Scott's Blog

I came across this interesting little program to detect code that appears to be copied and pasted from one place to another. It's about $20.00 and is free to try for Linux and Windows and works with any text. It doesn't seem like a difficult program to write, sounds like it might be similar to the rsync algorithm . Differences would be that you would chunk into n lines instead of bytes and you would store all the checksums in a hash table, to find duplicates. Maybe cleaning up whitespaces and removing comments might also improve the algorithm.

Yesterday, I was hoping that maybe I could at least get on a list to buy the Nintendo Wii, but no luck. I tried Amazon.com but they sold out in less than a minute. We are currently out of stock: We sold out of our initial supply of the Wii on Sunday morning, November 19, in less than one minute. We expect to receive periodic shipments of the Wii from Nintendo throughout the holidays and we will post availability updates in this section of the product detail page as well as in the customer discussions below. Looks like they were selling the bundle and I was looking mostly at the basic Wii console package. If you don't mind 100%+ markup you can get the Wii on e-bay and from various other places. Even if they mark it up 270%, it's still cheaper than a PS3!

This topic is brought up quite a bit on the internet ( google search ), but there are some new reasons that we may see a greater takeover of the desktop. Microsoft's new Vista is expensive , has too many versions, Vista requires a beefy computer , Vista's DRM is possibly killing itself . Microsoft has to lock down their operating system because of malware. This will make it more difficult for other software and hardware to work with Windows, and for users to set up their computer the way they want. Compelling gaming consoles and increased PC graphic card costs may kill PC gaming. The big advantage of PC gaming was that you had a better screen, a keyboard and the possibility of stealing games from the Internet. Also, you had a good excuse to purchase a kick-ass computer. Now with high definition televisions and gaming consoles with special remotes , all of a sudden installing games on a PC seems like a lot more work. Really super easy installs with the Synaptic package m

Mark J. Foster gave a longish presentation about the OLPC ($100.00 laptop) project which you can watch here . It's one of the best explanations I've seen yet about the project and goes into some details of the hardware. I've mentioned before that this project can make sense solely as an e-book reader and Foster says that (vindicating my guess). He mentions that most countries spend more than $100.00 over five years in books for children, if they buy the laptop and download the books they would not only save money, but have something that does more than what paper books can do. Other things that were new to me is that the laptop will have a light to see the keyboard. I already knew about the web cam but he gave a nice scenario about the first time you turn on the device. When you first turn it on, through diagrams and audio it help you take a picture of your face and creates an avatar. As others turn on their laptops and go through the process you should start seeing t

My flight back to Brazil was supposed to be San Jose, Dallas, São Paulo, Belo Horizonte. The first leg I had 40 minutes to get to my next plane (which means that it's likely that my bags would not make it). We left the gate of San Jose maybe five minutes late and then sat around the tarmac for another 5 minutes, so we took off about ten minutes late. The Dallas airport is huge and we have to taxi for what seems like forever and it made us 15 minutes late at the gate. So now I have 25 minutes to make the connection - and there's no way my bags will ever make it. Except I'm at the very back of the plane, it takes another 10 minutes to get off so now I have 15 minutes. I run to the area where the train is and it just leaves as I arrive. Another 5 minutes waiting - plus running for a few minutes. Finally, I get on the train and I see that I have a huge number of stops to do. I'm at terminal A and I have to go to terminal D, there must be 7 stops I'll have to do

Snopes has an interesting list of the most popular Halloween costumes . What I find interesting is that it appears that little girls overwhelmingly want to dress up as a princess, but when they grow up, they want to dress as a witch. But men and boys consistently want to be a pirate.