I wrote this as an Op-Ed for the last progression of University Writing. Posted here to share. A recent study found that 87% of US undergraduates are on Facebook for an average of 93 minutes daily. At 11 hours a week that’s nearly as long as many of us spend in class. If 12 hours [...]
Inspired by an Ars thread that was inspired by a 4chan thread found on reddit, it’s an interesting sort idea for integers. Basically, sort a list of integers by spawning a new thread or process for each element then sleep for the value of that element then print out that element. Here’s the original bash [...]
After reading Bob Ippolito’s excellent Playing with PyPy I was inspired to try PyPy out myself. I heard a ton of buzz coming out of PyCon that PyPy is wicked fast and wicked awesome. I wanted to take a look, and Bob’s instructions were a perfectly made intro. A lot of the work I do is [...]
Political Data Nerds, I’ve spent far, far too many hours of my life working with voter files. Every voter file sucks in its own unique way, and figuring out exactly how Montana sucks differently from Kansas is a unique and constant battle. Well, I’m tired of it! I don’t want to have to re-learn these challenges next [...]
For my own curiosity I created a python + R script to grab the MITRE leaderboard and graph it. It’s a bit of python to grab the leaderboard and write out some CSVs. Then a bit of R code (updated link: http://a.libpa.st/4KFGq) generates the graph. It’s running automatically with launchd on my laptop, and it should [...]
My illustrious former colleague Ryan is now over at MITRE doing operations research and who knows what. He pointed me toward the MITRE Challenge. The MITRE Challenge™ is an ongoing, open competition to encourage innovation in technologies of interest to the federal government. The current competition involves multicultural person name matching, a technology whose uses [...]
Recently I’ve gotten a bit obsessed with stackoverflow.com. It’s a programming Q&A site. You can ask questions, you can answer and comment on them. However they have a sick twist – people vote on everything. They vote on your questions, answers, comments. You earn reputation points when your content is voted up, and you lose [...]
I’m a fan of puzzles, programming and learning, so I’ve always enjoyed The Python Challenges. Recently my coworkers Delia, Chris and I came up with the idea of doing some of those within the company to help ourselves and our coworkers become more familiar with Python and R (and to a lesser extent SQL and [...]
As everyone is well aware, lunch is the most important part of the work day. However it’s often hard to find inspiration when deciding on a delectable dining destination. The ideal solution is to have someone propose options, and everyone reject them until consensus is reached. However nobody enjoys that. Computers can propose options, but [...]
The ever impressive Jamie wrote a nice little paste bin at work a while back. It was dead simple to use, relatively private (in that it used UUIDs and didn’t have an index), and hooked into pmxbot. Unfortunately like most of the code written internally it used a proprietary web framework that’s not open source. [...]