My first critical new normal happened when I was 12 years old. I participated in an online BBS dedicated to writing cheat programs for a popular web-based game. I would spend two to four hours per day after school on this BBS, socializing with a group of people that spent their f … | Continue reading
Object-Oriented Design is a big part of the debate the Ruby community has had in the last couple of years. People are writing blog posts, giving talks at conferences and writing books on the subject. | Continue reading
Twitter is a well known source of information regarding breaking news stories. This aspect of Twitter makes it ideal for identifying events as they happen. However, a key problem with Twitter-driven event detection approaches is that they produce many spurious events, i.e., event … | Continue reading
Twitter is a well known source of information regardingbreaking news stories. This aspect of Twitter makes it idealfor identifying events as they happen. However, a key problemwith Twitter-driven event detection approaches is thatthey produce many spurious events, i.e., events t … | Continue reading
2012 was a great year for Artisan Roast. We received awards as well as lot of press attention during the year. A big thank you to all our loyal customers that have supported us for the last 5 years!Some of the most relevant ones:Glenfiddich Spirit of Scotland Award 2012 in the fo … | Continue reading
A month or two ago, I signed up for a lightning talk for today’s Women Who Code event. I didn’t submit a title - I was more, “sure, I could talk!”Only on Tuesday did I find out I was actually on the bill to speak! Welp, here’s a just-in-time presentation. My slides are here - but … | Continue reading
A month or two ago, I signed up for a lightning talk for today’s Women Who Code event. I didn’t submit a title - I was more, “sure, I could talk!”Only on Tuesday did I find out I was actually on the bill to speak! Welp, here’s a just-in-time presentation. My slides are here - but … | Continue reading
Last week A.C., Sus and I got together for a game of Agricola. In Agricola, you play a peasant couple starting out in a small hut on an empty farmyard, and your goal is to grow into a prosperous family with crops, animals, and a big house. It’s a worker-placement game, where play … | Continue reading
Captain Awkward is my favourite blog right now, and it’s reaching heights of internet popularity that are awesome (because more people get to read the Captain and co-bloggers’ fantastic advice) but also mean that there’s a lot of newcomers to the blog who are wondering about Jedi … | Continue reading
Debates about gun rights must acknowledge that guns are not only technology, they are culture and symbol. | Continue reading
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