The Case of the Missing Ancestor – The Denisovans

National Geographic has a great article on the discovery and further research related to our cousins the Denisovans. Everyone knows about the Neandarthals, and at this point I think most people know that large portions humans living today have some percentage of Neanderthal DNA. I was completely in the dark about the prospect of another …

Backing up data on AWS EC2 Micro instances using the CrashPlan headless Linux client

I’ve been using a combination of scripts to do local backups on my Amazon EC2 micro instance I use to serve this website – AutoMySQL Backup and some cron jobs which ran rsync for various paths on a rotation. For example: This is frankly a pretty lazy way to do it. I’m not protected at …

Facebook’s suggested gifts algorithm needs some work

Some good friends of ours recently had their first child and posted photos on Facebook. When viewing that post on the desktop version of Facebook it had a little ad which suggested giving a gift to them: I don’t think their suggested gifts algorithm is doing a good job of suggesting Fast & Furious 6 …