I have been looking over eReaders for a while, but I never found one that look quite right and cosy like good’old paper. Yes, Sony has his own eReader and Amazon launched Kindle, but still feel they are too small—not to mention aesthetics criteria. However, Plastic Logic is getting ready to release their take to eReaders based on their plastic electronics technology. Slim, light weight, days of battery life, and the ability to visualize all sorts of document formats (not like the Sony or Amazon ones) are some of the claims about the device. There is a presentation video on the Plastic Logic site, and a life demo on TGDaily—found via Engadget. ...

Have you ever wondered who does your intranet link to? I was sitting the other day in a meeting (yes, I know, breaking news) and I was wondering what would be a fast way to be able to answer the question. The basic sketch I did in my mind was simple: Set up a web crawler to the domain I want to analyze Run the crawling job Get the links collected on the web map Process the links to only keep the site they refer to Remove duplicates Visualize the graph Simple isn’t it? So, what do I need to get it to work? Basically three pieces of software (a web crawler, a graph manipulation library, and a visualization package) and some glue. Going over the things I been playing for the last year I draw three candidates: Nutch, RDFlib, and prefuse. Oh, the glue will be just two Python scripts. ...

Every new semester has its quickoff overhead. Besides trying to get back on track after travelling, and having meeting after meeting, now I am sitting at the inagural act of the Institute for Advanced Computing Applications and Technologies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. A list and description of the three kicking off projects of the center is also available. These three themes are: Next-Generation Acceleration Systems for Advanced Science and Engineering Applications Multiscale Simulation in Science and Engineering Synergistic Research on Parallel Programming for Petascale Applications Quite and interesting mix to follow. ...

Remember everything. is the tagline of Evernote Corporation. Evernote concept is simple, your notes with you everywhere and always accessible. They version may seem a bit more accurate: Evernote allows you to easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at any time, from anywhere. I was a bit skeptical at the beginning. I have tried several times to use the Google notebook, and I never felt they got it quite right. I had to force myself into it. So far Evernote is looking promissing. Evernote, besides the web app interface to your notes provide desktop apps (for Mac and Windows), cellphone apps, clippers, and more. Definetely worthed to take for a spin. ...

One of the benefits of working with people smarter than you is the chance to never stop learning. My office mate, Bernie Ács, is an extraordinary source of experience and wisdom on production systems. Just right after coming back from vacation, he started unfolding a virtualized solution for high availability and load balancing of services. It is not me the one who should disclose the solution, but I just want to mention a piece of the puzzle that I found very interesting: ldirectord. In the words of the ldirectord developers: ...