Category Archives: tech
Using Google refine to produce a list of Ontario’s private schools
Last week, I excitedly read the announcement and watched the screencasts of Google Refine 2.0. Today, I used it to transform this hot mess of HTML: Into this structured data goodness:
Good news, Canadian style
Jim Prentice, former industry minister and suckup to american media companies — he authored the horrid copyright “reform” bill — has resigned: “I am closing the door on political life,” he said, stressing his support for Mr. Harper and the party. “I have completed that tour of duty.”
Change I can fucking believe in
The FTC just appointed Ed Felten as its Chief Technologist. That’s holy-shit awesome. This is the Princeton CS professor Ed Felten. The guy who helped show SDMI was useless, discovered flaws in voting machines and analyzed the Sony rootkit. Hey may give Ray LaHood a run for his money as my favourite administration appointment.
Apple’s new PR boilerplate signals change in direction
I just noticed this today, but it happened a couple of months ago. There’s no more “Apple ignited the personal computer revolution,” which had been there since at least 1998. Here’s the new boilerplate, which first appeared on June 28, 2010 in iPhone 4 Sales Top 1.7 Million: Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers …
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HOWTO install the rjb gem on Ubuntu and Mac OS X
Here’s how to install the Ruby Java Bridge (rjb) gem on Ubuntu Linux and Mac OS X: Ubuntu Linux (10.10) # aptitude install openjdk-6-jre-headless openjdk-6-jdk # JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk gem install rjb Mac OS X 10.6.4 # JAVA_HOME=/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Home gem install rjb Note: rjb 1.3.2 requires the Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 3 Developer Package. If …
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Why you should fix the bug
Or “how I tried to save Apple $11,000,000”: Avoids $1,000 in costs versus waiting until your customers catch the bug in the field, causing the team to remedy the problems, rush out a patch release, and/or go to heroic lengths to manage a PR problem.
How to install MediaWiki on a subdomain
Here is how to set up MediaWiki on a subdomain and use pretty/short URLs. This was tested on July 1, 2010 with MediaWiki 1.15.4, PHP 5.2.8, MySQL 5.0.90 and Apache 2.2.11. This assumes you are in a shared hosting situation, and do not have root access and cannot edit the Apache configuration files directly. Your …
how to delete .svn directories
find . -name .svn -type d -print0 | xargs -0 /bin/rm -fr
Dogs don’t buy dog food
A customer is someone who buys software. A user is someone who uses software. When it comes to enterprise software, these stop being the same person. This is why enterprise software is so bad.