Randomhacks - randomhacks.net - Random Hacks
General Information:
Latest News:
Best article I've seen on SOPA 19 Jan 2012 | 09:29 am
Wikipedia, Google and many other internet sites are protesting PIPA and SOPA today. But their official explanations don’t include very many details about the actual legislation. If you’d like to lear...
Screencast: Use Rails and RDF.rb to parse Best Buy product reviews 6 Jun 2011 | 07:07 am
In the past few years, many companies have been embedding machine-readable metadata in their web pages. Among these is Best Buy, which provides extensive RDFa data describing their products, prices an...
Heroku "Celadon Cedar" review 4 Jun 2011 | 07:20 am
Heroku just released a new version of their hosting service for Ruby on Rails. It’s called Celadon Cedar, and it adds support for arbitrary background processes, Node.js servers and long-polling over ...
Derivatives of algebraic data structures: An excellent tutorial 21 May 2011 | 08:01 am
Last month, the folks at Lab49 explained how to compute the derivative of a data structure. This is a great example of how to write about mathematical subjects for a casual audience: They draw analogi...
What do these fixed points have in common? 13 May 2011 | 12:09 am
A question asked while standing in the shower: What do all of the following have in common? Banach and Brouwer fixed points. If you’re in Manhattan, and you crumple up a map of Manhattan and place it...
AWS outage timeline & downtimes by recovery strategy 25 Apr 2011 | 08:41 pm
Renting a server from Amazon is no substitute for a disaster recovery plan. If you run your own servers, you need backups. If you can’t afford to go down, you also need offsite replication. But if yo...
The state of Ruby, RDF and Rails 3 21 Dec 2010 | 08:56 am
Recently, I was investigating the state of RDF in the Ruby world. Here are some notes, in case anybody is curious. I have used only a few of these Ruby RDF libraries, so please feel free to add your o...
Feedhose demo: Real-time RSS using Node.js and Socket.io 14 Oct 2010 | 12:09 am
Yesterday evening, I released an experimental Node.js/Socket.io application: feedhose.randomhacks.net Just leave your web browser open, and watch the New York Times headlines scroll by. Dave Winer i...
Visualizing WordNet relationships as graphs 30 Dec 2009 | 09:38 am
The WordNet database contains all sorts of interesting relationships between words: it can categorize words into hierarchies, find the parts of an object, and answer many other interesting questions. ...
Experimenting with NLTK 29 Dec 2009 | 10:31 am
The Natural Language Toolkit for Python is a great framework for simple, non-probabilistic natural language processing. Here are some example snippets (and some trouble-shooting notes). Concordances ...
