kmod's blog

I recently took part in a TopCoder Single Round Match (SRM), which ended up being very difficult.  You can see the overall statistics here — out of 557 people that opened the easiest problem (ie took a look at the problem description), only 223 (40.0%) got it correct.  In my (limited) experience, that’s a very […]

Google comes under a lot of fire these days for “controlling” too much of the information of the internet.  A lot of this criticism comes from the dying old-media types that’d rather blame someone else than innovate, and a lot of this criticism is (rightly) deflected.  Google doesn’t own any data; even with Google Books, […]

Disclaimer: I am now an employee of Dropbox, and though I see Mozy and Dropbox as providing distinct services, some may see them as competitors. I’ve started to think about backup again lately, since I have more and more files that would really suck to lose.  Until now I’ve used a combination of Dropbox and […]

I went to this a forum today on the recent “Climate-gate” event. In case you haven’t heard about it, someone hacked into the University of East Anglia’s email system and publicly posted a large number of emails sent by climate scientists working in their Climatic Research Unit. And some of those emails are pretty bad […]

I recently had to debug a piece of code similar to the following: def f(x): return globals.get(x) def g(x): # Very long function that calls f() at certain points #In a different module: def h(x): return g(x) The problem was that something was breaking inside the function of f. I started inserting print statements to […]

As I mentioned in the first post, I set this blog up on a Linode virtual server.  I debated for a while about how I wanted to host it.  My options were: EC2 instance Linode VPS prgmr VPS On my desktop machine Shared hosting Get a dedicated server First I looked into shared hosting, like […]

I posted yesterday about the DARPA Network Challenge, and the MIT team for it.  The balloons were released this morning, and the MIT team won!  I looked a little more into the MIT team, and from their site: We are a group of researchers at M.I.T. interested in understanding the role of social networks in […]

My fourth and final Putnam (though according to the MIT math department, my fifth??) was today.  I haven’t done any real math in a while, so one of the questions in the fist half was pretty jarring: Does there exist an abelian group where the product of the orders of the members is 2^2009? I […]

DARPA is hosting another crowd-sourcing competition, this time in terms of social networks.  They’re releasing large red weather balloons around the US, and the goal is to spot and report the locations of all 10.  The first team that can do this wins the $40k prize. https://networkchallenge.darpa.mil/default.aspx This seems like a really interesting application of […]

I have a blog. It’s set up on a linode.com virtual private server (VPS), which I plan to use for other things as well. My idea is to post random interesting technical things that I run into — we’ll see how this works out.