On the first day of the Colorado High Park Fire (June 9) I was in the Red Feather Lakes area, so I took a couple short time-lapse videos of the smoke plumes. As of this writing the fire has burned more than 82,000 acres and destroyed over 190 homes, and is only partially contained. Both…
The Long Road to IPv6
IPV6 launch day is just around the corner. Less than four days to go at the time of this posting. I couldn’t think of a reason why I should be left out of all the fun, so I took the plunge and configured my server (Bamboo) to serve up this site from both IPv4 and…
Text Mining Wikipedia for Misspelled Words
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…
Mac OS X Filenames with Apostrophe’s and Ruby 1.9 Unicode Support
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…