kmod's blog

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  • Rosetta Stone

    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…

    Kevin Modzelewski

    January 4, 2010
    Uncategorized
  • Avatar

    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…

    Kevin Modzelewski

    December 23, 2009
    Uncategorized
  • Topcoder SRM 456

    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. …

    Kevin Modzelewski

    December 22, 2009
    Uncategorized
  • Topcoder rankings

    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…

    Kevin Modzelewski

    December 22, 2009
    Uncategorized
  • Google: the benevolent dictator of information

    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,…

    Kevin Modzelewski

    December 17, 2009
    Uncategorized
  • Why mozy is terrible

    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…

    Kevin Modzelewski

    December 16, 2009
    Uncategorized
  • The Great Climate-gate Debate

    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…

    Kevin Modzelewski

    December 10, 2009
    Uncategorized
  • Why generator functions suck

    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…

    Kevin Modzelewski

    December 9, 2009
    Uncategorized
  • Linode vs EC2 vs Shared Hosting vs Dedicated

    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…

    Kevin Modzelewski

    December 7, 2009
    Uncategorized
  • DARPA Network Challenge Over

    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…

    Kevin Modzelewski

    December 5, 2009
    Uncategorized
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