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T10 Protection Information

Submitted by taylor on November 30, 2009 - 11:01pm

The feature that our NetApp team has been primarily working on is known as the SCSI T10 Protection Information (PI). Ultimately, this standard adds an additional guarantee that the data we are storing is correct. Hard drives already provide a CRC for each sector and some other internal magic to ensure data correctness, but PI adds end-to-end support for such guarantees.

This standard requires that the sector size on hard drives be increased from 512 bytes to 520 bytes. These extra 8 bytes will then be split up into three fields:

Netflix Prize: Reducing Error in Sample-Based Correlation Coefficients

Submitted by taylor on August 17, 2009 - 11:07pm

In a previous post we trying to reduce the temporal complexity of computing correlation coefficients by choosing a clever set of "critics" to represent other the views of all users. This concept was ultimately unsuccessful for us, but it did yield some exciting new ideas.

Netflix Prize: Critic Subsets

Submitted by taylor on July 11, 2009 - 1:10am

I've been doing research in a new and growing area known as Collaborative Filtering. The rise of web 2.0 applications has had the side-effect of creating large amounts of data about large amounts of users - something that before the internet just didn't have a means to happen. Using this data as input to a combination of statistics and artificial intelligence techniques yields the ability to extrapolate and form predictions. Predicting user satisfaction of a given product or a service translates into personalized recommendations for some products over others.

Bioinformatics

Submitted by taylor on April 20, 2009 - 3:20am

I've recently been looking into bioinformatics and computational biology because I love the idea of manipulating biology or biological information with computer science. I believe the ubiquitous integration of technology into human physiology is an inevitable leap that will be undergone in my lifetime. We have already laid the groundwork for this revolution and can do things like control rats' movements with joysticks, rewire part of the body to bypass damaged nerves, and crossbreed goats with spiders to produce significant amounts of spidersilk.

Drupal: Single Person Blogs

Submitted by taylor on April 16, 2009 - 12:15am

I made the switch to Drupal without knowing much about the Drupal core blogging module and as it turns out, Drupal's core blog implementation is excellent, but was intended for multiple bloggers. This way a user could view the site blog page and see recent posts from any member, but could still view just the posts from a specific user (e.g. Taylor's Blog). This was good and all, but it bothered me to hack my URLs to fit my single blog site.