By barneyb on December 29, 2008
I was looking at the leaderboard for the Netflix Prize while waiting for a huge DB transform to complete, and saw that as of last week, BellKor/BigChaos are within half a percentage point of the required 10% improvement to win. Yay those guys!
Posted in aside
By barneyb on December 28, 2008
I did a little experiment this weekend. I needed (well, wanted) to build a really simple little photo viewer application. Create a gallery, add some photos, view the photos as a slideshow. Really basic. The catch is that I build it using no framework at all, aside from Application.cfm. Note the 'm'. And no IDE: [...]
Posted in cfml, development, fusebox, tools
By barneyb on December 20, 2008
If you're showing a textual label such as "N items found", please, pretty please, put the logic in there to hide the "s" when N is equal to one. Same goes for changing "children" to "child", etc. It's not hard, and it makes your software look retarded (or super enterprise-y) when you don't do it. [...]
Posted in development
By barneyb on December 18, 2008
I've been having a hell of a time with the office VPN client this week. It refuses to install on my laptop (a stock ThinkPad) for some reason. The "Determinisit Network Enhancer" can't add a plugin. Whatever that means. Tried a few different version of the client, all to no avail. This prompted my walk [...]
Posted in tools
By barneyb on December 16, 2008
This evening I ran across yet another person trying to do the "keep your inbox empty" thing, and one who thinks the task is somewhere between difficult and impractical.
I have two inboxes: Gmail for personal, Outlook for work. They're both always empty, and I don't find it difficult at all. As email comes in I [...]
Posted in personal
By barneyb on December 16, 2008
Last night I added a new log field to PotD and since I did it live on my prod instance, I wrapped it with a bunch of error handling so that if anything went wrong it wouldn't affect users, it just wouldn't log the new data. (No, this is not my standard operating procedure – [...]
Posted in database
By barneyb on December 15, 2008
I'm pleased to say that Ozh has updated his Admin Menu plugin with a fix for the issue I blogged about a couple days ago. So as of a few minutes ago all the blogs I host have been upgraded to 2.7. Yay.
Posted in meta, wordpress
By barneyb on December 13, 2008
As a musician, is it strictly necessary to blaze through every piece of music you play? Listening to Christmas music on Pandora and probably 2/3rds of tunes, particularly non-orchestral pieces, are at about 125% the speed they should be played. It doesn't make you a better player just because you can flail your fingers and/or [...]
Posted in random
By barneyb on December 13, 2008
Just finished upgrading my blog to WordPress 2.7. Unfortunately I found what appears to be a bug in the truly excellent Ozh Admin Menu plugin. It doesn't seem to handle extra menu items being added to the main menu correctly; it only partially renders the menu bar when such an option is active. Not sure [...]
Posted in meta, wordpress
By barneyb on December 10, 2008
About four and a half years ago I wrote a little event tracking app that accepts a timestamp and a list of tags, and then provides a pile of ways to report on the data. Think Twitter, except a couple years earlier, and designed for consumption by software, not people, at least at the individual [...]
Posted in ajax, database, development, javascript, tools