Today I was challenged with the following advanced statistics problem: Two variables are exponentially distributed with rate parameters lambda 1 ( λ1 ) and lambda 2 ( λ2 ). What is the probability ( p ) that variable 1 ( X1 ) is less than v ... Continue Reading
Today while working with a 3rd party’s codebase, I ran into a situation which git-svn could not directly handle without pulling in massive amounts of unnecessary repository history. Turns out the solution was much simpler than I anticipated, so I’m sharing here in case it’ ... Continue Reading
Since I spent the time to dig up the method of calculating the wind chill given a specific temperature and wind speed, I figured I would go ahead and share it in case someone else finds it useful. Here’s three functions for calculating the wind chill, one each for Javascript, PHP, an ... Continue Reading
A good friend of mine started a new blog on Math and Programming related topics. She has an interest in Ruby development, especially with an abstract algebra / math focus, so if you’re interested in either Ruby or Mathematics, I’m sure there will be posts there which you will f ... Continue Reading
First drawing using Brushes, originally uploaded by Jeremy Johnstone. Today I spent most of the day catching up on my blog reading and I stumbled across an article about a guy using an iPhone app named Brushes to design this month’s cover of The New Yorker. Highly impressed by ... Continue Reading
Over the past week or so, I’ve been hearing a faint but very high pitched (>12k hz) whistling like sound coming from my 2006 Honda Accord V6 Coupe. It’s kind of a cross between an air leak type sound and the sound of a metal ball bearing spinning at high speed inside a metallic ... Continue Reading
Today over lunch coworkers were talking about Wolfram|Alpha and it sparked my interest again now that it’s finally open to the public. Tonight I decided to give it a whirl and unlike two of my friends, decided to throw it a softball initially with a very easy question: what is the sp ... Continue Reading
This weekend I finally got around to updating my website design again after a year since the last visual update. It seems it’s more or less become a once a year type deal. The old design just wasn’t doing it for me so I took the opportunity to scrap everything and start over. W ... Continue Reading
Digging around today for a PHP parser for OSX plist files, I was surprised to find no good pre-existing solutions. Even Apple’s own site gives a relatively poor solution to the problem (see here). Normally SimpleXML is enough to handle most XML parsing needs, but the plist XML format ... Continue Reading
I’m not sure what lead me to it, but I stumbled across a blog post on how to implement Enums in PHP via userland code written by Jonathan Hohle. I liked the concept he had, but the implementation was a bit unappealing because it used eval() among other more minor issues. You shouldn& ... Continue Reading
