November 2009
Red Sweater Blog – User Friendly Heuristics →
“Classic computer programming has largely failed, because it failed to copy nature. Nothing in nature works 100% of the time, but it sure works well MOST of the time – and when it fails, well, you die and get replaced. A human being, for instance, is an absolutely amazing machine, and is provably NOT provably correct.”
» Scalable Web Applications Programming the new... →
On Saturday June 13th 2009 I attended a talk by Eli White on Scalable web applications. Eli White previously worked at digg.com and now holds the position PHP Community Manager & DevZone Editor-in-Chief at Zend Technologies.
The Only Way to Become Amazingly Great at... →
It takes anywhere from 6-10 years to get great at something, depending on how often and how much you do it. Some estimate that it takes 10,000 hours to master something, but I think it varies from person to person and depends on the skill and other factors.
100 Google Wave Robots →
Google Wave Robots are the best way to explore Wave. Here is the huge list of Google Wave Robots that you can add in your contacts and enjoy waving
Statsy - more data points for markup quality /... →
In the spirit of the content-to-markup ratio bookmarklet, here’s another one that gives you some more data points to help you judge the quality of a page’s markup and help answer the old question - where does all this page weight go.
Last.fm interview: Behind the music - Crave at... →
We have a process that runs daily which finds the hottest music and pushes those tracks on to the SSDs streamers that sit in front of our regular platter-based streaming machines. That way, if someone is listening to one of our more popular stations, the chances are really good that these songs are coming off our high-speed SSD machines. They’re fast because every song is sitting in memory...
In the Binary Refinery | ChromeShell →
ChromeShell is a non-google affiliated replacement shell for windows that strips your desktop down to what you really need; the browser. The shell transforms your normal windows desktop into something a kin to Google’s unreleased Operating System, Chrome OS.
New brain connections form rapidly during motor... →
New connections begin to form between brain cells almost immediately as animals learn a new task, according to a study published recently in Nature. Led by researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, the study involved detailed observations of the rewiring processes that take place in the brain during motor learning.
A Reading Guide To Becoming A Better Developer |... →
I’ve stated previously that reading software development books is a good way of investing in your skills and your career. But which ones should you read? And in what order should they be read? I’ve compiled a list of books that i think can truly increase your skills substantially. I’ve put them in the order in which i believe they will have the most effect, and grouped them in 3 ’stages’. I...
zilkey's active_hash at master - GitHub →
ActiveHash is a simple base class that allows you to use a ruby hash as a readonly datasource for an ActiveRecord-like model. ActiveHash assumes that every hash has an :id key, which is what you would probably store in a database. This allows you to seemlessly upgrade from ActiveHash objects to full ActiveRecord objects without having to change any code in your app, or any foreign keys in your...
“Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet getting the work done.”
– Torvalds
Netbooks: The Disruptive Dual-OS Future – GigaOM →
In the computer operating system game, you don’t have to dominate to succeed — just ask Apple. With that in mind, emerging open source-based netbook software platforms could have surprisingly bright futures as secondary OSes, including Google’s. Here are several reasons why they’ll bring changes.
Linux and NetBSD Xen VPS hosting. →
Xen-powered Virtual Private Servers.
BBC News - Information goes out to play →
E-mails. News. Facebook. Wikipedia. Do you ever feel there’s just too much information? Do you struggle to keep up with important issues, subject and ideas? Are you drowning in data? In this age of information overload, a new solution is emerging that could help us cope with the oceans of data surrounding and swamping us. It’s called information visualisation.
Journal of Eivind Uggedal: VPS Performance... →
The scripts used for benchmarking, graphing, and all the raw data can be found over at my GitHub repository. Be aware that the graphs presented here has an Y-axis which goes from the minimum to the maximum value and not from 0 to maximum.
The 50 most interesting articles on Wikipedia «... →
Deep in the bowels of the internet, I came across an exhaustive list of interesting Wikipedia articles by Ray Cadaster. It’s brilliant reading when you’re bored, so I got his permission to post the top 50 here.
Compiling Ruby 1.9 with GCC 4.4 « Lab Notes – H →
Got the 1.9 pickaxe, so it’s definitely time to get Ruby 1.9 installed alongside 1.8. It turns out that if you try to build Ruby 1.9 with GCC 4.4 by means of the typical ./configure; make; sudo make install, you will hit a wall on the make step. I’m running into this while evaluating Fedora11 snap1, still in beta. The issue is that GCC 4.4 introduces a few changes that will impede ruby 1.9 from...
Talk: Writing a language in 15 minutes : The If... →
I gave a talk at London Ruby User Group yesterday, based on the work I’ve been doing on Heist, my Scheme interpreter project. I wrote the core of a basic Scheme interpreter in about 15 minutes as a live-coded demo (well, kind of – the coding was pre-recorded so I could focus on talking), which seemed to go down pretty well. If you missed it (or if you were there and want to watch it again in slow...
Jeeps on Ice on The CJ3B Page →
Frank J. Zamboni built his first ice re-surfacing machine in California in the late 1940’s. The machine was designed to scrape a thin layer of snow off the top of an ice rink, and cover it with a thin coating of water. As demand grew, the machines were built in the early 1950’s on top of complete Jeeps, then from 1956-64 on a stripped Jeep chassis, increasing water- and snow-carrying...
Penn Gazette | Essays | Notes from the Undergrad →
Go ahead: Laugh if you want (though you’ll benefit your brain more if you smile), but in my professional opinion, yawning is one of the best-kept secrets in neuroscience. Even my colleagues who are researching meditation, relaxation, and stress reduction at other universities have overlooked this powerful neural-enhancing tool. However, yawning has been used for many decades in voice therapy as an...
Pixel Poppers: Awesome By Proxy: Addicted to Fake... →
When I was old enough to care whether I won or lost at games, but still too young to be any good at them, I decided RPGs were better than action games. After all, I could play Contra for hours and still be terrible at it - while if I played Dragon Warrior III for the same amount of time, my characters would gain levels and be much more capable of standing up to whatever threats they encountered....
How Well Do You Understand CSS Positioning? →
When people are new to css layouts there’s a tendency to gravitate toward positioning. Positioning seems like an easy concept to grasp. On the surface you specify exactly where you want a block to be located and there it sits. Positioning is a little more complicated than it first appears though. There are a few things that can trip up a newbie and a few things to understand before positioning...
wepricot - Project Hosting on Google Code →
Aims to provide an Hpricot-workalike using MacRuby and WebKit, as well as expose additional functionality available through using WebKit, such as access to loaded resources.
OpenID: Now more powerful and easier to use! |... →
Google, Yahoo!, and MySpace have launched support for the OpenID OAuth Hybrid Protocol, which combines OpenID authentication (sign in) with OAuth authorization (access control) into a single interface. Websites that accept OpenID can now let the hundreds of millions of users who already have either a MySpace, Google, or Yahoo! account sign in and enable two-way data sharing of their profile,...
Want 50Mbps Internet in your town? Threaten to... →
egional telco TDS Telecommunications last week issued a press release announcing a major milestone for the company: 50Mbps service over fiber optic cable to residents of Monticello, Minnesota. The Minneapolis suburb became one of the few non-FiOS communities in the country to experience full fiber-to-the-home deployment, and subscribers will all receive a free upgrade from 25Mbps service to the...
How would you serve 100,000 simultaneous comet... →
I decided to set up my experiment using node.js itself as the client. I suspect that ‘ab’ is not optimized for c > 1k, but I might be wrong. Either way, using node as the client gives me full control over what is going on.
InfoQ: Tim Bray on the Future of the Web →
Tim Bray talks about why he is not convinced with the buzz surrounding Rich Internet Applications and shares his ideas on Cloud Computing. He also expresses his opinion regarding the debate REST vs. WS-* and the future directions web technologies will be taking.
What webhooks are and why you should care «... →
Webhooks are user-defined HTTP callbacks. Here’s a common example: You go to github. There’s a textbox for their code post webhook. You drop in a URL. Now when you post your code to github, github will HTTP POST to your chosen URL with details about the code post. There is no simpler way to allow open ended integration with arbitrary web services.
The dark side of the internet | Technology | The... →
Fourteen years ago, a pasty Irish teenager with a flair for inventions arrived at Edinburgh University to study artificial intelligence and computer science. For his thesis project, Ian Clarke created “a Distributed, Decentralised Information Storage and Retrieval System”, or, as a less precise person might put it, a revolutionary new way for people to use the internet without...
Knowledge Capsules | Detecting unused CSS... →
Anyone working in large web projects in collaboration with many people at the same time will see the consecuences of many hands on style files. May selectors and classes come and go while developing and testing. After a while, you will easily see style files that become untouchable: you don’t know which classes or selectors are being used or not. The same uncertainty creeps in when you...
LuceneFAQ - Lucene-java Wiki →
Lucene does come with a simple cache mechanism, if you use Lucene Filters . The classes to look at are CachingWrapperFilter and QueryFilter.
VoiceCode Programming by Voice Toolbox | Get... →
VoiceCode is an Open Source initiative started by the National Research Council of Canada, to develop a programming by voice toolbox. The aim of the project is to make programming through voice input as easy and productive as with mouse and keyboard.
The Next Hacking Frontier: Your Brain? | Wired... →
Hackers who commandeer your computer are bad enough. Now scientists worry that someday, they’ll try to take over your brain.
Cognitive Science Society : Home →
The Cognitive Science Society, Inc. brings together researchers from many fields who hold a common goal: understanding the nature of the human mind. The Society promotes scientific interchange among researchers in disciplines comprising the field of Cognitive Science, including Artificial Intelligence, Linguistics, Anthropology, Psychology, Neuroscience, Philosophy, and Education.
Mac Developer Network » Blog Archive » Security:... →
OS X’s API is full of unsung heroes. While everybody knows about Cocoa and Carbon, and is wowed by the new shinies such as Grand Central Dispatch or Core Animation, other components have been silently and solidly plugging away, forming a basic foundation on which the rest of the system can rest. This article is about one such component.
New York City User Groups - Brandorr.com →
Living in NYC? Looking for good user group meetings to go to? Here is a convenient calendar which we keep up to date with group meetings we enjoy attending
960 Grid System →
The 960 Grid System is an effort to streamline web development workflow by providing commonly used dimensions, based on a width of 960 pixels. There are two variants: 12 and 16 columns, which can be used separately or in tandem.
How to Learn About Everything →
My recent post “How to Understand Everything (and Why)” discussed an untaught, integrative kind of knowledge, and why is so important in science and engineering — how it can leverage specialized knowledge and improve the trade-off between bold innovation and costly blunders.
8 Things Programmers Should Know About UI Design →
In an ideal world, each big subject from the software development process would be handed to a specialized professional: UI designers, programmers, architects, database administrators etc. Unfortunately, this is not the case most of times. There a plenty of cases out there where projects suffer from lack of proper expertise and well trained people. That’s not to say we should know everything, nor...
iPhone Development: Using KVO for Table Updates →
If you’ve followed the guidelines in Apple’s Model Object Implementation Guide when creating your data model objects, you can handle your UITableView updates using KVO. This frees you from having to spread calls to reloadData, insertRowsAtIndexPaths:withRowAnimation:, or deleteRowsAtIndexPaths:withRowAnimation: throughout your controller class wherever the data in your table might get...
The Problem With the Boxee Box →
Boxee generated a lot of excitement on the part of online video fans when it said it would release a dedicated hardware device that will enable users to connect its open-source media center software directly to their TVs. But by becoming a hardware company, Boxee may have to choose between alienating its biggest fans and alienating potential content partners.
InfoQ: JDK 7 Milestone 5 Includes Concurrency and... →
Sun’s Java SE team recently released the JDK 7 Milestone 5 build. M5 includes roughly half of the Project Coin features, updates to the java.util.concurrent package from Doug Lea et al, and a number of other enhancements.
Data Robotics, Inc. →
DroboElite™ offers the best data storage experience ever for small to medium businesses (SMBs) and departments looking to consolidate storage across multiple servers. As the most powerful and flexible Drobo platform engineered to date, DroboElite redefines storage economics by delivering advanced features and performance usually reserved for more expensive solutions. Built on the award-winning...
CNS Tech Lab →
Classer is a set of software tools for applying machine learning classifier models to arbitrary data sets. Layered on top of implementations of ARTMAP neural networks, the Classer toolkit lets the user define classifier models, apply them to process data sets, and automate output data collection and parameter space exploration.
All of my research grows out from a desire to... →
In 1983, Stephen Grossberg gave a week-long series of tutorial lectures at an NSF-sponsored conference at Arizona State University. The lectures included a self-contained introduction to principles, mechanisms, and architectures whereby neural models link mind to brain and inspire neuromorphic applications to technology. Many leaders of the Connectionist Revolution which gained momentum during the...
Stephen Grossberg →
Stephen Grossberg [1] is a cognitive scientist, neuroscientist, biomedical engineer, mathematician, and neuromorphic technologist. He is the Wang Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems and a Professor of Mathematics, Psychology, and Biomedical Engineering at Boston University.
CNS Tech Lab →
The Boston University Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems (CNS) and the CNS Technology Lab serve as the home base for neural technology research and development.
Stephen Grossberg →
I develop brain models of vision and visual object recognition; audition, speech, and language; development; attentive learning and memory; cognitive information processing; reinforcement learning and motivation; cognitive-emotional interactions; navigation; sensory-motor control and robotics; and mental disorders. These models involve many parts of the brain, ranging from perception to action,...
Adaptive resonance theory →
Adaptive Resonance Theory (ART) is a theory developed by Stephen Grossberg and Gail Carpenter on aspects of how the brain processes information. It describes a number of neural network models which use supervised and unsupervised learning methods, and address problems such as pattern recognition and prediction.
Self-organizing map →
A self-organizing map (SOM) or self-organizing feature map (SOFM) is a type of artificial neural network that is trained using unsupervised learning to produce a low-dimensional (typically two-dimensional), discretized representation of the input space of the training samples, called a map. Self-organizing maps are different than other artificial neural networks in the sense that they use a...