Marcus Schwartz

Evolution and the meme of the lolcat

marcus — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 06:52:09 +0000

Here’s an article where someone claims that evolution explains why lolcats control your mind. It’s very helpful, as I’ve been trying to figure this out for myself for a while now.

Steal This Wi-Fi

marcus — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 22:58:59 +0000

Here’s a bit of great commentary from Bruce Schneier about why you shouldn’t password protect your wireless network at home.

(Why) Can’t We Talk?

marcus — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 20:01:26 +0000

“Can’t We Talk?” is certainly an interesting perspective on the differences between how men and women can communicate.

She doesn’t address the reasons behind the differences she notes, but I’ll just throw out there that it seems like it is correlated with our society’s gender structure in general.

Pork, The Meat of Kings

marcus — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 18:45:38 +0000

Ham and bacon, you should taste them…

An Annoyingly Efficient Relevancy Engine

marcus — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 23:47:09 +0000

There are a lot of things in The Nerd Handbook that I can really relate to.

Solr Search and Java GC Tuning

marcus — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 20:03:02 +0000

We just rolled out a new site search feature at DS, using Apache Solr as the search backend. We are making use of several of it’s more resource intensive features, including faceting (on a bunch of fields) and the dismax query parser.

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Hungry Wakeup Kitty

marcus — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 17:40:46 +0000

Hungry Wake-up Kitty!

Reverse Engineering Skype

marcus — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 17:38:25 +0000

It brings me an immense amount of pleasure to see that someone has de-obfuscated and reverse-engineered skype [PDF]. It describes how to detect and block skype traffic, in addition to how to find and screw with the network control elements. We can only hope that someone takes this a step further, and writes bridges between the skype network and real VOIP networks.

Hearing color and other brain strangeness

marcus — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 23:58:25 +0000

Here is a truly fascinating 25 minute video entitled A journey to the center of your mind.

From the site:

In a wide-ranging talk, Vilayanur Ramachandran explores how brain damage can reveal the connection between the internal structures of the brain and the corresponding functions of the mind. He talks about phantom limb pain, synesthesia (when people hear color or smell sounds), and the Capgras delusion, when brain-damaged people believe their closest friends and family have been replaced with imposters.

Creating Clean HTML

marcus — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 23:46:10 +0000

Rebecca sent me a link to an article describing POSH - Plain Old Semantic HTML, which does a pretty good job of explaining the basics of the clean HTML I wish I saw in more websites.

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