Links for January 5th through January 10th

Wednesday 11 January 2012 - Filed under links

My shared links for January 5th through January 10th:

• Manning: Big Data Big Data book by Nathan Marz and Samuel Ritchie: “Principles and best practices of scalable realtime data systems”
• byrd & belle Nice-looking felt and leather laptop, phone, etc sleeves.
• Own A Front-Load Washer? Read This in [Market-Ticker] –
• Order theory for computer scientists Order Theory Quick Reference! Note: no explanation of applications. Think type systems, maybe?

Comments Off  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2012-01-11  ::  mike

Links for January 3rd through January 5th

Wednesday 11 January 2012 - Filed under links

My shared links for January 3rd through January 5th:

• 2011 Annual Question | Edge : "what scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit" – As usual more thought provoking essays than will fit in my head, but seriously, what is "A Proxemic of Urban Sexuality" getting at?
• Simplified Unity Lens Development with Singlet | Michael Hall's Blog –
• llvm-py – Python bindings for LLVM – Google Project Hosting –
• The Mython Programming Language – "Mython is an extensible variant of the Python programming language. Mython makes Python extensible by adding two things: parametric quotation statement, and compile-time metaprogramming. The parametric quote statement is simply syntactic sugar for saying "run some function on this embedded string". Compile-time metaprogramming allows you to evaluate that function on the embedded string at compile time. This gives you added choice, both in terms of what your code looks like, and when you want to evaluate that code."
• Solaris Internals and Performance FAQ – Siwiki – Main Page for Solaris Internals Wiki. Tons of info about Solaris' er, Internals.

Comments Off  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2012-01-11  ::  mike

Links for December 28th – 29th (Including PyCon2012 Talks of Interest)

Tuesday 3 January 2012 - Filed under links

My shared links for December 28th through December 29th:

• The Email-SIG Archives – Archives of group working on email package in python
• Link Grammar – grammar parsing package homepage as part of abiword
• Overview — NetworkX 1.6 documentation –
• dmalcolm – Automatically detecting reference-count bugs in Python extension modules –
• PyCon US 2012: Parsing Horrible Things – If you've ever wanted to get started with parsers, here's your chance for a ground-floor introduction. A harebrained spare-time project gives birth to a whirlwind journey from basic algorithms to Python libraries and, at last, to a parser for one of the craziest syntaxes out there: the MediaWiki grammar that drives Wikipedia.
• PyCon US 2012: Python for data lovers – Exploring and analyzing data can be daunting and time-consuming, even for data lovers. Python can make the process fun and exciting. We will present techniques of data analysis, along with python tools that help you explore and map data. Our talk includes examples that show how python libraries such as csvkit, matplotlib, scipy, networkx and pysal can help you dig into and make sense of your data.
• PyCon US 2012: Time series analysis in python – Analyzing, storing and visualizing time-series efficiently are recurring though difficult tasks in various aspects of scientific data analysis such as meteorological forecasting, financial modeling, … In this talk we will explore the current Python ecosystem for doing this effectively, comparing options, using only open source packages that are mature yet still under active development.
• PyCon US 2012: Email package – The email package in the Python Standard library has had a somewhat rocky transition into the Python3 era, and still doesn't handle non-ASCII easily. That is about to change. This talk will compare how things worked in Python2 (the past), how things work now (in Python3.2), and how things will work much better in the future (hopefully Python3.3).
• PyCon US 2012: Advanced SQLAlchemy – How do you take the big step from casual SQLAlchemy user, who treats your database as a mysterious object store, to advanced power user, who optimizes critical queries, plans indexing and migrations, and generates efficient reports? This talk will teach you how databases think; why humanity invented the Relational Algebra; and how SQLAlchemy grants you access to relational power.
• PyCon US 2012 : Python FUSE – Contrary to classical kernel residing file-systems in *NIX, FUSE is an API to develop file systems in user space. This talk details internals of FUSE, developing your own file-system with Python-FUSE, followed by creative application of Python-FUSE based file system.
• PyCon US 2012: What's new in the PyStdLib – Lots of Interesting stuff has gone into Python Standard library in 2.7, 3.1, 3.2 and 3.3 release. Some interesting features that went in really make programmers life easy and it can bring in a 'wow' factor to their code. Additionally, it can also help the external library developers to relook at the their libraries to use new facilities available from standard library modules. This talk distills stuff from What's new document from 2.7, 3.2 and 3.3 and presents some of the choicest new features from Python standard library. Since a lots has gone in since 2.7, focus would be given to those which have had good discussion in tracker or in python-dev and would in general was a most sought out one.
• PyCon US 2012: Code Generation in Python: Dismantling Jinja – For many DSLs such as templating languages it's important to use code generation to achieve acceptable performance in Python. The current version of Jinja went through many different iterations to end up where it is currently. This talk walks through the design of Jinja2's compiler infrastructure and why it works the way it works and how one can use newer Python features for better results.
• Mailman 3 — PyCon US 2012 – Mailman 3 has been in development for several years. This is an evolution of the ever popular mailing list management system that runs thousands of mailing lists around the world. This talk describes how the code has been modernized and how the architectural deficiencies of Mailman 2 have been addressed using REST and other technologies. This is a spinoff from the AOSA chapter on Mailman 3.
• RelEx Dependency Relationship Extractor – OpenCog – RelEx, a narrow-AI component of OpenCog, is an English-language semantic dependency relationship extractor, built on the Carnegie-Mellon Link Grammar parser. It uses a series of graph rewriting rules to identify subject, object, indirect object and many other syntactic dependency relationships between words in a sentence. That is, it generates the dependency trees of a dependency grammar. Its set of dependency relations it employs resemble those of Dekang Lin's MiniPar and the Stanford parser (and it has an explicit compatibility mode). It is inspired in part by the ideas of Hudson's Word Grammar.
• Could you start a blog on this thing? –
• Chinese high end CPUs are now in the game – details: Part 2, Alpha by VR-Zone.com – Chinese supercomputer uses Alpha architecture. Article has some interesting details and some cringeworthy breathless praise for the lamented Alpha chips…

Comments Off  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2012-01-03  ::  mike

Links for December 22nd

Tuesday 27 December 2011 - Filed under links

My shared links for December 22nd:

• Pearsonified’s Golden Ratio Typography Calculator – calculates line height, font size and content width appropriately for readability. Using the golden ratio might be bogus, but the point of matching font size to line width and height is well taken and the results look OK.

Comments Off  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2011-12-27  ::  mike

Links for December 13th through December 19th

Tuesday 27 December 2011 - Filed under links

My shared links for December 13th through December 19th:

• Treatment and Side Effect Info from Patients Like You : PatientsLikeMe –
• NVIDIA open sources compiler for CUDA based on LLVM – tweeted by insideHPC at 12/13/11 7:19 PM
• The Architecture of Open Source Applications – Architects look at thousands of buildings during their training, and study critiques of those buildings written by masters. In contrast, most software developers only ever get to know a handful of large programs well—usually programs they wrote themselves—and never study the great programs of history. As a result, they repeat one another's mistakes rather than building on one another's successes. This book's goal is to change that. In it, the authors of twenty-five open source applications explain how their software is structured, and why. What are each program's major components? How do they interact? And what did their builders learn during their development? In answering these questions, the contributors to this book provide unique insights into how they think. If you are a junior developer, and want to learn how your more experienced colleagues think, this book is the place to start. If you are an intermediate or senior developer, and want to see how your peers have solved hard design problems, this book can help you too.
• An Empirical Comparison of the Accuracy Rates of Novices using the Quorum, Perl, and Randomo Programming Languages – It will never work in theory – We present here an empirical study comparing the accuracy rates of novices writing software in three programming languages: Quorum, Perl, and Randomo. The first language, Quorum, we call an evidence-based programming language, where the syntax, semantics, and API designs change in correspondence to the latest academic research and literature on programming language usability. Second, while Perl is well known, we call Randomo a Placebo-language, where some of the syntax was chosen with a random number generator and the ASCII table. We compared novices that were programming for the first time using each of these languages, testing how accurately they could write simple programs using common program constructs (e.g., loops, conditionals, functions, variables, parameters). Results showed that while Quorum users were afforded significantly greater accuracy compared to those using Perl and Randomo, Perl users were unable to write programs more accurately than those using a language designed by chance

Comments Off  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2011-12-27  ::  mike

Links for November 27th through December 1st

Tuesday 27 December 2011 - Filed under links

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…

Comments Off  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2011-12-27  ::  mike

Links for November 19th through November 25th

Tuesday 27 December 2011 - Filed under links

My shared links for November 19th through November 25th:

• Norway: an Eden with wifi – FT.com – "Visiting Norway during the global crisis felt like prosperity tourism, or “wealth porn”."
• The Axis of Eval: The extensible way of thinking – An interesting way of looking at requiring types: it hampers extensibility…
• U1DB in Launchpad – Potential replacement for desktopcouch
• How John Got 15x Improvement Without Really Trying (Compile My Code) –

Comments Off  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2011-12-27  ::  mike

Links for November 10th through November 18th

Tuesday 27 December 2011 - Filed under links

My shared links for November 10th through November 18th:

• Apache Lucy – Lucene for C, but not compatible with lucene files.
• The Xapian Project –
• About | Sphinx – C++ library for text search. GPL licensed
• Edward Tufte forum: Touchscreens have no hand – "So instead let us give more time for doing physical things in the real world and less time for staring at (and touching) the glowing flat rectangle."
• Camlistore –

Comments Off  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2011-12-27  ::  mike

Links for November 4th through November 8th

Tuesday 27 December 2011 - Filed under links

My shared links for November 4th through November 8th:

• The Social Graph is Neither (Pinboard Blog) –
• Cinder | The library for professional-quality creative coding in C++ – A very full featured 'processing'-like library in C++ targets mac and windows and ios
• Machine Learning 10-701/15-781: Lectures –
• Xtext – An environment for building DSLs on the JVM

Comments Off  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2011-12-27  ::  mike

Getting Bill Gates Wrong?

Friday 18 November 2011 - Filed under Uncategorized

John Gruber wrote a bit today (“Getting Steve Jobs Wrong”), about Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs was missing the central question of the man – how can we define what it was, exactly that he brought to the table?

Gruber’s piece rings true and a bit sad, because we probably won’t get the insight we were all hoping for. I certainly don’t plan on reading Isaacson’s book, after hearing all these disappointed nerds.

But because I’m a student of computing history (I took a class!), I had to pick a nit with Gruber’s assertion that Gates invented the software company:

But the whole idea that software in general could be more valuable than hardware — or even just valuable, period? Gates. The man pioneered the concept of selling software.

This is probably true from the perspective of the personal computer and hobbyist industry, but the idea that software itself was valuable can be traced directly to 1969, when IBM made the decision to price software and services separately from hardware. It was a big enough deal that the decision earned itself a name: it was called “Unbundling”.

That said, it leaves the question of what Gates brought to the table, too – he certainly seems like more than just a very effective businessman, but was he a visionary?

Comments Off  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2011-11-18  ::  mike