lee becker . com

I’m always excited to see NLP research featured in the mass media because it closes the gap between what my mom thinks I do and what I actually do. The most recent buzz has been for work from Kevin Knight, his students at the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) at the University of Southern California (USC), …

My friends at Inner Wave and I put on a small silat demo as part of the CU International festival.    For a more complete writeup, read my post at Boulder Silat.    

I spent a good part of this evening (can you call it evening when it’s well past midnight?) trying to learn how to do a simple Java-based query using Amazon’s Product Advertising API.  This entire exercise could have been finished within an hour had there been clear, concise documentation.  Instead of one recipe for success, …

As I was updating the site, I took notice of all the ways that people (myself included) attempt to obfuscate their e-mail addresses to avoid getting their e-mail picked up by the spammers diligently crawling the web.  You often see variations like first.last@domain.com first@lastname.com first[dot]last@domain.com <first_initial><last_name>@domain.com Even though the extra layer of HTML makes the …

About a month ago I ssh-ed into my server to discover that my bash settings were not initializing.  I thought it was just a little hiccup with our server configuration, but it turned out that our system was compromised.  The hacker had logged in by exploiting an ssh overload bug.  From there he/she/it felt compelled …