Installing Netscape 4.79 (clarified)    I feel so dirty. The number of times I've been interrupted by pop-ups from the browser asking me to make it become more a part of my system is extremely annoying. I have to install it because some organizations think it's too hard to deploy a newer browser (maybe because of all the dialogs and pop-ups?). I think someone in the IT staff just isn't being honest with their organization-- you can absolutely bet they are not using Netscape 4.x on their "personal" machine. I really don't care to make web pages "compatible" with 4.x if I have to make the pages "non-standard" to acheive a certain look and feel on the 5.x browsers. This "lust" for pixel-by-pixel control over web content that everyone wants and the problems of cross-browser support should be a sign that the web isn't Intended To Be A Platform.

Mathmatics     I've been reading whenever I can from http://planetmath.org/, which has become one of my reference bookmarks.

Python      This could probably use some casting or perhaps use of the Number classes, but I'm not sure that I like how IMDB calculates their ranks anymore after playing with the formula.

def weighted_rank(v,R,m,C):
   """From http://us.imdb.com/top_250_films :
The formula for calculating the top 250 films gives a true Bayesian estimate:
 weighted rank (WR) = (v / (v+m)) * R + (m / (v+m)) * C
 where:
  R = average for the movie (mean) = (Rating)
  v = number of votes for the movie = (votes)
  m = minimum votes required to be listed in the top 250 (currently 1250)
  C = the mean vote across the whole report (currently 6.9)
"""
   return (v / ( v + m ) ) * R +  ( m / ( v + m )  ) * C;

I played with this shortly after reading a little bit about the Advogato diary ranking system, hence also the interest in the PlanetMath site to understand Eigenvectors. At the moment I don't understand them well enough to compare to the IMDB estimate of rank.