Two of my favorite cmdlets from the PowerShell Community Extensions are get-clipboard and out-clipboard. These cmdlets let you read from and write to the Windows clipboard from PowerShell. For example, the following code will grab the contents of the clipboard,…
Monthly Archives: April 2008
Innovation V
About a month ago I wrote a series of four blog posts on innovation. The most important theme from these posts is the statement by Seth Godin just posted an article on his blog entitled The fibula and the safety…
Preventing an unpleasant Sweave surprise
Sweave is a tool for making statistical analyses more reproducible by using literate programming in statistics. Sweave embeds R code inside LaTeX and replaces the code with the result of running the code, much like web development languages such as…
How to calculate percentiles in memory-bound applications
I just published a new article on CodeProject: Calculating percentiles in memory-bound applications. Finding the percentiles of a list of samples is trivial if you can read all the samples into memory and sort the list. If the list is too…
60-second description of feeds
If you don’t know what a “feed” is, as in RSS feed etc., here’s a 60-second audio explanation. Audio clip from Sixty Second Tech Transcript
One program to rule them all
Do you have a single program that you “live in” when you’re at a computer? Emacs users are known for “living” inside Emacs. This means more than just using the program for a large part of the day. It means…
How to calculate binomial probabilities
Suppose you’re doing something that has probability of success p and probability of failure q = 1-p. If you repeat what you’re doing m+n times, the probability of m successes and n failures is given by Now suppose m and n are moderately…
Tagged with: gcc, Math, Overflow, Probability and Statistics
Posted in Math, Software development, Statistics
Posted in Math, Software development, Statistics
Fibonacci numbers at work
Today I needed to use Fibonacci numbers to solve a problem at work. Fibonacci numbers are great fun, but I don’t recall needing them in an applied problem before. I needed to compute a series of integrals of the form f(x, y)…
Duct tape on the moon
Yesterday’s Science at NASA podcast had an entertaining story about duct tape and Apollo 17. (Transcript, audio) The lunar rover lost a fender and they taped it back on with duct tape. That worked for a while, then they had to…
Problems versus dilemmas
In a recent interview on the PowerScripting Podcast, Jeffrey Snover said that software versioning isn’t a problem, it’s a dilemma. The difference is that problems can be solved, but dilemmas can only be managed. No versioning system can do everything…
Four types of errors
There are two kinds of errors discussed in classical statistics, unimaginatively named Type I and Type II. Aside from having completely non-mnemonic names, they represent odd concepts. Technically, a Type I error consists of rejecting the “null hypothesis” (roughly speaking,…
Automated software builds
My first assignment as a professional programmer was to build another person’s program. I learned right away not to assume a project will build just because the author says it will. I’ve seen the same pattern repeated everywhere I’ve worked. Despite version control systems and…
Cross-platform PowerShell
I just found out there’s a project called Pash to create an open source, cross platform version of Microsoft’s PowerShell. That should be very interesting.
Database-first or object model-first software development
The most recent edition of the .NET Rocks podcast interviewed Jeremy Miller and David Laribee. They made the observation that Microsoft’s development tools are implicitly designed to support database-first development rather than object model-first development. Because they are committed to agile and…
