Pagerank isn’t for humans

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 ;)

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

My Books arrived 2

Posted by Fernando Meyer on July 18, 2007

CIMG2736.JPGMy books from amazon arrived (with nice gifts from New York redhaters) yesterday. I spend about 2 hours reading some random pages and I can drop some lines about:

The IA book, I studied with the same book at university. so I just ordered to get the new 2002 version, but the mother… nice seller sent me the outdated 95’s version.
Principles of the Business Rule Approach, this book is a nice introduction to business rules, it explains all concepts in the natural way, some step-by-step topics are very interesting to figure out the more complicated rules concepts.
Jess in Action - that’s another book which you must have in your library, but don’t seize at it (try drools instead)
Expert Systems: Principles and Programming - That’s certainly the most advanced book I’ve ordered, so I must dive/read/assimilate more to write a good review.

    I think that’s a good start.

Interesting links for today

Posted by Fernando Meyer on July 17, 2007

Open source JBoss Rules gains speed

http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/07/16/jboss-rules_1.html

JBoss also extends business rules engine to nonprogrammers, adds MVEL language support

Essencial Drools blog reading

http://markproctor.blogspot.com/2007/07/essential-drools-blog-reading.html

My IDE through the years

Posted by Fernando Meyer on July 17, 2007

Today, after read something about the Kawa IDE, I tried to remember these I’ve used through the years.

  • Turbo Pascal - late 1997
  • Turbo C++ - 98/99
  • DJGPP - late 99
  • Emacs - 2000 - C++
  • Kawa - 2001 - Java
  • Netbeans- 2002/2003
  • Eclipse - 2003/2006
  • Visual Studio - 2006 - Yes I got a project in C#
  • IDEA intellij + textmate - 2007

Maybe I missed something, but it’s just to get an overview.

Hackers x Talkers

Posted by Fernando Meyer on July 10, 2007

Drop all your computer science books (including that damn algorithm book), forget about you time reading the linux kernel sources and all the time across the night you’ve lost mining the internet looking for useful information, (even that black screen with gray letters using vi + C), now you can be a hacker just binding components and/or creating a web page with a nice css style. It reminds me a nice antonym to the hacker meaning,

Talkers: A person who speaks more than effectively do something useful.

missing the old times

Books library update

Posted by Fernando Meyer on June 30, 2007

I just ordered these four books in amazon store, and will do some reviews as soon as possible probably I’ll be busy for a while :)

Expert Systems: Principles and Programming, Fourth Edition: Principles and Programming (Hardcover)

Jess in Action: Java Rule-Based Systems (In Action series) [ILLUSTRATED] (Paperback)

Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (2nd Edition) (Hardcover)

Principles of the Business Rule Approach (Paperback)

Linux Kernel in a Nutshell is now Creative Commons: free pdf download

Posted by Fernando Meyer on January 10, 2007

Written by a leading developer and maintainer of the Linux kernel, Linux Kernel in a Nutshell is a comprehensive overview of kernel configuration and building, a critical task for Linux users and administrators.The book is available for download in either PDF or DocBook format for the entire book, or by the individual chapter.

To quote of the book’s author:

If you want to know how to build, configure, and install a custom Linux kernel on your machine, buy this book. It is written by someone who spends every day building, configuring, and installing custom kernels as part of the development process of this fun, collaborative project called Linux. I’m especially proud of the chapter on how to figure out how to configure a custom kernel based on the hardware running on your machine. This is an essential task for anyone wanting to wring out the best possible speed and control of your hardware.

http://www.kroah.com/lkn/

Berkeley e-classes for your IPod 2

Posted by Fernando Meyer on January 07, 2007

Last April, UC Berkeley, one of the premiere schools in the United States, announced its plan to put complete academic courses on iTunes. Fast forward nine months, and you can already find 59 full courses ready for your iPod. Simply click here to access Berkeley’s iTunes site (or here for the Rss feed).

No matter where you live, you can access at no cost the very same courses attended by students paying full tuition. And, given the critical mass of courses being offered across a range of disciplines, you can put together your own personalized curriculum and expand your horizons on the fly.

That’s include interesting computer’s science coursers like, CS 162 - Operating systems and System programming and CS 61C - Machine Structures. You can listen this podcast and forget about these classes in university (but I think that your teacher will not appreciate)