RIM gets more bad news on NTP lawsuit

What good has NTP done for the public? RIM spends resources to make its products (during the process there could be certain gray areas, but definitely it's not a 100% copy-cat of anything out there in the market) while NTP with a bunch of greedy lawyers bought the IP and go sue and hope for a huge settlement. Companies are now afraid of innovation because one of the obvious building blocks was patented.

San Jose, Sunnyvale among safest cities

San Jose and Sunnyvale are among the safest cities in the United States and Richmond and Oakland are among the most dangerous.

UW - School of CS got $25M

The University of Waterloo received a huge "Google dividend" yesterday when David Cheriton, one of the search engine giant's early investors, donated $25-million to the school's well-respected computer science department. Mr. Cheriton estimates the return on his US$200,000 investment in Google at about 5,000%. CS School renamed to David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science. It’s really exicting to see and imagine all potential opportunities UW can do with this donation. As an UW/CS alumni, I thank you, Mr. Cheriton!

Linear Regression PHP Class

<?php /** * @author Son Nguyen * @since 11/18/2005 * @package Framework.Data * @subpackage Math */ class CRegressionLinear { private $mDatas; /** constructor */ function __construct($pDatas) { $this->mDatas = $pDatas; } /** get the coefficients */ function calculate() { $n = count($this->mDatas); $vSumXX = $vSumXY = $vSumX = $vSumY = 0; foreach ($this->mDatas AS $x=>$y) { $vSumXY += $x*$y; $vSumXX += $x*$x; $vSumX += $x; $vSumY += $y; } // rof $a = ($n*$vSumXY - $vSumX*$vSumY)/($n*$vSumXX - $vSumX*$vSumX); $b = ($vSumY - $a*$vSumX)/$n; return array($a,$b); } /** given x, return the prediction */ function predict($x) { list($a,$b) = $this->calculate(); $y = $a*$x+$b; return $y; } } ?>

Referrer & AJAX

Firefox does not pass referrer string while IE does.

RSLite - A cookie-based AJAX solution

This is another solution written by Brent Ashley for asynchronous information fetching, way before the term AJAX were coined var RSLite; function RSLiteObject(){ this.interval = 1000; this.attempts = 3; this.i = new Image(); this.call = function (page){ var d = new Date(); document.cookie = 'RSLite=x; expires=Fri, 31 Dec 1999 23:59:59 GMT; path=/;'; this.i.src = page+'&time='+d.getTime(); setTimeout("RSLite.receive(1);", this.interval ); } this.receive = function ( attempt ){ var response = null; var aCookie = document.cookie.split("; "); for (var i=0; i < aCookie.length; i++){ var aCrumb = aCookie[i].split("="); if (aCrumb[0] == 'RSLite') response = aCrumb[1]; } if ( response != null ){ this.callback( unescape(response.replace(/\+/g,' ')) ); } else { if (attempt < this.attempts){ setTimeout( "RSLite.receive( " + (attempt+1) +" );",this.interval); } else { this.failure(); } } } this.callback = function( response ){ alert(response); } this.failure = function(){ //alert("Timed Out ["+this.i.src+"]"); // disable for the time moment } } function myCallback(response) { // write the result back var tmpObj = document.getElementById('ResponseArea'); if (tmpObj != null) { tmpObj.innerHTML = response; } // if } RSLite = new RSLiteObject(); RSLite.callback = myCallback;

map - Google Search

If you search for "map" or "maps" on Google, the first result is not maps.google.com but MapQuest. This surprised me!

TV: PRISON BREAK

FOX Broadcasting Company: PRISON BREAK With too many pathetic reality TV shows these years. One of the best TV show I've ever seen. It's an excellent show. Very original and high level of suspense.

Funny Video - I Love Sky Video

I Love Sky Video on Metacafe

Make your files immutable in Linux which even root can't delete

Root account in Linux is considered all powerful. You can make or break the system if you have root access to a Linux box. Here is a cool tip to make your files immutable even by root.

read more | digg story

Math and the Computer Science Major

Computer science majors tend to struggle for reasons that have very little to do with computers. More often than not, such struggles are rooted in weaknesses related to math. If you plan on getting a CS degree, you need to come to grips with one important fact first: computer science has more to do with math than computers.

read more | digg story

Using JavaScript to dynamically add CSS

<script type="text/javascript"> if(document.createStyleSheet) { document.createStyleSheet('http://server/stylesheet.css'); } else { var styles = "@import url(' http://server/stylesheet.css ');"; var newSS=document.createElement('link'); newSS.rel='stylesheet'; newSS.href='data:text/css,'+escape(styles); document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(newSS); } </script>

How to insert a block of javascript code to a html page...

Issue: innerHTML simply writes HTML as a string; it doesn't call the javascript interpreter to parse and execute any scripts that are part of the string

Reference: http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum91/2912.htm

Solution: manually find these scripts inside the text string and append them to the document $vPat = new RegExp('<script .+>([^<]+)</script>','g'); RegExp.lastIndex = 0; // making sure while (($vResult=$vPat.exec($vTxt))!=null) { for (var i=1;i<$vResult.length;i++) { var js = document.createElement("script"); js.setAttribute("type","text/javascript"); js.text = $vResult[i]; document.getElementById($vDivID).appendChild(js); } // rof } // rof

/bin/rm: Argument list too long.

Instead: "find . -name 'abc*' | xargs rm"

Turnitin.com

Pretty cool technology but probably only good at catching those that stupidly enough to copy the whole paper.