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Showing posts from November, 2012

Using SQL Server on development machine

SQL Server is designed to use as much memory as it can to improve performance by caching lot of things in memory. If you are using that machine for active development or testing its good to limit SQL memory otherwise your machine might become slow. You can do the following to limit SQL Server memory. USE master EXEC sp_configure 'show advanced options', 1 RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE -- limit to 1 gig of memory EXEC sp_configure 'max server memory (MB)', 1024 RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE -- show all configs EXEC sp_configure

Stephen Hawking on God

According to Stephen Hawking: “What could define God [is thinking of God] as the embodiment of the laws of nature. However, this is not what most people would think of that God,” Hawking told Sawyer. “They made a human-like being with whom one can have a personal relationship. When you look at the vast size of the universe and how insignificant an accidental human life is in it, that seems most impossible.” Who is your inner god. Do you have set of personal laws that you cannot violate? Advice on life from Stephen Hawking “One, remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Two, never give up work. Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it,” he said. “Three, if you are lucky enough to find love, remember it is there and don’t throw it away.”

more features (vs) broken features

…people don’t remember that a feature was missing once you implement it, but they remember broken features long after you’ve fixed them. Quote from a forum thread.

P vs NP lecture

I really liked this presentation by Michael Sipser that explains p vs np in an easy way to understand.

False Positive / False Negative

  These are two important phrases used in many areas of computer science and other sciences. Long time back I had trouble understanding them. This is an attempt at writing them to down to ensure I can describe it to others. False Positive: When some test says you have cancer when in reality you don’t then the test is exhibiting false positive. It is giving a positive test response to a non-existent decease. False Negative: When a test is saying you don’t have cancer when you do have cancer is exhibiting false negative. False negative results are really bad in medical testing as they give false sense of security for the patient. In practice when dealing with large sample size False Positive tests are fine as long as the false negative rate is very very low. A test with reasonable false positive rates can reduce the sample size to a very small size which can be fed to a more thorough test that can establish the presence of the decease.