Monthly Archives: November 2007

Violating the Terms of Service

The other night I was experimenting with Microsoft’s Live Search, trying to write a program that would submit a search query and get back the results. Somewhere in my wanderings I ran across the “format=xml” option, that tells search to … Continue reading

Posted in Idiocy, Programming | Comments Off

Odds ‘n Ends

Lots going on here. I know I’ve been mostly absent from blogging for the last year. I’m trying to get back into it, and part of that is going back to update the status of previous entries. Back in August … Continue reading

Posted in Odds 'n Ends | Comments Off

Ending Spam

A while back I had to implement a simple statistical text classifier for a project I was working on. David dropped the book Ending Spam on my desk, saying that it had the information I needed. Understand, I’m not building … Continue reading

Posted in Programming | 2 Comments

Weird Computer Problem

This one is right up there with the strangest problems I’ve ever seen. We bought the parts for and built four new machines, each with a Gigabyte GA-P35-DS4 motherboard, Intel Core 2 Quad (Q6600) processor, 8 gigabytes of RAM. Three … Continue reading

Posted in Computers | 4 Comments

Windows Vista Secrets

I got another new computer a couple of weeks ago, but I’ve been too busy until recently to actually set it up. The new machine has an Intel Core 2 Quad processor that we’ve overclocked to about 2.8 GHz. 8 … Continue reading

Posted in Computers | 1 Comment

High school math to the rescue

If you’ve experimented with Bayesian spam filtering or similar statistical text analysis, you’re probably familiar with the technique of Bayesian combination that involves computing the probabilities for individual terms and then combining those probabilities to come up with a probability … Continue reading

Posted in Programming | 3 Comments

Sake update

At the end of July, I wrote about my attempt to make sake, but then failed to write an update about how the experiment progressed. Everything worked fine for a few days: I kept the mixture at the right temperature, … Continue reading

Posted in Homebrew | Comments Off

Watch that transaction log

This afternoon, the program that adds records to my database started timing out on every transaction. Although I could connect to the database and execute queries, all updates would time out. When I logged in to the SQL Server machine, … Continue reading

Posted in Computers, Oops | Comments Off