Unfortunately, A.C. and I didn’t have a chance to get together again before I had to clean up the games table, so there is no conclusion for our Twilight Struggle game. However, unbeknownst to him, I had the Middle East Scoring Card in hand, and was only one or two influence poin … | Continue reading
Paperclip is a great gem for adding file attachments to your Rails models. It ships with some storage adapters including Amazon S3 but the documentation isn’t totally clear for virtual hosted-style requests. If you need to use classic path-style requests like http://s3.amazonaws. … | Continue reading
You just got a notice saying that your talk was accepted to [some huge freaking conference]. Awesome!Oh but wait, now you have to actually talk. That entails preparation, and speaking in front of people!Step 1: Let it set in. Breathe. Maybe pour a glass of wine.Step 2: Find inspi … | Continue reading
You just got a notice saying that your talk was accepted to [some huge freaking conference]. Awesome!Oh but wait, now you have to actually talk. That entails preparation, and speaking in front of people!Step 1: Let it set in. Breathe. Maybe pour a glass of wine.Step 2: Find inspi … | Continue reading
I played the first half of a game of TwilightStrugglewith A.C. tonight, and it’s definitely one of my favorite games. The geeks overat Board Game Geek agreewith me, as it’s consistenly the highest rated game on the site. And before youask, it doesn’t have anything to do with spar … | Continue reading
As a web developer you learn that there is nothing more important than keeping regular backups of your databases. I've created a little bash script to help with Backing up MySQL databases for this I'll use mysqldump. Mysqldump is a nifty little utility that lets you dump the cont … | Continue reading
I've found that one of the best parts of putting my site live in May earlier this year, was being able to start again and use what I had learnt to improve my site. Today I have launched my new design and I couldn't be happier with it. I think as a web developer/designer it's easy … | Continue reading
If you use RequireJS and jQuery in a project, you might find yourself in a situation, where you embed jQuery before RequireJS, but still need to have the “jquery” dependency respected. This article describes, how to achieve this. | Continue reading
In order to meaningfully shape the future, design must challenge and overturn entrenched systems, not simply create new packages for yesterday’s ideas. | Continue reading
Twitter offers a phenomenal platform for the social sharing of information. We describe new resources that have been created in the context of the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) to support the academic study of Twitter as a real-time information source. We formalize an informat … | Continue reading
Twitter offers a phenomenal platform for the social sharing of information. We describe new resources that have been created in the context of the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) to support the academic study of Twitter as a real-time information source. We formalize an informat … | Continue reading
Information retrieval (IR) systems rely on document relevance assessments for queries to gauge their effectiveness for a variety of tasks, e.g. Web result ranking. Evaluation forums such as TREC and CLEF provide relevance assessments for common tasks. However, it is not possible … | Continue reading
The Twitter real-time information network is the subject of research for information retrieval tasks such as real-time search. However, so far, reproducible experimentation on Twitter data has been impeded by restrictions imposed by the Twitter terms of service. In this paper, we … | Continue reading
In TREC 2011, we focus on tackling the new challenges proposed by the pilot Crowdsourcing and Microblog tracks, using our Terrier Information Retrieval Platform. Meanwhile, we continue to build upon our novel xQuAD framework and data-driven ranking approaches within Terrier to ac … | Continue reading
The influential Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) retrieval conference has always relied upon specialist assessors or occasionally participating groups to create relevance judgements for the tracks that it runs. Recently however, crowdsourcing has been championed as a cheap, fast … | Continue reading
Went to the beach and put the iPhone 5 down to film the sand rushing over the beach propelled by the wind. Maybe not the smartest idea as sand got inside the lighting connector… https://youtu.be/GLyl401Y-1M | Continue reading
Web-based apps that match the speed and responsiveness of native apps are better for users, but they require more investment from product and engineering teams. | Continue reading
Hellz yea, I’m a freaking engineer (sounds more hilarious in my head then it reads). Now who the hell wouldn’t want to be an engineer? Fellow PyLady, Julia Grace, asked about my expectations of being an engineer versus what I actually experienced. TL;DR: It’s awesome. Here’s the … | Continue reading
Hellz yea, I’m a freaking engineer (sounds more hilarious in my head then it reads). Now who the hell wouldn’t want to be an engineer? Fellow PyLady, Julia Grace, asked about my expectations of being an engineer versus what I actually experienced. TL;DR: It’s awesome. Here’s the … | Continue reading
I’ve got a longer post coming about this but just wanted to let everybody know that we’ve got a new iPhone app out! It’s called ‘Faceship’ and for this version 1.0 release its one and only purpose in life is to give people Tiny Faces. Why Tinyfaces? Well, I did this quick video o … | Continue reading
The era of color-coded political parties is more recent than you might think | Continue reading
Zero to one is the process of creating new things while 1 to n is ‘copying things that work.’ | Continue reading
Provision of central support services (CSS) for the implementation of eTwinning and ancillary services to support EU action for schools | Continue reading
I’ve done a bunch of talks lately, in places ranging from Hong Kong to Costa Rica, about the future of cameras and photography. (Here’s one) And one of the things I discuss is this concept of ‘Lifelogging‘ – the idea of wearing an always-on camera constantly, capturing everything … | Continue reading
I had the absolute pleasure attending the first PyCarolinas conference. I was honored when Calvin Spealman invited me to keynote on the topic of community. He wanted folks to leave feeling inspired to build up the area’s sense of community. A lot of pressure, but having a confere … | Continue reading
I had the absolute pleasure attending the first PyCarolinas conference. I was honored when Calvin Spealman invited me to keynote on the topic of community. He wanted folks to leave feeling inspired to build up the area’s sense of community. A lot of pressure, but having a confere … | Continue reading
For the last couple of years, I've been fortunate enough to see quite a few beautiful places on this planet. Most of these pictures were shot by my girlfriend, Tina. My Home Town, Vienna On a broken motorcycle, near the Pakistan border Buddhist temple at Borobudur … | Continue reading
The other day I found myself needing to insert into an array at a given position, so I wrote this little function. For example if you have pulled a list of posts from a database and are going to loop through these to output the HTML, but want to insert an advert after the third p … | Continue reading
This is part 3 in a short intro series for netsec. Part I is on password storage, and part II is on symmetric ciphers.Riddle time: Q: You live in a country with a corrupt mail system. They open every package if they can. You put a lock on the box. You can’t mail a key. How does t … | Continue reading
This is part 3 in a short intro series for netsec. Part I is on password storage, and part II is on symmetric ciphers. Riddle time: Q: You live in a country with a corrupt mail system. They open every package if they can. You put a lock on the box. You can’t mail a key. How does … | Continue reading
An overview of several main ideas from Fred Brooks’ book The Design of Design. | Continue reading
File: PDF Size: 33.43 Kb | Continue reading
A continuation of NetSec for n00bs, part I: Password Storage A cipher is basically an algorithm to perform encryption and decryption. Important to note: cipher algorithms, as opposed to hash algorithms, go both ways, meaning if you process a plain text to encrypted text using a c … | Continue reading
A continuation of NetSec for n00bs, part I: Password Storage A cipher is basically an algorithm to perform encryption and decryption. Important to note: cipher algorithms, as opposed to hash algorithms, go both ways, meaning if you process a plain text to encrypted text using a c … | Continue reading
In prepping for my interviews for my newly acquired position with Red Hat for the FreeIPA project, I did my own crash course in studying net security/applied cryptography. It’s a very important subject, and I feel a lot of new developers rely on frameworks or libraries to impleme … | Continue reading