Matt's Blog

If you have tried to used RHEL 7 in VirtualBox, and run into the issue with the guest additions not compiling (see https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/12638 for details), you can download this tar file , extract it, and run sudo ./install.sh The tar file is just the guest additions pre patched to work with RHEL 7.

We use supervisord on our systems, which has a handy browser based 'tail -f' feature. The problem is that the end of the log file appears off the bottom of the screen, and the browser won't scroll to the bottom automatically. This bookmarklet will keep the end of the page in view. javascript:scroll=function(){setTimeout(function(){window.scrollTo(0,document.body.scrollHeight);scroll();},100);};scroll();

"We take comfort from Charles Darwin's observation that it's not the strongest species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change. We just need to be adaptable." - Gary Pruitt, then the CEO of McClatchy Newspapers and now CEO of the Associated Press ( http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/11/12/google_ad_revenue_tops_entire_us_print_media_industry_chart.html ). I recently spent some time looking into the stats for web content we were responsible for and noticed two things. The first was that the majority of visitors were viewing chunked versions of our books, where each individual web page aligned roughly with an entry in the table of contents. The second was that most visitors were spending only a couple of minutes reading the content in any given session. This observation aligned very closely with my own information gathering process. Once or twice a year I'll make time to sit down and read a technical book ...

In the next 5 - 10 years our good friend and faithful digital companion, the search bar, is going to ride off into the sunset. Googling has forever changed how we find answers to almost anything we could ever want to know, because the answer is most likely there buried in the first 10 links brought up in response to anything you type into the search bar. When you think about it though, having to trawl through those 10 links is actually not a great way to answer a question. If you were to ask your mechanic what was making that noise in your engine, you want the answer, not rambling descriptions and discussions on engine design and maintenance. But that is exactly what you get if you were to ask Google the same question: pages of forum posts when you only want the last one that actually has the answer; a blog post where that engine noise is coincidentally mentioned in the comments; or a 10 minute YouTube video where the information you want is 9 minutes in. That is all about to c...

A tutorial series looking at the JavaScript 3D engine three.js . Three.js - 1 - Getting Started Part One Three.js - 2 - Getting Started Part Two

Three.js - 2 - Getting Started Part Two THREE.JS TUTORIALS VIEW THE DEMO DOWNLOAD THE SOURCE CODE Introduction In the last tutorial we got a very basic three.js application up and running. This tutorial will continue on from that, adding a stats counter and dealing with window resizing. Stats Counter A number of the example three.js applications have a neat little stats counter showing the number of frames per second, and displaying a graph of the frame rate over the last few seconds. This information is invaluable when testing the performance of your 3D application. The JavaScript library responsible for this stats counter is not actually part of three.js. It is a separate library that can be found on GitHub at https://github.com/mrdoob/stats.js/ . The file that we need to include in our project can be found at https://github.com/mrdoob/stats.js/blob/master/build/stats.min.jshttps://github.com/mrdoob/stats.js/blob/master/build/stats.min.js . This JavaScr...

Duplicate document detection is becoming increasingly important for businesses that have huge collections of email, web pages and documents with multiple copies that may or may not be kept up to date. MinHash is a fairly simple algorithm that from all my Googling has been explained very poorly in blogs or in the kind of mathematical terms that I forgot long ago. So in this article I will attempt to explain how MinHash works at a practical code level. Before I start, please take a look at  http://infolab.stanford.edu/~ullman/mmds/ch3.pdf . That document goes into a lot of theory, and was ultimately where my understanding on MinHash came from. Unfortunately it approaches the algorithm from a theoretical standpoint, but if I gloss over some aspect of the MinHash algorithm here, you will almost certainly find a fuller explanation in the PDF. I'll also be using pseudo Java in these examples instead of traditional math. This means when I use terms like Set, I am referring to the gr...