Daniel Lemire's blog

Death of Learning Objects

, 3 min read

Millions were invested in Learning Object initiatives by most Western governments and nothing came out of it. David Wiley reflects on the failure of Learning Objects. For a very long time now (in 1999, in 2000, and heck, NSF even gave me a CAREER award founded on this criticism in 2002) I’ve…

Desktop Search using open source swish?

, 1 min read

This is old news, but one of my colleagues asked me if I knew about an open source search engine she could use for her knowledge management course. Here’s the answer: Swish-E Swish++ Lucene This made me wonder why I haven’t thought about using Swish-E, for example, to build some sort of…

FOAF going nowhere?

, 1 min read

It looks like FOAF (Friend of a Friend) is going nowhere. FOAF is one of the better RDF vocabularies out there. And the adoption rate is tiny. The idea is great: formalize social networks so that software can support it. We have tools to create FOAF files automatically, wordpress does it well, so…

IJCAI-07 (June 23, 2006 / January 6-12 2007)

, 1 min read

IJCAI-07 will be held in India. Thanks to Yuhong for pointing this deadline to me. The IJCAI-07 Program Committee invites submissions of technical papers for IJCAI-07, to be held in Hyderabad, India, January 6-12, 2007. Submissions are invited on significant, original, and previously unpublished…

Keep Mandriva/Mandrake up-to-date with Easy Urpmi

, 1 min read

Urpmi is a tool allowing to quickly install packages on your machine: it will resolve all dependencies and download the packages for you. All you need to do to install, say gnuplot, is to type, as root, “urpmi gnuplot”. However, I thought you had to carefully select your mirrors on your own.…

Looking for a RDF to SVG tool

, 1 min read

I’m looking for a tool to convert RDF files to SVG files. I’m currently teaching RDF without using pretty RDF plots because I haven’t yet found a way to generate them automatically. I know about 4suite which W3C uses, but the results are not pleasing to my eyes. Update: Actually 4suite and…

Python allows negative indexing on arrays!

, 1 min read

Python supports indexes on arrays, and they work reasonably: >>> [0,1,2][0] 0 [0,1,2][1] 1 [0,1,2][2] 2 Now, it gets strange when you use negative indexes… >>> [0,1,2][-1] 2 [0,1,2][-2] 1 As it turns out, the same is true if you create an array in Python Numeric or…

ongoing · It´s Not Dangerous

, 1 min read

Tim Bray’s It’s Not Dangerous post was the tenth more popular post of the year according to BlogPulse. It amazes me that someone like Tim is not only a good technical guy who invented things like XML, but he is also a top notch communicator. Surely, there is a strong correlation between the…

Are debuggers obselete?

, 1 min read

Are debuggers still useful? The main use of GNU debugger (gdb), for me, is to make sure I get a stack trace, like in Java. Putting break points and watching variables is just not something I do outside the code. Putting asserts and various checks in the code is far more valuable in my opinion even…

Grad Course by Kaser and Lemire: Data Warehousing and OLAP

, 1 min read

For the third time, this term, we are teaching CS6905 Advanced Technologies for E-Business: Data Warehousing and OLAP. The course material is mostly original content gathered from OLAP and Data Warehousing papers. This is probably a unique course and I’m very proud of its quality though there is…

Sim-antic Web

, 1 min read

Game Software publisher Maxis, producers of the hit games Sim City and The Sims, have announced what they expect to be their biggest success ever – Sim-antic Web. The game, where users play simulated XML experts, messaging architects and linguistic ontologists in order to build the perfect, or…