Liz and I went to see the movie 21 based on the book Bringing Down the House about some MIT students who went to Vegas and won a ton of money playing blackjack using card counting and signaling. While the movie way over dramatized the story, Kevin Spacey does an amazing job as always. One of his most memorable moments as an MIT professor is his description of variable change using the Monty Hall problem named after the host on the game show Let’s Make a Deal.

The Monty Hall Problem Explained

Suppose you’re on a game show, and you’re given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what’s behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, “Do you want to pick door No. 2?” Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?
- Marilyn vos Savant

If you don’t know the answer yet I suggest you give it some thought and then try out this experiment by the New York Times or if you like to be treated like a little kid of feel lazy here’s a youtube explanation.

Got the answer? Cool. Once you’ve got you mind wrapped around this problem it’s pretty simple but apparently it wasn’t till just recently that psychologists understood it’s implications on cognitive dissonance.

If you dig that problem the NYT has a few other related problems too.

Looking to load different symfony apps for various subdomains? Something like this: domain.com -> frontend dev.domain.com -> frontend_dev backend.domain.com -> backend backend.dev.domain.com -> backend_dev

Code

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Sorry about the down time. I’ve switched hosting providers and took some time to get everything back up.

Jon

Are you having problems with text being duplicated at the end of one of your floated div tags? It might not really be your fault. After spending about an hour verifying that my code was in fact OK I stumbled upon an article about the IE Duplicate Characters Bug.

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For those of you who use bit torrent to download various tv shows, podcasts, videocasts or any other type of periodicly updated media there is now a way to automate the process. I use azureus for my bit torrent download client and have added the RSSFeed Scanner Plugin which you can learn about how to install from zeropaid. While they certainly do a great job of telling you how to install the plugin they leave out the details of how to download from a site that requires a login. I’ll explain how this can be done with cookies.

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I’m starting to upload the photos from the trip. The photos you see are some of the best I took during the days of the conference. Most are taken near where I was staying and not so near the conference itself.