Yesterday, I posted the results of my quick exploration of whether sorting the list {0,1,2,3,4} using a comparison function that randomly returns < or > (with equal probability). My exploration was prompted by a report on the non-uniformity of the distribution of the random orderings of the browsers in Microsoft’s EU browser ballot. I had [...]
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Posted 24 February 2010
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Tagged: algorithms, browser, browser ballot, bubblesort, eu, european union, math, mathematica, mathematics, mergesort, microsoft, nb, quicksort, selectionsort, sort, sorting, sorting algorithms, statistics
An Ars Technica “etc” post linked to a TechCrunch article (apparently based on a Slovakian article, but I didn’t look into the Slovakian article to be sure) that talks about the ordering of the browsers in Microsoft’s EU Browser Ballot not being uniformly distributed. At a glance at the Javascript that does the randomizing of [...]
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Posted 23 February 2010
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Tagged: browser, browser ballot, eu, european union, ie8, internet explorer, javascript, math, mathematica, mathematics, microsoft, statistics
I haven’t tested it myself, but an “etc” posting on Ars Technica says: Want to get someone off IE6? Put these 11 characters into the address bar and hit enter: ms-its:%F0:. The browser will instantly crash. Better yet, set it as their homepage.
On the first day the Magic Mouse was available—well, not so much available as it was shipping with new iMacs, so available to play with in the Apple Store—I went to try it out. While I didn’t think it was the best thing since sliced bread (or any other such amazing invention), I did think [...]
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Posted 01 December 2009
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… or “how to serve different image types at one URL.” … or “why I let myself get carried away reading from one blog post to another.” After discovering free and cheap SSL certificates, I was playing with some sites over HTTPS to see what different browsers would show for the security. Very quickly, I [...]
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Posted 04 November 2009
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Tagged: apache, content negotiation, extensions, file type extensions, file types, htaccess, image, image file types, image files, images, mod_negotiation, multiviews, w3, w3.org
Several weeks ago, I attempted to enable OpenID logins on this blog. It didn’t work well. It didn’t work at all. Bad Behavior, which I consider absolutely critical in cutting down the impact of spambots, also broke the chain of redirects/reposts that enable OpenID logins. Now, however, with Bad Behavior 2.0.30 (and 2.0.31), the RPX [...]
A slight misconfiguration had SpamAssassin dropping spam into ~/Maildir/.spam/ while Dovecot was looking for mbox files in ~/mail/. From my initial bit of Googling, I was expecting to have to download some program to do the heavy lifting. Luckily, I came across a very simple blog post with a very simple answer that worked like [...]
IncompeTech has a variety of styles of graph paper and other specialty paper formats that you can tweak a bit (e.g. set the number of boxes per inch, the stroke width, etc.) and download as PDFs to print. It’s very useful.
BlackBerry App World is here and it’s nice. Really nice. What did I find in the top dowloads section that became the first thing I downloaded from App World? Pandora. Yes, Pandora for BlackBerry. I have a feeling that this will result in my getting in trouble with my carrier for improper/over-use of my somewhat-unlimited [...]
I’d written before about a really good VPS deal and how I was using it for additional secondary DNS. Not entirely surprisingly, that provider seems to have entirely vanished shortly after sending me an email at the end of my 1-month account asking me to renew (hard to renew when their web site doesn’t exist [...]