Exploring
Juxtapositions
From time to time, reCAPTCHA will give users odd juxtapositions of words. I got quite a kick out of seeing this one:
I think this would make a great show!
Recipe: Double Chocolate Chip Peppermint Cookies
This cookie is a nice variation on the classic double chocolate chip.
- 1/2 cup butter (one stick)
- 1/2 cup brown sugar
- 1/2 cup white sugar
- 1 egg
- 1/4 tsp vanilla
- 1/4 tsp peppermint
- 1 cup flower
- 1/4 cpu unsweatened cocoa powder
- 1/2 tsp baking soda
- 1/4 tsp salt
Directions
Laptop + Multiple Monitors Help
I'm trying to get my laptop to display on dual external monitors. I'd appreciate some guidance in getting this configuration set up
What I have
- A Dell Latitude D620 with nVidia Corporation G72M [Quadro NVS 110M/GeForce Go 7300]
- A Dell docking station with dual-link DVI output
- 2 Dell 2007FP Monitors
- Ubuntu 8.04
What I want
Amazon's CloudFront CDN: disappointing
I took a look at CloudFront today. They have really good intentions. The CDN space is quite a mess -- it could easily be a pay-as-you-go, self-service industry. However, players such as Akamai try to make a large profit. The CDN space is especially hard for small sites -- you can't get any reasonable pricing unless you are doing high levels of traffic.
Amazon wants to change all of that. However, I think they made a number of missteps in their initial offering.
More human computation with GWAP
It's oh so exciting to see that GWAP (games with a purpose) has launched. GWAP is part of the research on human computation that started the reCAPTCHA project. GWAP is a framework which allows researchers to create fun games which generate useful data. For example, "Matchin" is a game where you and a random stranger on the internet get a pair of images. You must agree on which one is "better" without talking with each other. The game is fast, fun, and very addicting.
Wanted: Temporary Palo Alto Housing
I'm looking for 1 bedroom in area below between May 1 and Aug 20 (so hopefully, something furnished). Closer to the green arrow thingy is better. Please email me at bmaurer@andrew.cmu.edu if you have something like this.
The Open Source Google Stack
The open source community is slowly growing a software stack that emulates a number of internal Google technologies. What's interesting is that the stack is being developed by a number of tech companies -- ranging from giants (mostly Yahoo!) to medium size firms (Facebook) to startup companies (Last.fm, PowerSet, Krugle, Veoh). So far, the following pieces of infrastructure have been developed
Silicon Mechanics
I'm looking at Silicon Mechanics for potentially buying a few rack mount servers. I'm wondering if anybody has good (or bad) experience dealing with them.
On paper, it looks like they have prices that are much cheaper than Dell (of course). Also, they have a nice thing where they can have two servers in a 1U (16 cores in a 1U... that's alot). I just want to see if anybody here has some real experience with them.
Windows Error Messages
While being out of disk space on a server isn't generally much fun, this error message made it worth the while
Randall Munroe (xkcd author) comes to CMU
Randall Munroe came to CMU to give a talk yesterday. It was the most attended talk of the semester. Randall's talk was fantastic -- he said that he is trying to fill part of his bedroom with plastic balls (like in one of his cartoons). He also drew two mini-cartoons while talking, which was very cool. Finally, he set two very useful standards. First, he declared that punctuation need not go inside quotation mark (eg, did she say "I love you"?). Second, he declared himself president of the Internet (so that another evil person wouldn't take it.
New reCAPTCHA APIs: i18n and Theming
We're really proud to announce the release of two new APIs for the client side.
Internationalization For users of our default theme, we've added a way to request the display of the user interface in a different language. We've translated our UI and help page into the following languages
German
Spanish
French
Dutch
Portuguese
Turkish
Russian
We're looking into getting translations for other languages. If your language isn't supported, you can use the theming API to allow you to customize the user interface.
Updating Ubuntu -- please make it faster
Dear Ubuntu hackers,
Gusty is out. I want it. But the update process for your wonderful operating system is broken. It seems that this process on getting files from a central machine. Said machines seem to be overwhelmed by other users who also want to upgrade -- they won't even respond to a TCP SYN packet
In the future, it'd be really nice if this process used mirrors so that it wouldn't be as flooded.
Randy Pausch: an inspiring video
Randy Pausch is a professor at Carnegie Mellon who believes in making programming, specifically for entertainment purposes, accessible to everybody. Sadly, Professor Pausch has an untreatable form of cancer which will take his life in the next few months. This week, he gave a talk which is truly inspirational. This is a person I wish I could have gotten to know.
Firefox Caching
Federico posted about some work he was doing on making Firefox not cache as many uncompressed bitmaps in memory. I was playing around with the cache stuff and noticed something: my Firefox cache is full of youtube videos. YouTube videos aren't exactly the best thing for Firefox to cache. My internet connection is fast enough that streaming the videos works just fine.
Yay Dual Homing!
Today, we had our first drill with dual homing on reCAPTCHA. In Pittsburgh, the water main that serves the Carnegie Mellon area broke today, causing a complete water outage on campus. This has resulted in many servers being shut down. reCAPTCHAs servers were kept up, as they are production servers, however we were told that it was possible they'd be shut down.
Facebook 2.0
So if your profile says you are single, and looking for women, single women looking for men might soon get a higher ranking in search results? I'm not sure what other "intentions" facebook might know about
Making bugs... and fixing them
Two interesting bugs from today.
First, you gotta be careful with order of operations. I wrote this code:
Yahoo's and Microsoft's CAPTCHAs likely NOT broken
BitDefender went a bit overboard in their claim about CAPTCHAs. Their statement about CAPTCHAs was issued as a press release (which clearly has meet their goals of getting press -- regardless of the accuracy of their statements). The article states that about 500 accounts are being created per hour. This is about the effort of one person solving CAPTCHAs. If they had actually broken the CAPTCHAs of Hotmail and Yahoo, there would be tens of thousands of accounts every hour.
Life at Google
NYTimes Article on CAPTCHAs
The New York Times is running an article today on CAPTCHAs. The article really misses some key points. For example, it talks about the CAPTCHAs on YouTube. YouTube's CAPTCHA is really, really bad. The CAPTCHA is mis-designed, using different colors to attempt to provide security. I can't imagine solving this as a color blind user, it must be nearly impossible. Most CAPTCHA providers have migrated to using a monochrome CAPTCHA (for example Google, Yahoo and MSN).
reCAPTCHA: A new way to fight spam
LD_LIBRARY_PATH empty entries
Many of us developers have a bashrc that has lines like:
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:$HOME/install/lib
I've always known that this isn't perfect, that one should check $LD_LIBRARY_PATH isn't empty, but had always thought it was just a minor point. It turns out that the loader sees an empty entry as meaning the current working directory. This means that it looks there for libraries.
In the Bay Area...
Starting this Saturday I'll be in the Bay Area, specifically Mountain View, for my internship at Google. While there, I'll be working on Google Calendar.
