A fun thread on mefi this morning, “What is the most efficient way to learn the native language of a country while traveling there on your own?”. One of the most interesting parts of this thread is that some of the commenters seem to have a natural feel for the language learning techniques I only […]
Category Archives: General
AskMefi on Language Learning
21-Mar-06Thesis Blues
15-Mar-06Ugh. I should be busily typing away at my thesis proposal(s!) right now. But I’m not. Perhaps it wasn’t the best idea to plan on finishing my MS Thesis and proposing my PhD Thesis in the same semester. Hrm. Well, my wife has her MS Thesis finishing up by summer too, so at least we […]
Tagging, Searching, Linking
08-Mar-06categorization vs ranked search. the old google-vs-yahoo! war of 1998-1999. it struck me the other day that these two paradigms aren’t as orthogonal as we make them out to be in our minds. full-text search is really just categorization where the categorical tags are the words in the text. it’s a very rough heuristic, but […]
Gentoo 2006.0
08-Mar-06Dusted off my old 5-year-old laptop–thinking it might make a good server–low power consumption, built-in UPS.� The new Gentoo Live CD is very slick.� Too bad it doesn’t quite work: The LiveCD auto-starts a gnome session.� Too bad it doesn’t allow the screen resolution to be any higher than 640×480.� This size is unfortunately too […]
a short braindump.
02-Mar-06hmm, haven’t posted anything in a while. a smattering of notes from life: my mother-in-law just took a trip to Yunnan, China to take photos. I’ve posted some of them in this flickr set went on ISI’s bi-annual AI retreat a few weekends ago. a few interesting things that I may fill out later: SIMILE […]
SQLObject Woes
27-Jan-06Don’t get me wrong, I still love SQLObject. The way it abstractifies database engines is very nice, and the way it treats SQL code in a pythonic way is absolute poetry. But it doesn’t seem ready for primetime. Two things that have been painful this last week: Evidently, you can’t have a boolean table column […]
Settling In
26-Jan-06An entry of more personal flavor: It’s been almost a month now that I’ve been married. Life is slowly settling back to normal. Our bed finally arrived today (no more sleeping on two unequal-height twin mattresses pushed together, THANK GOD). The books are getting unpacked and the pictures are getting placed on the walls… There’s […]
Art, (In)security, Surveillance
12-Jan-06While doing my best to shake off digital guilt, I’ve been slowly reading through the backlog of weeks of unread blogs in my spare time. We Make Money Not Art had a great commentary, Panoptic Insecurity, on an installation entitled Gun Control. Gun Control is an electromechanical installation, which explores underlying issues of both security […]
Back
10-Jan-06Back now. And married, too! Strangely enough, not much is different, with a few subtle exceptions: our kitchen is a bit more well-equipped from the wedding gifts I get to wake up every morning next to a beautiful woman our apartment is an absolute mess from all the moving boxes I suddenly have a little […]
twenty eight days
02-Dec-05???!