Learning Python, Linux, Java, Ruby and more with Videos, Tutorials and Screencasts

Learning Python, Linux, Java, Ruby and more with Videos, Tutorials and Screencasts: "Showmedo is about learning and (Free and) Open-source software (FOSS). We were inspired to start Showmedo by watching some very effective web video-tutorials/screencasts. These convinced us that web-videos can be a great way to quickly and efficiently acquire knowledge. It can even be fun, or at least painless. For some things there is no substitute to seeing it done."

Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition

Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition: "Here we illustrate the face mining concept for the TV series Star Trek. Specifically, we applied our state-of-the art algorithms in face detection, face tracking and face recognition to 67 Star Trek episodes over three seasons. This process automatically extracts all visible face tracks, and clusters these into a small number of same-person groupings. Currently, we recognize frontal or near-frontal tracks. In the near future, we will extend our results to non-frontal tracks as well.

Given our face mining output, it took a person less than five minutes to assign names to all the main characters (Kirk, Spock, Mccoy, Uhura, Scotty, Sulu and Chekov) and a couple of minor ones (Janice, Nurse Chapel) across all 67 episodes."

Reading for Pleasure and Instruction - John Derbyshire - The Corner on National Review Online

Reading for Pleasure and Instruction - John Derbyshire - The Corner on National Review Online: "Reading for duty is a miserable business, from which little is gained. It's much better, certainly for teens, to read second-rate stuff that engages one's attention, than classics that leave you cold."

The Corner on National Review Online

The Corner on National Review Online: "Reading for duty is a miserable business, from which little is gained. It's much better, certainly for teens, to read second-rate stuff that engages one's attention, than classics that leave you cold. In my own teens I read almost nothing but science fiction." - John Derbyshire

Exclusive Toad World Freeware

Exclusive Toad World Freeware: "The PL/Vision Code Library provides over 1,000 PL/SQL functions and procedures that extend the capabilities of the PL/SQL language."

Greg Mankiw's Blog: Fiscal Responsibility

Greg Mankiw's Blog: Fiscal Responsibility: "To put those numbers in perspective, imagine that the head of a household with annual spending of $100,000 called everyone in the family together to deal with a $34,000 budget shortfall. How much would he or she announce that spending had to be cut? By $3 over the course of the year--approximately the cost of one latte at Starbucks. The other $33,997? We can put that on the family credit card and worry about it next year."

OTL 4.0, Example 585 (Oracle Change Notification via otl_subscriber)

OTL 4.0, Example 585 (Oracle Change Notification via otl_subscriber): "This example demonstrates Oracle Change Notification Interface via otl_subscriber."

understanding hype cycles

understanding hype cycles:

A Hype Cycle is a graphic representation of the maturity, adoption and business application of specific technologies.

1. 'Technology Trigger'
2. 'Peak of Inflated Expectations'
3. 'Trough of Disillusionment'
4. 'Slope of Enlightenment'
5. 'Plateau of Productivity'

Building Ruby on Rails with Oracle Instantclient

- build ruby, gem, rails as per http://rubyonrails.org/download

build ruby
build gem
use gem to install rails

- get instantclient

instantclient-basic
instantclient-sdk

note: build against this, ok to run against the .so's in /usr/lib

- on mac, make this link

cd .../instantclient_10_2
ln -s libclntsh.dylib.10.1 libclntsh.dylib

- build ruby-oci8 from http://ruby-oci8.rubyforge.org/en/index.html

export DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=.../instantclient_10_2
ruby setup.rb config
ruby setup.rb setup
ruby setup.rb install

- test (this is on one line)

ruby -r oci8 -e "OCI8.new('nm/pass@db').exec('select * from user_tables') do |r| puts r.join(','); end"

- Install the activerecord-oracle_enhanced-adapter gem, NOT, as many pages out-of-dately specify, activerecord-oracle-adapter

gem install activerecord-oracle_enhanced-adapter

config/database.yml:

development:
adapter: oracle_enhanced
database: orcl # or, host:
username: scott
password: tiger

- do that sweet rails thing:

rails mhtest
cd mhtest
ruby script/generate scaffold comic title:string issue:integer publisher:string
rake db:migrate
ruby script/server

- hooray, it works

http://localhost:3000/comics

- references:

http://emphaticsolutions.com/2008/05/22/connecting-to-oracle-from-ruby-on-rails.html
http://www.oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/saternos-ror-faq.html
http://drawohara.com/post/37166893/rails-unsucking-oci-oracle-on-rails-2-1
http://www.oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/haefel-oracle-ruby.html

HowStuffWorks "How Corrective Lenses Work"

HowStuffWorks "How Corrective Lenses Work": "Corrective lenses can be made with glass or plastic, but nowadays, plastic is the most common. While several different types of plastic are used in making lenses, all of them follow the same general manufacturing procedures. Most of the steps outlined also apply to glass, although a few important differences are noted at the end.

A lab, even an automated one, follows 12 steps to make prescription lenses:"

Connecting to Oracle from Ruby on Rails

Connecting to Oracle from Ruby on Rails: "I’ll assume that the desired goal is to have an “application server”, which hosts your Rails app, connect to a remote database server, running some recent version of Oracle (8i )."

Laramy-K Optical Lab - Lens Form: Sphere, Cylinder, and Axis

Laramy-K Optical Lab - Lens Form: Sphere, Cylinder, and Axis: "Practically speaking, the laboratory has a limited number of curve combinations with which to work. Lens blanks come from manufacturers with a limited selection of front curves, also known as base curves, with suggested power ranges for each. Furthermore, since aberrations occur as the eye moves away from the optical center of the lens, the lab will choose curves that minimize aberrations. Lenses with curves chosen to minimize aberrations are called 'corrected curve' or 'best form' lenses."

Ask Tom: On Top-n and Pagination Queries

Ask Tom: On Top-n and Pagination Queries: "Our technologist gets more results using ROW_NUMBER, RANK, and DENSE_RANK."

InfoQ: Facebook: Science and the Social Graph

InfoQ: Facebook: Science and the Social Graph: "In this presentation filmed during QCon SF 2008, Aditya Agarwal discusses Facebook’s architecture, more exactly the software stack used, presenting the advantages and disadvantages of its major components: LAMP (PHP, MySQL), Memcache, Thrift, Scribe."

Mt. Holly Mayor's Office: World War I re-enacted by dogs!

Mt. Holly Mayor's Office: World War I re-enacted by dogs!: "More from the Dogville Shorts! 'Vell Mr. Schmartalec, zoon you will be a frankfurrrrtar!!!!!'"

IP address geolocation SQL database

IP address geolocation SQL database: "The SQL database behind iplocationtools.com is offered for free."

The 48 Laws of Power

The 48 Laws of Power: "by Robert Greene and Joost Elffers"

FT.com / Comment / Opinion - Ten principles for a Black Swan-proof world

FT.com / Comment / Opinion - Ten principles for a Black Swan-proof world: "Then we will see an economic life closer to our biological environment: smaller companies, richer ecology, no leverage. A world in which entrepreneurs, not bankers, take the risks and companies are born and die every day without making the news.

In other words, a place more resistant to black swans."

jQuery plugin: Tablesorter 2.0

jQuery plugin: Tablesorter 2.0: "tablesorter is a jQuery plugin for turning a standard HTML table with THEAD and TBODY tags into a sortable table without page refreshes. tablesorter can successfully parse and sort many types of data including linked data in a cell."

James Gardner � My Experience of Using reStructuredText to Write The Definitive Guide to Pylons

James Gardner � My Experience of Using reStructuredText to Write The Definitive Guide to Pylons: "All in all I thoroughly enjoyed working with reStructuredText. As is described in the book, it is possible to generate a PDF directly from reStructuredText using a tool called Sphinx and although I know the styling and level of control isn’t sufficient for a production book yet I’d very much look forward to the day when I can write a book with production-quality formatting directly from reStructuredText without needing to jump through the Word and PDF hoops."

Trifocal Glasses, Trifocal Eyeglasses, Tri focal, Trifocal Lenses,

Trifocal Glasses, Trifocal Eyeglasses, Tri focal, Trifocal Lenses,: "Trifocal Glasses Lenses contain three focal points, usually for distance, intermediate and near vision. A tri focal lens has an added segment above the bifocal for viewing objects in the intermediate zone, which is approximately arm's length away. Trifocal lenses are available with the reading segments in a variety of shapes and widths. The most popular is the flat-top (also known as straight-top or D-segment), 28 millimeters wide. Eyeglass Lens Direct offers a number of options for the trifocal lens wearer. To find out more about our selection of lenses for trifocal eyeglasses, search for Regular Plastic (CR-39) Trifocals, Polycarbonate Trifocals, High Index Trifocals, Photochromic Lenses, including Transitions Trifocals, Polarized Trifocals, and other eyeglass and sunglass tri focal lens options."

JEMoptical YOUR ONLINE EYEGLASS STORE - Re-lens your frame

JEMoptical YOUR ONLINE EYEGLASS STORE - Re-lens your frame: "Re-Lens your old (own) frames
$24.95 - Includes Single Vision Lenses

Have an old frame you just love? Buy a frame on eBay? Given a frame? We can help. Let us put your new prescription in that frame.

We make it simple for you. Just select your options below, enter your new RX when requested and send your frame to us at:

JEMoptical
12951 Walsingham Rd
Largo, Fl 33774"

Mu Dynamics Research Labs � Blog Archive � Interactive CouchDB

Mu Dynamics Research Labs � Blog Archive � Interactive CouchDB: "Interactive CouchDB is an emulator written in 100% JavaScript with tons of jQuery thrown in. It also implements the collation schemes as well as the map/reduce algorithms. While it doesn’t demonstrate replication, conflict management and a host of other capabilities in CouchDB, it does strive to illustrate concepts like schema-less JSON documents, map/reduce and how these things fit together.

You can try out the emulator here. Let us know what you think."

It’s very easy to underprice your product - Venture Hacks

It’s very easy to underprice your product - Venture Hacks: "And Sandy gulped and picked the biggest number she thought anybody would ever rationally pay. And said, “$75,000″. And she said all the buyer did was write down $75,000.

And she realized, shit, she left money on the table. Sandy Kurtzig was awesome. And she said, “Per year.”

And the buyer wrote down, “Per year.”

And she went, oh, crap what else? She said, “There’s maintenance.”

He said, “How much?”

“25 percent per year.”

And he said, “That’s too much.”

She said, “15 percent.”

And he said, “OK.”"

Conficker Eye Chart

Conficker Eye Chart