http://www.tropo.com/dave/blog David Spencer's personal weblog Fri, 08 Aug 2008 04:58:52 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en We like the Challah from Trader Joes, and one of the advances of this century is that you can buy it almost any day of the week, whereas in the ole days it seemed to be a Friday/Saturday bread. We usually make french toast out of it on weekends or ... http://www.tropo.com/dave/blog/2008/08/07/let-there-be-challah/ What do you do when you have a data set too large to fit into RAM? You could just use disk directly, so instead of a dict you use a shelve or bsddb, however the problem with that is that you then have a performance hit as all operations are disk ... http://www.tropo.com/dave/blog/2008/07/13/infinitesortedobjectsequence-for-large-data-sets-in-python/ I just rediscovered Draegers in Menlo Park. Informally the prices are just as high as Williams-Sonoma at the Stanford shopping center, however Draegers is open later (10pm nightly), seems to easily have more specialty food items than WS, and upstairs at Draegers they have a good selection of cooking ... http://www.tropo.com/dave/blog/2008/07/13/if-you-shop-at-williams-sonoma-in-palo-alto-dont-forget-draegers-in-menlo-park/ I've realized that I understand things best when I implement them myself, and I was recently reading Trevor Strohman's dissertation, intriguied by TupleFlow, a kind of more elaborate and improved MapReduce, and was about to write my own toy impl of TupleFlow when I decided to simplify and just ... http://www.tropo.com/dave/blog/2008/07/09/mapreduce-in-10-or-so-lines-of-python/ Kieran has made a great move from a fast runner to a faster "push bike" racer and is ranked first in his very serious division. Here's a nice picture of him here. http://www.tropo.com/dave/blog/2008/06/26/congratulations-to-kieran-sherlock-first-in-road-mens-cat-3-individual-time-trial-rankings-in-california/ It seems that for years I've been upgrading wordpress, and usually a security bug in xmlrpc.php is mentioned. The latest update, 2.3.3, has a typical line: ...a flaw was found in the XML-RPC implementation... Besides upgrading whenever I notice the problem, my attempt an additional measure of safety is: ... http://www.tropo.com/dave/blog/2008/03/03/wordpress-xmlrpcphp-considered-continually-dangerous/ In this sad story about a man being beaten after a traffic accident in Oakland, I found the first comment hilarious: In that neighborhood, unless your car can't run anymore, do not stop for anything. Call the police after you come to a safe environment. If your car is dead, come out ... http://www.tropo.com/dave/blog/2008/03/03/funny-comment-in-sfgate-story/ This is ominous: "Software giant says rejection of $45 billion offer is 'unfortunate.'" http://www.tropo.com/dave/blog/2008/02/11/ominous-use-of-unfortunate/ For years I used to go to Java Man in Hermosa Beach and regularly order their Morning Glory Muffins. I'm pretty happy with the Morning Glory Muffin recipe from Earthbound Organic Farms and it produces muffins that look like this: I've played around with the recipe and made some modifications: I don't use ... http://www.tropo.com/dave/blog/2008/01/28/morning-glory-muffins/ Unfortunately Bobby Fischer passed away recently :( I think I like Mark Crowther's writeup the best esp when he says: Fischer's greatness was the clarity, precision and beauty of his chess games, the battling uncompromising nature he took to every tournament and match he ever played and the sheer drama of ... http://www.tropo.com/dave/blog/2008/01/28/bobby-fischer-rip/