Mikhail Kyraha (Posts about math)

Guess text encoding with scalar product

Mikhail Kyraha — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 23:00:00 GMT

Playing with an 8-bit to multibyte text converter recently I came across with a rather interesting problem. The converter is intended to help with converting legacy text data encoded with older monobyte character encodings into UTF-8. Yes, the converting process itself is not a big deal. In fact it's a very basic and straightforward program a student would usually challenge him- or herself just after they accomplished the "Hello World!" one. However, the interesting part here is the fact that that "old encoding" can be one of a bunch of variants of slightly different ad hoc character sets. And to make things worse, the user doesn't usually know which code page exactly the original text was encoded with. And as always the user is reluctant to make any effort to find it out before using the tool. Where such ad hoc code pages came from and why they been used at all is a whole different story but it's not the point here. The point is how having only a piece of plain text to determine which code page it is encoded with. So...

Paypal Payment vs. Micropayment comparison

Mikhail Kyraha — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 19:56:00 GMT

If you sell stuff online and receive payments using Paypal you probably already know that you have two options for the payment fee with Paypal. One is the standard 2.9% commission + ¢30 transaction fee. The other is so called Micropayment Discount or 5% + ¢5 per transaction. The latter, as Paypal says, is better if your typical sales are less than $10. But how much better and what is typical? - are the questions that neither Paypal nor anybody else can answer for you. Here is a simple graph showing the total percentage you'd pay to Paypal from your merchant profit depending on the transaction amount. The graph is to help you understand your odds.

Below is my humble "analysis".

Google+ circles

Mikhail Kyraha — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 18:25:00 GMT

OK, as far as I could find so far the major, if not the only, advantage Google+ have against Facebook is their circles concept. But I'm still a little confused what would be the right way to use them. The circles are great, I agree, they prop your networking up into multidimensional space. However in my opinion it's still a half-way solution. And here is why I think so.