jlopez's blog
jlopez - Wed, 2010-03-31 12:56
Slashdot has an interesting (and old) item about R which features a New York Times article where various analysis sing the praises of the R statistical software package.
jlopez - Wed, 2010-03-31 12:17
This is an older link, but one I feel is worth sharing as the lesson is provides about security is a good one.
http://www.communities.hp.com/securitysoftware/blogs/rafal/archive/2010/02/25/a-big-case-of-oops.aspx
jlopez - Wed, 2010-03-31 11:02
Remote desktop is a great tool for administration of machines when you can't by physically present. One thing that comes from time to time is the need to connect to a machine that doesn't have remote desktop enabled. The steps are easy to enable remote desktop as long as you have administrative access to the machine.
First, launch regedit and select "File->Connect to remote computer". In the remote computer's registry tree, go to "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server" and edit fDenyTSConnection from 1 to 0.
jlopez - Tue, 2010-03-23 11:05
I have been accumulating interesting links as "starred items" in Google reader. The problem is that over 100 such items is beyond the effective range of that system, slowing access. So here is a link dump of things I find interesting but haven't yet been able to fully pursue.
The Predictioneer's Game: using game theory to predict outcomes.
Immersive Collaboration: Taking virtual worlds further in data presentation.
Data Analytics Maturation: Defining maturing levels of analytics in an organization.
Evoke: Augmented reality game about social problem solving.
20 most popular open source software packages: As the title states. I have used 13 of the 20 personally, so this list seems a good launching point for exploring open source.
5 best VPN tools: Personally I use OpenVPN, despite not being a traditional VPN solution. Easy to set up and reliable.
30 web applications: There are a lot of useful apps that require zero installation. The question: how critical of data to trust to such systems?
The Universe: Help in understanding our relation to the larger cosmos. (Here is a related Star Size Video.
jlopez - Fri, 2010-02-12 08:19
I ran into three really bad design decisions this morning while trying to work with a virtual machine, the sum total of which consumed hours of my day for what could have been a fifteen minute project. 70-persistent-net.rules in Ubuntu, the networking command line in Sun's VirtualBox and Sun VirtualBox's hard drive "manager".
jlopez - Tue, 2010-01-26 20:55
I normally keep this site dedicated to work related posts, but I needed *somewhere* to post the result of the beta ending event.
It has become something of a tradition for MMOs that are ending beta to have a special event. It serves two purposes. First, the testers get something special to experience, something that probably won't be repeated again in the normal operation of the game. Second, it attracts a huge number of the testers at once, a great way to ensure that your scaling can handle a real world load.
jlopez - Tue, 2009-12-08 14:54
If you do a search for “SQL Parameter Sniffing sp_executesql” one will find a very large collection of confused posts. The most common problems is that a query that runs fine in the query analyzer takes many orders of magnitude longer in code. Those who have dug deeper will find that if they rewrite the query to define variables and set them prior executing, the problem vanishes in code.
jlopez - Mon, 2009-11-16 13:55
I mentioned before that I’m using Privoxy because I prefer Chrome as my primary browser. That said, Firefox remains my second line browser and AdBlock Plus is simply the best ad blocker out there. Recommended. As I said before, I white list sites I want to support (and which don’t provide an alternate revenue model). The reality is there are some sites I use obsessively and only block the most obnoxious advertisements from.
jlopez - Mon, 2009-11-09 11:53
I have been doing more and more functional style programming, thanks mostly to the support for the style that C# 3.5 provides. There are some performance hits to be taken by using such a style, but for the most part they have been acceptable “percentage increases” over the non-functional code. However, there is one thing that I have been noticing as I adopt a more and more functional style and that is that I tend to write more and more “generic” algorithms that take a large class of types and work with them in a more abstract way.
jlopez - Thu, 2009-11-05 15:34
If you are doing virtually anything with LINQ, you owe it to yourself to get LINQPad. The basic program is free and makes experimenting with LINQ actually fun. For a few dollars you can register it and get auto-completion as a bonus. Frankly, I would have registered it without any perks because it is just so addictive.
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