May
21
2010
0

Fixing Spotlight under Snow Leopard

If you’re using Apple Macintosh OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, you might have discovered that spotlight indexing will automatically stop if your harddrive gets too full. This can happen if you’ve just got a lot of crap on your drive, or if any of your routine maintenance operations fill the drive as a hard drive check (for example if you run ‘erase white space’ on your drive).

You can get Spotlight back in action by running the following:

(more…)

Written by Dipsolect in: Computers |
Sep
04
2008
11

GLH compression

Over lunch today, I was talking to Gwyn and Laurie, two of the Ruby coders from New Bamboo – I work with them on a Top Secret Web Project for work.

We started talking about geeky things, and somehow ended up discussing a compression algorithm, where you would alphabetise each character of a message, and then replacing the number of instances of a character with a number, thereby drastically compressing how much space it takes up. (more…)

Written by Dipsolect in: Article,Computers,Essay | Tags: , , , , ,
Dec
15
2006
0

Reddit breaches Privacy Policy

So, the online bookmarking / social network site Reddit was down for a couple of days, and admits to having a lot of their data stolen. They further admit that the data will have included logins, passwords, and e-mail addresses.

The part that was stolen, according to the news story, was “media of ours that contained a backup of a portion of the reddit database was stolen recently”… Not being funny, but what the hell is a media company doing having unencrypted ‘backup media’ (CD or DVD, presumably) laying around? That’s hardly what’s known as being diligent in protecting your users. (more…)

Written by Dipsolect in: Commentary,Computers,Internet |
Jul
12
2006
1

Calculating interquartile mean (IQM) in Microsoft Excel

There is, sadly enough, no simple formula for calculating the IQM in Microsoft Excel (well there is one way, but that isn’t exact, as it strips away the partial numbers, which is no good). However, there is a complicated way :) (more…)

Written by Dipsolect in: Computers |

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