I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by. (Thanks to Douglas Adams) Despite being given a hard deadline for death-or-sale , the ever popular Scrabulous application appears to be functioning today. Yay! Did they take a horrible deal? Are they merely cursing the authorities and awaiting the inevitable kill shot? O...

I just set myself up on FeedBurner. Please subscribe to the new feed and let me know how it's working....

I've been subscribed to The Database Column blog for a while now. Their initial posts were intriguing, highlighting the efficiency gains available to column store databases and the impact of database architecture on scalability . While these posts were very interesting, their recent articles have contained a traces of a ne...

Problem Formulation Given vectors a and b of identical (but arbitrary) dimension, what's the best way to tell how "different" the vectors are? Simple distance function There are two different ways one can approach this problem. The trivial approach is to calculate an absolute distance between the two vectors. This works es...

Here's an interesting anecdotal story about the generational divide in copyright morality experienced by a person who lectures on that subject. In attempting to illustrate varying degrees of "wrongness" related to copyrighted material, the speaker proposes scenarios involving increasingly questionable legal and ethical act...

I just updated this site's configuration to use Mongrel on Lighttpd . It's not really a recommended setup, but I'm not using any of the features that are reported as being problematic. I haven't noticed a marked increase in speed over FCGI, but I do believe it's now able to withstand a larger pounding. I'm planning on tryi...

I'm slightly amused that not a day after I started submitting patches to Rails projects, the Ruby on Rails community was declared to be a ghetto . "Whatever," says I; I'm still happy to have done the following: Had this patch committed to Rails . Had this patch committed to will_paginate . Pretty sure this patch will be co...