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The Legend of the Rat Farmer
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/05/legend-of-rat-farmer.html
Rob Weir: An Antic Disposition. Thinking the unthinkable, pondering the imponderable, effing the ineffable and scruting the inscrutable. The Legend of the Rat Farmer. A long time ago in a land far away there once was a prosperous town called Hamelin. Everything was perfect in Hamelin until the year the rats came. The rats ate up the grain, bit the townsfolk in the toes and scared the young children. Something had to be done! Should they abandon the town and move someplace else? The Bürgermeister tracked ...
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Taking Control of Your Documents
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2009/03/taking-control-of-your-documents.html
Rob Weir: An Antic Disposition. Thinking the unthinkable, pondering the imponderable, effing the ineffable and scruting the inscrutable. Taking Control of Your Documents. How to free yourself from Microsoft Office dependency in three easy steps. Step 1: Take control of the default format. Party applications. This is a neutral step that preserves the status quo. By making these changes you will still be able to read and edit any OOXML documents that are sent to you, but all new documents you creat...Click...
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An ODF/OOXML Timeline
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/06/file-format-timeline.html
Rob Weir: An Antic Disposition. Thinking the unthinkable, pondering the imponderable, effing the ineffable and scruting the inscrutable. An ODF/OOXML File Format Timeline. I suppose the downside of a blog post containing only a picture is that there is nothing for anyone to quote. So here are a few themes that struck me while putting this chart together:. Comments… add one. Customers and developers who move to these formats. Will find their investment quickly negated when. I seem to recall that OLE2....
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Analysis of World Chess Champion Opening Repertoires
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2015/02/analysis-of-world-chess-champion-opening-repertoires.html
Rob Weir: An Antic Disposition. Thinking the unthinkable, pondering the imponderable, effing the ineffable and scruting the inscrutable. Analysis of World Chess Champion Opening Repertoires. A quick test run of the FactoMineR. Package for R. This package focuses on multivariate exploratory data analysis, such as Principle Components Analysis (for numerical data) and Correspondence Analysis (for categorical data). In an earlier blog post. Encyclopedia of Chess Openings. Players. Players try to influen...
robweir.com
The OOXML Leap Year Bug and the Chernobyl Design Pattern
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2006/10/chernobyl-design-pattern.html
Rob Weir: An Antic Disposition. Thinking the unthinkable, pondering the imponderable, effing the ineffable and scruting the inscrutable. The Chernobyl Design Pattern. In 1994, the world learned that the Intel Pentium chip had a bug. In certain cases it gave the wrong answer when calculating floating-point division. These cases were rare, only 1 in 9 billion divisions, and typically only resulted in errors past the 8th decimal place. What did Intel do about this? This is bad news. Just say no. I really li...
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First Move Advantage in Chess
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2014/01/first-move-advantage-in-chess.html
Rob Weir: An Antic Disposition. Thinking the unthinkable, pondering the imponderable, effing the ineffable and scruting the inscrutable. First Move Advantage in Chess. The Elo Rating System. Competitive chess players, at the amateur club level all the way through the top grandmasters, receive ratings based on their performance in games. The ratings formula in use since 1960 is based on a model first proposed by the Hungarian-American physicist Arpad Elo. Measuring the First Mover Advantage. It has long b...
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Archives
http://www.robweir.com/blog/blog-archives
Rob Weir: An Antic Disposition. Thinking the unthinkable, pondering the imponderable, effing the ineffable and scruting the inscrutable. How to Crush Dissent. Doing the Microsoft Shuffle: Algorithm Fail in Browser Ballot. The Right and Lawful Rood. An ODF/OOXML File Format Timeline. The Legend of the Rat Farmer. How to hire Guillaume Portes. The Chernobyl Design Pattern.
robweir.com
How to Crush Dissent
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2010/08/how-to-crush-dissent.html
Rob Weir: An Antic Disposition. Thinking the unthinkable, pondering the imponderable, effing the ineffable and scruting the inscrutable. How to Crush Dissent. While in Berlin for the LinuxTag 2010 conference a couple of months ago, I took the opportunity for a 8-mile long meandering walk across the city, from Warschauer Strasse and the East Side Gallery. To Wittenbergplatz and KaDeWe. As I looked at this display of samizdat publications, each a sign of struggle, technical and political, I was smug. S...
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The Right and Lawful Rood
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/12/right-and-lawful-rood.html
Rob Weir: An Antic Disposition. Thinking the unthinkable, pondering the imponderable, effing the ineffable and scruting the inscrutable. The Right and Lawful Rood. So what do we have here? So what are they doing? Is it an early early depiction of the hokey-pokey. 8220;You put your left foot in…”)? This print, from a 16th century surveyor’s manual by Jacob Koebel, called Geometrei. Von künstlichem Feldmessen und absehen. But who would maintain the standard? And would you trust them? Physical objects may b...
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A Leap Back
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2006/10/leap-back.html
Rob Weir: An Antic Disposition. Thinking the unthinkable, pondering the imponderable, effing the ineffable and scruting the inscrutable. 1/23/2007 A translation of this post, in Spanish has been provided by a reader. You can find it in the Los Trylobytes blog. I’ve also taken this opportunity to update page and section references to refer to the final approved version of the Ecma Office Open XML specification, as well as providing a link to the final specification. Now I have no problems with that bug re...
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