Figured out how to generate a list of all k-element combinations from a set of n elements using double recursion. Apparently, the solution I developed is the “classical” way to do it, but it was challenging nevertheless.

Microsoft recently released a new marketing campaign called The Mojave Experiment. The purpose of the experiment is to convince people to buy Windows Vista, even if they think they hate it. The site allows viewers to watch any of 55 video clips of an experiment Microsoft performed. Experiment Structure The outline of the experiment is [...]

So after it became painfully apparent that: Twitter was an attractive idea Twitter didn’t really fit with the distributed nature of the web Twitter didn’t scale all that well an obvious opportunity emerged: build a better mousetrap, err, Twitter. And that is exactly what the Laconica software does. Built by Control Yourself, and hosted on [...]

I’ve been wanting to pick up one of Asus’ EEE PC computers since I first saw one in the middle of 2007, but the features had not really hit the sweet spot for me until they announced the EEE 901 model back in May. Originally, one of the big draws to use EEE for me [...]

Senator Obama, As a Software Engineer, I am very impressed by your stance on technological issues. You position is well thought out and reasonable. I wish to highlight the importance of a couple of areas that you don’t specifically mention in your position discussion, but I am sure you are aware of. These two areas [...]

I bought a hybrid car back in November 2007 after my 1990 Toyota Corolla got totaled in an accident while I was stopped in traffic. I chose the Honda Civic Hybrid, and my experience ever since has been awesome. The most important feature (other than the electric assist and regenerative brakes) is the feature telling [...]

This will be short. I recall someone wrote the six word guide to eating well: Eat, not too much, mostly plants. This really captured a lot for me, and I found a similar version for investing today from New York Times personal finance columnist Ron Lieber, this time in seven words: Index (mostly). Save a [...]

I got into a conversation recently about the events surrounding the liberalization of C-SPAN’s policy regarding the use of their videos on the internet. This initially became an issue in early 2007 when speaker Nancy Pelosi purportedly violated copyright law by posting a video of a committee hearing (not congressional footage, which would be in [...]

In his latest post, Steve Yegge pointed out that Emacs’ biggest competitor wasn’t really IDEs, because Emacs isn’t really great because it edits text. Emacs’ biggest competitor is really Firefox, because what makes Emacs great is that it is so extensible, and so it is with Firefox as well (although I prefer ELisp to XML [...]

In the last post, I use the excellent SuperDuper! tool to make abootable clone of my hard drive. There are some (more advanced)techniques that can be used that allow bootable clones to be createdon the command line using free tools. I had some trouble gettingclones to work on the command line, but finally worked through [...]