quick commandline trick: find files that you can write to

Here's a trick I found useful today:
find . -writable -type f

find (rtfm) can do all kinds of crazy things. What this does is list out all the files under the current directory that aren't directories, and that you have write access to. Useful for Perforce users -- in p4, if a file is writable, either you're editing it in a change list, or you just accidentally made it writable and you should be editing it in a change list.

the literature: Realization with CCG

My "Alternative Syntactic Theories" class this semester was pretty interesting. I'd only spent so much time thinking about the difficulties that you face when trying to come up with a good formalism for describing the syntax of human languages. It's a big hairy problem! So this was a good exercise for me.

For my project for the class, I read a bunch of papers by the great Michael White about the work that he and his colleagues have been doing on realization (aka generating text) with OpenCCG.

If you're interested in CCG, text generation, or text generation with CCG...
- Here are my presentation slides
- and here's my writeup about it: html, pdf.

nice wireless card for Ubuntu: TP-Link TL-WN651G

I just got my TP-Link TL-WN651G wireless card, popped it in the computer, and it Just Worked. (Ubuntu Karmic, 9.10).

It uses the Atheros chipset (Atheros AR5001X+), and Ubuntu figures it right out, with the ath5k wireless driver.

So if you're looking for an inexpensive PCI wireless card that you can use on Linux without using a binary blob and ndiswrapper, this is a good choice!

Hooray :)