Thread

Posted on April 4, 2009 by MXH

I learned something interesting today: The thickness of thread (i.e. the stuff that makes up fabric) is not measured by its diameter, apparently because thread’s cross-section is not circular. Instead, thickness is measured indirectly, by means of density and volume.

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Difficulty

Posted on April 3, 2009 by MXH

While generating KenKen-style puzzles for my site, I’ve come head-to-head with a somewhat surprising axiom: It’s pretty simple to make an easy game harder, but pretty difficult to make a hard game easier.

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Adwords’ Quality Score

Posted on April 2, 2009 by MXH

My initial experiments with AdWords have revealed the importance, and capriciousness, of Google Adwords’ “Quality Score”. This number seems to have a great impact on the cost and success of one’s advertising campaign, but its provenance is obscure.

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An Experiment

Posted on April 1, 2009 by MXH

Editorial Note: I’m continuing the daily posting schedule into April, but I’m changing the format slightly; on weekdays, I will be posting updates on my new project (discussed below), while weekends will be devoted to more general musings.

I’m going to conduct an experiment, and I’m inviting you to follow along.

By way of background, please note that there are an awful lot of online Sudoku sites out there. I’m curious about what kind of traffic these sites draw, and how much (if any) money they can make. Sure, one way to find out would be to do some research, but where’s the fun in that? Instead, I’m going to devote this blog, during the month of April, to documenting my attempts to build a popular, puzzle-centered, website.

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A sed Quirk

Posted on March 31, 2009 by MXH

The sed utility is a useful, if slightly obscure, tool. (Fortunately, there are excellent guides available to its use.) Today, however, I ran across an annoying incompatibility in one of its features, which I want to briefly discuss.

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Single Signs

Posted on March 29, 2009 by MXH

Remember this fascinating article? (It’s about those www.CITYNAMEsingles.com signs that were nearly ubiquitous 6-9 months ago.) If you don’t remember, or haven’t seen it, it’s worth a read. I have only an anecdotal note to add.

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WordPress Backups (con’t)

Posted on March 28, 2009 by MXH

This is a quick addenda to yesterday’s notes on backing up self-hosted WordPress blogs. I noticed that I neglected to make the scripts I described available as downloads, and that I didn’t illustrate the final piece of the puzzle: a one-line script which obviates the need to specify any of the backup script’s 6(!) arguments. I’d like to correct those oversights today.

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WordPress Backups

Posted on March 27, 2009 by MXH

If you run a self-hosted WordPress Blog, it’s probably a good idea to back it up now and again. Here I present some code that I use to back up my blog to Amazon’s S3 service, which might help you to do the same.

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Twitter

Posted on March 26, 2009 by MXH

Today, a brief contest between two theories explaining why you’ve been hearing so much about Twitter recently. Our contestants are Mickey Kaus, who has reasonable instincts for when he’s being had, and Seth Godin, who knows a lot about how to persuade people.

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KenKen Puzzles

Posted on March 25, 2009 by MXH

I’ve spent a lot of time discussing the construction of a solver for KenKen puzzles. Most people, of course, prefer to play these puzzles. To that end, I present a collection of roughly 1000 KenKen-style puzzles, available here.

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