Recently in Technical Category

This one is cool!  You have to see it for yourself.  Welcome to the Interactive Linux kernel map.

"In October 2006, Netflix announced it would give a cool seven figures to whoever created a movie-recommending algorithm 10 percent better than its own. Within two weeks, the DVD rental company had received 169 submissions, including three that were slightly superior to Cinematch, Netflix's recommendation software. After a month, more than a thousand programs had been entered, and the top scorers were almost halfway to the goal."

Because of a past life in algorithmic problem solving I was and have stayed interested in the Netflix prize.  In fact it's more than that -- I honestly think their idea on letting others contribute and improve the algorithm was brilliant.

This Wired article is interesting, entertaining, and informative.  Read the full article at This Psychologist Might Outsmart the Math Brains Competing for the Netflix Prize.

Running on less than 300 servers, Wikipedia boasts some huge numbers:

• 50,000 http requests per second
• 80,000 SQL queries per second
• 7 million registered users
• 18 million page objects in the English version
• 250 million page links # 220 million revisions
• 1.5 terabytes of compressed data

Read the full article at A Look Inside Wikipedia's Infrastructure - Data Center Knowledge.

There is a generation of us that gets high by seeing a command line interface.  Now the effect of that is doubled if one sees screenshots of a root shell on iPhone, let alone attaching to a process and debugging it...  Love ya baby!

http://wxpython.org/

A blending of the wxWidgets C++ class library with the Python programming language.

These numbers will give you an idea about how much processing Yahoo! and Google are doing to index to web in order to let us search it...

I just saw an interesting article around using eJabberd - an XMPP application server - to build a Twitter like system in a distributed manner.  It happens that these days more and more things are showing me signs of XMPP as if I should do something around it!  Here's another interesting article by on the CTO of Jive Software.  I believe they have been extremely successful with XMPP through their enterprise solutions.

Among the things announced during my vacation was Mozilla Weave - a web based service by Mozilla to store browser meta data in the cloud rather than locally where user's browser runs.  I have been waiting for a long time for something like this to happen.

I have been using Delicious to manage my bookmarks online for some time now, but managing folders and synchronizing with local bookmarks has been an issue.  More importantly I could not do anything about my browsing history.

Some people do not like this kind of information to be stored online - they prefer it to be local and private.  Personally I don't have an issue with that, and I do want this information to be less and less dependent on my PC(s).

Weave has made it easy.  I signed up at services.mozilla.com and downloaded Weave (I have been running Firefox 3 Beta since it came out).  In a few easy steps Firefox/Weave backed up my history and bookmarks to the Weave server.  So from now on no matter where I am I can access my bookmarks, as well as history, within local look-and-feel of Firefox.  That works for me!

By the way, happy birthday to me :-)

Told you it's serious.  Here's a video in which Google co-founder Sergey Brin introduces Android.  The introduction is followed by demos of multiple applications on two prototype phones:

Last but not least, at the end of the video Brin talks again and announces the $10,000,000 developer prize.

Also, if you're interested in the architecture of the software, you may want to watch this three part video:

• Android, Part 1: Architecture Overview
  
• Android, Part 2: Application Life Cycle
  
• Android, Part 3: APIs (specially pay attention to the Location Manager and Location Based Notification)

Last but not least, here's the Android Documentation.  Updates can be found on the Android Developers Blog.

I usually do not post technical details here, but this one seems to be a fairly common issue and took an hour of my time, so here it is hoping it saves somebody else some time...

Changing the "navigation" (or sidebar) on MediaWiki in itself is in fact pretty straight forward - if you figure out the right way to do it, which is not easy due to confusing documentation.  So here's what you need to do:

1. Log into your MediaWiki as "Admin" or "Sysop".  If you're not sure what this means, see below.
2. Go to: .../index.php?title=MediaWiki:Sidebar - for example  http://www.example.com/wiki/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Sidebar
3. You will see the content of the sidebar, or navigation links, on a Wiki page as a list with a format of Link|name like this:

• navigation
• mainpage|mainpage
• portal-url|portal
• currentevents-url|currentevents
• ...

The rest is easy - edit this page like any other Wiki page, you will see the "unordered" list with "**" entries.  Add or modify as you wish.

For example, if you have a "To Do" page on your wiki and the page is called "To Do List" (meaning that its URL is .../index.php?title=To_Do_List), and you want to add it right after the link to Main Page, simply add this after the "mainpage" line:

** To Do List|To Do

Save and enjoy.

Now, the login as admin is important since this page (MediaWiki:Sidebar) is a special page and not editable by regular users, so if you do not login as admin you will not see the "edit" tab, and that will be confusing.  If this is a shared Wiki installation that somebody else has installed and you do not have admin access, you have to ask them to do the change.  If it's your Wiki but you do not remember the admin user name, go to Special:Listusers (.../index.php?title=Special:Listusers) and you will see whether you have Admin, Sysop, or something along those lines.  This is the name you specified at the time of installation.