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Installing & Debugging ODBC on Mac OS X 1 Feb 2013 | 02:14 am
I just spent nearly two full days in a bare knuckle brawl with my Macbook Pro trying to get it to talk to a corporate MS SQL Server. I had abandoned MSSQL more than a year ago in favor of PostgreSQL b...
Solving easy problems the hard way 18 Mar 2012 | 04:03 am
There’s a charming little brain teaser that’s going around the Interwebs. It’s got various forms, but they all look something like this: This problem can be solved by pre-school children in 5-10 minu...
Fitting Distribution X to Data From Distribution Y 13 May 2011 | 08:31 am
I had someone ask me about fitting a beta distribution to data drawn from a gamma distribution and how well the distribution would fit. I’m not a “closed form” kinda guy. I’m more of a “numerical simu...
Shell scripting EC2 for fun and profit 7 May 2011 | 08:57 am
Lately I’ve been doing some work with creating ad-hoc clusters of EC2 machines. My ultimate goal is to create a simple way to spin up a cluster of EC2 machines for use with Bryan Lewis’s very cool doR...
The best interview question I’ve ever been asked 21 Apr 2011 | 03:33 am
In 2005 I was interviewing for a job as Risk Manager with Genworth Financial. I was working a gig up in Armonk, NY so I hopped a car to the GNW office and met with Mark Griffin, at that point the Chie...
Details of two-way sync between two Ubuntu machines 19 Apr 2011 | 08:48 am
In a previous post I discussed my frustrations with trying to get Dropbox or Spideroak to perform BOTH encrypted remote backup and AND fast two way file syncing. This is the detail of how I set up for...
Fast Two Way Sync in Ubuntu! 10 Apr 2011 | 03:32 am
I love the portability of a laptop. I have a 45 min train ride twice a day and I fly a little too, so having my work with me on my laptop is very important. But I hate doing long running analytics on ...
Where the heck has JD been? 23 Mar 2011 | 01:14 pm
It’s been pointed out to me that I haven’t had any blog posts in a while. It’s true. I’m fairly slack. But in the last few months I’ve changed jobs (same firm, new role), written an R abstraction on t...
Controlling Amazon Web Services using rJava and the AWS Java SDK 1 Dec 2010 | 08:51 am
I’ve been messing around with using Amazon Web Services for a while. I’ve had some projects where I wanted to upload files to S3 or fire off EMR jobs. I’ve been controlling AWS services using a hodgep...
The O’Reilly Safari Books Online app broke my heart 12 Nov 2010 | 11:15 am
I’m a huge O’Reilly Media fan boy. I can’t hide it. I hear Tim O’Reilly speak at conferences and I think to myself, “Screw being president, I want to be Tim O’Reilly.” I’ve been a subscriber to their ...
