For some time I’ve had a post in the queue on probability as tool for knowing. There were essentially two points, both of which pertained to sequence of facts required to reach a conclusion. 1) If your conjecture depends on a number of highly improbable events, it is unlikely to be true. 2) If your [...]

I’d like to have an easier way to track where I am reading in an on line document.
I’d like this both for each page as I am reading it, and for bookmarking my location.
And, no, I don’t want a pony.
Perhaps I am an exception, but I like reading from the screen. Having a single laptop [...]

The New York Times’ Public Editor, Byron Calame, is calling Times Editor Bill Keller, and by extension the Times, to account. In his column Even Geraldo Deserves a Fair Shake he points out the Time’s TV Critic Alessandra Stanley made a factual error about an event that she observed on TV. She claimed that Geraldo [...]

Why does open source work?
Hed Gulley knows one way.
Mathworks runs a biannual programming contest in Matlab. Most programming contests pit solo contestants or teams in head to head competition, each contestant working alone and submitting their entries at the end, but this one works a little differently. Entries are entered in the open. Everyone [...]

There are many excellent features of Ruby on Rails. The technology has significant advantages for rapid development and deployment and I don’t think that I could undertake the work that I am doing to develop factscollector without it. I can prototype rapidly, and deploy the simplest thing that could possibly work. My plan is that [...]

I am starting to experiment with writing unit and funtional tests for factscollector. I haven’t ever worked with consistent automated testing.
I probably waited too long to start, both in general, and in this particular Ruby on Rails project. The general reasons are well known in the Agile Programing literature. Tthe existance of the test is [...]

Koz has a little whoops moment and deletes his installed application code.
So, say you’ve typed in:
$ sudo rm ruby gem irb rails
Then you realise you’re sitting in /usr/bin rather than ~/test/bin. You think to yourself, no worries, I’ll just kill that whole line. But instead of hitting C-k, you miss, and hit j.
I’ve been using [...]

I needed a laugh.
In a Time story on Michael Brown’s resume when he became deputy head of FEMA, his former boss says,
He was very loyal. He was always on time. He always had on a suit and a starched white shirt.
Well with creditials like that, no wonder he has gone so far in the Bush [...]

As I noted in the previous post, Google Desktop 2.0 breaks Firefox extensions.
The most annoying breakage is of Tabbrowser Preferences. Normally, my settings are to open new links typed in the location bar, and searches from the search box into new tabs. When I first installed Google Desktop, both of these reverted to opening in [...]

In all the hype over Google Desktop, for example in the New York Times, Slashdot and Ars Technica, I am surprised that no one has noticed that it hijacks your browser and internet connection settings, and more or less hoses Firefox extensions.
Before installing the Google Desktop, clicking on a mailto: link in Internet Explorer or [...]