Alexander Williams

we totally xkcd'ed someone tonight: so she goes in to the cafe and goes up to the guy and says "excuse me, but are you programming in ruby?" and the guy goes, "huh? what? yes, i am." and rene says, more...

“I have developed a few web applications powered by Google App Engine since its launch in May. It has been a fairly easy transition from my traditional programming in Python and Django backed by MySQL to the distributed App Engine more...

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.

There’s an interesting kerfluffle going on regarding the scaling woes that Twitter.com is going through, especially since it’s built on Ruby On Rails. Here’s the original interview with one of the Twitter coders, the somewhat evasive reply by the lead more...

Hadoop is a software platform that lets one easily write and run applications that process vast amounts of data. Here's what makes Hadoop especially useful: * Scalable: Hadoop can reliably store and process petabytes. * Economical: It distributes the data more...

“Rao's AgentSpeak(L) is a Prolog-like resolution-based language, but which is extended to support agent-based programming in several ways, most importantly: It extends the language, so that clauses can talk about not just satisfaction of predicates, but also of an agent 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...

Various SQL tagging storage schemas are performance tested.

“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...

MapReduce is a programming model and an associated implementation for processing and generating large data sets. Users specify a map function that processes a key/value pair to generate a set of intermediate key/value pairs, and a reduce function that merges more...

Real-world sources for terrain maps compatible with Terragen, et al.

Can a Bayesian spam filter learn to play chess?