Sunday, March 19th, 2006
Info theory book (free online)
David MacKay provides online copies of his textbook Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms (in pdf, ps, djvu, & latex formats). You can also buy the dead-tree version.
It’s a very readable text compared to the other things I’ve previously read (or skimmed) on Information Theory.
(via Sotos)
Sunday, March 19th, 2006
You can create a website in no time at infogami.com (a service created as a Y Combinator startup by Aaron Swartz). So, of course, I made a Daily Burrito site. Some good infogamis have already popped up; I like Y Rumors and Yet Another Javascript Reference.
Sunday, March 19th, 2006
Many of Berkeley’s courses are now available as podcasts. Listen and learn …
Sunday, March 19th, 2006
I like iStockphoto. It’s much easier that looking through huge clip art galleries — you just search and buy royalty-free photos right on the website. I enjoy looking for burros, donkeys, and mules.
Sunday, March 19th, 2006
Luxagraf mates markdown and XeTeX (LaTeX with MacOS X fonts) to produce a wonderful offspring: hi-fi text. In goes clean, minimal markdown text. Out comes beautiful typeset pdf documents.
Sunday, March 19th, 2006
GUI for real-time file usage info in Mac OS X
Robert Pointon has written the GUI analog to fs_usage in fseventer. It shows a very nice graphical display of all file system events.
Sunday, March 19th, 2006
I installed Broadband Optimizer, a program that aims to increase network speed on Mac OS X by increasing TCP memory buffers, effectively making data come in bigger chunks.
I used 3 online bandwidth testers to quantify the improvement (clearing Firefox’s cache between each test). I took the best of three runs of each test.
c|net test
1350 -> 1586 kbps (17% increase)
bandwidth speed test
2300 -> 2500 kbps (9% increase)
beeline
1104 -> 1488 kbps (35% increase)
On average, that’s about a 20% increase in download speed compared to the default Mac OS X settings. I like it.
Sunday, March 19th, 2006
The Joel Test gives 12 simple tests for the quality of a sofware development team.
Drew Mclellan offers thoughts on The Joel Test for Web Development. He finds that the test is still very useful in the context of web development.
Sunday, March 19th, 2006
Pete Freitag lists cheat sheets for developers. I love cheat sheets. This covers web, programming, version control, OS commands, and more.
Sunday, March 19th, 2006
Subversion Install and Use on Mac OS X
Justin Williams of MacZealots.com gives some good tips on installing and using subversion on Mac OS X. I found subversion indispensable in keeping track of all the code and writing for my master’s thesis.
Sunday, March 19th, 2006
Simple, Free Mac OS X RAM Disk
Michael Parrot offers a freeware RAM Disk creator (Esperance DV) that works great. Get it.
Sunday, March 19th, 2006
Haskell (a programming language) has no update operator. There is no order of operations. Find out more from this introduction to a “functional” programming language.
Sunday, March 19th, 2006
Face and text recognition for your personal photos. Upload, do little training, then search by face. “Hey computer, find me all the photos that have both Tim and Chad because I’m to lazy to browse my 30000 thumbnails.”
Try it. (only Firefox and IE6 currently supported)
Sunday, March 19th, 2006
Using mod_rewrite to make pretty URLs
Here’s a nice guide for using the mod_rewrite Apache web server module for making nice URLs. I use it to make my blog URL dailyburrito.com/blog instead of dailyburrito.com/blah/blah/morecrap/blosxom.cgi and to make www.dailyburrito.com map to dailyburrito.com (for some reason, I really hate that www).
I altered the configuration of Apache web server that comes installed Mac OS X in two spots to accomplish the above goals. First, I edited the main Apache configuration document by adding the following line at the very end of /etc/httpd/httpd.conf, instructing Apache to look at my own configuration files.
Include /private/etc/httpd/users/*.conf
Then, I created the file /private/etc/httpd/users/alan_apache_setup.conf that looks like this:
# Blosxom script redirect
ScriptAlias /blog /Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables/blosxom.cgi
# Redirect visitor by domain name
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^dailyburrito.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://dailyburrito.com$1 [R,L]
Voila! Missions accomplished. URLs are pretty.
Sunday, March 19th, 2006
Fun Putt Putt game that runs in your browser. (requires the Flash plugin)
Sunday, March 19th, 2006
A transcript of Robert F. Kennedy’s amazing speech about the some of the horrific things that we are doing to our environment. It touches on everything from coal-burning power plants to mercury in the water to strip mining to cultural values to draft dodging. Long, but well worth the read.
(via Wil Shipley)
Sunday, March 19th, 2006
Kathy Sierra, a writer for the Creating Passionate Users blog, elaborates on Paul Graham’s idea:
When you evolve out of start-up mode and start worrying about being professional and dignified, you only lose capabilities. You don’t add anything… you only take away. Dignity is deadly.
Suggestion: Eat a Burrito Every Day.
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