.comment-link {margin-left:.6em;}

Blog site moved to new location...

The Pile

Using a feed:
Using e-mail:: Your e-mail

Tuesday, August 17, 2004

Two-Terabyte Memory Card Coming to Production : Technology : MobileMag

Thanks to S. "Tetherless" Keshav, who gave a talk here today in HP Labs, for giving me a pointer to this promised Two-Terabyte Memory Card. This could change some of the trade-offs in designing distributed systems over unreliable, intermittent networks.

posted by Eamonn | 3:39 PM | 0 comments

Monday, August 09, 2004

In Defense of PowerPoint

From Computer Magazine - In Defense of PowerPoint comes an interesting approach to giving conference presentations:

conference presenters who merely recapitulate the contents of their paper place themselves in danger of putting their audience to sleep, particularly straight after lunch. A more effective approach uses the presentation to persuade the majority of the audience to actually read the paper, then devotes the question time to those few who have already read it.

and how to use bullet points:

Bullet points—PowerPoint's most vilified aspect—are the most misunderstood of presentation techniques. As far as the audience is concerned, bullet points only serve to remind them of the presentation's general context. As far as the presenter is concerned, bullet points replace the mnemonic techniques handed down from the Greeks and the more recent prompt cards hidden in the hand of a formal debater.

I am not sure that Tufte would agree.

posted by Eamonn | 11:35 PM | 0 comments

Sunday, August 08, 2004

Spatial Orientation of Desktops

John Siracusa has an written an excellent article on what, in his opinion, makes a good desktop shell, concentrating mostly on the Macintosh finder.

As an experiment I have set up my Windows XP folder options to to match his recommendations as much as possible.

In the folder context menu:
- Do view->thumbnails in each folder.
- Turn off the auto-arrange and the align to grid.

In the folder view→toolbars menu desect all toolbars

In the Folder Options panel
- General tab: select "Use Windows classic folders"
- General tab: select "Open each folder in its own window"
- View tab: uncheck "Display the full path in the title bar"
- View tab: check "Remember each folder's view setting"
- View tab: check "Restore previous folder windows at logon"
- View tab: click apply to all folders

It's like I have a brand new GUI on my operating system! Let's see how well I like it after using it for a while.

posted by Eamonn | 1:41 PM | 0 comments

How to read Smalltalk if you are a Java or C++ programmer.

My programming language trajectory has been BASIC → FORTRAN → Pascal → C → C++ → Java with a few diversions such as Perl and Python. On the way I have become a firm convert to object-oriented programming, and as such I always found my lack of knowledge in Smalltalk was a big gap.

Now that I sit near Alan Kay and have been impressed by Squeakand Croquet I have felt it was time to fill in that gap in my knowledge.

However, I did find initially that the syntactical differences of Smalltalk were a barrier to my understanding, one of the reasons I have created my own Java-Smalltalk cheatsheet.

So I was delighted to find Wilf LaLonde's tutorial, I Can Read C++ and Java But I Can’t Read Smalltalk.

posted by Eamonn | 12:31 PM | 0 comments

Friday, August 06, 2004

Some nice looking Java software

GeoSoft - Geotechnical Software Services has some nice looking GPLed Java software.

posted by Eamonn | 1:37 PM | 0 comments

Thursday, August 05, 2004

Non-linear Dimensionality Reduction Techniques for Unsupervised Feature Extraction

Non-linear Dimensionality Reduction Techniques for Unsupervised Feature Extraction

Overview of some thechniques for dimensionality reduction.

-------------------

Update: The above HTML version is missing parts of some formulas. To see them see the compressed postscript version.

posted by Eamonn | 9:51 AM | 0 comments

Wednesday, August 04, 2004

Charles Stewart's congressional data page

Lots of raw data of congressional roll call votes on Charles Stewart's congressional data page. I've got some ideas of some data mining I want to try out on this data.

posted by Eamonn | 5:22 PM | 0 comments

Monday, August 02, 2004

Wedding Anniversary

Twelve years today. Wow!

We treated ourselves to a night at the Stanford Court Hotel on Nob Hill. Last night had a nice meal at Fournou's Ovens where we particularly enjoyed the wine, Panther Creek, Freedom Hill, 1999.

This was somewhat of a contrast to John Edward anniversary meal at Wendy's earlier this week. Well he has other compensations.

posted by Eamonn | 9:25 AM | 0 comments