Matt's Blog

Here’s a challenge I’m facing right now for a little side project I’m dabbling with. Given an arbitrary webpage, return the ‘representative’ image that you would use if you were constructing a link to the page. For example, this Uncrate post should show the trailer, as it’s directly relevant. This news story should show one [...]

I’m toying with building a small library that will take a URL, load and parse it (using Mechanize and Loofah), and spit out a title, description/summary, and the ‘main’ image. Sometimes it’s a piece of cake, like when they have Open Graph tags indicating all of that information in the headers. (I also plan to [...]

I used to work for an ad-supported company, so I’ve always felt kind of bad using AdBlock. I bifurcated for a while between keeping AdBlock off except for obnoxious sites, or keeping AdBlock and whitelisting sites I frequent that aren’t obnoxious. It ended up getting to be too much of a hassle, so I’ve browsed [...]

When I put together my system, I picked the i7-930 because Microcenter offered it for less than the i7-920. Both are practically the same processor; the i7-920 is 2.66 GHz and mine is 2.8 GHz. Both are legendary for their ability to be overclocked. I didn’t necessarily run with the overclocking crowd, but I’ve always [...]