Violating the Terms of Service

By Jim, on November 30th, 2007%

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 return the results in an XML format. For example:

http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=jim+mischel&format=xml

Notice the copyright message:

. . . → Read More: Violating the Terms of Service

Comments are closed   Idiocy, Programming

Odds ‘n Ends

By Jim, on November 30th, 2007%

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 I posted about installing a pfSense firewall. Whereas the firewall I installed worked, it had . . . → Read More: Odds ‘n Ends

Comments are closed   Odds 'n Ends

Ending Spam

By Jim, on November 28th, 2007%

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 a spam filter, so I was somewhat dubious as to the book’s usefulness.

It turns . . . → Read More: Ending Spam

2 comments - (Comments are closed)   Programming

Weird Computer Problem

By Jim, on November 27th, 2007%

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 of them are working fine. One of them (mine, unfortunately), exhibits a rather odd flaw: . . . → Read More: Weird Computer Problem

4 comments - (Comments are closed)   Computers

Windows Vista Secrets

By Jim, on November 27th, 2007%

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 gigabytes of RAM and two one-terabyte disk drives. I’ll be stressing that machine pretty soon . . . → Read More: Windows Vista Secrets

One comment - (Comments are closed)   Computers

High school math to the rescue

By Jim, on November 15th, 2007%

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 of a message being spam. For example, if the individual terms’ probabilities are denoted by . . . → Read More: High school math to the rescue

3 comments - (Comments are closed)   Programming

Sake update

By Jim, on November 12th, 2007%

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, and stirred it twice per day as recommended. It was growing quite a nice batch . . . → Read More: Sake update

Comments are closed   Homebrew

Watch that transaction log

By Jim, on November 2nd, 2007%

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, I noticed that it was responding very slowly. It took a few minutes of poking . . . → Read More: Watch that transaction log

Comments are closed   Computers, Oops