Brilliant! The Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression (http://www.hutter1.net/prize.htm) takes as its challenge the task of compressing 100MB of Wikipedia text into the pre-competition best of \~17MB. The idea is that a chunk of Wikipedia text that big has characteristics relevant to compression that go beyond …

Jeff Atwood, of Coding Horror, says that "the benefits of moving to quad core and beyond are less clear." He produces some numbers to reveal that many of today's processor-intensive applications (media, gaming, databases, etc.) are not multithreaded and, therefore, do not run significantly faster on multicore machines. He observes …

You just have to watch this guitar solo to believe it. Amazing.

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I'm an easy-going guy, but the idea of trying to create a universe in a "bubble" in an accelerator seems like a bad idea.

I joined this book swap site today. Of course, its utility grows with the size of the network.

Look how natural that looks. Doesn't that look good? Wouldn't you buy that? I'd buy that. My friends would buy that. You'd buy that. Of course you would.

Oh yeah.

If you've been following my "Offtopic" or "Hawaii" topics, you've been hearing me lament what it's been like assembling a non-standard desktop machine (dual processors, huge hard drives, All-in-Wonder 800XT) by mail order when you live 3,000 miles from the mainland. Well, aside from cleaning up the boxes everywhere …

My colleague Andrew Binstock, who's always been too busy making money to blog, disagrees with me that Ruby-the-language is crossing the chasm. He think that Rails is great, but is not enamored of Ruby-the-language. I, on the other hand, continue to be skeptical about Rails (has it changed the dialogue …

Firefox 1.5.06 is my default browser. It's acting a little strangely with some of the admin facilities on this site, though, so I just opened IE (7, beta 3). OK, but now I discover that when I type a URI into the IE addressbar, a new tab opens …