Partially Attended

I work for a department where we try to do agile development. I liked thisDilbertabout the subject. ... (more)

A few weeks ago I was a beer festival in Munich, and I was talking tosomeone who was working on something, hey it was a beer festival, but then Ihad an idea about the type of interface that might be really useful fordoing search. We now search for images using text, so somewhere someone hasto build the text to image representation of the images in their database.Arguably this is one area where tagging has made an enormous improvement,ala flickr, but it seems to me that if you could make an interface thatwould allow a user to either draw or assemble a rough draft of the imagethey were searching for then this might offer a powerful and complimentaryapproach. ... (more)

References - "Python Objects", Fredrik Lundh, http://www.effbot.org/zone/python-objects.htm - "How to think like a Pythonista", Mark Hammond, http://python.net/crew/mwh/hacks/objectthink.html - "Python main() functions", Guido van Rossum, http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=4829 - "Python Idioms and Efficiency", http://jaynes.colorado.edu/PythonIdioms.html - "Python track: python idioms", http://www.cs.caltech.edu/courses/cs11/material/python/misc/python_idioms.html - "Be Pythonic", Shalabh Chaturvedi, http://shalabh.infogami.com/Be_Pythonic2 - "Python Is Not Java", Phillip J. Eby, http://dirtsimple.org/2004/12/python-is-not-java.html - "What is Pythonic?", Martijn Faassen, http://faassen.n--tree.net/blog/view/weblog/2005/08/06/0 - "Sorting Mini-HOWTO", Andrew Dalke, http://wiki.python.org/moin/HowTo/Sorting - "Python Idioms", http://www. ... (more)

A blog post from AcademicProductivity trundled across my reader this morning in which the blogpoints to a paper in which the author claims that academicsare prostitutes because they modify their papers in response to thedemands of reviewers. I got a sense frisson when I read the blog post andsome of the text that is quoted there from the paper, but then I read thecomments to the blog post, and they are very good at, if you like, pointingout that the paper is a bit weak in it's premise. ... (more)

Ensemble came out of the human genome project about 8 years ago to preventcommercialization of genomic data. the idea was to have an open source human genome companies would have to do some work before they could make money off ofsequences. the ensemble projects takes the raw data from the genes and adds other datato this, such as reference data from other experiments there is enemble codeand there is the data ... (more)

James is just an interested bysander on the HTML 5 mailing list, hey, it's abarcamp html5 is th enew verison of html applemozillaoperaanyone who joins the mailing list and w3c (which means MS, which means this is going to work in IE) if you have ideas, then you can joing hte mailing list and put ideasforwards for the specification why should we? lots of information is locked up in HTML, not XML, not SVGL ... (more)

a desk at the computer lab and at the chemistry lab. computationl lingustic chemistryauto-detect language in chemistry papers to try to recognics chemical andmarkup. suppliment the mark-up from publishers. can draw the chemical and annotating them overlayed over the paper some problems are that there can be new names in papers,comapct names, include extra hyphens, this program can deal with these kindsof things. also can use systematics parsing. ... (more)

OS CMS systems beat the crap out of the free ones for what you get for your money, including support. If you have a budget then you can get in touch with the authors of the OS systems easily the only thing they sometimes don't win on is polish it is someone's job to look at each piece and make sure that it is slick Drupal is free, It upgrades about twice  a year, one major one minor ... (more)

ARM microcontroler dev guy. hard to use these processors, whanted to make something like this availableto normal peoplewant internet bluetooth connected devices so they built something he just plugged in a microcontoler with a wireless sensorhis machine things that it's a flash drive he dregged over a binarythe device started blinking, this is the hello world of hardware hacking,cool what can you do now? well cool stuff obviously! ... (more)

what's cool about microformats web? is it the stickers?the t-shirtsthe community process urlb.at/2f personal information disastertravel airlines don't talk to railroads microformats say, what problem does it solve? perhaps there is no problem at all what problem does blogging solve?Twitter for christ's sake? no one knows what they do until they are popular e.g. yahoo pipes is not practical yetit is a user experience nightmareand it doesn't have a clear defined purpose ... (more)