Work, Play, Thoughts
After evaluating Dropbox for several months, I decided to go all in and sign-up for a paid account. Easy, seamless backup, sharing and syncing. It’s handled storing my school assignments flawlessly, allowing my documents to live through one catastrophic operating system upgrade snafu. Check it out via the link above (full disclosure: it’s a referral link, so apparently I get some space, and you do too).
“Intel and GE have announced a joint healthcare venture that marks a major step in the progress of Intel’s healthcare IT efforts…The new Intel/GE spinoff company has yet to be named, but the two companies will split ownership of it 50/50. The company will combine GE Healthcare’s Home Health division and Intel’s Digital Health Group, and it will launch later this year pending regulatory approval.”
Last week I was lucky enough to be able to attend a presentation by Grant Ingersoll to the RTP Semantic Web Group on Apache Mahout. Mahout is set of technologies designed to tackle machine learning problems in various clever ways, one of which is by using Apache Hadoop (hence the name, Mahout apparently means “elephant driver”).
Grant did a great job explaining the use cases for Mahout, describing how Google news, Netflix recommendations, Amazon suggestions and virtually every other feature advanced web applications have come to rely on machine learning.
While HTML5 has been widely touted as “the future of the web”, I think it’s important to remember that the content has to come from somewhere, no matter how beautifully rendered, and that increasingly the content will be the result of inferences created by software like Mahout. This is yet more incentive for me to continue plowing through Algorithms of the Intelligent Web.
Grant also spoke briefly about his new book Taming Text, which is all about extracting inferences from blobs of text, which strikes me as a highly useful set of related techniques to have on hand, given the amount of data-munging typical software development jobs inevitably require.
Thanks to Phil Rhodes for putting together this excellent presentation.
As someone who gets gadget fever on a regular basis, I found OSNews’s article describing the state of computer “recycling”, or what passes for it, very disturbing. Low or no safety standards for workers, shell charity organizations, and complete disregard for the environmental impact of discarded toxic waste are the norm in the foreign countries that receive our mountains iTrash.
The article mentions legal solutions to fix regulatory loopholes that allow this to go on in the United States, but more importantly it makes a solid argument for using refurbished equipment. Something I will have to consider before wandering the isles at Best Buy.
These pictures are courtesy of Basel Action Network
“But when the memory controller moves back onto the CPU die and takes the GPU with it, that’s going to give an instant, one-time boost to the overall platform’s performance and efficiency. In the case of both Intel and AMD, this boost should be large enough that, if you can hold off on your next laptop upgrade until next year, you should. These kinds of discontinuities, where a major, disruptive repartitioning of the standard system architecture drives a one-off performance boost, are quite rare. They’re worth holding out for if you can manage it.”
The oil continues to flow, and it does not bode well for life in the Gulf. Based on studies at UNC of the Exxon Valdez in 2003, “…environmental consequences of the Exxon Valdez oil spill went far beyond the more than 250,000 seabirds, thousands of marine mammals and countless numbers of other coastal marine organisms killed in the first days, weeks and months.”
Come one, come all to the new Chapel Hill / Durham Peace Corps Meetup group! I’m not sure what direction the group will take, but I’m definitely excited to meet some other volunteers, and folks interested in volunteering.
