The first challenge – build a web site that can handle the load.

I got a really creepy piece of mail today. What looks like a newspaper clipping arrives in a white envelope, my address hand written with a blue ball point pen. There is no return address on the envelope and is postmarked with a Research Triangle Region post office stamp. The newspaper clipping has a hand written Post-It note attached to it. The notes says ‘Sai, you gotta see this, J’

The Post-It note is on top of an article about someone who helps folks with sub-prime mortgages.

Frantic google searching followed. It appears that this is the latest method for delivering spam. Found blog posts that talk about this scam, like this one here.

Time sure flies fast, my blog is now a year old. It has been an interesting experience. Blogging can be easy one day and really hard on another day. I am still not sure what I should or shouldn’t blog about. Take today for instance, I can either blog about how to get the Eclipse plugin for vi to work properly in Flex Builder or profound truths about how not to do things. Given a crowded blogosphere, chockful of opinions, some days I feel like I probably should not even bother writing a blog. On the other hand, blogging is pretty therapeutic, just getting my opinions out of the system helps me.

One thing that I can blog about is a transition, I no longer work for IBM. It was a tough decision, I worked there for 8 years with lots of great folks. I will be working for a startup on some exciting new stuff. It was an opportunity I could not pass up. Let us see how this experiment works out.

An excellent post on open source software and different business models. I think the arguments apply to all software businesses.

I took advice posted here pretty seriously and started reading up on statistics recently. First step, buy a good book.
This book is hands down the best text book I have ever read. I was expecting a dry textbook filled with formulas, the kind that make you wonder how you ever made it through the formal education process. This book is fantastic, I just wish more of my text books were this good in college.

Despite being a great book, at some point you want to try something other than the exercises. Enter the Netflix prize. I have been mucking around with their large data set for the last couple of days, makes for an excellent practical exercise to try out experiments in statistics (and other fields). My wife asked me if I have a chance of winning the prize and here was my answer:

I see myself as the equivalent of a Chimp trying to solve the Rubik’s cube. I am not sure if anyone has tried the experiment of offering a Chimp the Rubik’s cube. If you can get one to solve the cube, I am sure you can make a lot of money with the demo Chimp, but until then I will assume that it is impossible. The Chimp could still have a lot of fun checking the cube out, twisting the faces, admiring the colors, pulling the cube apart etc. That is exactly what I am doing with the Netflix rating data set. The goal is to come up with one set of predicted ratings, I don’t really care even if the RMSE is twice that of the Cinematch algorithm.