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Tilted Twister – a Lego Mindstorms robot that solves Rubik%u2019s cube: “”

(Via .)

David MacKay: Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms: Humour
: “Comparison of Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms with Harry Potter”

The site for those who are debating buying a Harry Potter book or buying a machine leaerning book by David Mackay and need a little help in comparing the two.

The Future of Reputation full text online.

Many Eyes dataset visualization from IBM Research

Collective Intelligence FOO Camp

I found a great quote in the comments of Diomidis Spinellis’ blog entry Rational Metaprogramming:’Problems worthy of attack prove their worth by fighting back’ — Piet Hein

That’s a great way to put it!

Rob’s discussing object models for baseball cards. He is evolving a design bit-by-bit.

My first question is what use cases do you want for your database of baseball cards? Searching real stats for the season? Or just searching for cards? To me, that changes the way I’d lay it out.

To play along, here is a primitive set of plain old Ruby objects to model what he has so far. I thought it might be interesting to contrast the two.

OK, well, I lied, it is a little different, because I went ahead and subclassed for the variant card type.

class Card
  attr_reader :year, :number
  
  def initialize(number, year)
    @number = number
    @year = year
  end
end

class PlayerCard < Card
  attr_reader :player
  
  def initialize(number, year, player)
    super(number, year)
    @player = player    
  end
end

class BattingLeadersCard < Card
  attr_reader :top_50_batting_players # this is a list of players
  
  def initialize(number, year, top_50_batting_players)
    super(number, year)
    @top_50_batting_players = top_50_batting_players
  end

  def top_3
	top_50_batting_players[0..2]
  end
end


class Player
  attr_reader :name, :team
  
  def initialize(name, team)
    @name = name
    @team = team    
  end
end

Squeakland has a list put together by Alan Kay for his students that gives background on the ideas behind Smalltalk.

It looks like quite an interesting list.

Eugene Wallingford comments on comments received on his recent entry, ‘A Program is an Idea.’

This is timely given recent conversations I’ve had about getting kids interested in programming. Mark Guzdial’s recent discussion of introducing programming is relevant as well.

(Via Knowing and Doing.)

Using Google to Crack Hashed Passwords is very clever, but only works if software developers are dumb enough to store raw password hashes anywhere, and if people choose passwords made out of real words.

(Via Crypto-Gram.)

I updated to 10.5.1 and Safari wouldn’t launch. Instead, it told me I could not use this app with this version of OS X.

This article on the Apple support discussion board has a fix for the problem.

Broken permissions. So, the quick solution. Drag the app (Safari) to the desktop, and then back to Applications. That essentially fixes the permissions. WTF Apple?