June 2010
1 post
Comments as content: The medium hinders the...
When articles were published in hard-copy newspapers, reader response was left to the ultimate in asynchronous communication: letters to the editor for differences of opinion, and corrections when a mistake was discovered. As brick-and-mortar newspapers moved into the digital realm, the static publishing model initially stuck, albeit with an easier method for correcting mistakes.
When we digest...
May 2010
1 post
Twitter Papers at the WWW 2010 Conference
This past week at WWW 2010 has resulted in quite the spread of Twitter papers. Topic included systems, novel uses, and studies of tweets and users. I’ve made an attempt to provide a taste of each paper/presentation I experienced. Feel free to comment if I missed anything!
At the web science conference on Monday, we saw two presentations on Twitter. Devin Gaffney presented a paper...
March 2010
2 posts
256 colors in your xterm!
Have you ever used emacs or vim from the command line in GNU/Linux and been offended by the horrible color scheme you saw? I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve been through tons of vim color schemes and have never been able to understand why the colors did not show up as desired.
Yang’s blog post has changed my life. See here for more notes on which color schemes work well for...
Notes from NoSQL Live Boston 2010
I was excited to sit in on NoSQL Live Boston today. Thanks to 10gen for hosting and all of the speakers for putting the time in!
The NoSQL community is an interesting one. I was pleased to see Dwight Merriman suggest that the community look past its awkward and misleading name when figuring out how to define itself, and instead find other commonalities: removing the emphasis on joins, focusing...
November 2009
1 post
Building a Social Data Commons
(cross-posted on the Haystack blog)
Inspired by Ted’s vision of what he’d like to see happen to data.gov, I decided to have a try at my hopes for it. Ted’s desires for data.gov are all ones that I agree would make the data more accessible. I would now like to discuss what else I might want in a world where such steps were taken: a world in which government data was...
October 2009
3 posts
FeedMe Data on People's Sharing Habits!
Michael and I have a blog post Over on the Haystack Blog describing some work we’ve been doing in studying how people share news and blog posts with each other through e-mail and other social networking tools.
So far, we’re posting findings from surveys, but soon we’ll give you a double-whammy: we plan on announcing what we found through a user study of a tool called FeedMe...
Startup Bootcamp at MIT
I spent the day at startup bootcamp, which was an excellent opportunity to hear from startup founders and VCs about startups. As someone without a lot of experience in this field, it was wonderful to hear a bunch of different (at times conflicting) viewpoints on the startup world. I took notes on all but two of the talks, and put them here to read if you are interested.
Adam Smith: Xobni
How...
Avoid Subversion-Maintained Website Vulnerability
(Note: This vulnerability also exists for cvs and git-based repositories. Change these instructions appropriately.)
The news of this vulnerability came out a while back, but I spent the afternoon securing a few scarily exploitable sites, so I figured I’d reiterate.
If you store your website in subversion, you leave behind an “.svn” directory in each directory in version...
August 2009
1 post
Earn $30 for reading blogs!
Michael Bernstein and I are working on a project that we will release to the public soon. First, we want to make sure it does what we think it will, so we’re running a user study.
We’re looking for Google Reader users to try out a new extension that helps you share interesting items with people you know. E-mail the FeedMe team at feedme@csail.mit.edu to participate!
If you are: a...
June 2009
2 posts
NYT_Transformer and Data.gov: Your chance for a...
The awesome developers at
The New York Times’ Open blog have just
posted about
NYT_Transformer,
a tool for converting between various data formats (XML, comma-separated files)
and data storage mediums (flat files, databases).
This isn’t the first time such a conversion utility has been
written—Babel comes to mind. The
NYT_Transformer has a few perks in its favor, however,...
MIT Database Systems (6.830) TA Course Notes
In Fall 2008, I had the pleasure of TAing
Database Systems with
Sam Madden,
Mike Stonebraker,
and Evan Jones.
I figured that I could take notes to help students
follow the lectures while clarifying any confusing points that were raised
during discussion. It would also help me avoid the embarrassment of forgetting
something mentioned during a lecture and having students explain it to me
during...
April 2009
1 post
Local Communities, Information Gathering
By way of danah boyd I found the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities, which published an introductory whitepaper that asks how local communities find, digest, and react to information.
Outside of designing software, my biggest hobby is reading the news, so you would imagine that I would feel well equipped to answer how I keep up-to-date with, and respond to, local events. ...
March 2009
4 posts
Making the case for Raw Data
Tim Berners-Lee’s recent TED talk on Linked Data has inspired quite a few people to ask what exactly linked data is, how it differs from data on the semantic web, and how realistic it is to assume universal and unique addressability of data items. A world with linked data would be a world with richer, more explorable data, and that notion on its own makes Tim’s talk worth viewing. ...
Rethinking the Newsroom
I’ve had a lot of discussions with people about what news will look like in a digital age. Clay Shirky has just written this piece about that topic. He’s managed to say a few major things:
Big newsrooms were a means to an end. Unfortunately for them, what we actually want is information via journalism, and until recently, not everyone could afford the printing press that was a...
Driving in India
The key thing to remember about driving in India is that it is different, not worse than driving in the US. It also works, which the US’s system would not at the scale of transport that India’s population requires. Here are some basic rules of life when driving in India.
Honking
If you do not honk in India, there are two possible reasons:
you are walking, or
you have a broken...
Mumbai and home
We arrived at the Victoria Terminus (VT is the British name for it, but it’s been renamed to CST since). This train station is supposed to be the architectural Taj Mahal of the British empire, but I can hardly compare the two. It was 6 am when we got off the train, and it was still dark out, so we waited to leave the station and dropped our big backpacks off at a holding area for the...
February 2009
3 posts
Goa
Landing in Goa after our goodbye to A.J. (1-hour flight), we made our way into the hot hot sun. Goa is something close to paradise if you love heat, relaxation, and Bob Marley. Patrick (our bed+breakfast owner’s son) picked us up in a car playing Casey Kasem top 20 list of American songs. It was refreshing to drive along beautiful beaches and hear The Killers et al.
Our bed and...
Kolkata
Our train arrived on time, which was refreshing. When we got off and went to the prepaid taxi booth, we were hassled pretty heavily by the drivers to go with them, which is usual. By this point, we had gotten used to it and ignored them, but we’d break every once in a while and start repeating “no!” at them. Kolkata is the intellectual capital of India, and it shows; a...
Darjeeling
We had an awesome night in the hotel in Siliguri, which featured a dinner fit for the elite, though one we could hardly characterize as Indian. A.J.’s dish was the most amazing one, featuring a sizzler (it sizzled loudly as it was brought out) of vegetables and paneer served in a cabbage. The sauce was amazing, and the vegetables rocked!
After breakfast, we took a jeep for a two-hour...
January 2009
13 posts
Delhi to Siliguri Summary
Delhi
Arrived early in morning after a train ride with a nice Sikh family that featured a schoolteacher mom and a dad who looked like Ali G. He wore a skull and crossbones doorag, camo pants, and a SWAT TEAM shirt. He was also a partner in a company that represents Marshalls in purchasing bathroom accessories, and does $3M in business with the US. They gave us some snacks, including Gajak,...
Rajasthan Summary
Keeping a daily journal of our trip got a bit cumbersome and boring, so here’s an overview of the trip post-hoc. This posting summarizes Rajasthan. I’ll do the rest of the trip later, and then post in greater detail regarding the most interesting topics in the coming days.
Jaipur
Albert Museum is neat. You get a sense for how old India is when you stand in front of an...
Youtube is (one part of) the next Google
This article in the NYT, inspired in part by This blog post by Alex Iskold made me think about the future of search.
Both pieces speak for a growing group of children that increasingly depend on video, not text, for their information consumption. Neither piece cites studies for this, but there is no doubt that video will play an important role in the future of learning/entertainment.
Now that...
In Jodhpur: a marketplace, a mindgame, and some...
When we got to Jodhpur, we had two hours before it got dark. The RTDC (Rajasthan Tourism Development Corporation) itinerary suggested spending a bit of time at the Sojati gate and Clocktower, near an open-air marketplace. Saje (our driver) doesn’t know Jodhpur well, and met a guide at a restaurant, but we declined the extra fee since we didn’t know if the guy was good or had...
Jaipur to Jodhpur by way of Ajmer Jain Temple
(Note: we spent a day in Jaipur as well, but I’ll document that in a big summary of the entire trip)
We’re now driving from Jaipur to Jodhpur on NH-8, a one-lane (in each direction) highway with no divider. This means that every minute or so, Saje passes a bunch of slower trucks, and the rest of the time, he is riding both lanes to see oncoming traffic so that he can judge his next...
Rajasthani Forts
I wanted to condense everything about forts/rulers in Rajasthan that I can remember into one entry because it would get repetitive after the third city.
Rajasthan is to the west of Delhi - the farther west you go, the more desert-like it gets, but we didn’t go as far west as Jaisalmer, which is in the desert. The state of Rajasthan was originally ruled in sections by various Rajas...
An Afternoon in Jaipur
Upon arriving in Jaipur, we saw many elephants with everything painted (and I do mean everything, and I didn’t know those things were so large:)), camels, and a few monkeys. Traffic in the city was crazier but still managed to flow nicely. We caught a glimpse of Amber (pronounced Amer) fort from the road, and then Saje took us to a restaurant for lunch.
Lunch protocol is interesting. ...
Driving to Delhi from Jodhpur
We slept in Delhi on the first night, and it was a bit chillier than we expected (we had to use the blankets we got from Air India, which are very pretty) instead of the thinner sheets we got from the hotel. It was still warm overall, and we
discovered that this is as cold as it gets in Delhi—-something equivalent to a cooler spring day in Boston. The fog is apparently not smog. For...
We're Back!
Though a little jetlagged, we’re all back. Sorry for the lack of liveness to the blog updates—-it wound up being quite difficult to access the internet at the hotels we were staying at, and A.J. and I once even tried to find a cybercafe at night to no avail (after wandering Udaipur in the dark for an hour).
I have some diary-style content queued up, but decided that keeping a...
Our First Night Venture
We decided to venture out into Connaught Place for dinner upon arrival. It was dark by then,
so we broke our first rule, which is going out at night. In retrospect, the experience was not
as scary as it was culture shock. We learned many things quickly:
Stray dogs are the stray cats of India. On our trip so far, Meredith has seen 1 cat,
but we’ve all seen hundreds of dogs. They walk...
A night in Delhi
As the plane landed, it was still light out. Along the runway, we saw many one-story buildings and
trucks with people standing on top watching the plane land. I say this because most airports in
the US will not allow people so close for fear of someone shooting a plane down.
Upon landing, we exchanged money and got a taxi from the taxi stand. When possible,
you do not get a taxi on the street...
Happily in Udaipur
Sorry for lack of update. It’s surprisingly hard to get an internet connection in our hotels, and getting a cybercafe is harder than you think if you’re traveling all day. A.J. and I made two attempts at night (one took over an hour) and turned back without luck.
Either way - we’re happy and taking it easy in Udaipur before taking a train back to Delhi tonight.
I’ve...
Plane Ride
Our flight here was on Air India, which seems to make people who have flown it
before wince. They either claim that the bathrooms are dirty, the service is
not good, or that the only saving grace is the food.
At least on our flight, every bad thing I’ve heard was incorrect. The flight was as
comfortable as a 14-hour flight could be, the service was awesome, fast, and frequent,
and they...
December 2008
4 posts
Landed
Delhi rocks.
It’s really dusty/the exhaust is ridiculous.
We’ve crossed many streets running across traffic.
Traffic does not stay in the lane, but drivers stay on their horns.
Kati rolls in India taste better than the ones in NYC.
Itinerary
Going to India for 19 days seems like a long time, but it’s barely enough time to experience
half of the country. Our trip will give us a taste of the most popular cities and states,
but to do this, we’ll have to jump to a new city each day, usually travelling by overnight
train to get to our next destination. So that you know what we expect (it will be interesting
to compare to what...
India
At some point this summer my awesome old roommate A.J. and girlfriend Meredith decided to take a trip to India. We’ll be leaving this Friday and hanging out for 19 days. A.J. is leaving after 15, at which point Meredith and I will hang out in Goa—-probably the only relaxing part of our trip. Luckily, with the help of information technology (namely, this netbook), we’ll be...
Testing
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May 2008
1 post
Determining Postgres Page Size
Normally 8k by default.
In 8.3.0, you can change BLCKSZ in src/include/pg_config_manual.h, and recompile from source to change it.
How can you tell what the page size of your installation is? Create a table with a single item in it. Then print the size of the table - since it fits on one page, the size is the size of the page.
[marcua@sorrel postgres]$ psql -d imdb Welcome to psql...