I had a great time at NYC Code Camp this last weekend. About half the people in my talk already knew F# and were there to talk about Type Providers, the other half just came to see what this F# thing was all about. This post is to help those in the second half begin [...]

I know this post isn’t of my usual technical type, but I hope you’ll bear with me while I share an idea I’ve been thinking about. Starting way back with SETI@Home, scientists have been borrowing our computer time in exchange for awesomely nerdy screen savers for years. However, it’s only fairly recently have they discovered [...]

While writing the previous article on tokenized matching I realized I left out some important background information on Jaro-Winkler distance. First, there’s something important to know about the Jaro-Winkler distance: it’s not a metric distance and so does not obey the triangle inequality. That is, if you found the JW distance between strings A and [...]

Continuing from last time, let’s look at how one goes from imperative pseudocode to pure functional using Gale-Shapely as an example. Overall, to convert an algorithm from imperative to functional is a fairly simple process once you understand how to convert from a while loop to recursion with accumulators. This post is just a more [...]

Initially, one of the biggest problems I found when trying to marry records was the god awful quality of much of data I often have to work with. It’s mostly old mainframe and database data with truncated fields, limited character sets and fields with nonsensical contents. Even worse, much of the data is the result [...]