Daniel Lemire's blog

Java 6.0 is out

, 1 min read

The new Java is out! Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems that this is a minor release. Performance has improved, and that is always good, but I could not find any new feature to get me excited. Of course, speed, in itself, is a good feature! Well, there is one minor feature which might be…

Is the Tech Bubble Back?

, 1 min read

I heard many claims that the Tech Job Market was improving, but now Tim Bray says it is so. I tend to trust Tim more than most. So maybe I will have some students take my Information Retrieval course in 2007? (See you in January!)

New Information Retrieval Course Soon (in French)

, 1 min read

My INF 6460 Information Retrieval course will start soon. You can see most of the content online. Information Retrieval is the “science of finding stuff” (or “how Google does it”). In fact, you can almost take the course on your own without paying if you know French. I say “almost”…

Open Source Taste Engine Ready For Netflix

, 1 min read

According to Paul Lamere (I can’t help to wonder if we are, maybe, related?), Sean Owen’s collaborative filtering library Taste has a Netflix data model builtin. So, what are you waiting for? Go win the Netflix million dollar prize!

Extracting 3D Models from Still Images

, 1 min read

These guys from Carnegie-Mellon did something that is impressive: extract reliable 3D models from still images. See for yourself: Since I have not followed advanced in this field, I have no idea how close they are to the state-of-the-art, but I don’t care. If these guys were to launch a…

The Future of Database Research

, 1 min read

In a recent talk, I said that Academic Research had been surpassed by industrial research as far as databases are concerned. Bill McIver wrote to me that he disagreed. I have an edge over Bill when it comes to arguing: I have a blog and he doesn’t. I would say the best way for academia to be…

Warren Buffet Says the Rich Do Not Pay Enough Taxes

, 2 min read

Warren Buffet, who used to be the second richest man in the world, ran an experiment in his office. He asked his staff to check which fraction of their income they paid in taxes. Surprisingly, he pays a much lesser fraction in taxes than his staff does. This is a great quote: “There’s…

XML Schemas are harmful: is this news?

, 1 min read

We now have Slashdot quoting Tim Bray on XML Schemas: W3C XML Schemas (XSD) suck. They are hard to read, hard to write, hard to understand, have interoperability problems, and are unable to describe lots of things you want to do all the time in XML. How is this news? Tim is just saying what…

Firefox and Adobe Reader causing problems?

, 1 min read

Firefox and the Adober Reader plugin is a bad mix. The plugin has the benefit that it can display PDF files “on the fly” (without loading them all first), but on our home machines, it tends to eat up a lot of memory and even crash. John Haller has written a nice piece about disabling the…

Search engines that should come by default with Firefox

, 1 min read

Firefox is not the best browser. I think Opera is a technically superior solution to render HTML and XML. However, Firefox is easy to customize and that is, more than anything else, its main strength over any other browsers. It might have taken years, but the Netscape dream of an all-powerful web…