Programming

If you are looking for a list of the related blogging done during ICEIS 2008 just follow this link. During Sunday morning I run into Angel A. Juan, an assistant professor at Open University of Catalonia (UOC), interested on analyzing online teaching efforts and how tools to assist professors monitoring students performance on online media. I visited him yesterday at his office and we got and interesting exchange of ideas. Most of them revolved around the work we have conducted under the DISCUS project, and how similar is our efforts on marketing focus groups and their online teaching environment. His group, Distributed, Parallel and Collaborative Systems, was also interested on the work done under the SEASR project, mostly focusing on the Meadre infrastructure for data-intensive flow computing we are getting close to release. ...

This is the final sprint for ICEIS. I have been mostly focusing on posters this morning. It his hard to pick one up. I would just say that there was some interesting work on personalized recommender systems—paper 219. But as I said, there were a bunch of interesting ones and quite a few interesting by-the-poster conversations. Actually, I am having a very interesting time after the mix of attendees’ profiles. The morning finally meandered into Ricardo Baeza-Yates’s keynote talk. After the initial technical problems—presentation mode of OpenOffice running on Ubuntu 8.0.4 got up just 75% of the slide area—they finally succeeded on getting something up and get the talk started. This was a pretty technical talk about Yahoo! research effort on caching to improve the performance and also help scalability and contain cost on the coming years. Besides several cache techniques, he also presented a bunch of possible paralyzation models based on document/term partitions. A thing he breezed over was the machine learning model for classifying queries. That surfaced several places, from predicting common and rare content, to frequent, unfrequent, and rare queries. I was glad that the technical problems were solve and we could enjoy it. And the conference is finally close. Next year, Milan. ...

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 ...

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. ...

Are you looking for some code sniped? Are you looking for some freely available code available on the net written on a specific language? If the answer is yes, you may want to take a look at Google Code Search. I just canned a few examples below. Genetic algorithm in Python Genetic algorithm in C Genetic algorithm in Java