You are really lazy. It's nothing personal of course -- everyone tends
to procrastinate to some extent, but right now it's YOUR turn. In just a
moment, I am going to convince you that you want to do something. You'll
agree that it's a good idea, you'll tell yourself that you …
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Posted Mon 25 August 2008
by mcherm
in Uncategorized
(backup, bet, lazy, mozy, review, wager)
Unlike computers, humans tend to think in metaphors. That is, when we
want to reason about something new or unfamiliar we reason by analogy
with something familiar. This is a great mental trick and it is part of
what allows humans to be flexible and to deal with unanticipated
circumstances …
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Posted Mon 28 July 2008
by mcherm
in Programming
"Maintenance Programmer": This common, and
underappreciated
species of programmer is often heard muttering and cursing under their
breath. Sometimes bald from tearing their hair out in frustration.
From time to time we all have to do it: simple changes and maintenance
to code - often other people's code. And the truth …
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Posted Fri 18 July 2008
by mcherm
in Programming
Suppose you want to select k things randomly from a list of n items,
with no duplicates. Of course, if k > n, then it's hopeless, and if k =
n it's trivial, so the interesting case is when k < n. A naive approach
might pick an item randomly, and try again …
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Posted Fri 27 June 2008
by mcherm
in Math, Programming
In a previous
article I talked
about using salt with a secure hash, but all of the examples assumed
that the secure hash would be used to validate passwords. Secure hashes
can be used for many other purposes, and I'll illustrate that by
describing two other possible uses.
The first …
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Posted Thu 12 June 2008
by mcherm
in Programming