|
So Google has called their new indexing system Caffeine, which is powered by Google’s BigTable , or as they call it internally Colossus. I guess now all we need is Microsoft to announce their Bing back-end is called “Guardian” and the world is over . Actually looking at all of the information they have shows that while everyone was chasing MapReduce that Google was looking at implementing a distributed database where each update/trigger..
|
|
I just tried to create an account at Bed Bath and Beyond. They said my password could only contain letters and numbers. Many sites impose various restrictions on the password, including Password must be exactly some length Password must be greater than some minimum length Password must be smaller than some maximum length Password must contain some minimum number of "complex" characters Password must NOT contain complex characters Password..
|
|
Handling Bugs in an Agile Context is a blog post I came across via Hacker News this morning. As is often my experience when reading material on Agile from my perspective of an enterprise software developer, the experience was one of frustration and disbelief. So let me quote the portions of the article I find untenable in a enterprise software realm. Let’s start with the Product Owner. Not all Agile teams use this term. So where my....
|
|
At JavaZone 2010 I will be giving a lightning talk on APIs that use dynamic subclasses. These APIs make it possible to do things in Java that seem like pure magic. Here are some ideas of what you can get from these APIs and a look under the hood, so you really understand what’s going on. Mockito - “the best Java library named after a summery drink” Mocking is a hotly debated subject within testing camps.
|
|
So I'm a fan of Sonos music systems, but they've always been expensive. Almost prohibitively so. But now I can either spend $349 for an additional controller that controls my sonos and does precisely fuck-all else, or I can buy an iPod Touch on craigslist for $125 and then download the free Sonos controller application, plus do all the other iPod Touch stuff. I'm not sure who Sonos thinks is going to buy this thing anymore other than ..
|
|
So if a picture is worth a thousand words, shouldn't it be: one two three four five six seven....
|
|
So I guess now is about the time that I write about my first failure. Although I realised that the project was a failure quite a while ago I never wrote anything about it admitting so. I guess this can be considered my cleansing moment. So about a year ago when everyone was jumping on the Twitter bandwagon I remember reading about a simple app called MyTwitterButler that a .NET developer coded up in a few hours and was selling for $10. It..
|
|
Small Steps 2 – Teaching a Neural Network to Learn the Letter A from B-Z
-
boyter.org
-
15 years ago
-
eng
So in the previous article we managed to get our neural network to learn the difference between A and B . I mentioned at the end I was going to next test and teach it on various versions of A and B to see how effective it is, but rather then that I figured teaching a network to learn A from every other letter would be more interesting. Get the source to everything below in Step2
|
|
I’m at Dragon*Con this weekend, my second time here now. I decided that if I was going to Dragon*Con again, I needed to do something in terms of costuming, and I wanted it to be something unique – I wasn’t going to come anywhere near as epic as some of the costumes people pull off, but I wanted something that was going to be a little impressive, hopefully totally unique, and perhaps slightly insane.
|
|
I’m at Dragon*Con this weekend, my second time here now. I decided that if I was going to Dragon*Con again, I needed to do something in terms of costuming, and I wanted it to be something unique – I wasn’t going to come anywhere near as epic as some of the costumes people pull off, but I wanted something that was going to be a little impressive, hopefully totally unique, and perhaps slightly insane.
|
|
Bruce Schneier is a leading author in the technology security and cryptography fields. He is exceedingly rational and pragmatic. I consider his insights on dealing with terrorism to be bar none the best available. His blog often has great insights. However, for reasons I can't understand, he always posts a random post on Fridays about squids. Yes, the sea creature. I don't know why, but it stopped being cute long ago. To that end, I've c..
|
|
Reading this blog post just makes me cringe. This is why I am so persistently hesitant to bother with C and low level systems programming. They are broken. They are impossible to get right. If even after numerous decades, the cat program still has bugs in basic system interaction, it's not the programmers, it's the system. Thanks, but no. I'll code in a high level language that lets me focus on delivering functionality to my users, not ....
|
|
In Javadoc there is an @author tag so you can specify who originally wrote the class, method, etc., being documented. /** * This represents a user of the system as stored in Oracle. * @author Adrian Smith */ class User { ... } But really, what’s the point, when version-control tools such as “svn log”, “svn blame” and exist? (And any project where it would be necessary to determine the author necessarily involves more than one person, a..
|
|
So, which number takes more bytes inside an Oracle row? A: 123 B: 1000000000000000000000000000000000000 And the correct answer is … (drumroll) … A! The “big” number 1000000000000000000000000000000000000 actually takes less space than the “small” 123! Let’s verify this: SQL> select vsize(123) A, vsize(1000000000000000000000000000000000000) B from dual; A B ---------- ---------- 3 2 WTF? Why does such a small number 123 take ..
|
|
So, which number takes more bytes inside an Oracle row? A: 123 B: 1000000000000000000000000000000000000 And the correct answer is … (drumroll) … A! The “big” number 1000000000000000000000000000000000000 actually takes less space than the “small” 123! Let’s verify this: SQL> select vsize(123) A, vsize(1000000000000000000000000000000000000) B from dual; A B ---------- ---------- 3 2 WTF? Why does such a small number 123 take ..
|
|
As I release more frequently, I start to focus on automating the actual process of deploying a release. One of the most powerful steps of automating deployment is to automatically upgrade the database schema. This technique first saw mainstream use with the Ruby-on-Rails framework. Today, there are several mature tools that will help you organize and execute database changes (Scala Migrations, Ruby-on-Rails Migrations, dbdeploy, Liquibase, ..
|
|
Opening public data is a hot topic in Finland at the moment. As a small experiment with the data that is available I wrote buscatcher , a simple N900 app that displays Helsinki trams (and some buses) moving on a map in real time. This makes it easy to determine when your next tram is coming to the stop, or where it is stuck. Updated 2010-09-28: Buscatcher now has a stable release that is available from Maemo Downloads with..
|
|
A software architect who doesn’t care about what his system is supposed to do isn’t worth his salt. For the term “software architect” to hold any meaning at all, it must be to describe someone who understands what the customer needs and designs a system that is fit for this purpose. Sometimes, however, people talk about “technical architects”. I have myself been guilty of falling into this category once or twice myself.
|
|
Small Steps 1 – Teaching a Neural Network to Learn the Letter A from B
-
boyter.org
-
15 years ago
-
eng
I’m going to make the assumption that if you are reading this you already know what a NN is, and you are trying to do some sort of image recognition. I’m also going to assume you are somewhat familiar with programming preferably in Python since that’s what all the examples will be using. Get the source to everything below in Step1.zip To get started we are going to need the following,
|
|
A few days ago a small team of SoundCloud developers (@goldjunge, @jberkel, @purzelrakete and @sohm) participated in the first node.js…
|
|
A few days ago a small team of SoundCloud developers (@goldjunge, @jberkel, @purzelrakete and @sohm) participated in the first node.js…
|
|
Dear Universe, Please manifest a way for me to specify that my key browser keyboard shortcuts will work even when I'm watching a flash video. Specifically I always want "close window", "new tab", and "cycle active window" to work. I hate that after watching a video I have to click on the surrounding non-flash web page to get my keyboard commands working again. Please post a comment on this blog post when you are done manifesting this. T..
|
|
The more I’ve been exposed to it the more the way a company conducts interviews is a very strong reflection of how the company’s current state is. If you experience a very half hazard interview it’s likely a result that the person interviewing is half hazard in other aspects of their day to day. If you experience that someone is very set in their mind in what they want, and expecting a very cookie cutter answer, it’s a reflection of how the....
|
|
The more I’ve been exposed to it the more the way a company conducts interviews is a very strong reflection of how the company’s current state is. If you experience a very half hazard interview it’s likely a result that the person interviewing is half hazard in other aspects of their day to day. If you experience that someone is very set in their mind in what they want, and expecting a very cookie cutter answer, it’s a reflection of how the....
|
|
Which programming language you choose to work in (if it is your choice) affects your productivity, satisfaction and much more. Not only that, but working in a trending language can even help your career or business.
|
|
Which programming language you choose to work in (if it is your choice) affects your productivity, satisfaction and much more. Not only that, but working in a trending language can even help your career or business.
|
|
Basically anyone who’s used Linux for any amount of time eventually comes to know and love the strace command. strace is the system-call tracer, which traces the calls that a program makes into the kernel in order to interact with the outside world. If you’re not already familiar with this incredibly versatile tool, I suggest you go check out my friend and coworker Greg Price’s excellent blog post on the subject, and then come back here.
|
|
Basically anyone who’s used Linux for any amount of time eventually comes to know and love the strace command. strace is the system-call tracer, which traces the calls that a program makes into the kernel in order to interact with the outside world. If you’re not already familiar with this incredibly versatile tool, I suggest you go check out my friend and coworker Greg Price’s excellent blog post on the subject, and then come back here.
|
In my work, I deal with a lot of very similar codebases - and often if I fix something in one project I'll want to fix it in many others. For a long time this has meant popping open Beyond Compare, which works, but isn't the simplest solution. I use git on my projects - but they're not similar enough just to be branches. Recently I came up with a way to patch one or more commits from a project to another easily. Here is a simple shell s..
|
|
In my work, I deal with a lot of very similar codebases - and often if I fix something in one project I'll want to fix it in many others. For a long time this has meant popping open Beyond Compare, which works, but isn't the simplest solution. I use git on my projects - but they're not similar enough just to be branches. Recently I came up with a way to patch one or more commits from a project to another easily. Here is a simple shell s..
|
|
_I'm sorry if this post sounds like an advertisement, **but it is not.**_ I ran into this backup service yesterday. It's called Backblaze I was pretty surprised when I saw the p...
|
|
_I'm sorry if this post sounds like an advertisement, **but it is not.**_ I ran into this backup service yesterday. It's called Backblaze I was pretty surprised when I saw the p...
|
|
If you’re a JavaScript head, we’ve got something for you. SoundCloud now supports Cross Origin Resource Sharing, using XMLHttpRequest. Or…
|
|
If you’re a JavaScript head, we’ve got something for you. SoundCloud now supports Cross Origin Resource Sharing, using XMLHttpRequest. Or…
|
|
If you want to release your code frequently, you have to automate the release process. If your software interacts with shared components or other applications, the release script may have to update shared configuration files. In this blog post, I recall when I solved this with a crontab file. The problem My application needs a cron job. However, the operating system user that runs the application has other cron jobs it also needs to run tha..
|
|
Let’s go backstage. Welcome to the SoundCloud development blog!
-
developers.soundcloud.com
-
15 years ago
-
eng
Our very cool devs Matas and Hannes. With over 15 developers working on the SoundCloud site nowadays, we’re pumping out a steady stream of…
|
|
Let’s go backstage. Welcome to the SoundCloud development blog!
-
developers.soundcloud.com
-
15 years ago
-
eng
Our very cool devs Matas and Hannes. With over 15 developers working on the SoundCloud site nowadays, we’re pumping out a steady stream of…
|
|
Recently I was having an issue with some code I was working on for my pet project (A website search solution). Essentially my problem was that Smarty PHP wouldn’t loop through an array I had passed in. After much swearing and complaining I decided to take a step back and run through all of the newbie mistakes. In other words I looked at the problem from first principles. Turns out the issue was a missing $ before the variable I was trying..
|
|
Ever wanted to code a search engine from scratch? Well actually its a pretty simple thing to do. Here is an example indexer I coded up in less then an hour using Python. The first thing we need to do is have a way to take our documents we want to search on and turn them into an concordance. A concordance for those not in the know is a count of every word that occurs in a document.
|
|
Dear Sir, Log each and every flight(s) in which you fly 50NM or more to a distant landing as CROSS COUNTRY distance flights flown and logged. You may find this useful when or if you apply for other Airman ratings or higher Airman Certificates. Know, The FAA does not consider a flight a cross country flight without a landing 50NM or more distant to a full stop. Strange it may seem, that an airman flying glider, experimen....
|