Matt's Blog

I really love Markov chains, largely because they often produce text that resembles intelligible text just enough that we try to make sense of it only to realize that it’s absolute nonsense. So I find Garkov to be sheer brilliance. It takes drawings from old Garfield cartoons and generates text using Markov chains. And comics [...]

When I heard the Gates-Crowley thing, I pretty quickly came to the conclusion that it was a petty squabble that didn’t seem to involve race. I stopped caring. I don’t know who thought to ask the President what he thought about the borderline-justified arrest of someone for disorderly conduct in their home. But this ridiculous [...]

There’s a big movement in software development to do rapid release cycles. We tend to release every two weeks. If we ahve major work to do, we can expand the window, and sometimes we have just a small sprint and code, test, and release in a week. Software, be it a simple website or a [...]

When I get gas, I swipe my credit card at the pump, fill up, get my receipt, and drive off. Since the filling up process takes a couple minutes, I find myself observing other people. One thing I’ve noticed is that most people do not pay at the pump. They pull in, look around trying [...]

When I have the time, I find that I actually enjoy helping people with computer problems. It’s something that comes naturally to me, and often people are one stop short of terrified of the errors they’re seeing. But here is some advice on asking for help: Please provide context. What program were you in and [...]

I tend to be pretty obsessive-compulsive, and OxiClean is quite effective at cleaning, so it’s little surprise that I use it religiously. But what is OxiClean, anyway? Oxygen, of course. I never really thought it through enough to realize that my image of it as powdered oxygen made no sense at all. (And if oxygen [...]

This whole “birther” movement is really taking off. (Somewhat like “tweets,” I really hate the word “birther.” For those who don’t follow lunatic conspiracy theories, “birthers” are the people who content that Obama is not a US citizen.) I used to try to reason with these people, but I’ve given up on even listening to [...]

I had pondered aloud about Radiant CMS in the past about Radiant CMS, a small and slick CMS. After tooling around for about 45 minutes, here’s a mini-review: It’s easy to set up, and is, indeed, small and slick. Generally, it works well. It’s seemingly not meant for non-technical users. To get a basic templated [...]

Quantcast eventually collected enough data on visitors to the blogs to generate some statistics on visitors. I know from Google Analytics that 64% of visits come from search engines, and that “returning” visitors only make up 25% of visits, so “we” that post here are in the minority. Still, the results surprised me a bit. [...]

If anyone is interested, I’m gearing up to list my old camera, a Fuji FinePix S5100. It’s “only” 4 megapixels, but still takes good shots. It has excellent zoom, macro mode, and can do short videos at 640×480. It includes a 1GB xD card and an xD card reader; the manual and software are available [...]