Daniel Lemire's blog

How to recover “lost” changes in CVS

, 1 min read

Suppose someone destroyed one of your file revisions by checking in a file undoing any changes you made. While your version is still in the CVS tree (you are using version control, aren’t you?), you don’t know how to merge them with the current version of the file. Well, here’s a hack that…

Autocompletion in the Python console

, 1 min read

Hans tells us how to have autocompletion in the Python console: import readline, rlcompleter readline.parse_and_bind("tab: complete") This is brilliant, but I wonder how I would ever have guessed this exact sequence of code. Isn’t it a bit obscur? Anyhow. Hans also tells us how to…

Steven got his M.Sc.

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Steven’s presentation on Efficient Storage Methods for a Literary Data Warehouse went well and he got his M.Sc. Congratulations! (I drove 12 hours to get to Saint John… and 12 hours back… I’m exhausted!)

STXXL: C++ Standard Template Library for Extra Large Data Sets

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I haven’t tried it, but the description is cool: The The core of STXXL is an implementation of the C++ standard template library STL for external memory (out-of-core) computations, i.e., STXXL implements containers and algorithms that can process huge volumes of data that only fit on disks.…

Efficient Storage Methods for a Literary Data Warehouse

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FACULTY OF COMPUTER SCIENCE NOTICE OF ORAL DEFENCE MCS Degree Efficient Storage Methods for a Literary Data Warehouse By Steven W. Keith Examining Committee: Supervisors: Dr. Owen Kaser (UNBSJ), Dr. Daniel Lemire (Adjunct Prof., Univ.of Quebec) Chairperson: Dr. Larry Garey (UNBSJ) Internal…

Curse of Dimensionality and intuition

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Yaroslav has this thought provoking article on the Curse of Dimensionality: (…) consider a cube of width 1. As dimension increases, the volume stays the same. But (…) eventually almost all the mass is concentrated in the corners (meaning outside of the inscribed sphere). The plot is…

Beyond the algorithmization of the sciences

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Thomas Easton promotes algorithms as a higher form of science in his paper Beyond the algorithmization of the sciences: Algorithms have thus made biology as useful a science as physics, chemistry, and computer science. But are algorithms enough to move biology closer to the throne? Are they…

There´s No Such Thing as a Learning Object

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Michael Feldstein, Assistant Director, SUNY Learning Network, says that there is no such thing as a learning object. We learn by doing. We consider. We compare. We measure, discuss, debate, critique, test, and explore. We try, fail, and try again. Learning is an activity. It’s a process. Given…

Harold calls for the death of learning objects

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David Wiley said that learning objects are a bad idea. Albert Ip points out that standards in eLearning technology bring no visible benefit. Now, Harold Jarche adds his two cents to this “debate” (if “debate” there is): In a recent project where I reviewed the business case for SCORM…

JabRef reference manager

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JabRef reference manager is a Java-based tool to manage your BibTeX references. “JabRef runs on the Java VM (version 1.4.2 or greater), and should work equally well on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.” (Thanks to Harold Boley for pointing it out.)

A Star Is Made – New York Times

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A pretty exciting article in the New York Times about what is “talent”. The short story is that you should practice hard while ensuring you have immediate feedback and have clearly defined goals. when it comes to choosing a life path, you should do what you love — because if you don’t…