The Misinformation of Crowds

I’ve seen much recently piggy-backing on the Wisdom of Crowds. Much of the Web 2.0 seems highly focused on exploiting this phenomenon: Datamining the crowd: Yahoo and Google both have an Answers service that purports to harness the wisdom explicitly….

TA Training

Last week I had to attend an all day course for new TA’s (even though I won’t become a TA until at least next year). For lack of a better spot to record the notes I took during the class,…

Car PC

I’ve kinda been looking at the computer market recently, So I decided to goto Fry’s today, just to look around. While there I saw on the display of motherboards, some tiny Mini-ITX systems. They were all a bit underpowered, but…

Google still shiny?

So Google has recently released a new browser, Chrome, which must have been named to remind us that the company is still shiny and new. I must of course commend them for certain features: Relocating the address bar. Just like…

A Modest Proposal for a Home Server

Alright, I’m dissatisfied with my current computer setup, and am thinking about purchasing myself a desktop/server. To start off, Jeff Atwood has recently spec’d a nice machine for one of his friends. I began with his list, and modified it…

Yak Shaving — Git on a Terastation

Today I spent a considerable amount of time trying to install git on my Terastation. First I discover that all the git-core ppc debian and rpm packages are compiled against a different version of libc. So I get the source…

Bachelor Chow

Bachelor Chow

Like many other things in life, a comedy show had things absolutely spot on. In this case Futurama has in it a fictitious product called Bachelor Chow, which functions as a pet food, but for humans; specifically middle-aged men that…

Holographic Sunglasses

My moleskine has been holding on to a rather provocative idea for quite some time. On 7th Aug. of 2006 I wrote about a television system with no moving parts. The idea is that you use an LED laser together…

Heterogenous Lists

I’m used to C’s version of unions and structs. In C a union is simply a spot of memory into which various types of things can be stored. C doesn’t do all that much checking on the data types though….

Secure Computing

Cloud computing, remote virtual machines, web mash-ups, and anything that executes on someone else’s machine with data you (or your customers) provide is really insecure. Sure you can encrypt the traffic, but in the end that remote machine is forced…