Archive for August, 2008
A Little Cluetrain Reminder
I was in a local Target the other day and I saw this improvised product review: Isn’t it fairly clear that the Cluetrain people have a point? People are going to talk about your products, your company, your reputation. Corporations can’t stop that, and technology further empowers these kinds of exchanges. Corporations should work to [...]
Squared Euclidean Distance on Hashes in Ruby
For some simple analysis I’m doing, I needed a routine to calculate squared Euclidean distance in Ruby on two hashes. The squared Euclidean distance d2 between two n-dimensional vectors x1 and x2 is: I needed this calculation for values corresponding to the intersection of the set of keys for two hashes. I came up with [...]
Life Imitates Video Games?
As the recent conflict between Russia and Georgia has unfolded, faint but distinct memories of mine were triggered. Russia invades Georgia in 2008? Fighting in Tbilisi? Wait a minute—I know this! It’s eerily (well, vaguely) close to the storyline of the original Ghost Recon, even the year.
VMware Fusion and Cisco VPN on Mac OS X – Fixing a Hiccup
I’m using a Cisco VPN Client (4.9.01) on Mac OS X Leopard (10.5.4). Yesterday I installed VMware Fusion (1.1.3), and today I noticed that my VPN wasn’t working anymore. The error: “Error 51: Unable to communicate with the VPN subsystem. Please make sure that you have at least one network interface that is currently active [...]
Adobe Error Messages
I can identify with the conditions (complexity, time constraints, etc) that would give rise to these errors. But when you step back, it’s quite humorous. From an ideal perspective, messages like these shouldn’t really happen.
Animated John Lennon Interview
Great visualizations in this interview conducted by a 14 year old who snuck into John Lennon’s hotel room in 1969. Via Infosthetics.
Ruby code to convert MySQL XML to CSV
This very simple code will take a file saved by mysql –xml and convert it to CSV format, with a header. I know there’s a MySQL option to save a file as a CSV or TSV, but I needed this for my situation. The code uses Hpricot (by Why the Lucky Stiff) for XML parsing. require [...]
iTunes Music (Non-)Availability
Seeing this really annoys me. I thought in the age of the long tail (challenges notwithstanding) we were beyond antique distribution limitations like this. I know some of it has to do with legal issues. It’s still very disappointing to see.
An Error in Metamagical Themas
Douglas Hofstadter’s Metamagical Themas: Questing For The Essence Of Mind And Pattern has been one of my favorite compilations for most of my life. It’s been a mind-expanding read for me on numerous occasions since I was fifteen. Recently, my girlfriend and I were going reading through one of the word-play submissions by Howard Bergerson and [...]
Freebies are Good
My girlfriend and I shop at the Whole Foods headquarters in downtown Austin, usually a couple of times a week. Today we had our goods on the conveyor when my girlfriend ran off. Right after I finished paying, she came back with an açaí sorbet and said she had to try it. “Then it’s on us,” said the [...]
Presidential Candidates using LinkedIn?
I was on my profile page on LinkedIn recently, and I saw this:
The Why of Trolls
That’s something that’s hard for me to grasp. The New York Times has an illuminating article on internet trolls, as noted by Jon Lebkowsky and others.