boakes.org

Developing Linguistic Corpora

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 09:34:24 +0000

Good introduction to Linguistic Annotation.

Scaling JS

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 17:27:27 +0000

Series of talks on writing scalable JavaScript applications.

sharejs.org

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 21:43:52 +0000

LIbrary for concurrent editing on the web.

Book: Knowledge Representation

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 20:06:42 +0000

Free, online book on Knowledge Representation. If anyone creates a script to turn it into an ePub, RSVP.

Book: Graph Theory with Applications

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 18:35:39 +0000

Free for personal use. Scanned PDF.

Bite Size Science

Rich — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 09:16:03 +0000

As we move away from the peer reviewed, journal published, pay-for-access academic paper, there is a strong likelihood that shorter works will become the norm. Here, Bertamini and Munfano argue that shorter papers have drawbacks. Personally I appreciate these, but would argue to the contrary that in a meritocracy shorter papers are better because they are more focused so can be cited and used for different reasons. An experiment which aims to prove X may also support Y, and if the publication of the result is delayed for months or years whilst other data is gathered and interpreted then the advancement of Y is delayed. It also provides more opportunity for the authors interpretation to be seen to change over time. Science is not about taking a stance and sticking with it to the bitter end. Changing our minds is important and having this public, and the reasons for it is a good thing. A thought provoking read.

Weka Knowledge

Rich — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 08:35:35 +0000

An Open-Source data-mining suite. One of my project students is using this for test-data discovery in twitter sentiment analysis.

HTML5 Please

Rich — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 18:08:37 +0000

HTML5 Please is a new site reflecting the suitability of the latest Web Standards that are still works in progress. It’s somewhat similar to Can I Use.

Back from the Google Wilderness

Rich — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 21:39:53 +0000

Some time ago, I noticed the traffic on this site dropping off rapidly. Commensurate with it’s global norms, Google was driving the majority of new users here, and one day that traffic stopped without warning.

To see that happen is quite strange, akin to having your water supply cut off when the reservoir up the valley is full to the brim. There’s no easy way to ask why (and if you find your way through the webmaster tools to request reconsideration (in the stairless-basement; locked filing cabinet, “Beware of the leopard” sign etc), the likelihood is they won’t respond in a timely manner, and when they do respond the content will be terse and useless, at least, it was for me).

After much banging of my head on the wall of Google, eventually, an anonymous feedback engineer offered up that this site was “manually blocked” because someone else (let’s call them an operative, because it sounds dystopian) decided this is a “spam blog”. Google provided no more information than that, but eventually, after about 6 months, decided to unblock the pipes and people started to find the site again.

The Moral

The moral? It’s not safe to rely on only Google traffic for a business. If someone at Google makes an honest mistake then your whole livelihood can be removed overnight, with no warning, no explanation and no hope of a quick fix.

Hopefully, Google+ will go some way to alleviating this problem. The massive verified-human-crowd-sourced database of opinion on sites should go some way to removing the mis-flagging of normal small sites as spam blogs.

If you’d be so kind as to +1 this site, it might go some way to avoiding any future unplanned absence from the web (as google describes it).

PHP at 77

Rich — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 17:23:24 +0000

PHP is by far the most popular scripting language for websites.

SourceMap

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 11:14:09 +0000

This could grow into a useful tool – a system for mapping between compiled javascript (e.g. something thats been minified) and it’s original source form. Would make browser debugging much easier.

Runtime Performance Measurement of Box2D

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 09:33:50 +0000

Several implementation s of Box2D are compared, showing that for common tasks JavaScript is still* orders of magnitude slower that native compiled code. (*and probably always will be for many types of problem)

CSS4 Working Draft – Selectors Level 4

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 15:21:01 +0000

As CSS3 sediments itself into the browser, we can look to improvements in CSS4 that should help simplify CSS files (partly be reducing repetition). The :matches() pseudoclass looks very good, ut the most important bit so far is the subject selector ‘$’ which will make selection of a parent element possible for the first time (without resorting to JS).

Create a JS builder with node.js

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 22:09:52 +0000

if your JS is up to writing bigger projects, you may enjoy this post which suggests a few steps to better organised code.

Moment.js – A lightweight javascript date library

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 04:55:39 +0000

A date and time library for JavaScript, available via node package manager.

Swift Parallel Scripting

Sat, 10 Dec 2011 08:40:36 +0000

Swift looks useful. Katz, Clifford, Foster all involved.

CSS speech bubbles

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 08:02:18 +0000

Some cute CSS-based speech/thought bubbles. Mostly they use pure CSS, but a couple require additional markup.

Economic and Social Data Service

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 11:19:00 +0000

The ESDS provide a repository for primary and secondary research data.

Music for Programming

Rich — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 07:24:02 +0000

Several long mixes of unobtrusive mood music to help shut out the world and maintain focus. Perfect with a set of noise cancelling headphones.

HTML5 context menus

Rich — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 15:27:34 +0000

A brief video guide to using the menu element in HTML.