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Six Degrees of Wikipedia   28 May 08
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Ever heard of the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon? If you haven’t, it works like this: Every actor gets a Kevin Bacon number. Kevin Bacon has a Kevin Bacon number of 0, actors who were in a movie with Kevin Bacon get a Kevin Bacon number of 1, actors who were in a movie with someone who has a Kevin Bacon number 1 get a 2, and so on (Everybody always gets the smallest number possible, so if you were in a film with two people, one with a 4 and one with a 6, your Kevin Bacon number would be 5).

The same idea could apply to the articles Wikipedia. Instead of taking "in the same film" as the relation, you can take "is linked to by". We’ll call the "Kevin Bacon number" from one article to another the "distance" between them. It’s then possible to work out the "closeness" of an article in Wikipedia as its average distance to any other article. I wanted to find the centre of wikipedia, that is, the article that is closest to all other articles (has minimum closeness).

www.netsoc.tcd.ie/~mu/wiki

Dual mode bus   28 May 08
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What do you get when you cross a bus with a train? A dual-mode vehicle that has the versatility of a bus, the speed of light rail and fuel economy vastly better than either.

Good wired article!

blog.wired.com/cars/2008/05/half-bus-half-t.html

Thin -- a fast and simple ruby webserver   28 Feb 08
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I have not yet used it in production, but heard good things.

code.macournoyer.com/thin/

The pulse of uncertainty   27 Feb 08
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Very nice graph, well done!

www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2008/01/05/business/20080106_soapbox_graphic.html

Gold - towards the danger zone?   24 Feb 08
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Tom updated his analysis gold.approximity.com/gold_analysis.html

Vido of matz speaking at Google on ruby 1.9, Feb 20, 2008   24 Feb 08
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www.rubyinside.com/matz-at-google-video-771.html

Erlang Cookbook   13 Feb 08
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The Erlang Cookbook is designed to be a good starting point for learning about the language, the OTP platform, and fault tolerant programming. This book was started as a way for me to document what I learned about the Erlang programming language, best practices gleaned from reading the newsgroups and mailing lists, and tips and tricks from the helpful developers and scientists using Erlang.

I modeled this book on the nearly-completed Scheme Cookbook that I was fortunate enough to have been part of developing.

This book (and the Scheme Cookbook itself) could not have been created without the excellent templating system Anton van Straaten developed for the Scheme Cookbook.

— BrentAFulgham - 20 Aug 2004

schemewiki.org/Erlang/TOC

Gold: updated technical analysis   12 Feb 08
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Tom updated his analysis.

Sex sells ..   12 Feb 08
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Surprise, surprise .. :-). Men buy the DSL connections :-).

Took this picture in Hamburg at Hansenet (alice, Telekom Italia).

The model is Vanessa Hessler and she is playing in the latest Asterix movie.

Arc released   03 Feb 08
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Paul Graham released the first version of arc a new Lisp dialect.

arclanguage.org/

Gold, gold, gold ..   01 Feb 08
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As most of you know at the moment we are very bullish on gold.

Tom, Gold-Tom has decided to put some of his graphs online that he updates very frequently. Check it out

Tom even thinks that a $1,000 gold price and a $25 silver price is not too unlikely in the next few months.

Euruko 2008, Prague, March 29-30   31 Jan 08
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Euruko is an annual conference about the Ruby programming language with an informal atmosphere and lots of opportunities to listen, to talk, to hack and to have fun. This year it takes place in Prague, Czech Republic, on March 29th to 30th.

www.euruko2008.org/

Gentoo sysadmin with ruby skills wanted   21 Jan 08
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For Personifi we are searching for Gentoo guru.

Position is in available in Fort Worth, TX.

We are looking to hire a world-class Linux administrator and engineer to help We are developing a new class of optimization and targeting solutions that allow Internet and mobile services to increase advertising revenue, improve relevance, and increase traffic. Areas of work will include integrations of technology into advertising systems, content delivery systems, and mobile delivery systems. We are working on problems in a number of areas, including cutting-edge information retrieval algorithms, scalability issues related to dealing with huge amounts of data and a rapidly increasing user population, and a variety of novel personalization features. If you have a need to bring order to the chaotic web, contact us. Position will be a full time position and is an opportunity to get on board with a company at the ground floor.

JOB DESCRIPTION

  • Producing, integrating, operating & maintaining the Company Hardware, systems (including OS), Networks, applications, databases, SAN, and security systems.
  • Integrating Linux, WAN’s, LAN’s, routers and switches
  • Performing technical planning, systems integration, verification and validation, cost and risk analysis, and supportability and effectiveness analysis for total systems.
  • Total system product may include concept design, fabrication, testing, installation, and operation.
  • Performing engineering activities such as defining system requirements, developing technical solutions, performing systems functional analysis, conducting trade studies, and/or performing test and evaluation activities.
  • Ensuring project schedules and performance requirements are met.
  • Interacting with customers and functional peer groups.

All applicants applying for U.S. job openings must be authorized to work in the United States.

JOB REQUIREMENTS:

  • BS or MS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent experience.
  • 3-5 years minimum software development experience.
  • Excellent critical thinking and problem solving skills.
  • Experience and understanding of computer networking systems, data storage and retrieval, computer operating systems…must have Gentoo experience, programming languages a plus (Ruby, Perl, Python, etc.).

COMMENT:

  • We don’t care about titles, certificates, etc. We care about real-life experience
  • If you never made your own kernel, etc. don’t apply.
  • Be ready to make our army of servers happy :-)

For immediate consideration, please send a text (ASCII) or HTML version of your resume to jobs@personifi.com. Important: The subject field of your email must include Linux Engineer.

Clojure from Ruby   15 Jan 08
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A JVM-based Lisp interacting with JRuby.

Robin Bhattacharyya posted this on Jan 13 to clojure@googlegroups.com

 I was playing with JRuby and wondered how hard it would be to consume
 Clojure from JRuby.

 It turns out that it was not hard at all.

 For anyone interested, I attached a working interface.

 Robin

groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_thread/thread/41e811c158d7881f/b31dc456fb5280ed?lnk=gst&q=JRuby#b31dc456fb5280ed

My new mysites blog!   31 Dec 07
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I am experimenting a bit with our latest service .. the blog. Written by Mike in one hour, still lacking many features, but hey, we want to be on the cutting edge of disaster :-).

mysites blog

Shiny polar cloud   11 Dec 07
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I came across this great article on Slashdot.

Rack talk by Christian Neukirchen   06 Dec 07
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We use rack at personifi. Highly recommended simple elegant and fast!

Developing general web frameworks and frameworkless web applications is difficult because lots of different ways to connect to web servers need to be implemented. Since Ruby is popular for writing web applications, we try to address this problem by proposing a lightweight abstraction mapping HTTP requests onto a simple Ruby API. This makes it possible to combine all kinds of web servers with different web applications without further change. Furthermore, our solution enables new functionality by combining and composing web applications, as well as better testability. Talk given at the European Ruby Conference (Euruko) 2007.

Slides chneukirchen.org/talks/euruko-2007/chneukirchen-euruko2007-introducing-rack.pdf

Article chneukirchen.org/talks/euruko-2007/neukirchen07introducingrack.pdf

Dryad talk   16 Nov 07
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Dryad is the Microsoft copy from map-reduce.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPhE5JCP2Ak

Seuss technical writing   28 Sep 07
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Enjoy:

web.mit.edu/adorai/www/seuss-technical-writing.html

Yoko Kanno piano solo cowboy bebop   16 Sep 07
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Enjoy :-)

 

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