michael-mccracken.net (research)

Links for June 27, 2014

Michael McCracken — Fri, 27 Jun 2014 19:24:00 GMT

OpenTuner by jansel "OpenTuner is a new framework for building domain-specific multi-objective program autotuners. OpenTuner supports fully customizable configuration representations, an extensible technique representation to allow for domain-specific techniques, and an easy to use interface for communicating with the tuned program. A key capability inside OpenTuner is the use of ensembles of disparate search techniques simultaneously, techniques which perform well will receive larger testing budgets and techniques which perform poorly will be disabled." -- This looks really useful. I started on something like this long ago at LLNL, but since I was so young I focused mostly on fancy plots and designing a language for describing experiments.
Paper to Plants on Vimeo A really cute video about a game that seems pretty charming. I'm still not sold on little kids using iPads so much, I'm told it's bad for their eye development.
Ergonomic Workspace Planner Tool | ComputingComfort.org Use this to figure out the optimal height of your standing desk
pollen Write web based books in racket
Finding the perfect house using open data — dealloc.me A guy builds a map of available houses in Portland that match his desires. Seems like a good real estate agent should do this for you - but how do you know you've got a good one? I guess you have to write some code.
Drawing Presentable Trees "When I needed to draw some trees for a project I was doing, I assumed that there would be a classic, easy algorithm for drawing neat trees. What I found instead was much more interesting: not only is tree layout an NP-complete problem1, but there is a long and interesting history behind tree-drawing algorithms. I will use the history of tree drawing algorithms to introduce central concepts one at a time, using each of them to build up to a complete O(n) algorithm for drawing attractive diagrams of trees." -- I've always wondered what a good way to do this would be. Knew it had to be a solved problem.
Grain-Free Oatmeal Raisin Cookies | Against All Grain - Delectable paleo recipes to eat & feel great If you want oatmeal-raisin but you're trying to avoid oats and sugar, these are really quite good. The coconut makes a great texture.
Lev Grossman on his daughter, Lily: How being a father ruined my life and made me a better writer. A really heartfelt story about becoming a dad and getting your act together. Now that I have kids I'm a total sucker for this kind of article.
HAL :: [inria-00555588, version 1] A comprehensive study of Convergent and Commutative Replicated Data Types Formal exploration of sync-able data types. Abstract: "Eventual consistency aims to ensure that replicas of some mutable shared object converge without foreground synchronisation. Previous approaches to eventual consistency are ad-hoc and error-prone. We study a principled approach: to base the design of shared data types on some simple formal conditions that are sufficient to guarantee eventual consistency. We call these types Convergent or Commutative Replicated Data Types (CRDTs). This paper formalises asynchronous object replication, either state based or operation based, and provides a sufficient condition appropriate for each case. It describes several useful CRDTs, including container data types supporting both \add and \remove operations with clean semantics, and more complex types such as graphs, montonic DAGs, and sequences. It discusses some properties needed to implement non-trivial CRDTs."
What I Wish I Knew When Learning Haskell 2.1 ( Stephen Diehl ) Nice quick article with practical tips for beginners.
Not So Much 'New York Poor' as 'Pittsburgh Rich' - Pacific Standard: The Science of Society You can get a lot for your money in Pittsburgh, and lots of other places throughout the US. I'm from Pgh, and have fond memories. I'd consider moving back there if they could fix the weather.
Call me maybe: Elasticsearch Part of a series of irreverent but thorough explorations of various popular distributed systems.
What Do We Save When We Save the Internet So as you proceed with your protests, I wonder if you might also ask, quietly, to yourself even, what new growth might erupt if we let the Internet as we know it burn. Shouldn't we at least ponder the question? Perhaps we’d be better off tolerating the venial regret of having lost something than suffering the mortal regret of enduring it."
Music Animation Machine — "Music Worth Watching" Old stuff, but great. Couldn't believe I hadn't bookmarked it long ago.
Moving from Octopress to Nikola | serialized.net This post and a few tweaks got me into nikola without much hassle.

Links: Simulation, Programming, Crab Cakes and Hockey Player Usage Charts

Michael McCracken — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 15:41:00 GMT

DYNAMO Someone has rewritten one of the earliest simulation systems in JavaScript (the fate of all interesting software). Also includes a link to an article about the history of simulation software that sounds very interesting.
The Food Lab: The Crabbiest Crab Cakes I love crab cakes, but I'm not sure I really want to try to make them at home. If I do, I'll use these tips. The Food Lab is fun stuff.
Debug It! A review of a book on debugging, which is a topic that I think should be taught right alongside programming. See also "Why Programs Fail"
GiveDirectly: introducing a radical new way to give! | GiveDirectly Send cash straight to poor people. If their assertions are true, it's a really interesting idea, and I can't believe it hasn't been done before. It also seems transparently better than microloans.
ContinuumIO/Bokeh · GitHub Something to look out for -- a Python ggplot that works with HTML5 is a great idea. "Bokeh (pronounced boh-Kay) is an implementation of Grammar of Graphics for Python, that also supports the customized rendering flexibility of Protovis and d3. Although it is a Python library, its primary output backend is HTML5 Canvas. There are many excellent plotting packages for Python, but they generally do not optimize for the particular needs of statistical plotting (easy faceting, bulk application of aesthetic and visual parameters across categorical variables, pleasing default color palettes for categorical data, etc.). The goal of Bokeh is to provide a compelling Python equivalent of ggplot in R."
FitDesk X1 Level up from a standing desk? I'd love to try this for a day.
Concurrent Revisions DVCS-like concurrent programming. Interesting sounding research - I haven't read it yet...
Many thanks to @robvollmannhl and the good folks at Hockey Abstract for these great interactive Player Usage Charts: hockeyabstract.com/playerusagecha… Player Usage Charts are fascinating, but I can never figure out why people always change the axes so that the dots fill the space. It makes it impossible to compare two charts, and it's not obvious, so you end up comparing charts without realizing that it's meaningless.

Links: Hacking, Music in Python, Rust & unitasking

Michael McCracken — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 23:15:00 GMT

My shared links for April 5th through April 6th:

Why I still program - "I believe that the rejection of programming as a lower activity can be explained by the Theory of the leisure class. In effect, we do not seek utility but prestige. There is no prestige in tool-making, cooking or farming. To maximize your prestige, you must rise up to the leisure class: you work must not be immediately useful."
From counting citations to measuring usage (help needed!) - Building a Better Citation Index
workhacks.com: Top 3 Gmail Management Apps for Mac - Mailplane Blog - includes a list of gmail plugins that look useful
Melopy - """ >>> from melopy import Melopy >>> m = Melopy('mysong') >>> m.add_quarter_note('A4') >>> m.add_quarter_note('C#5') >>> m.add_quarter_note('E5') >>> m.render() [==================================================] 100% Done """
Rust Language Tutorial: Expression Syntax - Starts out good, but the "leave out a semicolon to return a value" leaves a bad taste. Why overload semicolons like that? Why not just use 'ret'?
Forget Self-Improvement -
The Magic of Doing One Thing at a Time - Tony Schwartz - Harvard Business Review - A few good points on avoiding multitasking burnout. Nothing too new, but maybe if people keep repeating it in places like HBR, then it'll start to become conventional business wisdom?

Links for mid-March see scalable python around corners. And Future Spies on Facebook!

Michael McCracken — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 19:20:00 GMT

My shared links for March 18th through March 26th:

7 Years of YouTube Scalability Lessons in 30 Minutes - Notes from a PyCon talk about the very pragmatic design philosophy at YouTube.
bkad/discoball * GitHub - shell tool to match and colorize lines of text
The Pragmatic Bookshelf | The Developer's Code -
How to see around corners : Nature News & Comment - And we thought the future was flying cars.
ARM's ultra-low-power fridge-puter chips: Just what the CIA ordered • The Register - Out of context interesting quote: "The spy boss was chiefly concerned with the huge amounts of data that can be collected from American citizens who intend to become CIA agents - in an age when parents set up Twitter and Tumblr accounts for their newborns, managing the identities of future operatives suddenly becomes non-trivial."
Who needs access? You need access! - new site about open access to research aimed at lay people (I think)

Links: More PyPy, Academia, Censorship we Love, and Monads

Michael McCracken — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 19:39:00 GMT

My shared links for March 1st through March 5th:

python - Does PyPY translate itself? - Stack Overflow - An informative answer about how PyPy works
On reviewing research papers « Lars Bergstrom - So, PL has a culture of really useful reviews, huh?
How to Do What You Love - "If you think something's supposed to hurt, you're less likely to notice if you're doing it wrong. That about sums up my experience of graduate school."

Boom!

The Millions : Ban This Book: An Uncensored Look At The Lorax And Other Dangerous Books -
A Neighborhood of Infinity: You Could Have Invented Monads! (And Maybe You Already Have.) - A practical way of thinking about monads.

Links: Chicken Pasta, Parsing, DEVONsphere and superpages!

Michael McCracken — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 03:04:00 GMT

My shared links for February 15th through February 20th:

Firebirds Restaurants » Blog Archive » Firebirds Chicken Pasta I made the sauce. Delicious! I can only assume the whole thing will come together.
Parsing Techniques - Second Edition -
DEVONsphere Express -- Make your Mac smarter - DEVONtechnologies - Context aware search. Menu extra for 10.6.6+ (See also my XRA, nat.org/dashboard, and others. nice looking realization of the dream by DEVONtech...
- Superpages allow each entry in the TLB to map a large physical memory region into a virtual address space. INCREASES TLB coverage; REDUCES TLB misses;

Challenges of superpages: (1) superpage allocation & promotion (2) fragmentation control

Links for January 11th

Michael McCracken — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 19:52:00 GMT

My shared links for January 11th:

Welcome to ELPA - emacs lisp package archive
OCaml for the Masses - ACM Queue - Why the next language you learn should be functional

by Yaron Minsky, Jane Street

Sometimes, the elegant implementation is a function. Not a method. Not a class. Not a framework. Just a function. - John Carmack

Elsevier-funded NY Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney Wants to Deny Americans Access to Taxpayer Funded Research -
byrd and belle - Nice looking sleeves with wool felt and leather

Links for November 27th through December 1st

Michael McCracken — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 20:11:00 GMT

My shared links for November 27th through December 1st:

The Acme User Interface for Programmers -
UF Sparse Matrix Collection - SNAP group - collection of datasets including social networks
Action Science Explorer (Formerly iOpener Workbench) -
iOpener Project - The goal of iOPENER (Information Organization for PENning Expositions on Research) is to generate readily-consumable surveys of different scientific domains and topics, targeted to different audiences and levels, e.g., expert specialists, scientists from related disciplines, educators, students, government decision makers, and citizens including minorities and underrepresented groups. Surveyed material is presented in different modalities, e.g., an enumerated list of articles, a bulleted list of key facts, a textual summary, or a visual presentation with zoom and filter capabilities. The original contributions of this research are in the creation of an infrastructure for automatically summarizing entire areas of scientific endeavor by linking three available technologies: (1) bibliometric lexical link mining; (2) summarization techniques; and (3) visualization tools for displaying both structure and content.
I regularly hire women for 65% to 75% of what males make | Hacker News - Lots of tips on salary negotiation for both sexes in the comments thread
pjax - ajax with permalinks
Moog (2004) - IMDb See also Walter/Wendy Carlos…

Links for September 27th through October 14th

Michael McCracken — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 23:58:00 GMT

My shared links for September 27th through October 14th:

pyprocessing - A Processing-like environment for doing graphics with Python - Google Project Hosting - processing in python. uses pyglet. installs very easily
Common Errors in Technical Writing - A list of common errors and peeves in technical writing. Very useful.
Renaissance: Harness Emergence to Avoid the Concurrency Trap - Languages for non-deterministic computing, and a manycore squeak VM
Geek's Guide to Portland 2011 - Waxy.org -
Candyspotting - Houndstooth Snowsuit Card - Holiday -
LLVM Project Blog: Greedy Register Allocation in LLVM 3.0 -
CUergo: Sitting and Standing - Short version: sit at your desk, but get up every 20 minutes and move around for 2 minutes. That's probably a good time to focus your eyes somewhere else too.
pandas: powerful Python data analysis toolkit -- pandas v0.4.0 documentation - python package for labeled multidimensional data

Links for July 6th

Michael McCracken — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 17:28:00 GMT

My shared links for July 6th:

Computational science: ...Error : Nature News - "…why scientific programming does not compute."

I too have worked with large codebases from non-programmers. It can be difficult to tell a brilliant physicist that programming well is hard. After QED, nothing seems hard.

Attachments.me - A nice interface to searching your email, with a focus on attachments. But they're not a hosting provider , so it is not immediately clear what's stopping your email provider (say gmail) from adding this and wiping out the business?
waffle -> Perturbingly - Jesper reading the tea leaves on Growl dropping features to get into the mac app store.