petemichaud.github.io
Education Porn | Pete Michaud's Technical Blog
http://petemichaud.github.io/2013/01/30/education-porn.html
Talk mathy to me, baby. January 30th, 2013. I’m working on a book based on a essay I wrote a while back called Achievement Porn. A section of that book is devoted to the state of our education system, and so I jumped at the opportunity for a short presentation at an Education Technology conference here in Austin. I recorded the talk, and provided the transcript below. What do you think? No soundcloud support available). Potent, but meaningless. Wait a minute, I learned things in school! How many people c...
petemichaud.github.io
DigitalOcean API Gem | Pete Michaud's Technical Blog
http://petemichaud.github.io/2013/09/11/digitalocean-api-gem.html
Talk mathy to me, baby. September 11th, 2013. As part of my attempt to make setting up Jekyll sites bonehead easy for myself. I wanted to make the script smart enough to actually set up the DNS records for a new site without any human intervention. I could just hit the DigitalOcean API raw, but that’s ugly and not maintainable, and I’m not a big fan of chlamydia. Part of the problem is that the only gem that encapsulates the DigitalOcean API. But not so much any more. I wrote some new functionality.
petemichaud.github.io
Frustration and 4 Dimensional Hypercubes | Pete Michaud's Technical Blog
http://petemichaud.github.io/2013/01/11/frustration-and-hypercubes.html
Talk mathy to me, baby. Frustration and 4 Dimensional Hypercubes. January 11th, 2013. I’ve always had a weird relationship with frustration. It pushes me to do things I didn’t think I could do. There was a time I was seven years old in the hospital after an accident. I couldn’t walk, and people were hauling me from the hospital bed in and out of wheel chairs all the time. One day my grandmother left to go get some food for lunch, and on her way out of my room she said Don’t go anywhere! Well fuck you man...
petermichaud.com
About This Site
http://www.petermichaud.com/about
Everything is weird. Weirder than you think. Totally fucking weird. This blog is a scratch pad for making sense of the some of the weirdness I’ve found over the years. It turns out that it’s primarily about applied psychology. That means that instead of primary research you’ll mostly find actionable tools, personal perspectives, and aphorisms. The consistent thread through my life that can explain basically everything I’ve ever done is that I want to do the most good I can possibly do. We don’t have enou...
petemichaud.github.io
Normal Random | Pete Michaud's Technical Blog
http://petemichaud.github.io/2015/07/16/normal-random.html
Talk mathy to me, baby. July 16th, 2015. Random number generators are generally uniform, ie. any number inside the range is equally likely to be chosen. But what if you’re generating numbers that need to fall along a normal curve? For example, what if you’re generating people for a game and those people have IQ scores? IQ has a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. How do I generate a population of people in which the IQ distribution is realistic? For most purposes that’s fine. Raquo; Build Meta.
petemichaud.github.io
rel="No-Refresh" | Pete Michaud's Technical Blog
http://petemichaud.github.io/2013/01/21/no-refresh-on-request.html
Talk mathy to me, baby. January 21st, 2013. Asyncronous javascript is a marvelous tool, that was tacked onto a language that wasn’t built for it by clever hackers at Microsoft. In 1998 they released XMLHTTP which was an Internet Explorer component, and by 1999 the XMLHttpRequest javascript object that was based on the original work had been adopted by all the major browsers. Ajax was born. And it’s great because it allows web pages to act like local software in terms of responsive and seamless interaction.
petemichaud.github.io
Wordpress to Jekyll Converter | Pete Michaud's Technical Blog
http://petemichaud.github.io/2013/09/07/wordpress-jekyll-formatter.html
Talk mathy to me, baby. Wordpress to Jekyll Converter. September 7th, 2013. I’m going through the process of converting all my WordPress sites to Jekyll. Jekyll makes it easy to convert by providing import scripts from various platforms including Wordpress. All I had to do was Export the xml file from the Wordpress admin panel, then run the Wordpress importer. To fix the problems, I created a throwaway script. Drop this into the the root of your Jekyll site, then run it from the command line.
petemichaud.github.io
Linux Hosting Account Backup | Pete Michaud's Technical Blog
http://petemichaud.github.io/2013/01/07/linux-account-backup.html
Talk mathy to me, baby. Linux Hosting Account Backup. January 7th, 2013. If you’re on a linux host, you might find this useful. It will backup all the websites and their MySQL databases into an archive folder that you can download regularly. This script runs weekly on my host, and backs up my dozen or so sites and databases. You’ll need a shell user probably, and the ability to set up CRON jobs. In the root directory of your account,. Above the web root. Create a folder called /backup. Make sure those fi...
petemichaud.github.io
Build Meta | Pete Michaud's Technical Blog
http://petemichaud.github.io/2013/11/05/build-meta.html
Talk mathy to me, baby. November 5th, 2013. TechStars Austin just finished up. I met a lot of super smart and passionate people over the course of it, and I hope they all make a trillion dollars. I’ve noticed something about companies that get investor attention that I’m going to share. I was talking to a VC some months ago about a social good startup. She had funded a social good startup before, and I wanted to know what she looked for. That addressed some inefficiencies in the nonprofit space. Still, i...
petemichaud.github.io
How to Model a Problem (with Math!) | Pete Michaud's Technical Blog
http://petemichaud.github.io/2013/01/08/mathematical-modeling.html
Talk mathy to me, baby. How to Model a Problem (with Math! January 8th, 2013. I have a weird problem that has a weird solution. The solution turns out to be more useful than I thought. I have a wide circle of friends, acquaintances, and colleagues, and I’m extroverted so I love talking to them all. But I’m also introverted, and I get super focused on whatever project I’m working on. Occasionally I’ll go incognito and when I pop up a month or two later people will ask Hey man, what happened to you? But th...
