Back on the fourth, I posted about "Project Dolphin", a project to count the number of keystrokes performed by its participants. Seventeen days in, my 510,683 keystrokes have advanced me to 7,923rd place out of 24,164 (just into the top third) and the LiveJournal team to 461st place out of 1,746 (nearly into the top quarter).
The reason why this is particularly timely at the moment is that within seventeen days, I have become the most prolific contributor to the LiveJournal team. Of course, the statistics change frequently, but I shall cut-and-paste the stats chart that I saw in here:
| The LiveJournal Typing Team |
| Click on a user's name to find out more about that user. | (F) = Founder | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| (F) = Founder | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
What can we conclude from this? Well, I write fairly extensively in my LiveJournal, I have moderately expensive USENET and Yahoo! Groups habits and I've even been in a number of web chats recently, which is rather unlike me. On the downside, I haven't got in touch with any of the other Project Dolphin participants yet, so the project does not have the great social side that it might. Perhaps it might be fun to start a LJPD team community, for instance.
However, I am not convinced that all 510,000+ keystrokes recorded are valid. Looking at the count from time to time, I think there have been a few cases where my client and the Project Dolphin servers are not properly co-ordinated. Specifically, my client registers (say) 20,000 keystrokes and sends a pulse. The master server receives the pulse. My client does not acknowledge that the server has received it; instead of zeroing the count, it assumes that the pulse has not been correctly received and continues to count onwards from 20,000. The next time the pulse is sent, the server will have effectively counted those 20,000 keystrokes twice. I would estimate that such double-counting is repsonsible for possibly 40,000 of my 63,000 Tuesday 10th keystrokes, 20,000 of my Wednesday 11th keystrokes and 11,000 of my Friday 20th keystrokes. I'm still happy enough about perhaps 440,000 of the half-million recorded. (However, I haven't been deliberately doing anything to cause the client-server interaction to malfunction, so I would expect that there is an element of this in all the participants' totals. Perhaps those who know more about how to get said interaction to malfunction could be racking up huge totals this way.)
If all Project Dolphin does is to register keystrokes and it does not do that single job reliably, why participate in it at all? For now, at least, it remains the only game in town.
