Daniel Lemire's blog

Montreal Tech Bloggers Network

, 1 min read

Somehow I appear on the (new) Montreal Tech Bloggers Network. I am flattered to be on the same list as Austin Hill. I am generally terrible at networking outside the Internet. It is not so much that I am totally socially inept, but I hate unwanted disruptions. So I am not sure I belong to any…

My favorite MacOS applications

, 1 min read

I made the switch to MacOS several months ago. I am now an experienced Mac user. Here are my favorite applications: TextWrangler. It is a free text editor that has pretty much everything you could dream off except for some nifty things like autocompletion. There is a commercial version called…

Tag clouds are here to stay

, 2 min read

I was chatting with a friend from NRC-CISTI this morning. He said he was not very keen on tag clouds. (If you do not know what a tag cloud is, follow the link!) I must admit that I rarely use tag clouds. This is usually a bad sign in IT: if you are not using a new gadget, maybe nobody is. A good…

Tag-Cloud Drawing: Algorithms for Cloud Visualization

, 1 min read

You might have noticed tag clouds if you are into Web 2.0. I think they are an interesting widget on their own. With Owen Kaser, I wrote a paper on tag-cloud optimization. I expect this will be a popular topic. Our paper has a definitively hard component, with lots of (non-human) experimental…

Making Firefox Prettier under Linux

, 1 min read

I think Firefox is a capable browser. It is also multiplatform. Unfortunately, I feel that the Linux version is sometimes far uglier than the Windows version. This has to do, partly, with the fact that Firefox uses GTK. This Gentoo HOWTO on how to Integrate Firefox with KDE helped me quite a bit…

Google Summer of Code and Collaborative Filtering

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Andre reports that the Taste Collaborative Filtering library was selected by the Google Summer of Code program. You can check out the various summer project ideas. Among those, you have multidimensional rating algorithms: for a reference, see my 2003 paper with Harold Boley and others. Seems like…

The big scientific questions in computing have been answered

, 2 min read

The Economist tell us about the downfall of Vannevar Bush’s research model: ideas are conceived in universities and then passed on to industry for commercialization. I honestly do not know if this model was ever true. I do not think that academic research has ever been about producing ideas that…

Streaming Maximum-Minimum Filter Using No More than Three Comparisons per Element

, 2 min read

My paper Streaming Maximum-Minimum Filter Using No More than Three Comparisons per Element will appear in the Nordic Journal of Computing. Despite the scary title, anyone with an elementary Mathematics background can read and appreciate the paper. There are mathematical proofs, but they are simple.…

One More Step Toward Infinite Storage

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Acccording to a new IDC study reported in Wired, the world had 185 exabytes of storage available last year and will have 601 exabytes in 2010. Meanwhile, the amount of “digital information” generated will grow from 161 exabytes last year to 988 exabytes in 2010. Their point is that we lack the…

Oracle buys Hyperion

, 1 min read

This might be a very big deal: Oracle just bought Hyperion for US$3.3 billion. The most obvious effect is that the Business Intelligence market has now fewer players then ever and Oracle is now a very serious player indeed. I wonder what this will mean for the defunct JOLAP? Could Oracle bring it…

Computer Science Departments will not survive

, 1 min read

When asked what would happen if Computer Science departments do not collaborate in the creation of a new Academic field, Web Science, Ben Shneiderman, from the University of Maryland, said: “they will not survive.” At least, his point of view is clear.