The ITAPPMONROBOT Saga

ast — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 22:33:34 +0000

I have been reading the site http://www.thedailywtf.com for some time now. Its tagline is “Curious Perversions in Information Technology,” and it’s true to both its name and tagline: it’s basically a blog with submissions about technology WTFs, strange error messages and interesting “Code Snippets Of the Day,” like this Java gem (sorry, geek alert):

void failIfNull(Object o) throws RuntimeException {
  if (o == null)
  {
    throw new RuntimeException(o.getClass().getName() + " is null!");
  }
}

In general, the site is very entertaining, and sometimes the discussion gets educational as people try to “fix” the WTF in creative ways.

Anyway, I mention this because one of today’s posts, ITAPPMONROBOT on the site was the probably the best I have ever read. It details a sysadmin’s ingenuity in maintaining a web server that needs to be restarted very frequently. The story is not exactly a WTF, as the solution is truly remarkable; on the other hand, the circumstances that led to the need for such a solution definitely is. Read the story for yourself.

Netflix Progress Prize

ast — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 04:09:51 +0000

The annual Progress Prize for the Netflix contest has been announced. The prize was won by Team BellKor, two researchers from AT&T Research who “blend[ed] 107 individual results” to come up with their 8.5% improvement over Netflix’s Cinematch algorithm (Thanks to Dan and Sujan dai for the pointers).

This contest was part of my senior project at college, where we looked at a number of algorithms to try to predict movie ratings using Netflix’s data (and use them to generate movie recommendations), and also generate recommendation of courses for students at Carleton, using historical transcript data.

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The ITAPPMONROBOT Saga

Netflix Progress Prize