Kategorie: Tim’s Weblog

Martin Roberts on Workflow versus Process Automation: „When a Process fails where do you need to route the fault to? Normally a human – so why do most tools make this a cumbersome task? Why do these so called next generation tools find dealing with people such an alien idea? I believe the answer lies…

Dale Asberry on the importancy of loose coupling – Why is Distributed so Hard?: „In some ways, marriage vows do a disservice to the richer subtleties in intimate human interaction. Namely, two people don’t come together to become one, they come together to become three! There will always be the self and the other. The…

„Xapian is an Open Source Probabilistic Information Retrieval library, released under the GPL. It’s written in C , and bindings are under development to allow use from other languages (Perl, Python, and PHP are working; Java will be available shortly). Xapian is designed to be a highly adaptable toolkit to allow developers to easily add…

Ken Arnold on the The Sum of Ant: „Ant is nothing more than the sum of its parts By this I mean that ant has not learned the basic power of composition, building things out smaller parts. This was the great insight that our Unix forbearers bequeathed us toolsmiths, and it’s pretty sad to see…

„Amberfish is general purpose text retrieval software. Its distinguishing features are indexing/search of semi-structured text (i.e. both free text and multiply nested fields), built-in support for XML documents using the Xerces library, structured queries allowing generalized field/tag paths, hierarchical result sets (XML only), automatic searching across multiple databases (allowing modular indexing), and relatively low memory…

The Flamenco Search Interface: „We are creating a search interface framework, called Flamenco, whose primary design goal is to allow users to move through large information spaces in a flexible manner without feeling lost. A key property of the interface is the explicit exposure of hierarchical faceted metadata, both to guide the user toward possible…

Alexander Johannesen’s essay „Here is a How to Topic Maps, Sir!“: „The truth about relational databases is that they really are Topic Maps that are trying to get out. Think about what your RDBMS is trying to do; you have a lot of tables with information bits, and you create relations between them to represent…

Fascinating stuff: „Rainbow is a program that performs statistical text classification.“ It can use Bayesian classification to automatically categorize documents. Jon Udell tried it out last year: “ There’s been some discussion in the blog world about using a Bayesian categorizer to enable a person to discriminate along various interest/non-interest axes. I took a run…

Found an old piece written by Micah Dubinko – „The Brain Attic“, where he’s asking for Personal Information Management software. (He’s written his own software now – using plain text files: „It’s the Data, Stupid“) „What we really need is a better way for our computers to be our brain-attics, freeing us up to do…

A lot of the advantages of Python over Java apply to PHP as well: „A programmer can be significantly more productive in Python than in Java. How much more productive? The most widely accepted estimate is 5-10 times. On the basis of my own personal experience with the two languages, I agree with this estimate.…