Page 49 of full list of posts


Unbiased tosses from a biased coin

This is a very handy algorithm that I came across today, which is, according to this paper, due to John von Neumann. […]

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Windows 7 Home Premium: turn off password expiration

class='posterous_autopost'>I use Windows 7 Home Premium as the OS in the various virtual machines I run. This is a space saving thing more than anything: I've limited the boot drive space to 20GB on my base VM so that I can have as many cloned VMs as I want on my external drive, and I'm assuming that Ultimate takes up a lot more room. Anyway... […]

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"Nothing To Be Frightened Of" by Julian Barnes

I picked this up the last time we went to England in September, and I was half way through it when I got the phone call from my sister in mid-December that my Dad had been admitted to hospital with a heart attack. […]

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Firefox 3.6 and S3Fox

class="posterous_autopost">A quick warning for those who use the S3 Firefox Organizer in Firefox on Windows and are contemplating upgrading to the new Firefox 3.6: S3Fox does not yet work in Firefox 3.6 and is automatically disabled when you upgrade. […]

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Posting mini blog posts from Posterous

Back in December, I commented that I could, with a judicious bit of additional code in the open source GraffitiCMS codebase, accept posts from Posterous and publish them on this blog. Well, it turned out that it wasn't that brilliant a code change: it broke the validation for XHTML. So, this evening, I fixed up the current HTML and took another look at my code. […]

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Megapixel Madness

Found this site this morning: Petavoxel, a brand new blog that so far seems to talk mostly about the hardware aspects of photography, especially about why the rush for more megapixels in a point-and-shoot camera is an exercise in stupidity. […]

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Best case, Worse case, Amortized case

A couple of weeks ago, Hacker News pointed to an article about how bad hash tables could be in a worse case scenario. […]

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MacBook hardware update

I have a second-hand black MacBook that I bought some 12 months ago (it's just over 2 years old by now, well outside any warranty) so that I could experiment writing iPhone apps. It's served me well. The only update I've made to it so far is to upgrade to Snow Leopard (OS 10.6), but it's about time I did some further upgrades, hardware related this time. […]

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Understanding the Apple Kool-Aid

This past weekend, the touchscreen part of my iPhone 3GS became what I can only describe as insensitive: it would hardly register any gestures or flicks up or down, and taps to the upper part of the screen wouldn't register. I felt completely stupid tapping forcefully on the screen: it's not as if there's anything mechanical going on that would respond better to such vigorous actions. There was even a point when I couldn't flick the slider to power off the phone: it's at the top of the screen. […]

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Handbrake 0.9.4 slower?

I use Handbrake and AnyDVD to rip DVDs I buy to iPhone/iPod Touch format so that I can watch them on flights. Since I fly quite often (to the DevExpress offices in Glendale, various conferences, home in England, etc), watching what I want to watch during these boring flights has been a life-saver, or at least a sanity saver. […]

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