Lock your workstation with bluetooth

BTProx lets you lock your workstation, based on your blue tooth device. Read more atbout it at lifehacker.

Setting up Sub-version

Here is a neat blog post on setting up a Sub-version repository.

Down for Everyone or Just Me!

Ever wondered if the stars had conspired to diver the bits reaching your router?
Worry no more, the internet is here to help - http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/

Check your clients network speed

There are many tricks you can use to check network speeds,

Seifi is discussing a couple

i) The use of an Ajax request for a small gif file E.g. speed.gif?rnd=xsz (with a random parameter
to avoid caching), and measuring the time taken for this image to be served, then classifying the time into different slots

ii) The other option is if you subscribe to the Google Analytics service,
reading into the data that Google analytics provides in its network properties section.

Reportedly Google maps the users IP against a table of Network providers and speeds,
the idea can be generalized to be used by any website, provided you have the mapping, and a
service to keep this updated.

Original article at SEIFI -
http://www.seifi.org/stats/how-google-analytics-determines-connection-speeds.html

SQL Injection & XSS (Cross Site Scripting)

CMSWire has a wonderful article on how you can hack a website with i) SQL Injection
ii) XSS iii) Authorization Bypass & iv) Google Hacking

The Article also has loads of links to other Bulleting Boards with more details.
And also lists out simple steps to keep your website secure.

Reset.CSS

Reset.CSS is simply a collection of CSS styles which removes and neutralizes the inconsistent default styling of HTML elements.

There are 2 popular Reset.CSS styles:

• YUI Reset CSS
• meyerweb.com Reset.CSS

Do know more head over to the Web Resources Depot.

Netflix Prize & Machine Learning

K-Nearest Neighbor, Single Value Decomposition & Support Vector Machines!

Do these terms scare you! Fear not - Captain Depraved & Wikipedia to the rescue,
these are clustering algorithms which make use of Machine Learning, the idea is to have a machine
guess based on a large data set, a lot like how experienced human beings make predictions, only this is by a machine working off data.

Simon Funk - has this wonderful article explaining, the Netflix prize, his approach and also a couple of the above mentioned algorithms/methods.

If you'd like to know how the Netflix recommendation system works currently - head over here.

To get a visual on the idea check this applet.

If you are interested in reading more, there are more posts from other Netflix competitors here and here.

If you want to get your hands dirty, there is always Weka - Happy Clustering Folks!