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December 2008

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Netflix Prize Within 0.5%

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!

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Adventures in Monkey Code

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: [...]

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1 Items Found [sic]

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.  [...]

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Yay VPNs!

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 [...]

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My Empty Inbox

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 [...]

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Weird MySQL Behaviour

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 – [...]

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WordPress 2.7, Take 2

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.

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Fast Music

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 [...]

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WordPress 2.7

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 [...]

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Tag Hierarchies

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 [...]

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