Have you ever read an article on Wikipedia and wondered if the article was more accurate or syntactically correct than if the article had been written by an individual or small team? I have, and this curiosity led me to ask a question [many questions in reality]. This paper is a demonstration of both the scientific method and of applying text mining to answer the question and test the hypothesis. The layout of this paper is rather untraditional in that it will mirror the steps of the scientific method nearly one-for-one. The question asked is how does the percentage of misspellings on Wikipedia, relative to total content, change through time? [click to read…]

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Ruby 1.9′s m17n (multilingualization) engine has eased some of the pains of supporting different encodings. Unfortunately, it makes things a little more difficult in the simplest of cases. I was introduced to this problem for the first time with the error message invalid multibyte char (US-ASCII). This is a mini crash course for understanding the new behavior of Ruby strings and different encodings when used on an HFS+ file system. [click to read…]

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This is a mini-guide for those struggling with trying to get Microsoft Flight Simulator X (FSX) Deluxe, and the Acceleration Expansion pack working on Windows 7 x64. The two big issues which I will cover are the “side-by-side” configuration error message, and frequent crashing while in the game. [click to read…]

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I spent several hours today struggling to fix my iMac triple boot setup with Mac OS X Lion, Windows 7 x64, are Ubuntu 11.10. rEFIt does not handle the new Apple Boot partition included in the latest release of Apple’s operating system. This article provides an example of how to fix your MBR table manually without using the rEFIt partition sync tool. [click to read…]

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Apple Bluetooth Keyboard Won’t Link with iMac After Installing rEFIt

October 14, 2011

Do you have an Apple Bluetooth keyboard that refuses to link with your iMac after installing rEFIt? Here’s my short story for those with similar problems looking for a solution.

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A Look at the Value of the Original iPad

October 4, 2011

When the iPad was first announced, in January 2010, I posted an initial outlook for the new device. Nearly 2 years has passed since that article, and since then the iPad 2 has been available on the market for quite some time. The question that I asked was, “is the iPad worth it?” Now it [...]

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5-Minute WebDAV Server for Dropbox and iPad Pages, Numbers, and Keynote

November 23, 2010

This quick guide will get you set up with a secured simple WebDAV server using Ruby and Rack. The idea is to make your Dropbox accessible through WebDAV. This enables secure saving of documents from the iPad iWork apps back into your Dropbox account.

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Is the iPad Worth it? My Initial Thoughts

January 28, 2010

We can all breath a sigh of relief that nearly a decade worth of rumors can now be laid to rest in the face of an actual product announcement: the iPad. With the iPad Apple says it is trying to create a new product category, but I think of it more as a merging of [...]

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