Daily Archive for June 9th, 2007

Stupid High IQ societies

Published on June 9, 2007 .11 Comments

After following some link, I stumbled upon this page called the “International High IQ society”. Apparently you need to take a test and get higher than 124 to join the society. I did give it a shot and scored a respectable 148. And then it gives me the sign up link, I spend ten minutes filling in the damn form, and submitted it and it asks me to pay anywhere between 90 and 500 dollars for the membership. Now I was turned off by this fact. Not because it requires monetary inputs, but because I started thinking how many great intellectuals would’ve probably reached this stage, and decided it probably wasn’t important enough. Because if they had, then the overall capital available to the society would be considerably higher, and the price wouldn’t be so relatively high. And I’m probably not the only one who feels that way. How many might’ve thought along the same lines.

In effect, the very intelligentsia that this society is out to unite is the sole purpose of the difficulty of their existence. But it’s one really good test though. I’d recommend giving the TA3 a shot.

Link >>http://www.highiqsociety.org/iq_tests/<<

Also I did some searching about these societies, and found this was among the lowest ranked society, for their acceptance criterion apparently. There are many of these societies, all with different acceptance levels.

Read More at :http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_IQ_society

The most amusing, however, remained reading about the Giga Society, a society for people who scores above 190, and the website claims

Giga Society is open to anyone scoring at or above the 99.9999999th estimated unselected population percentile on any of the acceptable tests. This means one in a billion individuals can qualify. The corresponding IQ, expressed on a scale with a set standard deviation of 16, is 196, respectively sd 15, an IQ 190. There are currently six Giga members.

I for one, welcome our new Giga Overlords.

The thing that’s going on in my mind is what would happen if I pitt these folks against the people who write in digg comment threads.

Update: I’ve applied for the mensa test, since there are local branches it should be easier for me to fit in. The test’s gonna be soon I reckon.

My First Wordpress Plugin

Published on June 9, 2007 .0 Comments

Tonight, I’ll write some code after a long time, by writing a wordpress plugin and chronicling every step of the way.

What I used:

I reinstalled windows after a nasty virus attack, but managed to get everything I required to get started: Firefox, xampp, and Dreamweaver CS3

Step 1: Install wordpress and Configure: 9:20

After setting the databases, and security settings for xampp, I installed wordpress 2.2 with minimal trouble. Also opened up several pages with information about the plugin api for wordpress.

Step 2: Create the plugin file: 9:25.

Created the plugin php in the Code folder of My Documents. Also wrote the header for php as instructed in the codex. Will fill up the description later.

Step 3:(9:30) Added the Basic Hooks to add to the admin_menu, to display under the “users” menu. The plugin area shows:

“AuthorCode 0.1

Allows Author Specific code snippets insertion into the template By Anirudh Sanjeev.”

IT WORKS!!!!!!!!

Step 4:(9:40)

Have to detect the user name from the dashboard. If I get the name, I can store the snippets in the database. After searching for a while, found it here. Now to find the username, and display it in the admin panel. And after some more trial and error, a plugin that says “Howdy, username” on the menu.

Step 5: (9:45)

Now have to figure out how to store data. Here I have to now make a critical choice. I can either use the wp options system, which is simpler but might not work, or make my own table, but it’s gonna be harder and more difficult.

After some thinking, I decided to use wp_options. it’s gonna write hundreds of options using sprintf(”authorcode_%s_%d”,$user_login,$snippet_num);

And after some strugging and reading php manuals, it works perfectly. God bless wordpress.

Step 6: (9:58)

Now I have to write the whole interface, and allow upto 10 code snippets(for now), send it via postdata to the same plugin, and store and call.

Step 7: (10:32)

Finally, the plugin is beginning to take shape. A lot has been complete. A couple more hours of coding should do the trick. I’ll finish more tommorow and update regarding that.

Screenshot After 1 hour of Work: (Click to Enlarge):