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I really do not get Wired Magazine’s subscription policy. They are supposed to target smart geeks, yet make really stupid moves. I used to be a subscriber. But I got annoyed by a large number of ads, deliberate and unnecessary foul language and subscription inserts advertising $8 new subscriptions. So, I did not renew early. Renewal notices starting . . . → Read More: Weird Wired Magazine (or maybe just stupid) It is hard enough to explain what we are doing to our professors; explaining it in plain English to our friends and family is nearly impossible. So it is always good to see people who can explain what POS tagger is and why it is important without having to throw around references to Norvig or Jurafsky. Markus Dickinson . . . → Read More: Explaining Computational Linguistics to friends and family I am visiting my parents and connect to their network via wireless router. My laptop, which is (still!) running Vista kept dropping wireless connection every couple of minutes and reconnecting again. Interestingly, the other computers connected to the same router had no problems. I could not figure out where to even start troubleshooting this issue, until I . . . → Read More: Vista repeatedly dropping wireless connection – solution I have written about converting Microsoft Word files into text or html using OpenOffice before. However, the wizards I described in that article were crashing when the number of files crossed into several hundreds. I have written some macros to do the conversion, but they were scary looking and fragile. Fortunately, I now found a tool that . . . → Read More: Bulk converting doc files into txt (or html) No, I am not complaining about food. I love food. And I love it different and – sometimes even – adventurous. Which is where Sour Grapes come in. We have been walking around the neighborhood and have discovered Middle Eastern shop with some unusual but recognizable foods and some not-quite-recognizable ones. Our strategy with the . . . → Read More: Cooking sour grapes They say at BarCamp that if you don’t like the session you are in, feel free to go to a better one. No hard feelings. But what do you do, if you show up for the announced moderated discussion session yet the moderator does not. That’s what happened to us with the last (5:15pm) slot of the . . . → Read More: Artificial Intelligence discussion at BarCampNYC3 I have gone (and will go back tomorrow) to the BarCampNYC3. The requirement for every person to speak was not enforced, but I figured I have something to contribute anyway. I brought and talked about the Chumby. I entitled my talk “Chumby – Open, Cool, Cute“. My session must have only had 6 people in it, but . . . → Read More: Chumby presentation at BarCampNYC3 Atlassian has just released Crowd 1.3 that now has the Delegated Authentication option – two-faced directory with an external LDAP facing part for authentication and an internal Crowd part for authorisation. This double-faced functionality causes some non-obvious interface issues. The most important issue to understand is that external part is accessed only when user is authenticated with . . . → Read More: 5 unobvious things about Atlassian Crowd’s Delegated Authentication Directory Watching the 21 Accents video (via Neatorama) made me think that different languages/accents seemed to require different mouth positions. Is it possible that some phonemes are only achievable with the mouth wide-stretched in a smile? Then loading a language with such phonemes would be one way to ensure people appear friendly to strangers whatever the real . . . → Read More: Languages that make you smile While reading weka Data Mining book, I have come across this impressive example of using machine learning to confirm person’s authorship (p. 358). In 19th century, there lived a famous rabbinic scholar Ben Ish Chai, who among other writings had two collections of letters. Ben Ish Chai claimed that only one collection was his and that the . . . → Read More: On uselessness of pretending to be somebody else |
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