Daniel Lemire's blog

Edd Dumbill on Web 2.0

, 2 min read

Edd Dumbill has a cool post on what the future of the Web is. What’s hot: Intellectual property and privacy law. If exchange and manipulation of data is key to the future web, then we need to understand that and be the ones in control. If corporations have too much control of data, as they are…

C# programming for GPL fans

, 1 min read

Looks like GPL is an ever expanding world. Through slashdot, I learned that there is GPL IDE for C# called SharpDevelop. Given that there is nothing wrong, apparently, with C# as a language, maybe I’ll need this one day. It is also being ported to Mono so it should eventually run under Linux too.

Computing argmax fast in Python

, 1 min read

Update: see Fast argmax in Python for the final word. Python doesn’t come with an argmax function built-in. That is, a function that tells you where a maximum is in an array. And I keep needing to write my own argmax function so I’m getting better and better at it. Here’s the best I could…

Aaron Straup Cope´s NYTimes Widgets

, 1 min read

One of the most interesting talk we had at SWIG’04 was “Design Issues and Technical Challenges Making the Eatdrinkfeelgood Markup Language RDF” where Aaron showed why it was hard to use RDF in a XML project. I think it all boils down to the fact that we have no good widespread way of…

Good software engineering according to Paul Graham

, 1 min read

Paul Graham describes what good software developers do: In software, paradoxical as it sounds, good craftsmanship means working fast. If you work slowly and meticulously, you merely end up with a very fine implementation of your initial, mistaken idea. Working slowly and meticulously is premature…

Globalization and the American IT Worker

, 1 min read

Norman Matloff wrote a solid paper called Globalization and the American IT Worker, published in the latest issue (Nov. 2004) of Communications of the ACM. Here’s a rather bleak quote: University computer science departments must be honest with students regarding career opportunities in the…

RSS is the Semantic Web

, 1 min read

Here’s what Stephen Downes has to say about the Semantic Web: RSS is the semantic web. It is not the official semantic web as I said, it is not sanctioned by any standards body or organization whatsoever. But RSS is what has emerged as the de facto description of online content, used by more…

TOOL: The Open Opinion Layer

, 1 min read

Here’s an interesting paper by Hassan Masum, TOOL: The Open Opinion Layer. Here’s the abstract: Shared opinions drive society: what we read, how we vote, and where we shop are all heavily influenced by the choices of others. However, the cost in time and money to systematically share opinions…

Follow-up on “Sébastien Paquet on blogs and wikis”

, 3 min read

In one my previous post commenting on the fact that technology had changed dramatically learning, I predicted that in 5 years, it would be an accepted fact that some university courses are better taught using mostly technology and very little live input from an instructor… I had one reply from an…

Sébastien Paquet on blogs and wikis

, 2 min read

As pointed out by Nicolas, Sébastien Paquet was giving a talk on Friday. He talked about blogs and wikis for collaborative learning. As an interesting sidenote, the famous Gilles Brassard attended Sébastien’s talk since Gilles was Sébastien’s thesis supervisor. As reported by Nicolas, I…

Wal-Mart´s Data Obsession

, 1 min read

According to this Slashdot thread, Wal-Mart has 460 terabytes of data stored on Teradata mainframes, at its Bentonville headquarters. That’s something like 249 if my computations are exact. That’s about 10,000 average hard drives (at 50 GB each) or 1,500 large hard drives (at 300 GB each).…

Cringely on Microsoft

, 1 min read

Cringely has nice things to say about Microsoft this time around. The gist of his argument is that Microsoft is a better company because it is lean and mean. I have no idea how lean and mean Microsoft is, but I buy it. I remember seeing a picture of the entire Windows dev. team, and it was a…

Backing up your data is hard!

, 2 min read

I lost the last 3 months of data on my Palm. People who know me can imagine my face right now. I take all my notes on my Palm. It is my primary data source/data management tool. It is stupid, really. Every time there is some quarters in my pocket, the Palm goes crazy. I think the metal from the…

Funny differences between Mysql and Postgresql

, 1 min read

I hope someone can explain these funny differences between Mysql and Postgresql. (Yes, see update below.) Here’s an easy one… What is 11/5? select 11/5; What should a SQL engine answer? Anyone knows? I could check as I used to be a member of the “SQL” ISO committee, but I’m too lazy and…

The Public Referee Reports Debate

, 2 min read

I think the wave was started by Seb this time as he hints we should consider publishing reviews when an academic paper is submitted. A reply comes from Lance who says we should kill this idea quick. I think his counterargument is badly flawed. For example, he describes the review process as…