kmod's blog

I did a bunch of traveling over winter break.  And there are a few things that are a constant about traveling: the first is the hassle, which I partially deal with by taking trains whenever I can instead of flying.  The other is seeing large displays of Rosetta Stone boxes.  It’s to the point that…

Well, I hate to say it, but Avatar didn’t live up to my expectations. Probably because they were impossibly high. Personally, i found the storyline to be cliche and predictable. The graphics, as expected, were amazing, but overall the movie was missing that feeling of “oh s***” that I’ve felt in all my all-time favorite…

Today I took part in another Topcoder SRM — only a week after the previous one.  I hadn’t competed in any since March, and now there were two in the space of a week. Anyway, the competition this time was fairly easy, so it seems like they were (over-)compensating from the hard tournament last week. …

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…