swalker's blog

The principle of least effort argues that people will act so as to minimize their probable average rate of work (i.e., not only to minimize the work that they would have to do immediately, but taking due consideration of future work that might result from doing work poorly in the short term).

Chapter 1, Foundations of Statistical NLP

Some testing related information (for ruby/rails):

gems to install:

cucumber.yml: (in config in rails project)

.profile: (add)

Some bundles I have installed:

CTags - http://github.com/adinardi/tm-ctags-tmbundle

Rspec - http://github.com/dchelimsky/rspec-tmbundle

Cucumber - http://github.com/bmabey/cucumber-tmbundle

Ruby Haml - http://github.com/douglasjarquin/ruby-haml-tmbundle

Ruby Sass - http://github.com/aussiegeek/ruby-sass-tmbundle

R - http://svn.textmate.org/trunk/Bundles/R.tmbundle

R console - http://svn.textmate.org/trunk/Bundles/R\ Console\ \(R_app\).tmbundle

I started playing with rspec and am getting some annoying warnings. I created a simple patch to get rid of the warnings.

If you could boil down everything you know into something concise that you would like to convey to the younger people in your life, what would you say? Below are some of my thoughts.

First, would be "Do unto others, as you would have done to yourself". The golden rule. With this, you don't need any other religion or morality.

Second would be to exercise. Exercise has so many benefits. Besides the obvious fitness, there are the self esteem and confidence benefits and I believe a strong relation to drive and intelligence.

Last night we went to the BMA Awards dinner, the keynote speaker was Keith Pigues. He gave a very good speech about delivering value. Here are a couple of the key points that I wanted to remember.

The top priorities for marketing companies should be to either increase their clients revenue or decrease their costs. This brings real value to their clients.

How to update a lost cisco password

Steps to password recovery:

 
One of the reasons that I believe communication between developers and non-developers is difficult is because developers must work in a world of specifics and details whereas a non-developer can casually neglect those details without even knowing they've been neglected.
 

I recently read a post by Don Stuart regarding haskell blowing away ruby and python. While it's interesting to see the haskell code and the code is faster for this specific application, this post leaves so much unquestioned. Is speed the most important factor? Why not use C or some other compiled language? How do you compare the speed of a compiled language with the speed of a dynamic language?

create usb net inst device for x41 tablet. Because of conflicts with SATA and the usb cdrom I couldn't get an install to work with the usb cdrom. I could get the installer to start, but it wouldn't detect the hard drive no matter what I did. I tried loading t he drivers manually, but nothing worked. I decided to try my luck with an old Lexar Jump Drive (256M). It worked! See my notes below.