Notes

A while ago Kumara Sastry introduced me to the beauty of SlideShare. I have been using SlideShare services for a while in the little blogging I do to upload, share, embed, and display some of my presentations. The other day David E. Goldberg introduced me to Scribd. The site takes the SlideShare idea further and allows you to use their services as a publish-it-yourself site. It also allows you to embed the document on your page, as SlideShare does. A slightly different flavor of the publish-it-yourself idea is Lulu. Here, the gears are more oriented to have an online cheap publisher where you are your own editor. As I said, a different flavor for a different purpose. ...

The other day I was looking for a piece of software that could help me pull data out of SVN repository so I can do a little analysis on it. Browsing over the net, I run into several tools, but the one that finally caught my eye was SNVKit. The package does a lot of stuff, but for instance, if you are only interested on pulling information out, it makes your like quite easy. The code below is just a simple example of how you can use it to pull information out of a SVN repository. ...

Interesting twist using Google Analytics to do site optimization. The interesting part is the shift of mentality. Instead of scratching your head going for the best, why not put a bunch out there and using as a row data for the next generation. Sounds familiar? Yes, they will not mention it, but it heavily uses a simple evolutionary model. Using they words: you start with a basic set of variations, then you measure, oh you may want to try another set of variants based on the best ones. Yes, definitely evolutionary-based flavor. After going over the presentation, you will be wondering why they do not called interactive genetic algorithm? Well, I do not have the answer, but what I can say is that process can be modeled using an interactive genetic algorithm. The DISCUS project has shown that for the last five years. An introductory paper about how interactive genetic algorithms can help with such kind of modeling can be found here. ...

Eurovision Song Contest is not dead after all. A simple proof is the amount of ink generated after the “ChikiChiki” (Spain entry to the contest), not to mention all the other curious participants from all over Europe (including the singing duck…). Thinking about it, I still feel that the ChikiChiki is dull and a bit borring when compared to the master of all the editions: Raphael. The above video was his performance on the 1966 edition. ...

Finally! I have been able to consolidate two of my blogs into this new domain :D. I just moved over my old IlliGAL blog and my newer DITA one. I started blogging after the push at IlliGAL, and when I moved to NCSA I took the habit with me into DITA. There are also a few more satellite blogs around (that I may or may not bring over here), but the final goal is to regroup energies and restart the blogging in a more unified manner. Let’s see how it goes… ...