The Curious Engineer

Daniel Lemire's blog

2004–2008

1,002 posts

2009–2026 →

2008 195

December 2008

  1. Where are the academic podcasts?
  2. What makes recommender systems work?
  3. Grabbing attention or building a reputation?
  4. We never invent anything new, yet progress is made!
  5. My (short) activity report for 2008
  6. My low-tech research tools
  7. Where do presidents and prime ministers go to school?
  8. Parsing CSV files is CPU bound: a C++ test case (Update 2)
  9. Parsing CSV files is CPU bound: a C++ test case (Update 1)
  10. Fast argmax in Python
  11. The Synthese Recommender System
  12. Parsing CSV files is CPU bound: a C++ test case
  13. Why is the free market letting us down?
  14. The next wave in IT: employee monitoring
  15. Parsing text files is CPU bound
  16. Native XML databases: have they taken the world over yet?

November 2008

  1. Are you really running out of time?
  2. Social Networking for Scientists: Mendeley
  3. Innovative ideas are indistinguishable from crackpot ones
  4. Diversity in recommender systems: sketch of a bibliography
  5. Recommender systems: where are we headed?
  6. Tim Bray on solving the economic crisis
  7. How to speed up retrieval without any index?
  8. Why am I not working on world hunger?
  9. Is what I do technical?
  10. SciFi book review: Spin by Robert Charles Wilson
  11. The most active blogs I follow…
  12. Full text search in SQL with LuSql
  13. Toward the Commoditization of Natural Language Processing
  14. Do not trust financial experts
  15. So, you think academic peer review works?
  16. Measuring the diversity of recommended lists, at last
  17. To improve your indexes: sort your tables!
  18. Leaves in the web of knowledge
  19. Understanding what makes database indexes work
  20. JOLAP is dead, OLAP4J lives?
  21. DUAT: Do not use acronyms in titles
  22. Selecting emails per language
  23. Going back to the basics
  24. Staying organized without planning
  25. Google is fighting back against cars: Google transit

October 2008

  1. A no free lunch theorem for database indexes?
  2. How I built my Web presence as a researcher…
  3. When in doubts, prefer unimpressive negative results
  4. The future of innovation is in software
  5. The problem with unidimensional research
  6. Blogging is networking
  7. How do you know that you are right?
  8. My school is not going out of business
  9. Cool software design insight #6
  10. Peer review is still declining?
  11. Need help protecting my blog
  12. What 20 years in academia taught me about my finances
  13. Google won’t help your blog
  14. Computer Science Research does not care about your System

September 2008

  1. Students want online learning
  2. A little brain teaser…
  3. Marketing to scientists… on YouTube?
  4. From freedom to intelligence
  5. MacOS open’s under Linux
  6. Why I am sometimes rude
  7. Canadian Computer Science professor fired for being into bondage
  8. From online courses to… automated teaching
  9. Inject chaos in your life
  10. Preparing your sons for the bad guys
  11. Please auto-hide content
  12. Cool software design insight #5
  13. Speed up Python without effort using generator expressions
  14. My blog got hacked

August 2008

  1. If you claim high scalability…
  2. The insane world of academic publishing
  3. Proceedings of the Large-Scale Recommender Systems workshop
  4. Cool software design insight #4
  5. How to select even or odd rows in a table using CSS 3
  6. Quick CSS quiz
  7. Peer review is an honor-based system
  8. The mythical bitmap index
  9. The secret to intellectual productivity
  10. Back from vacations
  11. Submit your papers where they are likely to be accepted
  12. Cool software design insight #3
  13. Cool software design insight #2
  14. A good word for Nintendo repair services

July 2008

  1. Given up on Eclipse, now with NetBeans
  2. Scientific productivity tips from Hartley and Branthwaite
  3. Cool software design insight #1
  4. Some myths about online teaching
  5. Coverage of the cuil search engine
  6. Updating your model as a researcher
  7. Encouraging diversity in science
  8. Google makes me smarter
  9. We need a more negative culture
  10. Do you think because you write, or write because you think?
  11. A small graph-theory puzzle
  12. I still don’t have the multiplication tables memorized
  13. Sorting 1 terabyte in 209 seconds
  14. Backing up your Mac on an external disk
  15. Classifying research projects by depth

June 2008

  1. Good research: invent new problems or explain mysteries
  2. Lowly tasks you should do
  3. The Disadvantages of an Elite Education
  4. Too much stress
  5. Blogs make meetings feel dull
  6. Proof that I am a stubborn bastard
  7. The Purity Scale in Science
  8. Distractions make you dumb
  9. From Graph Drawing to Tag-Cloud drawing?
  10. Grounded versus Pure Theory
  11. Why pure theory is wasteful
  12. A short review of Collective Intelligence in Action
  13. The ten-minute rule for presentations
  14. Research stamina

May 2008

  1. Pictures from paradise
  2. If your ssh connection times out when you ask for the content of a directory…
  3. My spam filter is asocial
  4. Are you descriptive or predictive?
  5. Patience, persistence, perseverance
  6. Why academia is so conservative: academic freedom
  7. Black tulips
  8. The art of paper review
  9. Better than Safari: Shiira
  10. Colorful professors
  11. The one thing I learned about gardening this year
  12. There is only one platform: the Web
  13. Graph diameter versus maximum node degree
  14. Seeking an efficient algorithm to group identical values
  15. Week-old cappucinos taste bad

April 2008

  1. Why you get annoying as you grow older
  2. The truth will make you relevant
  3. Job offer: education specialist
  4. Rigor or relevance: choose one
  5. Google stole my marker
  6. Writing alone: benefits and pitfalls
  7. Collaboration in Science: Three models
  8. The “e” prefix is obselete
  9. What is academic blogging about?
  10. Why aren’t there more scientific breakthroughs?
  11. Do you share and index your history?
  12. Automatic domain name generation?
  13. The upcoming genetic divide?
  14. Researcher or marketing drone?
  15. The need to do great things
  16. Everything is pseudocode
  17. The negative myths about academic blogging
  18. Do not invest in Blu-ray technology?
  19. The Microsoft-ISO debacle
  20. Programming with lego bricks and code completion

March 2008

  1. How to solve hard problems
  2. Blogging is and will remain a fringe effect in science?
  3. Google has broken my roman numeral captcha
  4. Multicore programming? Yawn!
  5. Reputation still holds in education… for how long?
  6. Large groups in science
  7. Even a tiny amount of beer makes you less productive?
  8. Why is there no new Einstein?
  9. What are your two biggest accomplishments?
  10. The lonely researcher: a loser?
  11. Yahoo! to exploit more metadata
  12. The 2 myths getting students into ivy-league schools
  13. What you can ask of a researcher in an email
  14. Anchoring effect in collaborative filtering
  15. Spam journals or open journals?
  16. What are conferences good for?
  17. Information is blood, coverage is intelligence

February 2008

  1. Research productivity versus funding received
  2. Publish or Perish: the Tool
  3. Online teaching is the future?
  4. Should we fear Google?
  5. When a terabyte is small
  6. Recommending Journal Articles in a Scientific Digital Library
  7. External-Memory Shuffles?
  8. What is a reusable research result?
  9. Yahoo! Research jobs in Montreal
  10. No shortage of Information Technology Workers
  11. How many users are needed for an efficient collaborative filtering system?
  12. Random Write Performance in Solid-State Drives

January 2008

  1. Chaining CAPTCHAs for fun and profit?
  2. Closed-source software is the source of innovation?
  3. A first draft of HTML 5… toward a new HTML?
  4. The network is the bottleneck?
  5. Tracking call for papers… with a wiki?
  6. On the sum of power laws
  7. What is an effective social network?
  8. Who should be buying expensive commercial database systems?
  9. Research questions about… tag clouds?
  10. My top blog posts in 2007
  11. Database indexes are less useful than you think
  12. Solid-state drives: when external memory becomes as fast as internal memory
  13. Coping with time taxes
  14. Science papers per country
  15. Death of the software application
  16. Do researchers keep a plan?
  17. Great scholars seek simplicity
  18. Workout to improve… intellectual productivity?
  19. In 2008, work fewer hours

2007 214

December 2007

  1. Keeping track of your time… lazily
  2. Coping with overabundance as a scientist
  3. What to get with your Nintendo Wii?
  4. I will be a better writer in 2008… I promise!
  5. Collaborative Filtering: Why working on static data sets is not enough
  6. How University professors ought to be teaching…
  7. How many Computer Science researchers are there?
  8. 21 open problems in Artificial Intelligence
  9. How much are the ideas of your competition worth to you?
  10. Why tenure matters?
  11. Why having a readership matters
  12. A better way to browse DBLP: Faceted DBLP
  13. Improving your intellectual productivity by accepting chaos
  14. Computers can do analogies
  15. For the Web hacker in you: Google Chart API
  16. Formal definitions are less useful than you think
  17. Find a Readership or Perish
  18. Thinking intelligence is innate makes you stupid
  19. Quintura: a cloud-based search engine
  20. More CS Ph.D.s than ever, what about research jobs?

November 2007

  1. Research productivity: what matters?
  2. Storytelling and research papers
  3. Is PageRank just good marketing?
  4. Why bother with Google? Go straight to wikipedia!
  5. When has a problem been solved?
  6. Physical factors making you smarter: white noise, carbohydrates, music, alcohol, and coffee?
  7. Do not write like we taught you to!
  8. How to become smarter
  9. Having scientific meetings with brilliant people… in your kitchen?
  10. Directed research is useless
  11. Matlab code and efficient algorithms for BIG tensors
  12. My research process
  13. UC Berkeley holding tribute for Jim Gray
  14. Netflix $50,000 prize awarded to AT&T
  15. The important problems: first update
  16. Why science will triumph only when we teach it properly
  17. How to recognize important problems
  18. IBM is buying Cognos
  19. How to make sure your paper will be rejected
  20. Skype 2.0 beta for Linux: video at last
  21. Non-commercial licenses and university courseware
  22. Non-industrial workplaces
  23. Yes, the Semantic Web is Flawed
  24. Why forbid derivative work?

October 2007

  1. Hidden Gems : seeking diamonds in your data (November 7th 2007)
  2. Your platform is your software
  3. Cool new native HTML widgets
  4. Publish or perish? Let them perish!
  5. Play the strongest checkers program in the world
  6. Famous tech drop-outs
  7. Optical disks, soon to be obsolete?
  8. Early impressions on Facebook
  9. What happens after a technological singularity?
  10. Productivity measures are counterproductive?
  11. What happens when everyone owns a telescope
  12. Disambiguate words using wikipedia
  13. Odd Networking Problem with MacOS
  14. Assessing a researcher… in 2007
  15. Great video on online education
  16. Search, Google, and Life: Sergey Brin
  17. Software Is Hard: you bet!
  18. Tape as the future of storage: are Sun and Dell insulting our intelligence?
  19. The medium is the message, in Computer Science?

September 2007

  1. Why don’t people use university libraries?
  2. My wife before and after
  3. Canadian dollar reach parity with American dollar
  4. Google Presentations: What did I tell you?
  5. No, you do not have to settle on a poor language because you have bad programmers
  6. My Experience as a proud Wii user
  7. Promo video for Windows 386 (very funny)
  8. How to make Smultron even better
  9. Food for thought: Searching attachments in Gmail
  10. Machine Smarter Than Naked Human Being?
  11. Science and Technology Advice is Not Free
  12. It may not matter all that much where you go to college
  13. The Web warps space and time
  14. Map shortage in the USA?

August 2007

  1. Get into pay sites for free as a Googlebot
  2. Where the progress is happening in hardware
  3. Super Flash Mario Bros
  4. Teaching radical novelties
  5. 0xFFFFUL
  6. Weighted Slope One in Haskell
  7. Free ads on my blog
  8. The world’s major polluter: USA
  9. Order pocket notebooks in Canada
  10. Best Possible Way to GET/PUT an XML File?
  11. Maybe you don’t
  12. Is the cosine similarity transitive?
  13. How to manage email (Inbox Zero)
  14. Finally giving up on PDAs
  15. PDFView is dead, vive Skim!
  16. Computing the Hamming distance between two strings in Java?
  17. Slope One in Scala
  18. The Web is a distinct society
  19. Babylon 5: The Lost Tales – Voices In The Dark
  20. On the upcoming collapse of peer review
  21. Anyone has a Nokia Tablet PC?
  22. Paper publications and climate change

July 2007

  1. Kasparov explains Russia
  2. 2007 International Symposium on Wikis (October 21-23, 2007)
  3. Eclipse Search Dialog box is killing me
  4. Web Development Bookmarklets
  5. Scalable Web Development
  6. Heh. Indeed.
  7. Digitalizing my old VHS tapes
  8. Trying out a new to-do list software
  9. Looking into buy a new PDA
  10. Why won’t to-do applications use mind maps?
  11. YouTube scalability
  12. UML and Web 2.0: a missing link
  13. On Overabundance and Innovation
  14. OLAP experts sought in Montreal
  15. My wife and my sons (pictures)
  16. The Cafes » North and South
  17. What is wrong with the software product economics
  18. My Fight Againt Comment SPAM: Spambots pass the Turing test!

June 2007

  1. Self-Publishing made easy: Lulu.com
  2. I have had it with Firefox under MacOS
  3. What? Only 25 MB of storage per core?
  4. More Funding for Universities Hurts the Economy
  5. Stephen Downes in Asia
  6. Slope One in Erlang
  7. $450 for 1 terabyte
  8. One-million-dollars grant for the ERASME Data Warehouse
  9. XXL library: an open source Java database library
  10. Unacomputer
  11. My philosophical interests
  12. Value Investing News is using the Slope One collaborative filtering algorithm
  13. Angry Lemur
  14. Everything is Miscellaneous
  15. WWWrong
  16. The Next Web

May 2007

  1. The Google Similarity Distance
  2. My favorite SciFi authors
  3. Yield returns are not esoteric anymore
  4. Thermal Noise makes Quantum Cryptography obselete?
  5. University of Quebec at Montreal (UQAM) going out of business?
  6. Blogosphere and Time Series
  7. Technorati: Only 45 People
  8. Is P vs. NP a practical problem?
  9. Really Good Web 2.0 Time Tracking Application
  10. Multivitamins are bad for you
  11. Bureaucracy is the ennemy of Science, or is it?
  12. My favorite Web 2.0 applications
  13. Amazon.com to Launch DRM-Free MP3 Music
  14. Journal of Interesting Negative Results in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning
  15. Tag-Cloud Drawing: Software Available for Download
  16. My favorite MacOS software so far
  17. Visualizing changes in LaTeX
  18. Odeo: Turning to Web into a Giant Radio

April 2007

  1. Final Word on SIAM Data Mining 2007
  2. SIAM Data Mining 2007
  3. Are we destroying research by evaluating it?
  4. Google Summer of Code – Collaborative Filtering
  5. WWW 2007 Tagging and Metadata for Social Information Organization Workshop
  6. Montreal Tech Bloggers Network
  7. ACM Transactions on Database Systems going double blind
  8. My favorite MacOS applications
  9. Tag clouds are here to stay

March 2007

  1. Tag-Cloud Drawing: Algorithms for Cloud Visualization
  2. Making Firefox Prettier under Linux
  3. Google Summer of Code and Collaborative Filtering
  4. The big scientific questions in computing have been answered
  5. Streaming Maximum-Minimum Filter Using No More than Three Comparisons per Element
  6. One More Step Toward Infinite Storage
  7. Oracle buys Hyperion

February 2007

  1. Computer Science Departments will not survive
  2. Writing and Maintaining Software are not Engineering Activities
  3. Why is Computer Science Education Obselete?
  4. TexMaker: a cross-platform LaTeX editor
  5. Taking charge of your IT
  6. JavaScript is interesting
  7. How artificial intelligences are already at war with us
  8. Crash course in sane Web programming
  9. Would you pass my XML course?
  10. The Web is not virtual
  11. Gutenberg-era Tech Support
  12. Web Semantics is Localized
  13. HTML/CSS Trick of the day
  14. Flying kills the planet
  15. Taporware: have fun with words
  16. Academic Career Advice from Curt Bonk
  17. Duck Typing, MustIgnore and the Web
  18. Saner rules for udev
  19. VirtueDesktops
  20. Got XFig to work under MacOS with fink
  21. Tagging as a new information retrieval paradigm
  22. Advice for a student going into Computer Science
  23. Why building software is hard
  24. The paperless office finally coming?
  25. The death of computing
  26. The Big Bang is Intelligent
  27. Podcasting using ccPublisher
  28. Lawrence Lessig – On Free, and the Differences between Culture and Code

January 2007

  1. The Power of Web 2.0 Strikes Again
  2. Jim Gray missing at sea
  3. Duck Typing, Artificial Intelligence and Philosophy
  4. Debug CSS with the Firefox DOM Inspector
  5. inDiscover – a better music recommender system
  6. IBM’s Many Eyes
  7. Help: Looking for High Quality Webcam for Video Blogging
  8. Harold Jarche » Where would we be without school drop outs?
  9. Best telemarketing joke ever
  10. Innovative Collaborative Filtering Venture going down: Findory
  11. Color terminal under Mac OS X
  12. No Great Researcher is Special
  13. Turing award recipient tears apart artificial intelligence
  14. Too Much Semantics is Harmful in Information Technology
  15. Priority R-Tree
  16. Human Brain Evolution Slows To A Crawl
  17. Peter Turney launches his blog
  18. Outsourcing Email: Universities Switching to Google Apps for Education
  19. Half an Hour: Things You Really Need to Learn

2006 214

December 2006

  1. Should Academia care for standards?
  2. Christmas parties are more fun with kids
  3. Yes, there is snow in Montreal
  4. Is this web page trying to sell me something?
  5. We do not need to teach math and science
  6. My predictions for year 2007
  7. Roleplaying is Indicative of a Delusional Mind?
  8. Collaborative Filtering Made Easy
  9. Java 6.0 is out
  10. New Information Retrieval Course Soon (in French)
  11. Is the Tech Bubble Back?
  12. Open Source Taste Engine Ready For Netflix
  13. The Future of Database Research
  14. Warren Buffet Says the Rich Do Not Pay Enough Taxes
  15. Extracting 3D Models from Still Images
  16. XML Schemas are harmful: is this news?
  17. Firefox and Adobe Reader causing problems?
  18. So, Stéphane Dion won the race
  19. Search engines that should come by default with Firefox

November 2006

  1. Why do people think a noisy user interface is better
  2. Cool free H323 videoconference software for Macs: xMeeting
  3. On video-on-the-web a.k.a. youtube, is going to change teaching!
  4. Stock-Picking Computers
  5. Do not think you have to go to college
  6. A few days with MacOS X
  7. My first Mac
  8. Are Smart People Dumb?
  9. In vitro kids are smarter
  10. RSS hygiene and Google Reader
  11. Querying the library of congress using Search/Retrieve via URL
  12. Looking for an all-recording plug-in for Firefox
  13. 90% accuracy for translation software?
  14. ACL Wiki for Computational Linguistics
  15. My Erdős number is 4

October 2006

  1. Reinventing HTML or, yes we admit it, XHTML failed
  2. What is infinite storage?
  3. Free Web Conferencing Solutions
  4. NRC sets up publication RSS feeds for its researchers
  5. Better email notifications in subversion
  6. Revert back changes in subversion
  7. Run Internet Explorer under Linux easily!
  8. Netflix Prize: First Entries

September 2006

  1. If you are using a computer or a cell phone right now, please continue
  2. Java’s Momentum Is Running Low
  3. DOLAP 2006 Preliminary Technical Program
  4. The Semantic Web landscape is changing
  5. Operators and, or and xor written in English: is this standard C++?
  6. New security measures making airports unsafe?
  7. VLDB 2007 (14 March 2007 / 25-28 September 2007)
  8. When recommendations go bad: Walmart
  9. Web is leading a backlash against traditional authority figures
  10. YoungFemaleScientist: Men publish in better journals than women

August 2006

  1. An upcoming revolution in science? The end of academic journals?
  2. Scam Spam, the death of email, and Machine Learning
  3. Taste – Collaborative Filtering for Java
  4. Highly Affordable Computing (HAC)
  5. Prestige is overrated?
  6. Google Scholar launches a “related articles” feature
  7. Efficient FIFO/Queue data structure in Python
  8. Embedding fonts for IEEE
  9. A Tectonic Shift in Global Higher Education
  10. Google launches online, shareable, spreadsheet tool!
  11. Get an RSS feed of your favorite researcher
  12. Technique without theory or theory from technique? An examination of practical, philosophical, and foundational issues in data mining
  13. The Scare Effect
  14. IRMA 2007 – Data Warehousing and Mining track (October 1, 2006 / May 19-23, 2007)
  15. Statistical Data Mining Tutorials by Andrew Moore
  16. Database-less: the new trend
  17. FeedOnFeeds-Redux
  18. Big schools are no longer giving researchers an edge?
  19. TaskFreak! web-based todo list
  20. Research on Computers and Games
  21. Numbered references in Word
  22. Google releases massive n-gram data set
  23. Open Source Moodle picking up speed!
  24. So, you think you are a big shot?
  25. The Power of the Marginal

July 2006

  1. Babylon 5 is back
  2. Theoretical Computer Science is Closed Minded?
  3. Yahoo and MSN cannot compete?
  4. Suresh says we don’t need publication counts
  5. Some summer pictures
  6. Migration from CVS to Subversion
  7. How to fix pango fonts problems
  8. Perfect Hashing
  9. Some interesting KDD 2006 papers
  10. Olivier Bousquet at Curves and Surfaces 2006: Learning on Manifolds

June 2006

  1. Geometric Wavelets
  2. Text Mining ICML 2006 Tutorial Slides
  3. Leaving for Curves and Surfaces (Avignon)
  4. Kamel Aouiche in Montreal!
  5. Slashdot | String Theory a Disaster for Physics?
  6. Second order probability
  7. Google funding the implementation of Slope One in Drupal
  8. My little family
  9. Does theory helps in algorithmic design?
  10. Slope One Collaborative Filtering in Drupal, coming along…
  11. Springer Online Mathematical Encyclopedia
  12. Computer-free math is obsolete
  13. ACM Launches several new journals
  14. PyX – Python graphics package
  15. Canadian Semantic Web Working Symposium
  16. How to recover “lost” changes in CVS
  17. ACL 2006 accepted papers
  18. Autocompletion in the Python console

May 2006

  1. Steven got his M.Sc.
  2. STXXL: C++ Standard Template Library for Extra Large Data Sets
  3. Peter Norvig on solving every Sudoku puzzle
  4. Efficient Storage Methods for a Literary Data Warehouse
  5. Curse of Dimensionality and intuition
  6. Beyond the algorithmization of the sciences
  7. Google Web Toolkit – Build AJAX apps in the Java language
  8. There’s No Such Thing as a Learning Object
  9. Harold calls for the death of learning objects
  10. JabRef reference manager
  11. A Star Is Made – New York Times
  12. Multidimensional OLAP Server for Linux as Open Source Software
  13. How do people balance out precision and recall?
  14. Java Serialization is not for long term storage
  15. Flattening lists in Python
  16. Harold and RuleML
  17. Google Data APIs
  18. Stallman does it again
  19. Wink: free tool to generate Flash or PDF from your screencasts
  20. When XML abstraction kills your web services
  21. See who blogged about this page
  22. This map shows the current location of Tim Hibbard
  23. Flamenco Search Interface Project
  24. The Generic Mapping Tools (GMT)
  25. Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google were all founded by people who dropped out of school
  26. Open-Source MOLAP with PHP and Linux
  27. Baby blues: Louka is growing teeth

April 2006

  1. Hierarchy of Collaborative Filtering Distribution
  2. Open University announces £5.6m project to make learning material free on the internet
  3. China and India as academic powerhouses?
  4. UCR Time Series Classification/Clustering page
  5. The Cost of Graduation
  6. On moving a sofa around a corner
  7. Problem Solving Heuristics
  8. The Combinatorial Object Server
  9. When to use the geometric mean?
  10. Why blog? What about Reed’s law?
  11. The 20th century blueprint for research is now mythical
  12. The end of SOA web services
  13. ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest Final Results
  14. Asian Universities are beginning to dominate
  15. What are the computer langage people waiting for?
  16. Slashdot: Why Is Data Mining Still A Frontier?
  17. CSWWS 2006: Call for Participation
  18. Bill Gates is a cheap bastard!
  19. Kunal Anand: The uncloneable web
  20. Science in an exponential world
  21. Academic blogging: why still bother?
  22. Canadians, set your clocks… on the Internet

March 2006

  1. Carnegie-Mellon heavy on distance learning
  2. Formatting advice everyone should know
  3. Mixing Web Services And Collaborative Filtering
  4. Sci-Fi Writer, Math Professor and Communist, All in One!
  5. Must start a company to be a succesful Stanford professor?
  6. Computers live their lives in sensory deprivation
  7. AI requires huge volumes of data to exist: what about learning?
  8. We need better text forms on the web
  9. Thoughts on Software Complexity
  10. Opening lots and lots of files under Linux
  11. China soon to export degrees?
  12. Workshop on Service Oriented Techniques at ICEC06

February 2006

  1. An Anti-McDo Videogame
  2. Giving Efficient Distance Lectures on a Budget
  3. Web Service Stack Smelling like a Dead Corpse?
  4. Eclipse is decimating the IDE market
  5. Firefox Extension Development Tutorial
  6. When only 2.5% of your students are female
  7. Most frequently asked question about XML
  8. The word “computer” is not associated in any way with math.
  9. Long File Support in GCC (C++)
  10. Control a NASA helicopter using AJAX

January 2006

  1. New Electronic Mathematics Journal For Students
  2. Do not open external links in new windows
  3. After Oracle and Microsoft, IBM sets its database free
  4. How to make external links exit HTML frames?
  5. Looking For Great Open Source Graph Library
  6. NRC Promoting Slope One
  7. Why libxml2 takes forever to transform XHTML files
  8. kd-tree applet
  9. Sex.com sold for $14 million dollars
  10. Saving Bandwidth with CSSTidy
  11. Quasi-Monotonic Segmentation Talk in Ottawa
  12. Google was eating all my bandwidth!
  13. JOLAP versus the Oracle Java API
  14. Java 4K Game Programming Contest
  15. Meetings == bad
  16. Academic Careers for Experimental Computer Scientists and Engineers
  17. Best Blonde Joke Ever!
  18. Googlebot accounts for one fourth of my page hits!
  19. Update to XML Course
  20. Java Sound under Linux
  21. Optimal Algorithms for Unimodal Regression
  22. State-of-the-art in automated translation
  23. Hasty benchmarking of various programming languages
  24. Death of Learning Objects
  25. Desktop Search using open source swish?
  26. IJCAI-07 (June 23, 2006 / January 6-12 2007)
  27. Keep Mandriva/Mandrake up-to-date with Easy Urpmi
  28. FOAF going nowhere?
  29. Python allows negative indexing on arrays!
  30. Looking for a RDF to SVG tool
  31. ongoing · It’s Not Dangerous
  32. Are debuggers obselete?
  33. Sim-antic Web
  34. Grad Course by Kaser and Lemire: Data Warehousing and OLAP
  35. My most commented posts so far
  36. My wordpress statistics
  37. Stephen Downes comments on his current job/location
  38. Longtable LaTeX package breaks pages after header

2005 262

December 2005

  1. My predictions for IT in year 2006
  2. Time to move from Numerical Python to SciPy Core
  3. Java Data Mining 2.0 – Early Draft Review
  4. Standard Deviations : XSLT, RDF, XQuery, XLinq
  5. Merry Christmas to all my readers!
  6. A solid Firefox extension for turning any textarea into a rich editor
  7. BASIC for Javascript
  8. AJAX RSS Display
  9. Multisite lecturing on a budget using webhuddle
  10. Wget doesn’t eat XML
  11. Metaclass programming in Python
  12. Making a Creative Labs Instant Webcam work under Linux
  13. Getting an old 3COM HomeConnect webcam to work under Linux
  14. Semantic Web Services Challenge 2006
  15. IBM UDDI Shut down
  16. What are the good conferences?
  17. Women desert IT in droves
  18. In Memoriam, Alberto Mendelzon
  19. Using a USB Palm Pilot with udev
  20. Backslash URLs in Firefox
  21. Recording audio under Linux using a shell script
  22. Linux 64 bits: lessons learned
  23. Google mail allow you to view attachments as HTML

November 2005

  1. I’m leaving for Houston (ICDM’05)
  2. Tabs are evil
  3. Java OLAP Interface (JOLAP) is dead?
  4. IBM, Oracle and Microsoft freeing their databases
  5. Idea for a cool AJAX-based project: a web-based slide projector
  6. Cross-platform videoconferencing/slides sharing: still a long way to go?
  7. Me with my new son Louka!
  8. Mondrian 2.0 is out!
  9. Mondrian to partner up with Pentaho for Open Source Business Intelligence
  10. Numerical Python versus SciPy core
  11. StumbleUpon: collaborative filtering meets Firefox
  12. Grep is just not for matching lines anymore
  13. Wikipedia category for Algorithms on strings
  14. Boyer-Moore Fast String Searching Example
  15. No loops in Python one-liners?
  16. My second son has arrived!
  17. Computer Science is the new Physics
  18. New XML technologies: much to be happy about!
  19. My favorite Firefox extensions
  20. American middle class cut off from college?
  21. Gmail: How do I customize the ‘From:’ address on outgoing mail?
  22. Is Computer Science a Science? A challenge for you!
  23. Overproduction: a modern-day curse

October 2005

  1. MIT fires associate professor for making up data
  2. Comments are back! But you need to pass a reverse Turing test!
  3. The average of averages is not the average
  4. MySQL 5.0 Now Available for Production Use
  5. Daniel W. Drezner: a blogger was denied tenure
  6. OpenOffice.org 2.0: It is all about politics!
  7. Spoofing your user agent – When Firefox tells the world it is Internet Explorer
  8. Spam bots got to me: no more comments
  9. Oracle and MySQL — is MySQL in a weak position?
  10. Research versus Teaching versus Development versus Blogging versus Consulting
  11. Logitech USB Desktop Microphone under Linux
  12. Doing the Martin Shuffle
  13. Academic Authorship
  14. Firefox 1.0.7: better memory management?
  15. Google launches an online RSS aggregator
  16. Amazon’s Developer Contest
  17. Editing forms in Firefox
  18. Battle for Wesnoth 1.0 released
  19. If you can’t record using a microphone on the CMI8738 card under Linux…

September 2005

  1. IrfanView – one of the most popular image viewers worldwide
  2. 2005 QlikView Think Outside The Cube Contest
  3. Sample Cover Letter for Journal Manuscript Resubmissions
  4. Einstein vs. Physical Review
  5. Strange KDE bug: can’t resize or move windows
  6. KDD 2006 (March 5, 2006 / August 23-26 2006)
  7. NSF Reports No Geek Shortage
  8. Battlestar Galactica: when AI goes wrong
  9. Repositories of electronic journals
  10. More measure of impact factors for CS conferences
  11. That’s why I tinker
  12. Career Swings
  13. Google Blog Search
  14. We are only visiting the shore of mathematics
  15. Make your publications available as a RSS feed
  16. SSHRC – National Consultation on Research Data Archiving, Management and Access Systems
  17. Now, that’s fun stuff!
  18. Why I think a lot of Machine Learning research is misguided
  19. Balmer Vows to Kill Google
  20. Massachusetts plans to abandon Microsoft Office
  21. Gas up or plug in?
  22. Winfixer got to me, but I had the last word
  23. 8 reasons why I like Gmail
  24. Comparing Linux distros: gentoo vs. Mandrake

August 2005

  1. Most scientific papers are probably wrong
  2. Slava Pestov : Client-side Java is dead
  3. Here’s why we are soon going to be flooded by data
  4. Getting pdflatex to embed all fonts
  5. Am I too critical of the Ph.D. track?
  6. Antioxidant Values in Fruits And Vegetables
  7. Pentaho – Open Source Business Intelligence
  8. Journals are already dead! Long live eprint servers!
  9. Should you encourage your M.Sc. students to go for a Ph.D.?
  10. PODS 2006 (December 1st, 2005 / June 26-28, 2006)
  11. SIGMOD 2006 (November 17, 2005 / June 27-29, 2006)
  12. Now you can prepare your math slides using MathML!!!
  13. Hitflip DVD recommender is using Slope One collaborative filtering algorithm
  14. What’s the PageRank of your university and what’s yours and are they related?
  15. Working too much is bad for your health
  16. Don’t touch XML Schema
  17. How many emails are we sending?
  18. Voluntary academic simplicity
  19. Number of pages indexed by Google over time
  20. To fully use your brain, you have to act
  21. Want a free mirror of your site?
  22. Searching for Intelligence in Edinburgh
  23. Benzes: J’ai de la misère, ô calvaire…
  24. ongoing – Web 2.0 or Not?
  25. The Free Lunch Is Over: A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software
  26. The Heraclitus Project
  27. Generalized Multi-dimensional Data Mapping and Query Processing
  28. Information Retrieval as Quantum Mechanics
  29. A future in IT? Think about IT security!
  30. UQAM to launch an ePrint server
  31. Paul Graham – What Business Can Learn from Open Source
  32. Next Textbook “Introduction to Data Mining”
  33. Tim Bray against Web 2.0 “slogan”
  34. Met with Michael Stiber today!
  35. Computer Science Eulogy
  36. BI is Ready for Open Source – Is Open Source Ready for BI?
  37. Sudoku solver/designer by David Eppstein
  38. A “Measure of Transaction Processing” 20 Years Later
  39. One day sober!

July 2005

  1. Coffee May Raise Heart Disease Risk
  2. Want to know your Google PageRank?
  3. More on IBM versus Essbase
  4. IBM killed its DB/2 Olap Server
  5. Journals with RSS feeds
  6. You and Your Research
  7. IT Curriculum Committee Seeks Input on Guidelines
  8. Internet killing researchers?
  9. Who are the technology natives?
  10. “Tall, Dark, and Mysterious” goes for career advice
  11. Expert Opinion: An open letter to Bill Gates
  12. Privacy versus Accountability in Academia
  13. Why don’t women study Computer Science?
  14. Rumors of Jython’s death were exagerated!
  15. Expert Opinion: U.S. losing lead in science and engineering?
  16. Blogs and jobs
  17. Presentation Skills

June 2005

  1. Jay and Return On Investment from Research Funding
  2. Balancing hate
  3. Why I wouldn’t move to the USA
  4. Ernie’s 3D Pancakes: some honest answers
  5. Map of a lake where I lived
  6. What value do employers give to qualifications?
  7. MYTH: NDAs are a Good Idea
  8. Programming and college CS education
  9. Being open or not, that is the question
  10. High demand for storage
  11. fixacm.sty
  12. Expert Opinion: College expectations
  13. Joe’s OpenSolution Page
  14. LaTeX Tips & Tricks
  15. Gentoo bug: incorrect dynamic linker run time paths after gcc upgrade (libstdc.so.5 not found)
  16. eLearning is all about searching and connecting

May 2005

  1. Trump University
  2. The Geomblog: Do we really need more students in CS ?
  3. Do we really want more students interested in CS?
  4. Using XPath in Java without loading the external DTD
  5. From XML to Atom (1997 and 2005)
  6. Your Brain and Learning – Five Tips
  7. Employers’ preferences for academic letter recommendations
  8. Getting my research back in focus
  9. Word of wisdom from Yuhong

April 2005

  1. Expert Opinion: The life of an academic
  2. Managing stress: I want to live past 50
  3. A sample paper review
  4. Marshall’s Web Tool Blog: Blog Possibilities
  5. The Geomblog: On knowledge for knowledge’s sake
  6. ACM Queue – A Conversation with Tim Bray
  7. The rise of social conciousness in cyberspace
  8. What constitutes research blogging?
  9. Attention.XML
  10. Lupy: Python Lucene
  11. American site leaks Jean Brault testimony
  12. Inexpensive ubiquitous mass storage is closer than you think!
  13. The fate of reduce() in Python 3000
  14. Top obesity researcher was a fraud

March 2005

  1. Research is a form of art
  2. Are you an IT-empower worker or an old school worker?
  3. Technological singularity
  4. Jython Webapp Tutorial
  5. Delicious Linkbacks
  6. What will be the next Web? A prediction
  7. A blog strike closer to home
  8. Picture quiz of the day!
  9. Now that’s learning!
  10. They don’t even have a telephone (c. 1876) in every classroom yet
  11. Google Goopy
  12. French is the third language in the USA
  13. Personalization: the TiVo case
  14. The Social Software Revolution is happening!
  15. Simple Recipe for Debugging Web Services
  16. How to Start a Startup
  17. How to Read Mathematics
  18. A survey of Eigenvector Methods for Web Information Retrieval
  19. Becoming a gmail expert
  20. Don’t Become a Scientist!
  21. The professoriate is likened to a slime mold
  22. Best Degree to Pair w/ a B.Sc. in Computer Science?
  23. Academia: am I too much of a pessimist?
  24. Wanted: Really Smart Suckers
  25. Using vegetables as learning objects
  26. Real knowledge management
  27. On Grace Murray Hopper
  28. Primed for Numbers
  29. Alternative careers for Ph.D. holders
  30. Robert Paterson’s Weblog: Going Home – Our Reformation

February 2005

  1. Multi User Weblogging
  2. Generous post-doctoral scholarship
  3. SPIP: a powerful courseware platform?
  4. Back to 1979: Alien
  5. Loneliness in academia
  6. Damn cold!
  7. Using Vim under Cygwin
  8. Job Market for CS Students
  9. Real Benefits of Blogs
  10. From British Columbia comes Open Source Academic Publishing Software
  11. Market Diversification by jarche.com
  12. The Geomblog: "To chop a tea kettle"
  13. Die trackback, die!
  14. How to change or modify your Linux kernel under gentoo
  15. KDD 2005 (February 18, 2005 / August 21-24, 2005)
  16. XPath support in Java 1.5
  17. Why I have the best and most beautiful wife in the world!
  18. Code in plain text for “Implementing a Rating-Based Item-to-Item Recommender System in PHP/SQL”
  19. Gutenberg books as marked up XML

January 2005

  1. From Word to (clean) XHTML
  2. Making RedHat Enterprise usable
  3. Hard problems and hot coffee
  4. The Google Browser?
  5. JAWS Screenreader Adaptation for Mozilla Firefox
  6. gnuplot tips (not so Frequently Asked Questions)
  7. Implementing a Rating-Based Item-to-Item Recommender System in PHP/SQL
  8. Useful JavaScript documentation
  9. Working upwind
  10. In the electronic world, less structure is better
  11. Introduction to Python as a Functional, Object-Oriented Programming Oriented Language
  12. Introduction to Python as a Functional, Object-Oriented Programming Oriented Language
  13. Piled Higher and Deeper
  14. NSERC – Policy on Intellectual Property
  15. Michael Nielsen: Optimizing travel
  16. Online courses force a deeper understanding
  17. Does JavaScript scale?
  18. Paquets… ou Seb en français
  19. My experience so far with Google ads
  20. Creative Commons Remix Contest
  21. Why encyclopaedic row speaks volumes about the old guard
  22. Tim Berners-Lee first executive summary of the World Wide Web
  23. Slope One Predictors for Online Rating-Based Collaborative Filtering (SDM’05 / April 20-23th 2005)
  24. The Medici Effect
  25. Mozilla Web Developer’s documentation
  26. Joel on Software – Advice for Computer Science College Students
  27. Meritocracy in America
  28. State of blogging
  29. Current state of affairs in the XML world (according to me)

2004 117

December 2004

  1. Increase in older students forecast
  2. ASCIIMathML: a brilliant JavaScript/XML hack
  3. Consulting: my experience on when to drop a client
  4. Science Commons
  5. Blogs for Computer Science Tutors, starting point
  6. Open Text Summarizer
  7. Yuhong Yan’s Tips to Graduate Students
  8. Object Oriented Learning Objects
  9. EC-W e b 2005 (February 19, 2005 / August 23, 2005)
  10. Entering the Mainstream: The Quality and Extent of Online Education in the United States, 2003 and 2004
  11. Affordable TeraBytes

November 2004

  1. Edd Dumbill on Web 2.0
  2. C# programming for GPL fans
  3. Computing argmax fast in Python
  4. Aaron Straup Cope’s NYTimes Widgets
  5. Good software engineering according to Paul Graham
  6. Globalization and the American IT Worker
  7. TOOL: The Open Opinion Layer
  8. Follow-up on “Sébastien Paquet on blogs and wikis”
  9. Wal-Mart’s Data Obsession
  10. Sébastien Paquet on blogs and wikis
  11. Cringely on Microsoft
  12. Backing up your data is hard!
  13. Funny differences between Mysql and Postgresql
  14. The Public Referee Reports Debate
  15. Good introduction to collaborative filtering
  16. Being a Nice Researcher and the Real World: pure, applied, and industrial research
  17. At Cross Purposes: What the experiences of today’s doctoral students reveal about doctoral education
  18. The Alps

October 2004

  1. McGrath on XML usage for Web clients
  2. Tim Bray opposing Web Services
  3. So, you want to do a Ph.D.?
  4. Building the Open Warehouse
  5. Graduate student/faculty relations
  6. The art of supervising students
  7. e-Learning or else…
  8. How to Misuse SQL’s FROM Clause
  9. If we taught you to memorize, we failed you
  10. More on the CS enrollment drop
  11. Don’t memorize, change your neural pathways!
  12. Don’t Be Afraid to Drop the SOAP
  13. SOAP leads to strongly coupled, poorly scalable, and bandwidth hungry solutions?
  14. Victor Shoup’s A Computational Introduction to Number Theory and Algebra

September 2004

  1. How Technology Will Destroy Schools
  2. What the Bubble Got Right
  3. Data centers as a utility?
  4. If you haven’t switched to Firefly, do it now.
  5. SOAP Problems
  6. On tools for academic writting and a shameless plug
  7. An Amazon Web Services (AWS) 4.0 application in just a few lines
  8. Academic life: a balancing act
  9. Does your university think that “Jobs are for the little people”?
  10. Some insight from John Travolta
  11. Why analogies matter!
  12. Use of blogs in higher education
  13. The Edu-Blogger: ITI: Stephen Downes keynote
  14. eLearning live!
  15. Not succeeeding any better
  16. Marketing will never be the same
  17. Chronic lack of time in academia

August 2004

  1. PlanetMath a free/better alternative to Mathworld?
  2. How Google is just plain better
  3. Transparent aliminium: at last
  4. Living with the fear of failure
  5. If you attend all classes, you pass…
  6. Most amazing Cringely article ever…
  7. A Theory of Strongly Semantic Information
  8. Journal of Algorithms is no longer accepting submissions
  9. Anonymous Academic Bloggers
  10. 23% Fewer Computer Science Majors This Year!
  11. Cool RDF tools
  12. How to be creative
  13. Great Hackers

July 2004

  1. A megabyte is a mebibyte, and a kilobyte is a kibibyte
  2. Michael Nielsen: Principles of Effective Research
  3. Collaborative Filtering Java Learning Objects
  4. The Three Dijkstra Rules for Successful Scientific Research
  5. Nielsen’s Extreme Thinking
  6. Michael Nielsen: Principles of Effective Research: Part VII
  7. Finally: a good computer store in Canada?
  8. Freedom in networked research: what does it mean?
  9. Michael Nielsen: Principles of Effective Research: Part IV
  10. A must read paper in the Chronicle
  11. Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon
  12. Students as Colleagues for Professors
  13. Eating poutine in Montréal
  14. Innovation in Montreal
  15. How to recognize a succesful long term project
  16. Capturing the Value of the e-Generation

June 2004

  1. Received a Gmail account through Sean
  2. Do you censor your own blog?
  3. Why are blogs working?
  4. Turning the fight for Linux up one level
  5. Need for increasingly poweful tools as cyberspace grows
  6. What defines leadership?
  7. Is Montréal a creative city?
  8. Let complexity be thy guide
  9. The Effects of Loss and Latency on User Performance in Unreal Tournament 2003
  10. Got any non-reusable Learning Object?
  11. OpenTextBook
  12. Sun’s employee can blog without asking permission
  13. Slashdot | Google’s Ph.D. Advantage
  14. One room syndrome
  15. Are teachers overpaid?
  16. Funding application blues

May 2004

  1. A journal that gets it
  2. Is Python going bad? or The curse of unicode….
  3. How to be a great scientist
  4. Qualities for a good Ph.D. supervisor
  5. Selling your services as a scientific paper writer?
  6. The world is changing, and I’m there!
  7. Changing job for a Linux addict
  8. Job prospects for new Ph.D.s are good?
  9. Research: when does it matter?
  10. Overproduction of Ph.D. a myth?
  11. Death of the invisible adjunct
  12. Will there be universities in 20 years?

2009–2026 →