Somehow, I had missed this: Lulu.com is a website where you can upload your word or PDF document and have your book published, for free, right there.

Amazing.

I have been a Firefox user for at least 4 years now. I generally enjoy the unrivaled flexibility Firefox offers. Firefox can be tweaked in so many ways. As far as I can tell, for standard-based web development, it is the best browser around. It also does pretty well on standard compliance, while Opera can give it a run for its money.

However, at least under MacOS, Firefox has becoming too annoying to use, so I have switched to Safari for the time being. I think that Firefox supports a wider range of sites and features than Safari, but here are some things that I cannot live with:

• Firefox, presumably because of its spellchecker, can’t keep up with my typing. I type fast. I type all day. I will not tolerate any noticeable delay between the moment I type a letter and the moment it appears on my screen. Sorry. I have crazily fast CPUs, there is no way a good programmer can’t get rid of these delays unless the application is bloated. In fact, I have noticed that several modern applications can’t keep up with my typing. Am I the only one who types too fast for Firefox?
• Downloading a PDF or Word file is a pain. Some dialog box appears and there is a long delay while Firefox does something, before I get to see my file. No good. I am a busy fellow, do not make me wait for a dialog box 3 seconds 50 times a day.

What I’ll miss the most? Firefox has customized search boxes, so that you can quickly search wikipedia, for example. Thankfully, it is possible to have similar feature with Sogudi under Safari. Not quite as nice, but close enough.

And Safari is fast. Oh yes, very fast.

Now, if someone could take the bloat out of NeoOffice, I’d be a happy fellow.

(This should not be seen as a vote against open source. I was a Konqueror user when Apple came in, took Konqueror and made Safari out of it. To a large extend, Safari is open source software. We just do not notice as much.)

An article in wired tells us that Sun recently designed a crazy computer which will be, for a time, the most powerful computer in the world. It will have

• 62,976 CPU cores;
• 125 terabytes of memory;
• 1.7 terabytes of disk space.

It will cost one million dollars per year in electricity bills to keep humming.

I do not have all the facts, but I am pretty certain this machine exceeds human capacity in every respect.

What I find odd is that the machine has very little disk space compared to its computational power. Of course, these numbers are misleading as there will probably be plenty of available disk space, but it will probably be outside the core of the machine.

They seem to predict that this sort of monster will soon be common. I make the opposite prediction. We are reaching the end of an era in the computational sciences. Wasting a million dollars a year in electricity bills is quite probably not sustainable unless you do something incredibly useful that cannot be done another way. They will have to find a way to achieve the same results by using much less power.

Yes, we will all have terabytes of storage and hundreds of CPU cores at our disposal soon, but only if it does not require large electricity bills. Generating that much heat, because electricity does turn into heat, just does not make sense.

Also, I make the prediction that we will build machines with far more storage space in the future.

Stephen Downes points us to an article about the apparent negative correlation between economic growth an university funding. Here are some good quotes:

Universities, while they’re virtuous institutions … do not necessarily promote economic growth and development, because resources have to be taken from the private sector or somewhere to pay for them

There is very, very, very weak evidence that more spending on state universities actually leads to more college graduates — let alone higher-quality ones.

See also my posts An upcoming revolution in science? The end of academic journals?, A Tectonic Shift in Global Higher Education and Big schools are no longer giving researchers an edge?

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WEBIST 2008 is going to be in Funchal, Madeira. It is a conference on web-based information systems. I was in the program committee last year, so it is a good conference!

If you care about e-Learning, watch this video.

Philip Robinson implemented the collaborative filtering algorithm Slope One in Erlang.

Peter is getting one of these new Hitachi 1 TB drives. He remarked:

At $450 each, 1 million dollars will buy you 2000 terabytes!

Together with Gilbert Paquette and Petko Valtchev, I received a $1 million grant from the Canadian Foundation for Innovation to build a Research-oriented Data Warehouse called ERASME. The Data Warehouse will include terabytes of storage and a cluster of powerful machines for high performance computing.

Other researchers involved include Martin Brooks (NRC), Abdulmotaleb El Saddik (U. Ottawa), Étienne Gagnon (UQAM), Robert Godin (UQAM), Owen Kaser (UNB), Hakim Lounis (UQAM), François Magnan (UQAM), Olga Marino (UQAM), Hafedh Mili (UQAM), and Guy Tremblay (UQAM).

I am not entirely sure yet what the XXL library does and why it is important, but it felt important enough to blog about it. It seems to be a library allowing one to build custom database engines. Here’s the summary from their web site:

XXL is a Java library that contains a rich infrastructure for implementing advanced query processing functionality. The library offers low-level components like access to raw disks as well as high-level ones like a query optimizer. On the intermediate levels, XXL provides a demand-driven cursor algebra, a framework for indexing and a powerful package for supporting aggregation. The XXL project provides various packages. See the longer introduction to XXL for an explanation of the packages. The library is publicly available under GNU LGPL and comes with a full documentation.