I came to the realization that while MediaWiki worked, it was hideously industrial-strength for my purposes. Ditched it in favor of MoinMoin. MoinMoin has turned out both snappier (especially when I run it from a mac ;) ) and easier to customize/hack. There’s a handy conversion tool to port MediaWiki data to MoinMoin format, but […]
Category Archives: computer
Data Synchronization/Backup Headaching
24-Sep-05A friend of mine’s recent hard drive catastrophe finally got me around to implementing a decent, cron’ed backup implementation for all the stuff I don’t store in my svn server (mp3s, photos, and other media just don’t change enough to merit the overhead of checking them into a VCS). RSync would work well, you’d think… […]
latex
13-Jun-05Urgh, LaTeX. Tools with clunky UIs, nonintuitive markup, unhelpful error messages on failed compiles, and a glass-cannon bibliography manager. Resourcelist: a latex primer mac-tex: latex resources for mac the one thing that made it worthwhile: automatic citeulike2bibtex export TexShop my latex tool of choice on the mac, for now Kile my linux-based latex tool-of-the-day (yes, […]
Freetag
19-Apr-05Freetag – an Open Source Tagging / Folksonomy module for PHP/MySQL applications. Gordon is awesome.
Mass Transit and Google Maps
19-Apr-05Spent the good part of an hour yesterday night helping my girlfriend navigate between Big Blue Bus and Culver City Bus routes, so that she can get from Westwood to Culver city without a car. What a pain. After seeing the wonderful hack combining housing on Craigslist with Google Maps, it seems like it might […]
Pi
04-Apr-05An article on Slashdot quite a while ago prompted me to google for the Chudnovsky brothers. In doing so, I found a great article from the New Yorker written in 1992. It’s a bit outdated, mathematically, and (more funnily, technologically). For instance, What really struck me was the parallels to Aranofsky’s movie, Pi. Not only […]
A Caveat About the Brain
22-Mar-05One caveat off of last post, comparing the brain to a Turing Machine: Perhaps I should be more careful about making such comparisons. Throughout history, mankind seems to have always used the latest tech to talk about the brain. The ancient romans said the brain was like a catapult. Later, people have compared the brain […]
Telepolis has an interview with Slavoj Zizek entitled “Hysteria and Cyberspace”. Deep, deep, good stuff. Do you know the function ‘undelete’ in computers? The problem with computers is not that something can be erased: you worked all afternoon and then have a power failure and it’s gone. Okay, these things can happen. But you know […]