Fascinating. My Erdős number is 4. According to wikipedia, the median Erdős number amongst all working mathematicians at the turn of the millennium is 5 and the average is 4.64. In this case, being below average is good. Here is how it happened: Paul Erdös coauthored with Janos Galambos who coauthored with Eugene Seneta who coauthored with Serge Dubuc (my thesis cosupervisor).

As promised, here are some Halloween videos of my two sons!

You may want to compare with how Lohan looked two years ago:

They do grow up, don’t they?

(To those who object that the picture is dark and the color not very rich: I do these videos with a very simple camera. I will buy something better before I turn pro. Do not worry.)

Very interesting post by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web.

Some things are clearer with hindsight of several years. It is necessary to evolve HTML incrementally. The attempt to get the world to switch to XML, including quotes around attribute values and slashes in empty tags and namespaces all at once didn’t work. The large HTML-generating public did not move, largely because the browsers didn’t complain. Some large communities did shift and are enjoying the fruits of well-formed systems, but not all. It is important to maintain HTML incrementally, as well as continuing a transition to well-formed world, and developing more power in that world.

I say this as one of the few people in the world who spent a year building an XHTML/XML web site: it ain’t worth it. As long as XHTML is the end product, and as long as browsers don’t care too much what you feed them, then XHTML does not and will not matter.

I always assumed that XHTML would find applications as a data source, but alas, it is not and will never be a good data source. I will keep on producing valid XHTML code whenever convenient, because working with XHTML is just better than working with tag soup, but there other formats, such as HTML 4.0, which are better than tag soup.

A colleague of mine, a Ph.D. in Physics, objected to my use of the term “infinite storage” in some lecture notes I posted on the Web.

I think that infinite storage is something that might be possible in my lifetime. What does “infinite storage” means? Let us consider how much is required to achieve the mythical (digital) memex.

• To record everything you read in a year requires 25MB.
• To record everything you hear in a year requires 100GB.
• To record everything you see in a year requires 10TB.

Hence, I argue that whenever I will be able to buy a cheap 10TB disk at my local electronics store, I will have infinite storage. Currently a portable 1TB drive can be had for $569.

What about recording everything I hear? Right now, I can buy a slick 100GB portable drive for $160.

Interesting question: how would I ever search through all these sounds?

And what about all these people who will get upset that I am recording them?

(Reference: Jim Gray, What Next? A Dozen Information-Technology Research Goals, Journal of the ACM, Vol. 50, No. 1, January 2003.)

Sharing slides and white boards on the web ought to be free, multiplatform, and easy. We have used the Java-based
webhuddle with quite a lot of success. Now comes along Vyew which is the Web 2.0 equivalent of webhuddle.

(Source: Harold Jarche)

Finally! My call for researchers to make available their publication lists as RSS has been heard! NRC decided to make it available for all their researchers, see this example.

(Source: Peter Turney)

Subversion is a great version control tool, but the scripts that accompany it are still immature. One of them, commit-email.pl is particularly bad. It goes on and on for hundreds of lines, and the end result is very poor usability. Earlier tonight, I found a better solution on the Web with color and all, then I fixed it. But I can’t figure out who I stole this from. In any case, here is my fixed commit-email.rb (run gunzip on it first). You may have to change the first line. To activate the script, edit the post-commit file of you repository (or create it from post-commit.tmpl) and make sure you have the following:


REPOS="$1"
REV="$2"
./commit-email.rb "$REPOS" "$REV"


where “commit-email.rb” is located in the same directory as “post-commit”.

TIME 2007 will be held in Alicante.

The 14th International Symposium on Temporal Representation and Reasoning will bring together researchers working in various areas that involve the representation of and reasoning about temporal phenomena. As with previous meetings in this well-established series (see http://time.dico.unimi.it), one of the goals of the TIME symposium will be to cast a bridge between theoretical and applied research in temporal representation and reasoning. Thus, we especially encourage submissions concerning temporal issues within areas such as Artificial Intelligence, Linguistics, Temporal/Spatial Databases and Applications of Temporal Logic in Computer Science, in order to achieve a multi-disciplinary perspective on the topic and to benefit from cross-fertilization of ideas.

DaWaK 2007 will be held in Regensburg, Germany in September 2007.

Submissions presenting current research work on both theoretical and practical aspects of data warehousing and knowledge discovery are encouraged. Particularly, we strongly welcome submissions dealing with emerging real world applications such as real-time data warehousing, analysis of spatial and spatiotemporal data, OLAP mining, mobile OLAP, mining natural science data (e.g. bioinformatics, geophysics)