Building an environment to develop software takes time. Lots of time. If you gave me a fresh Macbook and said “Go!” it would take me nearly a week to get all my environments set up correctly. Sure, there are smart people using Chef to get around this and automate everything. This is a good idea [...]
I’ve seen a few blog posts on reading in config files to node.js apps. This can be done with an eval() (which is potentially dangerous) or by reading in a file and JSON.parse()-ing it. I wanted a solution that would work on both a node app, and could also be called as JSONP in the [...]
Anyone building a web application knows that XmlHttpRequest can only be made to the same domain and port that the page was loaded from. This is known as the ‘single origin’ policy for web browsers. Bypassing this restriction is known as Cross-Site Scripting or XSS. While there are some very real security reasons for only [...]
I recently had to make a visual editor that included lines between different boxes to define the ‘flow’ of a process (think UML). Rendering something like this in a web page is sometime tricky when you want the line to look fluid between it’s two connecting points. What I wanted was something like Bezier curves. [...]
Also known as the “mayor problem” or “mayor puzzle”, this is a directed graph puzzle where a group of people have single directed relationships. That is person A knows person B, but person B may or may not know person A. The puzzle is to find a person in this group that everyone knows, but [...]
SkyHook Wireless is sitting on the greatest behavioral corpus known to man. This software that powers the location based services for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch is a self-learning map of wireless access point to GPS locations. They seeded this database over the past several years by war driving across the US and recording [...]
Yahoo has published another tool in their series of open technologies called SearchMonkey. The principle is that website owners can create a “data service” that runs an XSLT on their site output and then pipe it to a “presentation application” that produces a custom L&F for search results relating to your site.
Optical Character Recognition is one of those technologies that has been around for a long time and never quite met customer demands. This is a common AI application, but I thought I’d see what’s currently available publicly instead of trying to write my own from scratch. The primary options I found were PHPOCR, GOCR, and [...]
An honest man is flipping a fair coin. After flipping ‘heads’ seven times in a row, a banker walks up and offers the honest man a bet of $50 if the next flip is ‘heads’. The banker hasn’t seen the previous seven flips. Should the honest man take the bet? More importantly, do the previous [...]
Note: I wrote this several months ago and never published it because I felt it was unfinished. However, this is a good introduction to another article I’m writing so I’m publishing it before it’s quite complete. Update (4/21/08): Looks like my discussion on tracking by Bluetooth has actually been done by the CS department of [...]