Viewing profile — ztravis

The "personalized" basketball example isn't a good one - your hand pushing the ball down and the floor pushing it back up aren't an action/reaction pair. You could, for example, pu…

Around 12 years ago I helped design and set up a 48-drive, 9U, ~120TB NAS in the Chenbro RM91250 chassis (still going strong! but plenty of drive failures along the way...). This l…

From the list of words, I think F was the required (central) letter.

There is no "Google Docs" format, though - you have no idea how Google is representing your data, or if there even is any single "blob" that is your file (and even if there is one …

My guess is that the output PDF is still valid, but that an embedded (subset) font has had its `ToUnicode` map stripped, so that there's no link between the character codes used in…

Crappy bike infrastructure (e.g. sharrows, bike lanes that end and dump cyclists onto bad/dangerous roads) is a negative for everyone: cyclists, drivers, bike advocates,... better …

I actually built this product out (for both Uber and Lyft) - SMS/MMS-based ride requests (MMS only for sending google maps PNGs to confirm pickup location). I was about to convert …

I'm stunned by the fact they have a graph comparing two stock tickers by share price. Do they not realize that comparison is essentially meaningless (without market cap, etc)? If y…

It's actually not too bad. You can run a pool of soffice processes, but unless you really care about the startup time, I'd suggest running individual processes per job, which you c…

I absolutely agree - Arabic is a beautiful language and a joy to learn, and it is particularly appealing for those who enjoy structure and regularity (e.g. CS and math folk!). Be f…

(insert bike credentials here) For me one of the largest (if not THE largest) factor* in bike safety is route choice, and the main factor in that for me is density and speed of car…

I have the Nokia 3310 3G (relaunched version). It has many noticeable bugs/issues ranging from annoying to near deal-breakers, e.g.: * Terrible MMS/group chat support (and bugs, e.…

This is an interesting project, although as others have mentioned the space of arabic words is (reasonably) bounded and an explicit parsing approach or something that uses known la…

Yeah, definitely! I'm planning on writing a blog post about how it was built, and I'd be happy to release the code (although I'd like to clean it up some, and I'm not sure how much…

http://www.arabicreference.com I've always wanted a good Arabic root-based dictionary with vowelling, plurals, etc (basically Hans Wehr online). I also wanted the structured datase…

Having browsed through a few different zip parsers in the course of writing my own, most handle a range of malformed/modified input, including prepended/appended garbage, filename …

I'm consistently surprised to hear people saying positive things about "Ready Player One" - to me it was one of the most hackneyed and silly books I've read in a long time. My revi…

More likely it is a reference to its eponym, the Banach-Tarski paradox.

I'm amazed at what is being claimed in the headline/description in this article versus what the paper actually has demonstrated (from the brief description in the article/reading t…

The question of whether something is ethical is very different from the question of whether it causes any harm.

Small stylistic comment: the busy background on quotes makes the text very difficult to read!

No, I think he's saying that MS put out a browser bundled with every windows computer sold, so that was what dominated. Now google can do something similar in leveraging its existi…

> Not all the time. And if they do, there still are subtle variations in suffixes. There are many patterns and forms in the broken plurals themselves which you can pick up on and l…

No, but the parent article did: "I felt what they were doing was a sexual assault."

A good approach is to do an 'active warmup' - some light cardio, maybe ~5 min of biking or jogging, followed by a series of exercises done over ~20meters or so, going out and back:…