February 2007
22 posts
AsiaMedia :: SINGAPORE: Google to open R&D centre... →
This is great news for Singapore’s tech scene!
Where the Coffee Shop Meets the Cubicle →
Co-working facilities blend the appeal of an independent environment with many of the advantages of the traditional office
Torres Talking: Natural Language Search in Windows... →
This is really interesting. We should have something like this in GDS and Beagle!
Surveillance Cameras Get Smarter - International... →
Intelligent security cameras which observe gestures and walking patterns and so on.
Bill Gates - How to Keep America Competitive -... →
Bill Gates again laments about the lack of enough software engineers in the US and wants America to relax immigration policies.
The Python Conference 2007 →
Observations from PyCon 2007
SourceForge.net: Cluster SSH - Cluster Admin Via... →
SSH to several boxes simultaneously and run the same commands on all of them by typing in one xterm.
Windows Multipoint →
O'Reilly Radar > Progress Always Needs Help From... →
Argument for the need of user generated content in maps.
teideal glic deisbhéalach » Blog Archive » A quick... →
Nvidia is really considering GPGPU seriously!
Unboxing the OpenMoko phone →
This guy (from Redhat) managed to get his hands on a OLPC and a OpenMoko phone!
UNIX® Load Average Part 1: How It Works →
Measuring efficiency of tagging with Entropy
Ed H. Chi of Xerox Parc has published an interesting paper [pdf] about the efficiency of the tagging system built into del.icio.us. The way he does that is to measure entropy (yup that same old same old Claude Shannon’s information theory which you learned in one of the CS courses) of entities like documents (D), users (U) and tags (T). His research group crawled the entire del.icio.us...
Chetan Maini of REVA Electric Car on How It All... →
Audio interview of Indian entrepreneur Chetan Maini. His company based out of Bangalore makes electric cars.
Google’s disk reliability study
If you hang around at the right places on the web, you would have heard about Google’s disk reliability survey which they published as a paper recently. Actually I didn’t know much about S.M.A.R.T parameters for disk drives until I read that paper (though it strikes me now that I have seen the word S.M.A.R.T a lot of times during initial bootup).
Anyways I downloaded a freeware...
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom & Lua
Lightroom is 40% Lua. How did you select Lua? Which parts of the program are handled by Lua? MH: I foisted Lua on the rest of the team which actually at that point was very small. But I had discovered it just in reading some of the mailing lists I was on—I think it was actually a garbage collection mailing list that led me to it. I wanted to build an app that was heavily scriptable and was...
Python usage inside Googleplex
# The Google build system is written in python. All of Google’s corporate code is checked into a repository and the dependency and building of this code is managed by python. Greg mentioned that to create code.google.com took about 100 lines of python code. But since it has so many dependencies, the build system generated a 3 megabyte makefile for it!
# Packaging. Google has an internal...
Rule of thumb for determining try/catch block...
I’ve been coding in Java for one of the assignments for the Database Management Systems course. (For the curious, the assignment is about implementing the heap file layer for the Minibase database). public boolean doSomething() {
func1();
func2();
func3();
return true;
}
Consider the above piece of Java code. doSomething() is a method which I need to implement for the assignment. It...
Unit testing for programming assignments
In the last few installments of our program transformation course, the students had to develop a program instrumentation that traces the number of calls for every callee/caller pair for one of the assignments (we usually have about 10 assignments). Last year, we just described the problem in the assignment. The solutions of the students were ok, but not really exciting. They forgot to handle all...
Python Screen-scraper in 59 seconds
In response to Ilya’s “Ruby Screen-scraper in 60 seconds” post, here’s my Python version. The script uses ElementSoup. And as Ilya suggested, I used Firebug to grab the XPath. It basically grabs the blog URLs from sgblog.com. It is a little bit complex because the default URLs grabbed from the HTML source actually redirect to the true URLs. There’s some extra code to...
Scribes - TextMate for Linux
I just tried Scribes on OpenSUSE 10.2. Scribes is a text-editor inspired by TextMate on OS X. Scribes is written in Python using PyGTK (sweet!). Download scribes (current version: 0.3). I’m not sure what is stopping someone from running it on Windows considering PyGTK has already been ported to Windows. Maybe it is the D-BUS dependency?
What does it have?
simple, slim and sleek - no...
More (un)conferences
E27 Singapore version 4-Dot-Oh is happening on Feb 15. Nexus (technically not an unconference) is happening in March. In India: The unconference bug has hit India much sooner and quicker than I expected it to. Barcamps have already been held multiple times in Bangalore, Delhi, Chennai, Hyderabad, and lots of other places :) Proto.in, the Indian version of DEMO conference was held recently in...