I am facing the task of refactoring a database whose structure has accreted through the years. Table names like "Foo" and "FooX." Something like 20 tables that have no records (those are easy to scratch), others that have virtually the same columns and yet which each have thousands of records …

I have Acronis TrueImage, which got good reviews from PC Mag, as my backup software, running against a Maxtor OneTouch over USB 2.0. It's insanely slow: an incremental backup of my data partition takes more than a day. The partition is big (200G) but the delta is some small …

The Netflix optimization challenge exemplifies a situation for which there should be a solution, but which I've not seen a good answer. Namely: for-profit but initially ad-hoc cooperation. For instance, let's just say that I made the case that a Pandora-like "Movie Genome Project" was the key to winning …

Scott Swigart points to this article that gives a non-technical overview of the use of genetic algorithms to determine the optimal tuning characteristics of one's Linux Kernel. This ought to work: many years ago I wrote a genetic algorithm that tuned the optimization parameters of one's C++ compiler and it …

My "Mechanical Turk" reference in the previous post was, as Michael Chermside says, a facetious strategy of using Amazon's cheap-human-labor service to improve movie recommendations. I've been trying to come up with a joke about this that involves the word "Bollywood" and yet which isn't potentially offensive...

In the real …

Well, looks like my Christmas shopping is done for the year... [via Jeff Atwood]

Netflix is offering \$1M to the first person who can achieve 10% better movie recommendations than their current system. Sweet.

I have all sorts of ideas on this. Thank heavens I have copious spare time.

Jon Udell's latest Screening Room is about Windows Live Writer, Microsoft's quite-nice blogging client. However, the discussion of microformats glosses over a significant limitation in the current version of Live Writer, which is that addin content is atomic. For instance, I secured the domain name distributedreviews.com (it's just parked …

Borland is abandoning its two-year-old strategy of delivering a "software development platform" to further the goal of "software delivery optimization." As I feared from the start, Borland's over-stuffed product portfolio and large ambitions clashed with their limited resources.

To summarize: Borland was once the most loved brand in the programming …

Microsoft has granted two additional "grand prizes" to other "Made in Express" finalists. As you may recall, I declared "shenanigans" at the original winner, which was a team project that had been in development for years. An uproar slowly developed and after some reluctance (including a letter from MS Legal …