Work for Idle Hands

Sci-fi and Fantasy roundup

2011-05-02T17:31:00.000-07:00

Recently read:

Rothfuss: The Kingkiller Chronicles, parts 1, 2. As far a world-building goes - a fairly compelling piece of work, with the second book, perhaps being even more interesting to read than the first. I really dug the idea of a society where no one believed the role of men in procreation, although I suspect that any society that domesticated animals would eventually put two and two together. The love story has a lot of Charles Dickens in it. Some secondary characters were not well-characterized in the first book, a bit better in the second. I would be very surprised if it turned out to be just a trilogy. While there is only one day left in the present tense narrative, the first two books went up to Kvothe turning 18 or maybe 19. The present character is in his mid-30s, so there are still about 15 years of narrative. Or maybe 10. Plus, whatever has to happen in the present.

Stross: The Trade of Queens. I, of course, think that Amber Chronicles is one of the best pieces of fantasy, so I really dug this series. The break happened in the previous book. It went from one cliffhanger to another in one fell swoop. The last book though - it almost looked like it was written by a different person. Much more exposition and soap-opera-style rehashing of events from previous books - in some cases awkward (defined as: it is obvious that the text is there to help the reader remember what was in the books before, NOT for any in-story reasons). Also, details aside, at least one ending of the book obvious from the beginning (the other - the carpet bombing of a medieval country is kind of cruel - it was clear that some form a military action will take place, but I did not expect the 100 H-bombs.) More importantly, the books had a number of really great characters in them, who, in the last book have a total of zero moments of awesome.. Individual parts - e.g., the bombing scenes - very well written. But Stross can do much better. I need to start reading his other books....

Sawyer. Hominids. This, on the other hand, was a great read. I dig books that mostly deal with alternate societies - these days, it almost invariably means reading fantasy. While the "science" part was probably the weakest link in the book - one just assumes there has to be an in-story explanation of how a transfer between two worlds is possible, the aspects of Neanderthal society as presented were great... Reading Humans now.

Apropos of Nothing

2011-02-16T17:14:00.000-08:00

Random number generator played this song for me in the car today.
As a result:

Go Away /Victor Tsoi/

Go away.., but leave me your number
And maybe I'll give you a call
At the same time, I don't know, why
I am keeping these digits.
And I do not even remember,
What you said was your name
And at this point for me
Phone numbers are just pretty much cyphers.

Go away... leave me your number and go...

We had met by a pure accident
Where, I just cannot recall
The chance of our second encounter is
Pretty much nil
And now you don't want to leave
You say that you cannot leave
Go away, I do not love you!

Russian lyrics

On the fate of Aveeno Shave Gel

2010-07-08T10:37:00.000-07:00

Aveeno's shave gel, which I use with no substitute for the last 13 years is off the shelves of all major department stores and is nowhere to find on-line. When a product is discontinued, it disappears from various stores at different times. So, I inquired with Aveeno.

Here is part of the response. "The product" is the shave gel.

Dear Dr Dekhtyar: Thank you for contacting the Johnson & Johnson Consumer Companies, Inc. Information Center. It is always important to hear from our consumers, and we appreciate the time you have taken to contact us. Thank you so much for your loyalty to our product. Unfortunately, due to problems with the dispensing components, we have decided not to ship the product until we can correct the problem and bring you the high quality product you rightly expect. We are working diligently to bring this product back to the marketplace by the end of this year.

I am cautiously optimistic. In the meantime, Rite Aid has a copycat gel. For reasons beyond my understanding, they don't seem to have it in the on-line store, but it is on the shelves.

Now, back to scheduled procrastination.

Maui has a shrimp truck too

2010-06-27T00:23:00.000-07:00

Oahu's shrimp trucks are the famous hidden gem of the North Shore. Three years ago we have sampled the fares from three of them, and decided that it was the best food we had in Hawaii.

Now, we are on Maui. No North Shore shrimp farms, but, fortunately, there is a shrimp truck:

Found it by googling "Maui Shrimp Truck". Yelp has a bunch of reviews and an address. Google Maps screws the "address" (how can a actual moving truck, and this one is an actual moving truck, have a street address)... The truck is located a couple hundred meters north of the intersection, right next to the entrance to the harbor.

We had two shrimp dishes of the four on the list: the scampi and the spicy pineapple (the other two are hot and spicy and lemon and pepper). The proprietor made the spicy pineapple not too spicy at our request.

The key drawback of the place is the lack of any tables to consume the food. The harbor has two tables next to the boat drop-off point. It is quite windy there though, we had to hold the food boxes with cans of soda.

The shrimp is cooked in the same style as in Oahu: each dish is a dozen non-shelled shrimp, but the recipes were different. The scampi sauce did not have the mass of bread crumbs and garlic chunks like the Oahu scampi. The sauce was clear, a bit caramelized and, I guess, somewhat healthier than what you'd get a Giovanni's or Famous Kahuku... (-: Spicy pineapple sauce was similar in structure, had pineapple chunks in it and had a slight kick - I am guessing it'd be much spicier if ordered unmodified. The shrimp in both dishes was juicy and extremely tasty. The rice was ok, but became tasty only after being soaked in the sauce. The crab macaroni salad was excellent in my opinion, although I was the only one who ate it.

Overall a good experience. A very nice proprietor (asked us where we were from and how we found out about him), decent prices ($11 per main dish) and great food. Skip the luau, get some some Geste shrimp!

Google I/O thoughts.

2010-05-20T22:16:00.000-07:00

Conference page here.

Google's own postmortem here

Brief Impressions.

Keynote #1. Relatively low-key, with only one truly major announcement. However, they have very clearly staked out their position and pointed a big fat arrow in the direction they intend to go. Empower the browser. Make it the main environment in which everyone works. Take care of (1) all the pipework and (2) delivery mechanism. Leave to others content/app generation.

The latter appears to be a theme for a lot of things Google does. Google provides the unified, open and accessible platform, and builds the low-level, and leaves the top level of the hierarchy for others to fill.

WebM. In my view, the only really big announcement of the first day. Everyone's collective life is made easier by open-source video encoding standards. Hence a good way to start the conference.

Chrome. No Chrome OS announcements at all. But Chrome played a big role during the first day's keynote. Google has drawn a big fat arrow pointing in the direction they want to head: delivery of all standard applications over the web. Chrome and its facilities essentially serve as the backdrop of this particular goal.

GWT and Roo. Of all the techy demos during the first day this was the one I appreciated the most. Roo looks like a great tool for development of simple database applications as it stresses the design part of the process. This will be a summertime project.

Venture capitalists have peculiar insight into things.

Ignite. An excellent experience. We should run something like this here at the department.

HTML 5. Gotta learn it now.

Keynote #2. That's where they dropped the bombs.

Android. Total lack of Android mentions during day 1 official festivities and the wink-wink "there's going to be something big tomorrow" gave way to Android being the star of day. Froyo demos were quite convincing. They did well both in terms of speeding up the system (as a G1 owner, I can vouch that slow-running Android is much less fun than fast running one) and in terms of expanding the features.

Apps to SD cards. Was sorely needed for Android phones. G1 has 64 Meg of memory. I do not know if it will ever get the Froyo update, but if it is at all possible, this feature alone (along with the JIT compiler) can extend its life for at least another year... (not that this is in the interests of HTC, but G1 is a special phone...)

Tethering. Yay!

Push notifications. A not-so-subtle dig at Apple (one of many), and an impressive demo: study something on your desktop, send it as an intent to the android phone.

HTC Evo. Two free phones?? Great phone, a pleasure to hold in your hand and use. I was hoping it'd come with Froyo on it - this would have been really inspired. As it is, though, let's hope for an upgrade shortly... And Sprint... I am temped to find out what those "special terms" for I/O conference attendees are...

Google TV. I want one. 'nuff said.

Go. On a more serious note, Go may wind up being a good development language for various data mining/machine learning algorithms, and for various data analysis code with interchangeable parts.

Other notes. The drone was fun to watch. Held Joojoo pad in my hands (ha!). Saw Nvidia's tablet in someone else's but did not get to see it close by. Sloppy Joe's? The Android phone stand was impressive. Of the non-Evo models, two, Samsung's Android iPhone clone and Sony's XP10 looked like fun phones. I have Square's square (although have not installed the app yet). A randomly selected person in the crowd either graduated from Cal Poly, or has kids attending Cal Poly. New category of swag: beach chair for your cell phone.

Raleigh: no urban revival in near future

2010-04-26T17:43:00.000-07:00

Downtown Raleigh is rather disappointing, although, I should have known what to expect. The similarities with Lexington (KY) are rather striking.

At 7pm on Monday, the downtown is dead. The only people around are the
WWW'2010 attendees, who stick like sore thumbs in the otherwise empty place.

Essentially, it's a typical southern affair - office towers with little retail underneath, block-consuming posh hotels and a monstrous convention center, interspersed by parking garages and lots. All surrounded by blocks of light industrial zoning. Nobody lives here.

After a bit of wandering around, two convention center hosts pointed me in the general direction of "The Pit", which appears to be a local Caroline-style barbeque joint. It was very easy to pass by on the side street, nestled among a bunch of one-story somewhat run-down buildings and across the street from some no-name watering hole (the no-name part probably means that it is totally awesome and a local favorite). The dinner was excellent, but the walk back to the hotel along empty streets. The closest to urban life I saw was a condo complex across the street and a parking lot from the hotel, which had a corner bar built into it with people actually sitting outside... (the complex is pictured above).

Ebook Nostalgia redux part II: defeating the beast

2010-04-11T16:47:00.000-07:00

Turns out that the key to overcoming the overbearing nature of REB 1100 w.r.t. our previous report on its behavior when a card is inserted is to simply press the CANCEL button.

This kills the misguided attempts to read the contents of the card, and keeps the ebook in its previous state: looking at the correct location of the correct book. Crisis averted!

Citizen Journalism!

2010-04-11T16:46:00.000-07:00

It's actually more of a weather post. It's been windy starting the morning, although not sufficiently windy to preclude me from cooking up some special recipe chicken and grilling a tri-tip. But by 2:40pm, the wind's gotten worse.

The baggage cart at the train station was overturned by a gust of wind minutes before the rain has started.

Ebook Nostalgia redux

2010-04-05T21:41:00.000-07:00

After 24 hours of using REB 1100 with the installed card, the following two things became apparent (and, in short term, effectively, deal breakers):

Each time REB 1100 is turned off and then on, it rereads the contents of the media card. Takes about 1-2 mins.
It "forgets" the current book and the current location in it, and restarts the device "looking" at the beginning of some book it thinks to be the "first".

The former is tolerable. The latter makes use of media cards almost infeasible.

Ebook Nostalgia

2010-04-04T20:40:00.000-07:00

RCA REB 1100 is probably the oldest mass-market Ebook reader (its immediate predecessors, to my knowledge were not spread widely). It was also not a very commercially successful device. However, as the first, and, for quite a long time the only open (read: amenable to firmware modifications and upload of user-generated content), it has acquired quite a cult following.

My family owns quite a few of these devices and until today, whenever we needed to put a new set of ebooks on them, we used the old (distributed with the device) program Ebook Librarian. The latter has one nasty feature: it does not work under Vista. In fact, it does not even install an executable under Vista. I have not tried it, but I am assuming that neither will it work under Win7.

Turns out there is a way out of this conundrum. REB 1100 has a SmartMedia card slot, and it is supposedly good for cards of up to 128 Mb. Not too much by current standards (of 64Gig SD cards), but sufficient to put a few dozen books in RB format on. The instructions for how to do this are quite scarce, so here is my straightened version:

Plop the SmartMedia card into your PC's card reader. (on my machine it coinhabits the xD card slot).
Create a directory called Books on the card.
Transfer the books in the RB format into this directory.
Power REB 1100 down.
Insert the card into the card slot for REB 1100.
Power REB 1100 up. You should see a message saying "Reading titles from memory card" or something to that extent.
Wait. At some point the message disappears and you are all set.
To take the card out, power the device down, remove the card, power it up, then power it down again. This way, REB 1100 establishes that it no longer has the card.

The really good news is that there is no longer any need to hold onto the old, and almost broken, WinXP laptop that we have.

PS. Most of smartmedia cards run anywhere between $25 and $40 on Amazon etc. However, Amazon did have a place that sold me a 32Mb card for $7.99 + $1.99 s&h. Very decent, all other things being equal.

Election results

2008-11-04T21:57:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-02T16:31:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-02T16:22:00.000-08:00

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.

2008-09-30T20:29:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-06T15:15:00.001-07:00

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

2008-04-27T23:12:00.001-07:00

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

2008-04-27T23:07:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-24T14:47:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-23T22:15:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-09T09:54:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-06T15:42:00.000-07:00

SUM and MUD.

Also, we now have a poster in ICWE.

Grumble

2008-04-06T15:39:00.000-07:00

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

2008-02-27T09:21:00.000-08:00

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

Human subjects

2008-02-22T10:56:00.000-08:00

This is important.

IRB at Cal Poly.

Ta-ta-ta ta ta- ta-ta

2008-02-19T22:35:00.000-08:00

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

Also, youtube has some versions.

MUD

2008-02-18T20:30:00.000-08:00

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

Recommender Systems resources

2008-02-14T17:43:00.000-08:00

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

PROMISE 2008

2008-02-14T17:42:00.001-08:00

PROMISE 2008 should soon announce accepted papers.

CIKM 2008

2008-02-14T17:33:00.000-08:00

This year, CIKM in in Napa Valley.

Lucene

2008-02-14T17:31:00.000-08:00

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

The way we want our grants to be

2008-01-25T23:00:00.000-08:00

Dark and Stormy Night

2008-01-12T22:42:00.000-08:00

The results of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for 2007 are in.

My favorite is the winner in the Western category:

The easy and comforting roll of the saddle was second nature to Luke, and as he gazed off into the distant setting sun, he wondered whether he had enough change for one more ride at the supermarket before he had to return to the home.

Glenn Lawrie
Chungnam, South Korea

The Ultimate Geocache,

2008-01-08T20:09:00.000-08:00

From this report two things emerge. First, there is such a thing as Pole of Inaccessibility, in this case, the Southern one. Second, Ilyich has found its way there.

Quoting the wikipedia about the station:

Today a building still remains at this location, marked by a bust of Vladimir Lenin that faces towards Moscow, and it is protected as a historical site. Inside the building there is a golden visitors' book for those who make it to the site to sign.

All that's missing from a "proper" geocache is a trinket exchange box.

2008-01-06T16:36:00.001-08:00

I have now moved into a permanent office: 14-215.

Happy Birthday!

2007-11-18T00:54:00.001-08:00

Happy Birthday, Dad!

Cal Poly loses to Portland...

2007-11-16T22:51:00.000-08:00

Presumably, the last two games of the soccer season were supposed to be very important and, also, presumably, the team plays very well at home (I vaguely recall reading "stellar home record" somewhere). Now, granted, the game was quite entertaining, with three lead changes and three ties, and the final score 4:3 in favor of Portland...

But it did not seem like Cal Poly was playing its best soccer. In fact, it seemed quite the opposite. With the caveat that my experience of watching soccer is limited to World Cup and my son's soccer league games, I submit the following:

Defense got systematically outhustled by Portland's offense. In fact, the first goal Portland scored was a result of a break on defense (right wing).
Decision-making was not the best. The last goal scored was a result of the goalie clipping the ball on a goal kick to go short in the vicinity of a one-on-one on the left wing. Once the Cal Poly defender was outhustled (see above), the goal was almost inevitable.
Gaps in midfield. For stretches, the transition game was surrendered.
Offense, sporadically was good, and punishing. The first two goals punished Portland for their mistakes on defense. The second goal, in fact, was the most spectacular. However, lack of middle-of-the-field presense meant that Cal Poly could not mount a real sustaining pressure.

Argh.

Any takers?

2007-11-16T22:49:00.000-08:00

Let's see what comes out of this...

KDD Course

2007-11-15T00:17:00.000-08:00

It's official, CSC 467: Knowledge Discovery from Data will be on the books next year.

It's an overview course - there is only so much one can put in 10 weeks (19 lectures and labs). A brief overview of OLAP, the triplet of traditional data mining problems: association rule mining, classification, clustering, then more information retrieval topics: IR proper, collaborative filtering... There won't be much time left for web mining, but this gives me an incentive to teach a grad class on it, and not worry about the remedial data mining stuff in it.

The main issue will be textbook assembly. There are decent Data Mining textbooks. There is a couple of books on IR. Whether collaborative filtering is covered anywhere, I am not certain. The challenge is to put all these together in a single text. Thus far - the books I know of are from different publishers.

Real Estate pains

2007-11-14T17:59:00.000-08:00

Housing bubble watch:

Dr. housing bubble
bubble markets inventory tracking (So.Cal.)
The housing bubble

Somehow, not owning the house at this point does not sound like a bad idea.

Coffeeshop sociology

2007-11-13T18:43:00.000-08:00

Men are served coffee at coffeeshops about 20 seconds faster than women are.

PL/SQL

2007-11-13T16:33:00.000-08:00

Some PL/SQL materials for future and current use.

One of many reference manuals from Oracle.

PL/SQL article on wikipedia.

Notes from Stanford DB group.

Interests

2007-11-07T23:03:00.000-08:00

I was renewing (long overdue) my ACM membership. They now ask to fill out a profile. Here is a list of interests I checked:

Computer Applications: Arts and Humantities
Computer Applications: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Computing Methodologies: Artificial Intelligence
Computing Methodologies: Document and Text Processing
Data: Data Structures
Information Systems: Database Management
Information Systems: Information Storage and Retrieval
Information Systems: Models and Principles
Mathematics of Computing: Discrete Mathematics
Mathematics of Computing: Probability and Statistics
Software: Software Engineering
Theory of Computation: Analysis of Algorithms and Problem Complexity
Theory of Computation: Mathematical Logic and Formal Languages
Other: KDD

Moscow schools ban Helloween

2007-11-02T15:56:00.001-07:00

Idiots.

Quote:

This is destructive for the minds and the spiritual and moral health of pupils

More blog rankings

2007-11-02T15:48:00.000-07:00

Work of Jure Leskovec, Andreas Krause, Carlos Guestrin, Christos Faloutsos, Jeanne VanBriesen and Natalie Glance from CMU on information propagation in networks led to a ranking of blogs.

Wiki

2007-11-02T09:57:00.000-07:00

Also, CSC 560 now has a wiki. We'll be collecting information on various XML indexing and storage techniques.

XML indexes

2007-11-02T09:51:00.000-07:00

Looking through my XML paper stack I discovered that I lack papers on XML indexes from last couple of years... Fortunately, ICDE decided to publish their list of accepted papers, and I was able to find the tech report version on the University of Waterloo site.

The full citation is:

Iman Elghandour, Ashraf Aboulnaga, Daniel C. Zilio, Fei Chiang, Andrey Balmin, Kevin Beyer, Calisto Zuzarte, XML Index Recommendation with Tight Optimizer Coupling, University of Waterloo Tech Report CS-2007-22

Use use cases

2007-10-28T19:05:00.000-07:00

Attended CTL's workshop on using use cases in class on Friday. Use cases as discussed appear as a study of an existing piece of literature, and shift the stress from the instructor to the student in terms of who does the "discovery".

I do not know how recent is this trend, but it appears that lectures are considered now a "bad" form of learning, because, the assumption is made, that the lectures are not as conductive to learning as other, more hands-on activities. I am certain that there is literature with some empirical studies on the topic.

Interestingly enough, this is not how I learned when I was a student. For me the quintessential "learning" moment was when I took notes: i.e., when information filtered through my brain and onto the paper. Less so in grad school, perhaps - there "learning" was all over the map, from lectures to programming projects. But certainly in all my undergraduate classes - in order to understand something, I needed to hear this spoken by someone else (instructor), and then, from his/her words, to comprehend it and write it down.

Of course, I cannot claim that how I learn is indicative of how others do it...

2007-10-25T12:59:00.000-07:00

A very interesting survey from Pew global about the attitudes towards various "hot topics" in different countries. This graph, for example, shows relationship between overall wealth of the nation and how religious it is. USA and Kuwait are outliers on the graph, while most Eastern Europe countries are all below the curve.

XQuery wisdom of the day

2007-10-23T17:03:00.000-07:00

XQuery blends the line between functional and procedural programming.

Simple queries are almost purely functional, but the more complex the query is (i.e., the larger the number of the "for" iterators) the more it starts resembling C code. While semantically it is not the case, it seems using C programming as analogy is helpful when learning how to build XQuery queries.

smoke

2007-10-22T17:32:00.000-07:00

We are at least 60-65 miles away from the nearest major wildfire (Santa Ynez). Yet, all day the air is thick with smoke, and, people around tell me, there is a smell of smoke as well. I am not good at detecting the latter, but I am inclined to trust three-four independent reports.

on the dangers of factor analysis

2007-10-22T13:38:00.000-07:00

Via some political blogs comes a link to an interesting illustration of dangers of interpreting results of factor analysis as causal links.

Little Bobby Tables

2007-10-19T10:09:00.000-07:00

Database humor

XPath features

2007-10-18T11:31:00.000-07:00

hard to recognize at the first try feature of XPath

//x[position()=1]

and

/descendant-or-self::x[position()=1]

return different answers. This becomes more clear when "//" is replaced with what it stands for:

/descendant-or-self::node()/x[position()=1]

This suggests two things that need to be addressed when XPath is covered in class:

Location steps are evaluated in their full, each input node from the sequence (nodelist) at a time.
The exact verbose equivalent to "//" is "/descendant-or-self::node()/", which means that any //x expression is actually two location steps, not one.

O'Reiley's book on XQuery actually has this example.

diff cs ce se

2007-10-16T13:13:00.000-07:00

An answer to the "what's the difference between computer science, computer engineering and software engineering?" question worded for high school students.

"tuh"-Mater without the "tuh"

2007-10-14T23:47:00.000-07:00

This is one of my favorite pictures taken on the trip from Kentucky to California. The location is Wigwam Motel, Holbrook, AZ, the prototype of the Cone motel in the Cars movie. I cropped the picture and faded the color to give it a more dated look, but all-in-all, this Studebaker just has so much character...

XML and its applications

2007-10-14T14:12:00.000-07:00

a new book in the works.

Cute kids edition

2007-10-13T20:40:00.000-07:00

Grisha on the side of Cerro San Luis Obispo, behind our house.

Not a sky in the cloud

2007-10-13T12:13:00.001-07:00

As reported yesterday, we had an actual drizzle throughout the whole day. This being (I am told) a highly unusual thing, here are some pictures.

View of Cerro San Luis from ~~about~~ above Bishop's Peak ES

View of Bishop's Peak from the same spot

Footsteps of Dijkstra

2007-10-12T22:55:00.000-07:00

Null considered harmful for Java.

For different reasons nulls are a pain in databases as well. Unlike the proposed Java tweaks, nulls in relational data seem to be unavoidable. Don't want nulls? Use XML.

Irony

2007-10-12T17:01:00.000-07:00

It's school carnival night and it so happens that this is the first day since early August (and this is just how far my knowledge stretches) when it's drizzling all over San Luis Obispo. It is also rather cold.

2007-10-12T13:55:00.000-07:00

I went to the implementing professionalism in students workshop last week. I am not 100% certain that the level of professionalism can be measuresd (even by proxy) by the level of student cheating, but this is what the conversation was mostly about.

2007-10-12T13:14:00.001-07:00

There are some issues with setting up a CMS on my own website, hence this.