Digital Digressions by Stuart Sierra
From programming to everything else
Part of what I hope to do with the Program on Law & Technology at Columbia is bridge the communication gap between lawyers and engineers. The two groups think completely differently. To take a recent example, a new P2P file-sharing system has emerged called the Owner-Free Filesystem (OFF). It stores and transmits only chunks of…
The web is a strange beast. Server logs reveal just how strange. Someone’s crawling AltLaw.org, sending an HTTP Referrer of “http://www.nero.com/enu/downloads-nero8-trial.php” with a User-Agent identified as “MSIE 5.00; Windows 98”. What the heck?
Just when you thought the A.I. Winter would last forever, up pops Brainhat with an open-source inference engine that uses natural language as its primary interface. Cool!
Finally, my blog has a new theme. I liked the old one, but it was getting a bit… old. And the serif-font-on-a-translucent-background-image was never a great idea. I didn’t have time for a complete redesign, so I settled on the excellent Mandigo theme by onehertz. The header image is my own — the view from…
I need a new laptop. My current machine, a rebranded ASUS that I bought on the cheap a few years ago, has developed a crack in the screen hinge, so it’s only a matter of time. I have to admit, I’m sorely tempted by the Macbook Air. It’s a beautiful machine — sleek, light, even…
I dropped by the Java Users’ Group meeting last week since Rich Hickey was there to talk about Clojure. I expected a bit of carping from the Java guys, and at first they were all “efficiency this” and “security that.” But by mid-way through the talk I think they were getting it. A few even…
Cool fact: All valid JSON is also valid YAML. So any YAML parser can also parse JSON. Long live the mighty list/map data structure!
Paul Graham writes, “Cambridge seems to be the intellectual capital of the world. … And what US city has a stronger claim? New York? A fair number of smart people, but diluted by a much larger number of neanderthals in suits.” Harsh but true. I’ve never been to Cambridge, and never lived in any city…
I just did my first test-run of a Hadoop cluster on Amazon EC2. It’s not as tricky as it appears, although I ran into some snags, which I’ll document here. I also found these pages helpful: EC2 on Hadoop Wiki and manAmplified. First, make sure the EC2 API tools are installed and on your path.…
Back in February, in a slightly plaintive post, the W3 sysadmins asked that people stop hammering their servers with requests for XHTML DTDs. Everyone said yes, this is a stupid problem that wouldn’t have happened if a) the XML spec were less dumb, or b) XML libraries were less dumb. After that post, I spent…