Daniel Lemire's blog

Don´t Be Afraid to Drop the SOAP

, 1 min read

Through Downes’, I found another article speaking up against SOAP: Don’t Be Afraid to Drop the SOAP. Here’s a few things it holds against SOAP, all of which are things I can testify to: SOAP is difficult to debug. The SOAP message format is verbose even by XML standards, and decoding it by…

SOAP leads to strongly coupled, poorly scalable, and bandwidth hungry solutions?

, 1 min read

Here’s some comments by Joe Walnes on his experience with SOAP. The scary thing is that he comes to exactly the same conclusions as I did on my own… Any SOAP supporter out there wants to answer these: On the last system I worked on, we were struggling with SOAP and switched to a simpler REST…

Victor Shoup´s A Computational Introduction to Number Theory and Algebra

, 1 min read

Through Didier, I got to Victor Shoup’s Home Page. He has an on-line textbook called A Computational Introduction to Number Theory and Algebra. It is unclear whether he intends the textbook to remain free, but it is pretty cool to post the book on his home page. Shoup’s is an expert in…

How Technology Will Destroy Schools

, 2 min read

Through Downes’, I found an article by David Wiley’s with the provocative title How Technology Will Destroy Schools (he actually is being needlessly provocative, he means “schools as they exist now”). The gist of his argument goes as follows: The development of (…) technology will…

Data centers as a utility?

, 1 min read

Seems like Gartner predicts data centers are going to become a utility: The office environment will dramatically change in 50 years’ time, with desktop computers disappearing, robots handling more manual tasks, and global connectivity enabling more intercontinental collaboration. Data centers…

What the Bubble Got Right

, 2 min read

A beautiful article by Paul Graham: What the Bubble Got Right. It is a good analysis of the dot-com era. I totally agree with the analysis too! People tend to overestimate the impact of technology over the short term, but underestimate it over the longer term. The dot-com bubble was proof of that.…

If you haven´t switched to Firefly, do it now.

, 1 min read

I’ve finally moved all my machines to Mozilla Firefox 1.0. It is, by far, the best browser I ever used, and it is totally, truely free. Unfortunately, the French version is lagging behind a bit. Unless you are running something else than Windows, Linux, or MacOS, you have no excuse to use another…

SOAP Problems

, 1 min read

Here’s a page of links reporting many SOAP Problems. Glad to see I’m not the only one who doesn’t get SOAP.

On tools for academic writting and a shameless plug

, 1 min read

First, the shameless plug: my long-time friend, Jean-François Racine published a book available both as hardcover and paperback. The title is “The Text of Matthew in the Writings of Basil of Caesarea”. More seriously, and maybe he had told me about this, but he told me about this specialized…

An Amazon Web Services (AWS) 4.0 application in just a few lines

, 4 min read

I have somewhat of a debate with my friend Yuhong about the correct way to use a Web Service. Yuhong seems to prefer SOAP. I much prefer REST. What is a REST Web Service? For the most part, a REST Web Service is really, really simple. You simply follow a URL and magically, you get back an XML file…

Academic life: a balancing act

, 1 min read

Today, I realized that the life of a researcher/professor is really a balancing act. A professor… has a rich personal life; gives great courses; gets a lot of funding; has many students; publishes a lot papers each year; consults on industrial/governmental projects; manages something…

Does your university think that “Jobs are for the little people”?

, 1 min read

Tall, Dark, and Mysterious is a Math. professor somewhere in Canada, possibly in British Columbia. She graduated from a big school and now teaches at a smaller (lesser?) school. Well, is it a lesser school? That’s where her tale becomes interesting. Myself, I attended UofT. I don’t know if the…

Some insight from John Travolta

, 1 min read

This morning, I was chatting with a colleague, Richard Hotte, and we were discussing research, funding, and the relation between the two. I’ve also had these discussions with Martin Brooks. Richard pointed out that John Travolta has figured it out all some years ago when he received a prize at…

Why analogies matter!

, 1 min read

From Peter Turney, here are two books to convince you that analogies are an important concept: Metaphors We Live By and Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being.