Archive for July, 2006

Wednesday, July 12th, 2006

How fast can you type?

Time your speed here.
I’m about 80 WPM (with 2-4 mistakes per para). Pretty damn sad.
IntelliJ has spoiled me.

2 Comments » - Posted in Programming by dkaz

Saturday, July 8th, 2006

UNIX symlink ~= Windows junction

Need to do create symbolic links on NTFS? Try using Junction.

No Comments » - Posted in Programming, Windows by dkaz

Thursday, July 6th, 2006

GoDaddy.com Booking Path - Worst Ever?

Wow. I just bought a domain through GoDaddy.com and I’m absolutely SPENT!
It is, by far, the worst booking experience I’ve ever had - it takes a fucking half hour to actually get to the purchase button.
Can you possibly squeeze more upsells into a booking experience? Who the hell is running that place?

2 Comments » - Posted in Technology, User Experience by dkaz

Thursday, July 6th, 2006

Simpson’s Paradox

One of the most interesting statistical phenomena I’ve run into is the Simpson’s paradox, in which the successes of several groups seem to be reversed when the groups are combined.
According to Wikipedia, this seemingly impossible result is encountered surprisingly often in social science and medical statistics, and occurs when a weighting variable which is not […]

No Comments » - Posted in Math by dkaz

Tuesday, July 4th, 2006

Markov property

I’m trying to deepen my understanding of Markov chains - it seems like I run into an application of Markov’s work on a weekly basis these days.
Starting at square 1…
In probability theory, a stochastic process has the Markov property if the conditional probability distribution of future states of the process, given the present state and […]

1 Comment » - Posted in Math, Programming by dkaz

Tuesday, July 4th, 2006

Crayfish, Crawfish and the Decapods

My morning web browsing somehow ended up on Wikipedia’s definition of decapods. I started out by looking up the definition “crayfish” (making sure “crayfish” are equivalent to “crawfish”) - Tour de France today was passing by the “capital of crayfish” - and found it interesting that all decapods are made up of 19 body segments […]

No Comments » - Posted in Science by dkaz

Saturday, July 1st, 2006

Downgrading MySQL password hashes

If you’re having problems logging into MySQL 4.1/5.0 from MySQL-Front, Drupal or some other client using 3.0/4.0 client code, you might be able to solve them by “downgrading” the hash algorithm for your user password.
SET PASSWORD FOR ’some_user’@’some_host’ = OLD_PASSWORD(’newpwd’);

No Comments » - Posted in PHP, SQL by dkaz

Saturday, July 1st, 2006

PHP - they were drunk

[00:51] DK: empty(”0″) returns TRUE in php
[00:51] DK: wtf were they thinking
[00:51] Josh: ha ha, they fail the assertTrue test
[00:57] DK: NULL == 0 is TRUE in PHP
[00:57] DK: that’s ridiculous
[00:57] Josh: sounds like they were drunk

2 Comments » - Posted in Programming, PHP by dkaz