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Thanks to everybody who attended my OCW hacking session! Sorry to guys who attended via webinar – I’ll do the session again in a few weeks, with audio from end to end hopefully! And I will get someone to assist me with monitoring the transmission quality and attendee questions etc. Note that this stuff is mostly for hacking and fun – don’t use the undocumented stuff in production! The links are below:
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Well it appears that Cuil the troubled search engine that didn’t is dead . While I am not that surprised by this considering its lackluster results, I do feel that this is bad for the web in general. With the Yahoo/Bing deal we now have very few independent indexes that power search on the web. The big players are down to the following it would seem, Google Bing Ask Gigablast Blekko What did suprise me about this though w..
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Herne Hill is looking for support, it's both historic, and a fantastic facility in London. It'd be great to see more people supporting this! Here's the campaign page .
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Herne Hill is looking for support, it's both historic, and a fantastic facility in London. It'd be great to see more people supporting this! Here's the campaign page .
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No computer system is an island. At least not these days. This creates a challenge when you want to change APIs: Do you want to upgrade all affected systems at once, or do you want to support multiple versions? Both approaches have downsides. Coordinating several upgrades increase the risk that one of the upgrades fail, in which case, you may want to roll everything back. In some situations, rollback may not even be possible.
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A while ago I was using the Django Framework and was a big fan of the parts of it which save time. One part which I both loved and hated was the ORM . The bit I loved was for creating new database entities, loading them and modifying them. The ability to just load up an object and modify it and then call its save method saved me a lot of time. What I hated about it however was using it for doing any form of complex query (since I am very c..
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There was a pretty interesting snippet in Engadget's coverage of yesterday's Nokia World keynote: "By 2013 800 million people will be using GPS-enabled devices. Soon, everything on the Internet will have a location coordinate. This is a space we intend to own." Indeed, this is a quite possible future, and one for which we with Midgard are quite well prepared for. Many smartphone browsers (and even desktops) nowadays can transmit ....
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Here is my class with their new Kindle DXs. Notice the absence of heavy textbooks on the desks! UPDATE: Unfortunately, while it was cool to carry around all of our textbooks in PDF format on our Kindle DXs, the pilot ultimately led to us not adopting eBooks exclusively. Simply put, many of our students just preferred the ease of printed books. eBooks may become the norm in the future, but probably only when everyone carries a laptop with ..
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Here is my class with their new Kindle DXs. Notice the absence of heavy textbooks on the desks! UPDATE: Unfortunately, while it was cool to carry around all of our textbooks in PDF format on our Kindle DXs, the pilot ultimately led to us not adopting eBooks exclusively. Simply put, many of our students just preferred the ease of printed books. eBooks may become the norm in the future, but probably only when everyone carries a laptop with ..
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Copy and Paste in Outlook Without Messing Up Your Formatting
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justingarrison.com
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15 years ago
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eng
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Smidig 2010: Norges største smidige konferanse Har du fått med deg at Smidig 2010 arrangeres 16.-17. November på Radisson BLU, Holberg plass i Oslo? Konferansen har åpnet for foredrag. Early bird prisen på billetter varer KUN TIL TORSDAG, så det gjelder å bestemme seg fort! Opplev vårt unike format, med over 70 lyntaler og 100 diskusjonsgrupper! Smidigkonferansen er den årlige nasjonale hendelsen som samler mennesker fra alle typer roller i..
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Asking people for payment for work is a touchy subject for everyone involved. We've had the luxury of experimenting a little bit over our first couple of years, and here's what we learned.
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I have been moving things around a bit here in preparation for my ninth and probably last trip. (Yes, I know, I always say it is going to be my last trip. But this season marks the end of the construction of IceCube , so far fewer people will be going to Pole after this austral summer.) I am tentatively scheduled to leave Chicago for the South Pole on Jan. 1, 2011. After taking last season off, I’m excited to go back for one last time.
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I have been moving things around a bit here in preparation for my ninth and probably last trip. (Yes, I know, I always say it is going to be my last trip. But this season marks the end of the construction of IceCube , so far fewer people will be going to Pole after this austral summer.) I am tentatively scheduled to leave Chicago for the South Pole on Jan. 1, 2011. After taking last season off, I’m excited to go back for one last time.
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I have been moving things around a bit here in preparation for my ninth and probably last trip. (Yes, I know, I always say it is going to be my last trip. But this season marks the end of the construction of IceCube , so far fewer people will be going to Pole after this austral summer.) I am tentatively scheduled to leave Chicago for the South Pole on Jan. 1, 2011. After taking last season off, I’m excited to go back for one last time.
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I really like Twitter. I think it’s a great, fun, service, that helps enable interesting online communities, and is a surprisingly effective way to spread news and information to lots of people online. One of the things that I’ve loved about Twitter is their API, and how open and welcoming they’ve been to developers. I even use Twitter from an IM client that I develop, using protocol support that I wrote myself.
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I really like Twitter. I think it’s a great, fun, service, that helps enable interesting online communities, and is a surprisingly effective way to spread news and information to lots of people online. One of the things that I’ve loved about Twitter is their API, and how open and welcoming they’ve been to developers. I even use Twitter from an IM client that I develop, using protocol support that I wrote myself.
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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..
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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..
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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....
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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.
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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 ..
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So if a picture is worth a thousand words, shouldn't it be: one two three four five six seven....
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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..
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Small Steps 2 – Teaching a Neural Network to Learn the Letter A from B-Z
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boyter.org
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15 years ago
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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
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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.
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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.
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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..
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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 ....
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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..
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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 ..
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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 ..
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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, ..
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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..
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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.
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Small Steps 1 – Teaching a Neural Network to Learn the Letter A from B
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boyter.org
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15 years ago
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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,
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A few days ago a small team of SoundCloud developers (@goldjunge, @jberkel, @purzelrakete and @sohm) participated in the first node.js…
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A few days ago a small team of SoundCloud developers (@goldjunge, @jberkel, @purzelrakete and @sohm) participated in the first node.js…
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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..
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