2008 Election Correctly Predicted

November 30 2007

Three European scientists have produced a document which correctly states who will win the 2008 US presidential election. They don’t need to give you the document (although they do) because they can give you the MD5 checksum. A checksum, which is a kind of fingerprint for the document, accordingly to the… read more

How to Survive a Robot Uprising

July 10 2007

Keep an untrusting eye on your LAMP servers — you don’t get 5 nines of reliability and robust support for hundreds of simultaneous connections without building up a little resentment for all that unpaid labor (say, in the form of license fees to the software’s proprietor). I just finished How to… read more

The Future of Auth? Commoditized

June 07 2007

If you’re still writing your own authentication for your websites, you may want to get with this program. Have a look at the bottom right of this page: www.buxfer.com/index.php Yep, almost everybody has one of those accounts these days, and more and more of those users are getting tired of endlessly multiplying… read more

Forced votes: How to ruin your online poll

June 06 2007

If you loosely follow the US presidential party nomination process like I do, you know the second republican debate was last night. I heard there were some surprisingly strong results for Ron Paul in the MSNBC online survey, so I thought I’d have a look myself at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18963731/. Six questions,… read more

Hat color matters

May 14 2007

From The Mathematical Sciences Research Institute. The hat problem goes like this: Three players enter a room and a red or blue hat is placed on each person’s head. The color of each hat is determined by a coin toss, with the outcome of one coin toss having no effect on the… read more

The Optimal Google Search is the Result

May 14 2007

I spend a lot of time coding in a lot of languages, with a lot of libraries, with a lot of obscure error messages. I don’t check any language or platform’s “official online docs” and I haven’t touched a hardcopy manual in years. No, the resource I reach for first… read more

Pumping Iron is the new Rails

May 02 2007

All the developers I know are hitting the gym, chugging protein shakes, and running three times a week. The geek image is changing! read more

Agent-Based Simulation Of Open Source Evolution

April 16 2007

This Tuesday, I have the good fortune to give a presentation on N. Smith, A. Capiluppi, and J. Fernandez-Ramil’s classic journal paper “Agent-Based Simulation Of Open Source Evolution,” from Software Process: Improvement and Practice 2006; 11: 423-43. Well, if anything from 2006 can be a classic, F/OSS is the place. Figuring… read more

What's your text to code ratio?

April 15 2007

When I was a software developer for the O’Reilly Network (articles and blogs, like the one you’re reading now), I probably wrote about 3 to 5 times as much text as code. It was a lot of code, but in my role as an analyst, I sent a lot of… read more

What do 7, 77 and 168 have in Common?

April 13 2007

If you’re a programmer, you may spend a lot of time figuring out how to make things faster. If you work with number-crunching, you’ve seen plenty of cases where you can greatly reduce a program’s runtime by some huge factor. You’re probably pretty good at it… If you’d like to test… read more

1984 wasn't just the year Richard Stallman started writing GNU software

April 11 2007

I was lucky enough to read J. Michaelson’s classic (well, 2004) magazine article entitled “There’s No Such Thing as a Free (Software) Lunch.” He digs deep into the details of licensing and corporate acceptance of Free Software. He’s a lawyer so he doesn’t speculate, but I’ll connect the dots where he… read more

The Two Things About LAMP

April 08 2007

I don’t know if you’ve seen The Two Things Meme, but apparently if you ask an expert what the two things you really need to know in her discipline are, she’ll think for a minute and come up with them. But, other experts all come up with different pairs! Glen Whitman,… read more

What's in your bash History?

January 05 2007

If you’re like me, you never want to lose a command. I’m constantly searching back through them to find out just what those command line flags were, what the esoteric command is (and where it’s located), and most of all: what in Tcl’s name did I do last month when… read more

The Hello World of CGI

November 18 2006

We all know that Hello World is the first program many people write in a new language or to test that their development environment is properly configured. But there’s actually a family of domain and paradigm specific Hello Worlds, for instance, the factorial program could be the Hello World of functional… read more

If you're not blogging, you're wasting your life

October 19 2006

For a general definition of blogging: You should be asking for help on puzzling problems. You should be tagging your best pictures on flickr. You should be getting recognition for your genius and hard work, as well as business, money, priceless feedback, and readers who one day may become friends.… read more