Halfbaked Ideas

I have not worked a Euler Project problem in some time. Here’s problem 183:

Let N be a positive integer and let N be split into k equal parts, r = N/k, so that N = r + r + … + r.
Let P be the product of these parts, P = r × [...]

I am testing the jsMath package. Here’s how the authors describe it.

The jsMath package provides a method of including mathematics in HTML pages that works across multiple browsers under Windows, Macintosh OS X, Linux and other flavors of unix. It overcomes a number of the shortcomings of the traditional method of using images [...]

A couple of years ago I spent some time playing with Haskell. Not enough to get good with it, but enough to get an idea what it is about. After I satisfied my curiosity, I let it drop because I saw no real opportunity to use the language in earnest. The hardest thing about [...]

We’ve been moving to the Mac Pro as our standard development box where I work. … We’ve been buying from Crucial, but today I was reading a review of the new Mac Pro’s in Ars Technica, and they mentioned an outfit called Other World Computing .

I like to listen to tech podcasts, and one of my favorites is Mac Break Weekly. It is well produced, informative, and funny. Over the years, I feel like I have come to know Leo, Merlin, Scott, Alex, Andy, and the rest of the MBW gang. I am sorry to say that the last two [...]

I’m interested in learning a bit about the Jabber/XMPP protocol. There’s only one way I know to do so, and that is to mess with it. So I decided to install a Jabber server, ejabberd.
Installing ejabberd on Ubuntu is easy, but I hit an immediate roadblock: ejabberd has a web-based administrative interface, but following installation, [...]

I deal with windows, macs, and linux boxes in roughly equal parts on a regular basis. In my experience, macs and linux boxes tend to run smoothly for months, even years at a time. Window’s machines are relatively crotchety and hard to maintain. They gunk up, slow down, and require too many reboots.
I do some [...]

In my fantasy life, the one where I have some spare time and am not bleary from lack of sleep, I imagine myself studying math. Really. Here’s a nice list of free online math books.

Macs have a habit of littering remote servers with .DS_Store files. Apple explains how to make it stop:

To configure a Mac OS X user account so that .DS_Store files are not created when interacting with a remote file server using the Finder, follow the steps below. Note: This will affect the user’s interactions [...]

Some months ago Kevin (check him out at Hypothetical Labs) started the RDU erlounge, a monthly meeting of area erlang enthusiasts. The meetings were organized via a mailing list. Recently one of the guys on the list, Jared (Alloy Code), asked for a bit of help. He was working an exercise (a function to compute [...]