Articles
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10 January 2012
An Exhaustive Explanation of Minimax, a Staple AI Algorithm The minimax algorithm is used to determine which moves a computer player makes in games like tic-tac-toe, checkers, othello, and chess. You can think of the algorithm as similar to the human thought process of saying, "OK, if I make this move, then my opponent can only make two moves, and each of those would let me win. So this is the right move to make."
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05 January 2012
A Philosophy of Programming, Rough Sketch An attempt to describe an approach to programming within an integrated framework.
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03 August 2011
Why I Don't Want to Start a Startup I don't want to start a startup because of the experiences I've had with working for them. Also, the idea of financial freedom is not as appealing to me as it once was. Finally, there are already big challenges in my life.
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02 May 2011
Thank You Thank you, everyone who has viewed Clean Up Your Mess. Thanks as well to everyone who has passed it on.
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21 January 2011
Higml: Hierarchical, Cascading, Dynamic Configuration If your configuration is convoluted as all hell, Higml might be for you. Also, this is my first attempt at writing first-class documentation.
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19 January 2011
Writing Better Documentation The learning curve for code libraries is often unnecessarily steep. I frequently feel that if the author had written better documentation, I'd be able to use his work much more quickly, or at least figure out that it's wrong for me and move on. I'm trying to write better documentation myself.
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14 January 2011
Blog Reboot It's been nearly a year since I've added anything to this site. There are a few reasons for that, though for now I'll only mention that I didn't like that the site existed in part to sell an iphone app and possibly future apps. Well, it turns out that I don't really care about overtly selling stuff. What I really want is a place to write about the pursuits I care about most.
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15 February 2010
Models for Dealing with Fear The world abounds with wacky models that help actual people actually overcome actual fear. Some people believe their obstacles are put there by God as tests for them to pass. Others believe that mortal life is a game played by immortal energy beings, just for the fun of it. And some folks believe that there is nothing more to life than what we see; when we die, that's the end, so we better make the most of it. Wacky!
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10 January 2010
Look Into My Eyes My first attempt to give myself super powers merely gave me sore palms. Riding in the back of my mother's beater as a five-year-old, I focused sunlight on the center of each hand using a magnifying glass likely found in a cereal box. After I was "charged up" I would point at trees, cars, fire hydrants, and other hapless objects and think to myself, "In five years, that thing's going to burst into flames."
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06 January 2010
I'm Going to Take All the Help I Can Get A few months ago, I was really psyched about some project (don't recall which), and said to myself, "I'm going to finish this thing, and nothing's going to get in my way." Immediately it occurred to me that a better attitude would be, "I'm going to finish this thing -- and I'll take all the help I can get."
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01 January 2010
Control Time Submitted to App Store Today I finally wrapped up Control Time and submitted it to the app store :-). Hopefully they'll publish it soon.
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12 December 2009
How to Get and Stay Motivated A lot of people view their motivation as something out of their control. It comes and goes, catlike in its fickleness. By breaking down motivation to its components, however, you'll be able to troubleshoot your lack of motivation and figure out ways to increase it.
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01 December 2009
The Why of this Site I'm a young software developer and caregiver. This web site is about my experimentations in creating and following a system for constant personal growth. This article gives some background on the circumstances that motivated me to start those experimentations and this site.
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21 May 2009
Follow Your Followers Using Ruby A quick way to automatically follow people who follow you on twitter.
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11 May 2009
Aikidoka Prevents Namespace Collisions A way to avoid namespace collisions.
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24 August 2008
Usability Embodied A few years ago I ordered DSL service. The DSL modem came with an ethernet cable, and one end was labeled "this end goes in your computer", and the other was labeled "this end goes in the modem." Obviously, it doesn't matter which end goes where, but the labels undoubtedly eliminated any possible confusion.
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14 July 2008
Robots! I've been learning more about electronics, in part to get a ground-up understanding of computers. In the process I've become interested in learning to build robots.
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02 June 2008
RubyProfHelper: Reducing ruby-prof Boilerplate This is meant to save me from having to write the same boilerplate profiling code over and over.
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14 May 2008
Announcing Palmist A tool for finding and fixing mysql bottlenecks in Ruby on Rails
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12 May 2008
Chunky Iterator: So You Don't have to Load All your AR Objects at Once The following code lets you iterate over large collections of Active Record objects without having to load them all at once, thus reducing memory usage. It's allowed me to run cron jobs which iterate over thousands of records without getting the cron'd process killed for using too much of a system's resources.
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05 April 2008
Rails Prototypal Attributes Give your models javascript-esque prototypal methods. When accessing an attribute on the prototypal object, the attribute's value is returned if not nil. Otherwise, the "linked" object's attribute value is returned.