Viewing profile — sketerpot

Considering that "Fred" deliberately burned down a client's factory during payment negotiations, I think that "asshole" is quite an understatement.

I was playing with FUSE, and had managed to mount a loopback filesystem. And then, for some ill-considered reason, I tried to delete the directory that I had mounted it inside. I m…

To anyone who learns the idiom, this code is fine, and perfectly readable. I don't even know Ruby yet, and it took me less than a minute to become fully comfortable with this kind …

A periodic table will make the atomic number and element type easy to look up. You can get it on coffee mugs. It'll be fun.

This one isn't just a cache; it's a database with a simple key-value data model. It has very good clustering support. It can handle datasets too large for memory. It's fast, allege…

To clients, it looks exactly like a memcached server.

Saying "probably" is a way of avoiding dishonestly over-representing his confidence in the marriage lasting. Obviously you're offended, but don't let that be an excuse to let your …

Why would any computer automatically run programs on USB sticks? It just seems like a really obvious security hole for negligible benefit.

Of course, it makes sense if you interpret it right -- but it looks at first glance like it's comparing absolute sales figures, rather than change from baseline for each.

I would actually really like for my search engine referrer headers to be blocked, even without the privacy concerns, for one simple reason: some web sites highlight the search term…

I guess people will just have to use one of the many other BitTorrent search sites with similar features and torrent coverage. This sucks for the IsoHunt folks, but for the people …

Excellent basic guidelines. Some of these might overlap with yours: * Give the user content that they can see at a glance. If you can glance at your web site without seeing content…

I just wanted to point out, that is a really misleading graph. All the lines start at "100%", so the scales aren't comparable at all.

I remember the early 2000s. I devoutly hoped that Linux would get widely used in some way, even if it never really took off on the desktop. I wanted open source to be fairly common…

A good book for this sort of thing is Toby Segaran's excellent Programming Collective Intelligence. It walks you through this sort of fascinating thing with easy examples and clear…

And there's the beauty of Aubrey de Gray's plan: it's not about finding a Cure for Aging. It's about finding a number of techniques that will allow us to extend people's life-spans…

This isn't surprising, but is is disappointing -- and perfectly understandable, considering the devout wishes of the people at Facebook to avoid being killed by religious nuts. The…

I don't know what kind of books you're writing, but 100,000 pages is too many pages. Did you mean 100,000 words? I've only ever written 50,000 word NaNoWriMo stuff, but I've had a …

I couldn't find any, but here's an explanation of the input format, with some example snippets: http://code.google.com/apis/predict/docs/developer-guide.htm... It's pretty straight…

Directed Edge, a promising YC startup, makes recommendation engines surprisingly easy: http://www.directededge.com/ It's quite a bit higher-level than what Google is offering here,…

There's also Weka, which can use almost exactly the same file format that Google is using, and do the same kind of things (though perhaps with different algorithms). It's pretty pl…

A fun thing about the VP8 patent situation: any company which attacks VP8 with a patent lawsuit has their license to use VP8 automatically terminated. From the license: > If You or…

Naturally, the most insightful comment so far is a reply to a massively-downvoted "wake up sheeple" post.

Directed Edge is a lot higher-level than this, and more focused on making it easy for their users to make good recommendation engines. Prediction API is focused on more general tas…

Download Weka. The file format is almost identical, and it has a nice GUI to get you started fast. Google's algorithms and infrastructure may be more sophisticated and scalable, bu…