Pagerank isn’t for humans 1

Posted by Fernando Meyer on August 02, 2008

Transitioning from a web of links and a sequence of words to a web of content, meaning and knowledge is probably the next great moving that we are going to see on the next two or maybe three years.

I was chatting with a friend, how can we bring knowledge to the web, how can we use the web to make a really efficient human driven search engine, last week a few former Googlers made some noise about a totally new SE named cuil, I tried some queries on that page, but it does work almost like google, you must be pretty much binary to retrieve some interesting information, in another words, nothing has changed since 90’s on this area. This problem is around researcher’s minds for a long time, trust, influence, authority when applied to the web are essentially people based issues.

The propose is the content being an asset with information about what it really means running against the link/words algorithms with no explicit meaning and a simple assumption “yes … we know you’re a good reference because you have a lot of links”.

Make yourself a question, how to ask something? How do I ask for information?

You ask your close friend: “Sunday night guitar red cap TV?” when you really want to know about the Sunday night TV show where a girl with a funny red cap playing a guitar. Things does change when you bring meaning to it, thats what a human being does.

Indeed, Google is still leading this running, with several fields under extreme research, articles about Data Mining, Collective Intelligence and AI being published denotes the new approach.

Yes … things are about to change ;)

Welcome to Django… conference

Posted by Fernando Meyer on August 02, 2008

DjangoCon is the first official international Django conference. It aims to bring together the community and provide a wide range of sessions, panels, lightning talks and showcases of Django usage within various businesses. The first DjangoCon will be on September 6-7, 2008 in Mountain View, CA at the Googleplex.

After losing the first registration day I constantly pissed of Robert Lofthouse about the registration site’s stability. So, for those who will attend the conference, see you there.

Ps: Is there another brazilian going to the conference?

How many trolls do I have on my online community? 2

Posted by Fernando Meyer on July 22, 2008

After some math work I figure out how the online-communities Troll coefficient is calculated,

  • Ut = Total Users
  • Ua= Active Users
  • Mt = Total Messages
  • Md = Daily Messages

I tried with some different online comunities and I get a close number for all of them, probably my next job is calculate the total online-bullshit coeficient :)

Restoring IPhone with error 1604

Posted by Fernando Meyer on July 22, 2008

When trying to restore my iPhone with iTunes and firmware 2.0, iTunes continuously shows a message that stops the restore process, it was probably related to basehand update, but I ain’t sure about this. After some headaches here is the solution.

Downgrade to 1.1.4

  • Step 1) The first problem in your downgrade is that you probably are getting error 20 in restore mode and error 160x in DFU mode. This is due to iTunes 7.7.  So, you now you need to uninstall iTunes 7.7 and install iTunes 7.5.
    Load up Terminal and type the following:
  • Step 2) Now that you have  iTunes 7.5, you will still have the DFU driver for 7.7. This is good and will allow the process to work. Put your phone into DFU mode using the DFU steps. You will not have any display on your device in DFU mode. If you see the cable and connect to iTunes, you did not get into DFU mode.
  • Step 3) Restore using iTunes 7.5. and 1.1.4 firmware, it will work after all.

Now you have an unlocked 1.1.4 iphone, you can choose between upgrade to 2.0 with pwnage or unlock it with ziphone, again … up to you.

Help Andrii Nikitin (MySQL Engineer) get his son a bone marrow transplant operation

Posted by Fernando Meyer on July 18, 2008

Andrii Nikitin, one of the MySQL support engineers located in Ukraine, has asked for help from MySQLers and so I’m sharing this information to the community at large. Andrii’s son Ivan, who is 2 1/2, is in need of a bone marrow transplant operation. This will require going to a clinic in Europe that will not be covered by regular insurance. So Andrii has asked to see if we could help raise funds. The cost is expected to be €150,000 - €250,000. A huge amount for an engineer from Ukraine to cover. But a small amount by many people could make a big difference.

Many have kicked in to help out thought twitter, blogs and forums, but more is needed. Ivan’s health has taken a turn for the worse recently and the issue is now quite pressing. Even a small donation could mean the difference between life and death for Ivan.

Paypal:
Paypal

Me @ Fisl

Posted by Fernando Meyer on April 15, 2008

Speaking about JBoss Drools 
When: 17 April, 1pm~2pm Room 41B 
http://fisl.softwarelivre.org/9.0/papers/pub/programacao/274 

No JavaOne for me 1

Posted by Fernando Meyer on February 01, 2008

This morning I got a sweet email from JavaOne CCT,

Dear Fernando ,
Sun Microsystems, Inc. and the JavaOne(sm) Conference Content Team are grateful for your proposal to present at the 2008 JavaOne conference. The high quality of submissions made the selection process extremely difficult. We regret to inform you that we will be unable to accept your proposal.

Just today I spoke with three friends and a team mate from RedHat, none of these were accepted, I still don’t understand why Sun keeps supporting non-sense people as speakers on his conferences.

For those who will attend JavaOne I desire you a good time watching the JSF, NetBeans advanced topics and that guy dressing the brazilian flag :)

MS about to buy Yahoo! 1

Posted by Fernando Meyer on February 01, 2008

Microsof has made an offer to buy yahoo, hoping they will grow as a new strong player on internet … blah blah blah, probably this deal is going to be completed, as a fail over plan I need to find another place to storage my Photos (flickr) and Bookmarks (del.icio.us)

Any suggestions?

Little Continuous Integration with Growl Notifier 2

Posted by Fernando Meyer on November 19, 2007

Are you tired to run ant scripts and wait for tests results whenever you change some source file? Yes, me too, basically I got autotest’s idea for ruby and Did it work for ant as well. Continually runs tests based on files you’ve changed improving feedback with a fancy Growl alert.

If you are a Java developer and works with ant (on mac of course) check out my bash script( and avoid cruise control for little stuf ) **see update

Change all images paths on the script, put the script in your project folder and execute it

remember you need unit tests to use this script properly.


If you have some idea on how to improve it, let me know

** now hosted at github

git clone git://github.com/fmeyer/autotestmac.git

Antlr Lecture at Conexao Java 2007 3

Posted by Fernando Meyer on November 12, 2007

As I promised at CJ2007 I’m uploading my slides and demo code from my ANTLR lecture. I got really surprised about people’s interest in ANTLR, compiler theory and DSL in general.

You can import the demo in both eclipse or Intellij (or use maven to generate your own ide config). to run the code without an ide just unpack and execute the runconsole.sh you can set variable’s values ex:

x=1

y=2

And execute some expression using these predefined variables ex:

3*(x-y)*(x/y)

when you finish to input your expression just press ctrl+D on unix or ctrl+Z on windows ( EOF char ) to execute it
ps: Thanks to Danilo Sato to help me figure out a Grammar ambiguity, my approach wasn’t the optimal solution to resolve the problem.

*Update, Sami Koivu just sent me the pictures from my lecture,

Explaining the compiler process

Explaining the compiler theory

 

 

Hands on

Hands On

 

 

 

The antlr grammar as itself

The Antlr Grammar file as itself

Drools DLS sample

Drools Sample DSL