The Bag of Tricks

It seems like everyone else is blogging these days, so I've decided to keep track of my bag of programming tricks here so that I can find them later and perhaps you'll find some of them useful as well. I'm a graduate student in machine translation (read: I do a lot of data munging and plumbing in Natural? Language Processing and occasionally play with some large statistical models), so I might also use this space to celebrate or bemoan various things in our field.