Seen on Planet Debian: a nice writeup of a debugging session with a user watching over his shoulder.
One thing to note about user empowerment: Fred isn’t a tech geek, but he can be curious about the technology he relies on if the situation is right. He was with me through the whole process, didn’t get antsy, and never tried to get me to "just fix it" while he did something else. I like that, and wish i got to have that kind of interaction more (though i certainly don’t begrudge people the time if they do need to get other things done). I was nervous about breaking out wireshark and scaring him off with it, but it turned out it actually was a good conversation starter about what was actually happening on the network, and how IP and TCP traffic worked.
We detect, but generally do not locate, about 50 mine blasts (explosions) throughout the United States on any given business day. These blasts typically occur between noon and 6 PM local time Monday through Saturday. Of these, about one event every two days is large enough that we compute a location for the blast and post it to a separate explosions listing.
There are a few interesting plugins in the works. One of them is the LLVM compiler, which can be plugged in to perform the back-end functions for GCC. Another is milepost, which uses a brute-force approach to figure out the optimal settings of the command-line flags for a specific body of code. Then, there are "the hydras," which are Taras’s work. These plugins take an interesting approach, in that the actual analysis work is done in JavaScript scripts. The idea was originally seen as amusing – "wouldn’t it be fun to put Spidermonkey into GCC?" – but it has actually worked out well. JavaScript is a relatively nice, concise language which makes it easy to implement the needed capabilities.
Seen on Planet Debian: Apparently there’s a thing called termcasting, and some people are doing it.
I’ve hooked one of my laptop’s terminals up to the net, so anyone with IPv6 can telnet in and see it.
I’ve long wanted to be able to broadcast my terminal sessions on occasions when it makes sense. Like when I’m fixing someone’s bug, or closely collaborating with someone distant.
OK, so not only am I suffering from a terrible case of gadget lust, but I find fascinating some of the comments like this one:
actually all it does is make it easier for talentless people to claim how good they are at playing guitar, when they aren’t playing at all. get a real guitar if you’re serious or go back to the guitar hero b/s.
I think it’s an interesting idea that because an instrument isn’t "real" guitar, then it doesn’t count. Clearly a game like Guitar Hero is different from a real guitar — the Rock Band instruments are all simplified versions of the real thing. But the idea that you don’t have any skill as a musician because your instrument is in a nontraditional form seems a little untenable..
If you find yourself trying to do a polynomial regression in R, you may find Polynomial Regression in R by Bret Larget extremely helpful. I always have a hard time remembering the I(x^2) syntax. The explanations of the underlying statistics are also useful if you already know a little bit of what’s going on.
While r2 has this nice interpretation, its major deficiency is that it will always increase as you add additional variables — the residual sum of squares from a small model must be at least as large as that from a larger model of which it is a special case. So, looking at r2 is not a good strategy for picking out a good model, because you can get increasingly better r2 values by addiing spurious variables. One attempt to correct for this is to compute the adjusted r2 statistic.
The other stand is different. The lemonade is free, but there’s a big tip jar. When you pull up, the owner of the stand beams as only a proud eleven year old girl can beam. She takes her time and reaches into a pail filled with ice and lemons. She pulls out a lemon. Slices it. Then she squeezes it with a clever little hand juicer.
Part of the ongoing memeplex of how to make money on the Internet..
After I finished my recent articles on Teaching with Tux and Learning with Gcompris, I received a couple of suggestions from readers that I take a look at Childsplay. I spent some time looking at Childsplay and if you have small children, I think you should too. As soon as I started the program, it started to play it’s theme song and my 18 month old son came running, and he still comes running every time he hears that music. For most parents and educators, my review of this program could end right here, but I suspect that I should probably write a bit more.
