The strange man reading a novel in the meeting room

Why is a visitor reading a novel all week in the meeting room?

Zwibbler: A simple drawing program using Javascript and Canvas

Now it's a commercial product, but Zwibbler was once a fun side-project, and here's some details on its implementation.

Fun with Colour Difference

Are you looking for a nifty way to choose colours that stand out? Are you the type of person who is not satisfied until you have mathematically proven that your choice is optimal?

20 lines of code that will beat A/B testing every time

A/B testing is used far too often, for something that performs so badly. It is defective by design: Segment users into two groups. Show the A group the old, tried and true stuff. Show the B group the new whiz-bang design with the bigger buttons and slightly different copy. After a while, take a look at the stats and figure out which group presses the button more often. Sounds good, right? The problem is staring you in the face. It is the same dilemma faced by researchers administering drug studies. During drug trials, you can only give half the patients the life saving treatment. The others get sugar water. If the treatment works, group B lost out. This sacrifice is made to get good data. But it doesn't have to be this way.

Detecting C++ memory leaks

It's fairly simple to redefine malloc() and free() to your own functions, to track the file and line number of memory leaks.

Bending over: How to sell your software to large companies

For a micro-ISV, selling to businesses can be more lucrative than selling to consumers. Instead of making a few dollars per sale and hoping for thousands of sales, you sell to only a few customers, and charge much higher rates. But the rates are high for a reason. It takes more time and money to sell to businesses.

Optimizing Ubuntu to run from a USB key or SD card

Fortunately, by following the tips below, you can make your USB or SD card based linux system fly!

The PenIsland Problem: Text-to-speech for domain names

Recently, I was contracted to run a list of domain names through the custom-built pronunciation engine that powers my rhyming web site. On the first attempt, I found that the results were embarrassingly bad. A quick inspection revealed the problem: most domain names are severalwordsstucktogether.

VP trees: A data structure for finding stuff fast

Let's say you have millions of pictures of faces tagged with names. Given a new photo, how do you find the name of person that the photo most resembles?

In the cases I mentioned, each record has hundreds or thousands of elements: the pixels in a photo, or patterns in a sound snippet, or web usage data. These records can be regarded as points in high dimensional space. When you look at a points in space, they tend to form clusters, and you can infer a lot by looking at ones nearby.

Cell Phone Secrets

How to choose a cell phone in 2006, if you want the best possible radio.