Election results

It is down to three states as of the moment: Indiana, Missouri and Montana. I am glad to say that I have foreseen Indiana. I was never comfortable with Missouri. And Montana, if Obama wins it will be a big surprise - I would have not bet on it. Overall, I may be anywhere between 0 and 2 states off of my original projection, which is ooodles better that my performance in 2004 election.

Good times.

Update. The final tally seems to be:

• Missouri. Alex: Obama. Reality: McCain. As I said originally, I was more confident in North Carolina and Indiana, than in Missouri, but I went against my gut feeling. Should not have.
  
• Nebraska, 2nd CD. Alex: McCain. Reality: Obama. Wow! I am officially impressed. I did not think it'd flip. Besides Indiana, I think that this is the most impressive feat accomplished by the Democrats this election.
  

Overall: two errors, and a 10 point overestimate in the electoral college. I am certain that I did better than many others. (-:

Election Projection

For the record, my election projection is here. 1 - Obama wins the state, 0 - McCain does.

Overall, it is relatively optimistic towards Obama, but almost everywhere, reflective of even the most tightened polling.
The only "out-of-the ordinary" prediction is Obama winning Inidiana. The one I am most uncertain about is Obama winning Missouri.

New Toy is here

The new toy is here. Thus far, the main negative is the 3-cell battery which gives a measly 1:40 if time. For an ultraportable, this is crazy. The 6-cell appears to be rare, third-part and expensive... I will probably have to buy it, but color me upset.

Other parts of the deal look pretty good. It is not as wimpy as I was afraid it'd be. It is small and easy to carry around. The camera is good, and it makes for a great use of skype.

I have no clue where my USB DVD-ROM drive wound up, its lack is unfortunate, because I cannot install some software... Will have to come up with something...

Back from summer oblivion.

This is second week of the fall quarter. I am teaching CSC 101.

Things I am on the lookout for:

• any software that takes text input and does cool stuff, whatever that cool stuff might be.
  
• an instance of such software that colors a US state map.
  
  

One really cool map coloring page is found, but not sure if it is feasible how one can hit the way I want to do it. State county maps are
here.

Kill to Get Crimson

Fortunately, did not have to kill anyone. But, I am marking June 27 on my calendar. I am going to Mark Knopfler's concert in LA (Greek Theater).

The list of "must see them live" now is:

• Pink Floyd - check (2 Roger Waters shows in 2000)
  
• Dire Straits - check (MK show, hopefully)
  
• King Crimson
  
• Van der Graaf Generator
  
• Gong - check (show in 1996)
  

I am getting there.

Alice

I goofed during the Open Day - should have brought my older son and had him play with Alice there. This now has been remedied. I installed both Alice and Storytelling Alice at home.

Alice installed just fine and ran well. There are some quirks with the image of the scene - occasionally the main window just loses the feed. But other than that - works like magic.

Storytelling Alice showed a runtime error. I suspect it did not like Vista.

At any rate, the kid is having fun moving trees and making mechanical spiders jump.

It occurs to me, that this is a nice prelude before getting him started on Lego Mindstorms.

LEAP

Ask, and you shall be granted.
LEAP is a relational-algebra RDBMS. The front end is command-line, which means that relational algebra operations are encoded using a number of conventions (e.g., operand goes first, selection/join condition - later).

Judging by the demo session, the system is a bit bulky, but may prove useful.

Hat tip to one of the students in my CSC 365 class.

ISO: large XML collections

It is interesting that while oodles of XML get processed every second around the world, there are relatively few sources of XML collections that can be downloaded and used for software testing purposes. The standard collection I used for many years, DBLP is now on the order of hundreds of megabytes in a single file - which is good, but smaller "large" files are also desirable.

Wikimedia has their content in XML format up.

The search is on for more readily available data...

GRAPE

I am starting a search for a relational algebra client for DBMS.

The first one discovered is GRAPE from University of Minnesota.

The demo looks cool.

SEDNA

New version of SEDNA is released.

I've met some people developing it a few years ago. Back then, the system was a bit raw, and we could not use it as a back end for any of our work. Better luck this time?

Conference roundup

SUM and MUD.

Also, we now have a poster in ICWE.

Grumble

The whole point of advertising usb hubs as "stackable" is that when you run out of ports on one, you come back to the store and purchase another of the same kind, and then, actually, stack them. The appeal of more expensive and more, shall we say, wierd-looking hubs is just in that: you can eventually build towers out of them....

This of course assumes that a year or so after the purchase of the first one, when you come to the store to buy the second... well, it will be there...

School bus

School bus overturns in Riverdale Heights, MD. We used to live nearby the place where it happened )-:

Human subjects

This is important.

IRB at Cal Poly.

Ta-ta-ta ta ta- ta-ta

Django Reinhardt's Minor Swing tab #1 (easy) and tab #2 (realistic).

Also, youtube has some versions.

MUD

MUD #2 is in New Zealand. Thus far, only the VLDB link is up?

Recommender Systems resources

In 2002, ACM TOIS had an issue devoted to collaborative filtering.

PROMISE 2008

PROMISE 2008 should soon announce accepted papers.

CIKM 2008

This year, CIKM in in Napa Valley.

Lucene

Lucene is an open-source Information Retrieval package, now part of the Apache project.