Recent content on Notes
As you may know, GitHub recently complied with an RIAA legal threat demanding they cease distributing youtube-dl . Last time something like this happened, nerds around the world revolted by putting the affected software on T-shirts and whatever other media they could get their hands on. In that tradition, I put youtube-dl on a T-shirt: You can get it here . If anyone buys this I’ll donate…
An incomplete and infuriating list. PageRank (Larry Page) MySQL (My Widenius) Debian (two people named Deb and Ian) New Relic (anagram of Lew Cirne) Price Club (Sol Price) Taco Bell (Glen Bell) Westlake, Los Angeles (Henricus Wallace Westlake) Outerbridge Crossing (Eugenius Harvey Outerbridge) Main Street, San Francisco (Charles Main) Erlang (Agner Erlang) Mars (candy) (Franklin Mars) A few…
I love the phrase “much ballyhooed”: I even used it as my Twitter bio for a while. Does anyone ever use any word besides “much” before “ballyhooed”? Has anything ever been described as “occasionally ballyhooed”? To find out, I turned to a “trigrams” dataset that Google makes available on BigQuery. The provenance of this dataset is…
A couple of days ago, I was working on a web server, and I got stuck on the “tell the server to listen on localhost:3000” step. Why was I using port 3000? For local development, it’s a meaningless and arbitrary choice. That got me to wondering: what port numbers do others choose use when developing software? So I did what anyone would do in this situation and decided to search…
A few days ago I wanted to find a dataset with a list of winners of the Palme d’Or. The table on Wikipedia wasn’t formatted in a way that would be easy to copy, and I figured this was as good a time as any to figure out how Wikidata works. Wikidata is a Wikimedia Foundation project that aggregates structured information about the world. It stores and retrieves facts based on an…