This post on 43 folders gave me the idea of offering free job ads on my blog. Why not?

In any case, if you have cool jobs in the Montreal area having some relation to my blog, just add a comment on this blog post and you’ll get a free ad. I promise to do a nice job at it too!

(Ok, the monetary value is tiny. It is likely there will be no takers. But who knows?)

Stephen nails the USA. He pulls out a nice graph that says it all.

Turns out that ditching my PDA is harder than I thought. After spending over an hour at the local Staples, it turns out that there is no market for pocket notebooks. I want something I can keep in my pocket without looking like an idiot. It needs to be elegant, because I am not eager to look like a nerd. All I could find were cheap notebooks from China. I own one that looks good, but the pages are falling off and the paper is too cheap.

Someone had suggested Moleskine notebooks, and they do look cool, but I could not find a way to order them cheaply in Canada. Ciak pocket journals are another alternative, but again, no luck in figuring out how to order them. I was also a bit upset to learn that the true Moleskine notebooks, out of Tour in France, are no longer made and all you buy are copies from a company that has had nothing to do with the original notebooks. So maybe people are falling prey to marketing? It may sound cool to think that famous writers used the same notebooks you are buying, except that they are not.

Happily, there is a company in Vancouver called paperblanks producing beautiful notebooks and journals. To top it off, you can order their product cheaply on Chapters/Indigo. I will let you know how they are once they arrive. Here is what it should look like:

After seeking a good GTD-compliant to-do list manager, I finally designed my own. I seek a tool that lets me:

• backup the data
• does not suffer from vendor lock-in
• keeps stuff confidential (sorry, you can’t know what I have to do today)
• will not lose or corrupt my data (ever).

Among the tools I have reviewed is Chandler which looks good but is still in alpha. Actiontastic is very nice, but is not GTD-compliant in my opinion and it is hard to tell what the license is. What’s next is really brilliant, but it is not GTD-compliant and comes with its own Web server which is a bit odd.

Then you have dcubed or MonkeyGTD, TiddlyWiki-based solutions. It is very nice and there is no doubt some people will like it, but I never could get used to TiddlyWiki and I distrust it.

Really, the best application I found so far is PHP-GTD but the developers are not hacking it fast enough and they seem to have a case of spaghetti code based on how slowly they come up with new versions.

What I did is actually pretty sweet. I simply fill out an XML that looks like this:


<goal title="stay alive" category="personal">
<nextaction title="stop the fire in my kitchen" />
<action title="go get some milk" tickle="2008-12-12" />
<someday title="go on a diet" />
</goal>


In any case, you see the idea. My application supports deadlines, goals, actions, next actions, ticklers, lists, descriptions, some-day projects and so on. I can easily extend it (recall what the X of XML stands for!).

The XML file is linked to an XSLT file. This XSLT file (executed by the browser) generates HTML which, thanks to ECMAScript, allows me to navigate through the data fully. As far as I can tell, I support many of the same views as an application like php-gtd, except that my application is a thousand times faster and I have ten times less code. Everything is in XML and in this instance, it does make things so much better. I do not even want to think about designing a database schema for this data.

So, what is the problem? Well, I can happily edit an XML file, but before I release this software to the world, and I think it has value even though I only took one evening to write it, I need a user-friendly way to edit the data. It won’t do to have people edit an XML file by hand. It is easy enough for me to include, through ECMAScript, so way to add actions and stuff. However, how and where do I save the data?

There is no browser-oblivious way for an HTML page, even a local HTML page, to modify a local XML file. This probably means that I need some kind of server-side companion to my XSLT/ECMAScript application. Of course, it appears that TiddlyWiki manages to store its own data in an HTML file, but I am not certain I trust this sort of mechanism: I would always be afraid to have unsaved data. Google Gear is browser-specific (won’t work with Camino, Safari, Konqueror, and so on). It is fine and sweet to build Firefox-only applications, but that’s eventually as bad as writing Internet Explorer-only applications. I do not consider a browser-specific application to be a Web application.

What I need is brutally simple. I only need a server-side application that will allow me to retrieve the file (GET) and then to replace it with another one (PUT or POST) after the user has edited. I say POST because I toy with the idea of having version control: instead of replacing the existing file, edits would be reversible.

So, security issues aside, I think I only need a server-side application that’s really very, very simple. Maybe ten lines of Perl or Python.

I searched, but I can’t find any discussion on the best possible way to do something so simple. Naturally, my goal here is to keep things so incredibly simple that can pick up my application and build their own variants.

Anyone can help me?

The list of CIKM 2007 accepted papers is out. Thanks again to Owen for pointing this out to me.

Some papers that caught my eye…

• Anthony Don, Elena Zheleva, Machon Gregory, Sureyya Tarkan, Loretta Auvil, Tanya Clement, Ben Shneiderman, Catherine Plaisant, Discovering interesting usage patterns in text collections: integrating text mining with visualization (looks like a HCI paper)
• Akihiro Inokuchi, Koichi Takeda, An Online Analytical Processing of Text Data (no preprint to be found, anyone has a copy?)
• Stefan Buettcher, Charles Clarke, Index Compression is Good, Especially for Random Access (no preprint, but I like Stefan’s work
• Fianny Mingfei Jiang; Jian Pei; Ada Wai-chee Fu, IX-Cubes: Iceberg Cubes for Data Warehousing and OLAP on XML Data (no preprint to be found, but I like icebergs)

I have been looking for a written-down version of this deep-sounding quote from my favorite TV show (Battlestar Galactica) ever since I heard it, and I finally found it, on IMDB. It was uttered in the episode Resurrection Ship: Part 2 in 2006. Here it is:

Lt. Sharon ‘Boomer’ Valerii: [Adama asks Sharon why the Cylons hate humanity so much] I don’t know if ‘hate’ is the right word… it’s like you said at the ceremony… you said something that sounded like it wasn’t the speech you had prepared. You said, ‘Man never asked itself why it should survive.’ Maybe you don’t.

Context: the cylons, these advanced AI machines initially created by man, wiped out humanity without any apparent reason.

Owen pointed out to me that the list of VLDB 2007 accepted papers is available. On a first pass, here are some papers that caught my attention:

• Man Lung Yiu, Nikos Mamoulis, Efficient Processing of Top-k Dominating Queries on Multi-Dimensional Data
• Ming Hua, Jian Pei, Ada Wai-Chee Fu, Xuemin Lin, Ho-fung Leung, Efficiently Answering Top-k Typicality Queries on Large Databases
• Jingren Zhou, Paul Larson , Hicham G. Elmongui,
  Lazy Maintenance of Materialized Views
• Doug Burdick, AnHai Doan, Raghu Ramakrishnan, Shivakumar Vaithyanathan, OLAP over Imprecise Data with Domain Constraints

Notice that all these papers are available for the authors’ home pages. The days when a researcher could afford not to post electronic documents are over.