Anthony's Blog

Motivation & Psychology (I) For Gamification you need psychology to a certain degree to understand users motivation and making gamification effective. Motivation is different for everyone and can be counterintuitive.  Cognitivism  - about the mental states, internally. Behaviorism - looking externally at what people do. Testing what goes in and out of the persons behavior. Making a stimulus connect with a behavior and leading to something good or a consequence.  Observation - Pick up on people's reaction and learn from it. Feedback loops - Users seeing this learn and get a reaction from it. Reinforcement - Learning between motivation and gamification system. Behavioral economics  - "lets look at what people actually do" Loss aversion  Power of default Confirmation bias Cognitive Evaluation Theory Tangible/intangible Expected/unexpected Contingency Task noncontingent Engagement Completion Performance Reward Schedules - A ti

    Continuing from my previous article  this post is a collection of my notes, and my study of SQL databasing. Relational Algebra Tuple - Wikipedia sql - What does the term "Tuple" Mean in Relational Databases? - Stack Overflow sql - Clear explanation of the "theta join" in relational algebra? - Stack Overflow Two selection operators in a row can always be replaced by a single selection operator whose condition is the "and" of the two selection conditions. If there are two projection operators in a row, the attribute list of the second (outer) projection must be a subset of the attribute list of the first (inner) projection. Thus, the first projection can be removed without changing the result of the expression. SQL Join Inner Join on  Condition Natural Join Inner Join Using (attrs) Aggregation Aggregate Functions (Transact-SQL) Aggregate function - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia SQL Functions Null Values  in relational databas

   The main reason for  me taking this class even though it was not related to the computer science was to gain a better understanding on terrorism and also to make any connections to related topic in the computer science like cyber-terrorism . To explain a little bit more on why I felt I should have a better understanding on terrorism draws back from my last year college. During which the summer of 2013, I meet with SUNYIT's  president. Our discussion was about collaborating with  Google Maps' floorplans . With the help from a Google Maps team, this project would allow students to find classes and events more easily while on the campus. However this motion was denied and had end on the note that terrorists would use this new technology to their advantage. I strongly disagreed with this acquisition and so I started my research on the topic using the Tags: SUNYIT, Google Maps. Questions to ask? Who would have an agenda? National?  Local? Religion? Are we on another

      One day while I was exploring Google's Page-speed Insights to determine whether there was anything I could possibly improve with Penguins Rising. I discovered that I was not  Leveraging the browser cach e . Up to this point the only type of caching I had done was with the HTML5 cache manifest, however  this was  different than what Page-speed insight was advising me with and this was also what lead me to my question that is the  majority of what this article is about .        Question Lucky for me, I am not the only person to have asked this, but " What is the difference between a Cache Manifest and a Cache header? " As it stand with Page-speed Insight my current results with  Penguins Rising (will vary)  as you can see for yourself. Using Expiration in the Content Header You can set the expiration time however you like, I tested my application with 10 minute expiration date. //Inside the app.yaml default_expiration : " 10m " An Ex

    Gamification is not turning everything into a game but changing the user's experience to be similar to one. It is not the same as  Game theory  and is about recognizing the point of fun. In short it is parts of a game but without the full blown version in the user's face. From the definition of Gamification it can become some difficult to understand the differences from a game. So I ask myself what is a game or how does it explain more what gamification is?   Unfortunately this question is a little more philosophy than a cut and dry answer, but a few people have tried. Such as Bernard Suits who puts it into these terms... Terms Per-Lusory Goal Constitutive Rules Lusory Attitude Voluntarily overcoming unnecessary obstacles. Characteristics of games     Participation is voluntary     Players work towards achieving an objective     There are rules defining how the objective can be reached. Pyramid of Elements (Top to Bottom) Shows variety of options and lowe

    Using  QUnit  is important for me on some of my projects that are more front-end driven. So developing, debugging and testing all need to happen in javascript but without being in the final production. One thing I do not want to do is include the QunitJs in my bundles and would serve no purpose because the bundling and minifying does not happen for debugging. Instead what I did was create an extension method and return a bool, like the one shown in the resources. //Location ../Helpers/IsDebugging public static bool IsDebugging(this HtmlHelper helper) { #if DEBUG return true; #else return false; #endif } //Location ../Views/Shared/_Layout.cshtml //These two files are not apart of any bundled packages. @ if(Html.IsReleaseBuild()) { @ Scripts.Render( "~/Scripts/qunit-1.14.0.js" ) @ Styles.Render( "~/Content/qunit-1.14.0.css" ) } Side Notes The intellisense will do some weird things with the coloring for code inside the else sta

    I was first introduced to the Python during my first year of college. However sadly it was not the focus of the class and it was only added as a extra piece of material. The class, I was took was more focused around pseudo-code or basic programming concepts and the professor just added the book Python Programming: An Introduction to Computer Science by John M. Zelle  for students who had no programming experience prior or to those who would like to use their pseudo skills in programming language. I had no prior programming experience but I also had little time during college to complete extra work on top of my two jobs and full college semester. I did try to read in between semesters while I worked the phones at my desk job which had me handling IT calls but it was just impossible to do. Once I completed college I had experience C++, C#, Java, and almost everything else so I felt it was time to return to Python.     With all my new skills I felt getting Python under my belt woul