Alexander Williams

“The cluster statistics were: * 910 nodes * 4 dual core Xeons @ 2.0ghz per a node * 4 SATA disks per a node * 8G RAM per a node” Reproducing the result yourself on Amazon EC2/S3 = ~ $100k

Tweak The Commentator's Personality Controls as you please and you'll be coding sweetly and more effortlessly than ever before.

“Character animation in video games—whether manually key-framed or motion captured—has traditionally relied on codifying skeletons early in a game's development, and creating animations rigidly tied to these fixed skeleton morphologies. This paper introduces a novel system for animating characters wh more...

“Instructions: The server will think up a word, and add it to the end of the list above. Type in the first word that comes to mind and press enter, or click "Frac!". If nothing comes to mind, click on more...

“Markovian models -- specifically, hidden Markov Models -- are also related to our old friend, Bayesian spam filtering. They're even better!”

“The "I challenge your challenge!" scenario is particularly amusing. And on top of the two issues Scott highlights, there are other social problems with challenge/response spam blocking. Although I've had great success with POPFile, which uses Bayesian filtering techniques, I more...

"With Skynet, one can easily convert a time-consuming serial task, such as a computationally expensive Rails migration, into a distributed program running on many computers."

Knuth considers the construction of a set of nine boolean functions telling the correct next move in an optimal game of tic-tac-toe. In a footnote, Knuth tells this story:

Presented with a 20-fold increase in selectable items, it's not too difficult to see why traditional keyboard navigation techniques completely break down. They were never designed to handle such complex navigation scenarios.

government had quietly embarked on a novel experiment to manage Chile’s economy using a clunky mainframe computer and a network of telex machines.

Unfeasible: it means impossible. Since no engineer is going to admit something is impossible, they use this word instead. When an engineer says something is "non-trivial," it's the equivalent of an airline pilot calmly telling you that you might encounter more...

Don't underestimate the power of survival of the fittest.  And don't EVER make the mistake that you can design something better than what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a feedback cycle. That's giving your intelligence much too much credit.&am more...

The interviewer hauled out FizzBuzz and asked to solve it. It took a minute to stop laughing.

The CouchDB development team is proud to announce CouchDB version 0.7.0 is now available at http://code.google.com/p/couchdb/downloads/list.