Tim on May 1st, 2008

I found a very good quote from St Augustine the other day. Basically it’s about people keeping their mouths shut about things they don’t know about. I’m sure I could get into a great philosophical discussion about this, but I’ll save it for real life, maybe over a beer. Any takers?

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Tim on April 25th, 2008

I just installed Ubuntu (8.04), which I believe to basically be Debian with a nice interface.
There’s a neat utility called Wubi which handles the move from Windows to Ubuntu. It installs Ubuntu through Windows, handling partitioning, boot loader, and everything. It uses the Windows boot loader, adding Ubuntu as an option. It also shows up […]

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Tim on April 24th, 2008

I’m slowly learning to play the drums. Right now I’m working on practicing syncopation, which is basically a technique of either playing a beat where there isn’t otherwise one, or not playing a beat where one should be. It seems to be what is used to mix up a beat somewhat so that it’s not […]

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Tim on April 16th, 2008

Gonna be at Refresh Central Florida tomorrow night. It’s the first meeting — apparently nothing to do with Refresh Orlando.

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Tim on April 15th, 2008

My buddy Kevin saw my previous post on training Gmail to deliver only Viagra spam, as well as the part about how Pfizer must handle their spam filtering.
Being an enterprising person, he emailed Pfizer. Here’s their reply:

From: pfizer@pfizer.com
Date: April 15, 2008 12:53:23 PM EDT
To: EMAIL

Subject: RE:Email Validation

This email is sent by the Pfizer server. In […]

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It happened. BarCampOrlando 2008 is over, and it freakin’ rocked.
There were a lot of really good presentations. I took some notes and thoughts down, and I’ll probably do a followup post in a day or two with some notes. There were tons of awesome people, and I liked it even more than last year since […]

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Tim on April 2nd, 2008

It’s almost here! BarCamp Orlando 2008!
I’m thinking about doing a presentation on Bayesian probability. I’ve learned some stuff about it from the Loud3r project that I’ve been working on, and it’s pretty fascinating stuff. It’s a very elegant way of quickly computing the odds of something happening given a few basic pieces of information. I […]

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Tim on March 21st, 2008

If you want to insert values into a MySQL table, but only if those values don’t already exist, and you don’t want to use a primary key on the table (and deal with the resulting error suppression ), here’s an elegant one-query method of doing so.

INSERT INTO [table name] SELECT ‘[value1]’, ‘[value2]’ FROM DUAL
WHERE NOT […]

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Tim on March 17th, 2008

Remember the old saying: “6 months in the lab saves an afternoon in the library.”

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Tim on March 12th, 2008

So I finally bought an iPhone. It’s rockin. I’m going to be getting on a plane to Vegas for the weekend, and I have a 6-hour layover at Dallas-Fort Worth. Between books and phone video, I think I’ll be sufficiently entertained.
I really do like the phone. It’s so convenient. I’ll be walking along somewhere, and […]

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