suit your needs. Be it a “better” or more “correct” way of doing it. All you will end up with is confused users.

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encryption/security question

Posted by Ian Holsman Wed, 05 Dec 2007 17:16:00 GMT

So I had an idea on how to semi-anonymize logging and wanted to run it by you guys.

I have a need for a system to record the location of the person who is doing something. So I can’t just not log the IP#.

So I was thinking if I could just keep the md5 of the IP# that would be enough. but it still leaves me open for a brute force attack.

so the next thought is if I could use the authenticated user’s password (which is passed in plain text into apache at one point) and use that in combination with the IP#. That way you would need to know something private to the user as well.

Is this sufficient?

or am I showing my total idiocy on encryption here.

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Sold!

Posted by Ian Holsman Tue, 04 Dec 2007 22:43:00 GMT

Woot.

Our house was sold 1 week prior to auction.

What a interesting time. We got to do all the home improvements we were meaning to do but never got around too and the house looks the best it has ever had. Unfortunately the buyers will be the ones who will enjoy it. cest la vie.

We are moving to Donvale, which is 20km away from the CBD (Hawthorn is about 4-5km) so we are going to be in the car a tiny bit, but the trade off is we have a large area for the girls to play in now, and need to worry about snakes and things.

We ended up selling before as we got a really good offer. It is always a nervous time, do we hold off on the hope that there will be 2-3 people who would bring the price up higher, and risk the possibility we might get less.. or go the safe option and take the sure thing.

Naturally the day after we signed the paperwork the paper had a large article on how house prices in the inner city are on a rocket, and people moving out and ding the tree change are finding they can’t get back in…arg.

on Wow news, I finally got my flying mount (or budgie as my guild calls them), and have been hanging out in the PVP zones trying to get the season 1 gear, and doing arena in the hopes of snagging a season 3 item or two as well.

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