Vox Import: May 2009

Hawaii foobar

Goodbye and goodluck Steve!

Posted at 05:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Piximix self-publishes its books via lulu.com, a site for independent authors to get their works out. They have a paid upgrade option to be listed on Amazon.com, but apparently they choose a few select books and upgrade them for free. They're currently listed under our artists name, Kyle:

All Piximix Books on Amazon

While we've always had our books available on our Piximix Store, its great to have them become available to a wider audience.

Posted at 09:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Hi Sally!

I was l browsing around the web today, when I found Sally, the HR representative in the sexual harassment training I took recently, repping for an auction site:

Sexual Harrassment Training HR Lady

I guess Sally must have lost her job at the company after her and Steve started a relationship. Even though they signed a 'love contract' I imagine it ended messily when Steve got drunk at the Christmas party and finally gave in to Mary's advances.

Posted at 01:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

New Piximix iPhone App!!

I'm so excited today; the Pixipets iPhone app we here at Piximix have been working on with Fika was just put up on the iTunes App Store!

Pixipets iPhone Screen

We've been waiting a long time for our Pixipets comic to come out as an app and now I can finally load it onto my phone! Its free so if you have an iPhone why not give it a shot? If you like the Pixipets, you should check out the buttons and books we have on the Piximix store ;)

Posted at 12:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Not impressed by Wolfram Alpha

So, Wolfram Research, the company who created Mathematica, an amazing bit of math and visualization software has just released something called "Wolfram Alpha". Its supposed to be a kind of search engine for data as opposed to contextual information. For example, from this Information Week article,

Whereas Google takes an ambiguous query like "bass" and returns results related to the fish, the musical instrument, and the shoe brand, Wolfram/Alpha returns an array of nutritional data related to the fish.

Ok, I guess, that's useful, but one the first few results on google will probably also be the wikipedia page on bass, giving me the same information. Article like this have been gushing about this new service, saying its not like google, but then comparing it directly to google.

I decided to test this out myself. The bass example seemed a bit esoteric, so I thought I'd start off with:

"distance to the moon in pennies"

This is one of those common nonsense measurements that help kids learn that grownups think they're dumb. Wolfram Alpha reports:

"Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input."

On google, the first two results were directly about this question and the second actually gave the answer. I decided maybe this was too lighthearted for Wolfram Alpha, so I tried:

"fermat's last theorem"

This is a famous theorem made in by Fermat in the notes of some other paper. In this note he gave the theorem and said he thought he could prove it, but died before he could put in to paper. This seemed like a pretty good topic. Wolfram Alpha said:

"Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input."

Google on the other hand, returned a full first page of results related just to this, the third result I might add was a link back to a Wofram Site. I decided to dumb it down a bit, but above the pennies question. How long to hard boil an egg?

"hard boiled egg"

This time WoframApha did have some results. Massive amounts of vitamin and mineral nutritional facts, but nothing about the time to hard boil an egg, the different times for different hard/soft qualities, what to change depending on altititude, which google returned in addition to all the information given by Wolfram Alpha.

The one area it did succeed in besting Google on was a calculation suggested by the Information Week article, "$250 + 15%." Wolfram Alpha correctly took the percentage of $250 first and then added the result.

Hooray! We have a web based search engine that can do something my solar powered ruler calulator could do when I was in 3rd grade. I wonder how many pennies that comes out to?

Posted at 03:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)