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MySQL 5.0 is out. It now supports: Stored Procedures and SQL Functions (about time!); Triggers (about time!); Views (about time!); Cursors (about time!); Information Schema — to provide easy access to metadata (I don’t know what this is); XA Distributed Transactions — supports complex…
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Daniel W. Drezner: a blogger was denied tenure
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OpenOffice.org 2.0: It is all about politics!
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Through Jean-Pierre Cloutier’s blog, I got to this post by Daniel Dreszner, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago who was recently denied tenure. It would seem he suspects his blogging activities have something to do with his dismissal, but I like his analysis: That said, if one…
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Here’s an interesting interview with Louis Suarez-Potts, “community manager” of OpenOffice.org. I really like the point she is making: free software is all about communities, it is all about politics. Free software is, in part, politically motivated which is an important difference with the…
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Spam bots got to me: no more comments
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Spoofing your user agent – When Firefox tells the world it is Internet Explorer
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A nameless university is using Oracle’s jinitiator applets on some management web sites. Jinitiator is just Oracle’s version of the Java JVM, but you can use any recent JVM and be happy. The trick under Linux is to fool the browser into interpreting the mime-type…
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Spam bots killed my server. I had fancy spam filtering code in place, but it was taking too much juice to filter all the crap being sent at me. This blog is now read-only. There are just too many people buying penis enhancers and falling for get-rich-quick scams. Stop wasting your money.
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Some nameless university has some management web site requiring Internet Explorer. If you ask me, that’s a lot like requiring GM cars on some highways. Such a web site is no longer a web site, but an Internet Explorer site. You can often get around these problems by using a Firefox extension…
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Research versus Teaching versus Development versus Blogging versus Consulting
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Oracle has recently bought Innobase which makes one library MySQL relies upon for storing its tables. One user on slashdot had the following insightful comment: Among the technologies that MySQL licenses from third parties under commercial redistribution licenses: Berkeley DB (Sleepycat…
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I’m working rather intensively on a new course (Information Retrieval and Filtering) which should be offered in 2006 or 2007. This course is really a pleasure. Normally, teaching is something you do seriously, while you either do as much consulting or as much research as you can. You won’t see…
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Steven will be presenting our paper Analyzing Large Collections of Electronic Text Using OLAP at APICS 2005. This work is based on an idea by Owen Kaser:__ what happens if we apply multidimensional databases (OLAP) to literary research?__ Data Mining and Information Retrieval techniques are used…
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Analyzing Large Collections of Electronic Text Using OLAP at APICS 2005
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I got my new Logitech USB Desktop Microphone working under Linux. Should have been very easy, but I hit a small nail. Plug the device in and type “lsusb”, you should see: Bus 001 Device 004: ID 0556:0001 Asahi Kasei Microsystems Co., Ltd AK5370 I/F A/D Converter Ah! The device is called…
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I don’t know where this come from, but Yuhong seems upset: A professorship is not only a position to do research, but also a resource to exploit the other’s work by acquiring the authorship. She’s right, of course. If you seek fame and fortune through a professorship, you have to become an…
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Academic Authorship
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Doing the Martin Shuffle
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Through Will’s I got to the Martin Shuffle which is a cool randomized algorithm to quickly find sonds on a MP3 player (without browsing them one by one). They implement a nice Markov Decision Process using my favorite language: Python.