Notes

Yes, I am back. Almost 28 hours later than expected, but I am back to Urbana. The trip started with a very tiny little delay of 8 hours in Barcelona. Yes, COA121 was the flight to Newark. Yes, COA121 was the first leg toward Urbana. Yes, the plane had technical problems on the way to Barcelona and had to land at the Azores islands to get it “fixed”. Yes, we did not dare to ask. Yes, we were tired of waiting for a plane that seemed never to come; but you should have seen the faces of the passengers deplaning at Barcelona, exhausted is not a word descriptive enough. Yes, we all filled a complaint form asking for money back according to the European Union bill of right for air passengers. Yes, we know that it was a bit of wishful thinking and the lack of anything better to do while waiting. ...

A while a go I wrote about tools for managing your LaTeX bibliography. Despite the fact that the tools I described help managing your LaTeX bibliography collection, it still did not help much with managing the tons of PDFs files you end pilling up when doing research on a particular topic. BibDesk has now the ability to attach files to entries, Zotero with its ability to store snapshots is still the closest thing I have found so far. However, a friend just pointed me to Papers, a Mac tool—yes it is just available for Mac—for managing your digital library of papers. Very much like iTunes, it allows to streamline your search, reading, organizing, and writing—there is a very interesting webcast by the creators of the software. If you have a Mac, it is worthwhile to give it a spin. ...

Are you familiar with threading in Java and looking for a crash course in Python? If the answer is yes, I just found an article written by Peyton McCullough that may help you. The “Basic Threading in Python” article can take you from no clue to writing your threaded Python code in a few minutes. See the example below, extracted from his article, to see if that rings a bell :D ...

Walking the streets of Barcelona—oops didn’t I mention I am on vacation?—I run into a bookstore near las Ramblas. Meandering around the narrow stacks, I found the newly released Catalan translation of Amélie Nothomb’s “Jornal d’Hirondelle” (Diary de l’oreneta/Diary of the swallow). The first book I read from her was “Méthaphysique des tubes”, and she got me at the first line. I need to speed up with Ulam’s autobiography—extremely addictive—so I can move on to this one. ...

Yesterday I was reading an interview to Brian Aker (MySQL director of technology) I found via Slashdot when something caught my attention. On the second side of this which may actually be more exciting is the issue of–instead of the structured data world of the relational database but the semi–the semi-structured world. You look at what is being done today with CouchDB, you look at Amazon ScaleDB, to a lesser extent but to a similar extent you–not ScaleDB, SimpleDB–to a lesser extent or a similar extent Tokyo Cabinet, those databases are really kind of fascinating because those databases are redefining really how we access data and how we are going to be searching and using data. So there’s a whole world out there that’s just starting to open up in that direction. ...