July 2009
2 posts
Android is a step backwards (for now)
Let me start off by saying that I’ve done some recreational hacking on Android and I really like it. From a developer perspective it’s very much a step forward.
But the whole situation in mobile reminds me of the mess on the desktop when I was in college. Back then we had 16-bit windows, the new Win32 APIs, some Unix layer stuff. Then there were the native APIs, the MSVC libraries,...
Ubuntu, Vista, Cygwin and all that
I just purchased a new Acer Timeline, an ultra-thin and ultra-light laptop with amazing battery life. First impressions of the machine are fantastic, but I’m facing yet again the recurring dilemma: what O/S?
I’m generally a Unix person, and most of my time is spent either in a terminal, Emacs, a web browser and, sometimes, Eclipse and Matlab. For these things, Linux is fine. But I...
May 2009
1 post
Research... renowned robots?
I recently found out that all major [industrial] computer science labs have Twitter feeds. Here are some back-of-the envelope statistics.
FollowersTimeLinearExp.Google2,736<1 month2,736 (100)3.44 (100)Microsoft1,7082 months854 (31)1.62 (47)IBM3,4918 months436 (16)0.44 (13)Yahoo!1,46913 months113 (5)0.24 (7)
Ranked purely by number of followers, IBM research is first. But factoring in the...
April 2009
5 posts
Consular comedy
Yesterday I went to the Greek consulate in NY to get a certified copy of my degree. The level of absurdity seems to increase each time I visit them.
I brought in color photocopies and, of course, the original (a big thing, with raised seals etc, in a leather case). The officer helping me suggested I instead ask for a “true copy” from CMU, which they will notarize and subsequently...
Less is definitely more
After suffering through a big, steaming pile of (mostly) poo of 18-page(!!) paper submissions for a conference I shall not name, I was ecstatic to discover that my next batch of reviews consisted of 3-page papers. A bit on the other extreme but overall I think that, at least in data mining / machine learning, lower page limits are appropriate for conference submissions (journals are another...
On data ownership, again
When I went through the identity verification process for a Cyworld account, I didn’t think much of it. But the recent news about Google and S. Korean laws (WSJ and RRW coverage — oddly, NYT coverage seems to have disappeared) got me thinking about that and also about what I wrote on data ownership. The problem seems to be one of dual standards: revealing some information (true...
Super-nodes!
Someone recently told me that, in a Chinese online forum dataset, a few very popular posts are commented by everyone and claimed that they may have up to hundreds of millions (!!) of distinct commenters! Generally, I’d find that hard to believe (number of commenters on a single post is at least an order of magnitude larger than the whole population of Greece, and about equal to the...
March 2009
5 posts
“One of the things he told me was that wait long enough and people will surprise...”
– Randy Pausch, in “The Last Lecture”; at the time I didn’t realize it, but this requires at least as much guts as kindness.
Medical recordkeeping
A bit sore from what is now becoming my annual [sic] Td vaccine (FYI, normally it’s once every decade). My records always seem to be with some previous doctor, not me. This must be at least the second redundant dose since arriving in the US. So I decided to start manually entering this information in Google Health. That can’t be worse than the good old “paper PHRs”...
Is the tide turning?
According to this segment (from ca. 8’30”) on the Brian Lehrer show this morning, Ireland recently decided to relax it’s requirements for citizenship: you can apply if you great-grand-parents were Irish.
Reasons mentioned by the guest or callers why Irish-Americans apply: (i) sentimentality, (ii) work opportunities, (iii) fear of being a US passport holder after 9/11, (iv)...
Belated discovery of what is, apparently, a recent...
Tumbling along
Let’s try this Tumblr thing. I don’t know if I should be concerned, but most of my random thoughts that might be worth writing down rarely fit in 130 characters or less.