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Category Archives: English

Errata and I

For some unknown reason (e.g., my being nerd) I love getting the errata for the books I buy and correct the copy in my possession. I don’t go as far as periodically checking whether a new errata came out. Wait, didn’t I already write a blog post on this topic? Update: No, I just checked.Posted [...]

Posted on 21 February 2011 † Matteo § Nerd ‡ Comments (0) °

Taking it to a new level

I just decided, after having received the LEICA Newsletter this morning, that I will enter the competition for the LEICA Oskar Barnack Newcomer Award, a photographic contest organized by LEICA reserved for 25 years old (and younger) photographers. Given that I turned 25 just few days ago, I am eligible . Although I almost surely [...]

Posted on 03 February 2011 † Matteo § Photos ‡ Comments (1) °

Goals for 2011

Here is the new edition of my “Goals for the year” post (old editions: 2010, 2009, 2008). Looking at the 2010 post again, I am very surprised: I achieved all the goals I listed. Either my goals were too easy to achieve or 2010 was a very good year for me. The latter is true [...]

Posted on 28 January 2011 † Matteo § Personal ‡ Comments (1) °

GPG key updated

Yearly update of my GPG key done (later than usual). See also my GPG key page. Now off to jogging on the treadmill.

Posted on 13 January 2011 † Matteo § Nerd ‡ Comments (0) °

WP Theme

I switched WordPress theme, from the good old blogtxt (heavily modified by me and not always in a good way) to the default wordpress theme (I don’t remember the name). It will be a temporary change. I hope. Update: it only lasted a few hours. Back to blogtxt with some bugs fixed (pointy hat to [...]

Posted on 11 January 2011 † Matteo § Nerd ‡ Comments (0) °

Firefox 4 and RSS icon

A new major version of Firefox (4.0) will soon-ish be released. I have been testing Minefield, the nightly builds of Firefox 4.0 for some months now. Over all, I’m very well impressed and I will not go in depth listing what I like and what I don’t. Still, as a heavy user of RSS feeds, [...]

Posted on 10 January 2011 † Matteo § Nerd ‡ Comments (0) °

On film scanning

Learning how to use a film scanner is not hard but really time-consuming. You have to try different pieces of software, read documentation, read blogs and forums and group discussions on flickr, ask other people and, eventually, scan scan scan. I bought my Epson Perfection V700 in September, tired of shooting a lot of film [...]

Posted on 23 November 2010 † Matteo § Nerd § Photos ‡ Comments (0) °

P, NP, and Goedel

Some time ago I had the “intuition” that there should be a connection between Kurt Goedel’s Incompleteness Theorem and the P=? NP question. I never found the time to look at the literature on that, but eventually Suresh posted a short summary of a tutorial held at FOCS this year. It’s a nice, short, and [...]

Posted on 24 October 2010 † Matteo § Nerd § University ‡ Comments (0) °

In “praise” of Bickel and Doksum

The only class I am taking this semester (and the second-to-last before I am done with classes) is APMA 2670, Mathematical Statistics 1, an advanced graduate course on statistical inference. Among the suggested references for the course there is P.J. Beckel, K. A. Doksum, “Mathematical Statistics, Vol. I, 2nd Ed.” If you read the Amazon [...]

Posted on 21 October 2010 † Matteo § University ‡ Comments (1) °

Elements of Ph.D., Volume 7

The “Standing on the shoulders of Giants”-method: “You should mine previous works as Dwarves mined Moria: deeper and deeper.” Tolkien’s advice (from the highly cited previous work “The Lord of the Rings”): “You should be wiser than the Dwarves and know when to stop. You do not want to wake up a Balrog, do you?” [...]

Posted on 17 October 2010 † Matteo § University ‡ Comments (0) °