Check it out… I was mentioned in a recent Nature article about research paper management tools:

http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080430/full/453012b.html (doi:10.1038/453012b)

Cool, eh?

I wanted a simple GTK-based LaTeX editor with spell checking, syntax highlighting and a preview pane. None that I could find fit this bill, so I rolled my own.

Website: http://desigle.org/

Use if you wish.

The NetFlix Prize

I remember reading about it after it was announced (probably on /.), and promptly forgetting about it. I stumbled across it again listening to one of the Google lectures on MapReduce, and started poking around, thinking “maybe this would make a good test project for my new (I-just-want-to-play-sized) Hadoop cluster”. But then I needed an algorithm before I started parallelizing it, and, hey, what do you know, I’m getting really good numbers.

Of course, I’m getting my good numbers on a very small randomly selected subset of the entire project. So it could be just a fluke. And it’s slower than molasses in an Adirondack winter (current estimate: 10+ years to calculate the entire qualifying data set). But hey, it has my attention.

hahahahah

http://www.osnews.com/story/19266/WTFs_m

My PyGTK skillz are improving…

Allow me to introduce gPapers, a Gnome-based Digital Library Manager. (think iTunes for all your PDF files)

If you have to ask “why?”, you’re probably not working in academia, and have never had to manage piles of journal papers. This isn’t for you. If you’re a Windows or OSX user, this isn’t for you. If you’re afraid of compiling a library or two, this isn’t for you. In fact, I believe there is a worldwide audience of perhaps seven people who will find this software useful.

But to those six others, I promise it’s a godsend.

This has been a side project for me for a little over a month now, and I’m ready to start collecting external feedback. So please, give it a whirl (and join the listserv).

I’ve been doing a lot of python programming this last year {allurstuff, deseb, flyback, ogmaps}, and several people have asked me variations on the following:

Thought of you when I read this
http://www.xkcd.com/353/
So is python really all that??

Well the answer is: Good god no. While python’s the best “everything is a hash table” language I’ve used, it shares the same problems all such languages have: very little compile time checking of object types. Your function is expecting a list, but someone passes in a string? Opps! And it doesn’t even fail-fast – you iterate over every char in the string. Which means many possible runtime errors, which are infinitely harder to test for and debug. Plus python STILL doesn’t have multi-processor support, even though it has its own reasonably nice threading model.

But it is great for banging out stuff quickly. And the glade/GTK bindings are pretty sweet.

So I’m proposing “Derek’s PvJ Rule”:

For every minute saved typing “my_list = []” instead of “List<String> myList = new ArrayList<String>();“, one hour of debugging is lost, one customer is pissed off, and god kills a kitten.

=P

So I bought a Nokia N800, initially so I can work on a mobile version of allurstuff, but also I’m curious if I can get android working on it… But while I’m waiting for FedEx to deliver, I decided that it needed a way to access Google Maps even without an internet connection.

And so was born ogmaps. It’s a fairly simple python script that downloads all the HTML/Javascript/image files used by gmaps, and modifies them to run right off your hard drive. (or flash drive, whatever) It then looks up whatever location you give it, and caches all the surrounding map files. (within reason….grabs about 5-10mb of data for each location you give it)

You don’t need a handheld to use it either… It’ll work wherever you have python and firefox. (I haven’t tried it with IE yet, and likely won’t – get a better browser!)

Anyway, tell me what you think.

derek

Interesting that they deploy their code without stripping the debugging info. I wonder what “gse” stands for… Google Server Engine?

Error: Exception thrown while generating page

java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: MemoryError: Unable to resize ULIST to 20: Out of memory
	at org.clearsilver.CS._parseFile(Native Method)
	at org.clearsilver.CS.parseFile(CS.java:58)
	at com.google.clearsilver.base.PageBase.go(PageBase.java:486)
	at com.google.clearsilver.base.PageServlet.handleRequest(PageServlet.java:44)
	at com.google.clearsilver.base.PageServlet.doGet(PageServlet.java:33)
	at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:689)
	at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:802)
	at com.google.gse.HttpConnection.runServlet(HttpConnection.java:534)
	at com.google.gse.HttpConnection.run(HttpConnection.java:458)
	at com.google.gse.DispatchQueue$WorkerThread.run(DispatchQueue.java:299)

Google has announced their “gPhone”, and it’s a open, Linux-based software platform called Android:

• watch their intro video

And they’re celebrating by also announcing a $10 million developer challenge, two be handed out in two $5 million dollar rounds with at least 50 individual recipients each round. Pretty exciting, eh?

So does anyone have any suggestions for “i wish my phone could do this”? I’d love to hear your thoughts…

If you’re not familiar with Apple’s Time Machine, it’s a backup system that lets you browse using historical snapshots of what your system used to look like. It’s pretty neat, but I use Linux, not MacOSX. So I rolled my own.

http://code.google.com/p/flyback/