I was recently asked by someone who manages a librarian newsletter, why I thought that library tools did not make it in the Top 100 Tools for Learning by Jane Hart. I immediately replied that Google Scholar made it to the list.

(source)

Then I had to think back. What about the last time I used a library tool (other than Google Scholar)? I can remember bad feelings like “why is the user interface so complicated?”. Then “why can’t I find what I am looking for?”. And “why do I have to choose which database I want to search in, can’t it just search them all?”. And “why do I have to go to another, different tool, to know who cited this paper and when?”.

Beyond these frustrations, I came up with some more specific reasons why library tools are not used:

• They are not user-friendly. They were clearly designed with the “we shall train the users” motto in mind. Sorry. I do not want any training. I want you and your tools to get out of my way and let me find what I am looking for.
• You may not consider this workshop paper that appeared on the Web two months ago a “worthwhile” reference, but I do.
• It is ok for you to have to mail order a journal article and wait a week for it. Me? I want it now, on my screen, or else…
• So, your search engine covers more prestigious journals than Google Scholar? It can count citations appearing in prestigious journals with absolute accuracy? Because, of course, you can only trust the “reliable sources”. Well, you are a librarian and you care about these things, but I am a researcher and I do not care as much as you do. I have a social network, I know who are the researchers you can absolutely trust, those who I should investigate further. In minutes or even seconds, I can tell about the quality of a paper. It is not a problem for me to trim out junk: the Web has trained me well to do it. Students should learn to do the same.

Update: This blog post was cited in the Fall 2007 newsletter of the Online Computer Library Center, Inc.

My wife, before and after losing 35 pounds. Note that she had two kids in the process.

I think that the pictures are sufficiently impressive, I do not need to tell her how impressed I am.

We went to the Botanical Garden today. What a great day it was.

First, my favorite picture of the day… I caught my son Lohan as he was running:

This is Louka, being funny as usual (his left eye is all swollen):

My beautiful wife is, well, beautiful:

Finally, Lohan with Anne-Sophie:

For all my adult life, the American dollar has been worth more than the Canadian dollar, often much more. No longer! We reached parity today. Maybe Americans should reflect on what this means for them that the value of their currency is going downward so fast. (Hint: stuff is going to cost more.)

Less than a year ago, I predicted that Google would come up with a PowerPoint-like tool. They did it. And you know what? It is pretty good.

Downes had this to say about it:

What I’d really like is a slide library I can simply draw from to create presentations. But you can’t even drag and drop slides inside presentations.

To this, I reply:

• You can’t drag and drop slides within your presentation, but you can move them in the slide desk using buttons to achieve the same result.
• You can’t drag and drop slides from one presentation to another, but you can copy a slide in a presentation and copy it in another.

(Picture source)

The call for papers of the International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2008) is out. The conference will be held, next June, in Barcelona.

I do not entirely believe the title of this post. Clearly, if you hire subpar programmers, you have to settle for whatever programming languages they know. These days, it is probably going to be Java. And you could do a lot worse than choose Java. Or maybe it is PHP. Again, PHP is fine.

The real question is… should you prevent your programmers from using Ruby or Python because you worry about what will happen to the next guy who needs to maintain their code?

On this issue, Eugene makes a great point. What languages like Java offer that “crazier languages” like Ruby do not offer is builtin testing. In Java, types are checked at compile time, except of course, when it does not, such as when you use collections of objects. In languages with dynamic typing, fewer tests are done at compile time.

The solution? Simply get programmers to use unit testing more aggressively. In my experience, unit testing is relatively painless to put in place. It is a great way to document what you expect your code to do, way beyond what static typing offers.

So, next time a programmer working for you wants to use Ruby, just say yes, but require him to do unit testing.

We got our Wii on Friday. This was a busy week-end!

First, some background. I have owned and played video games ever since I was twelve or so. My wife has played on the Nintendo first generation machine extensively as a kid too. I have two young boys who are still a bit too young for video games.

In the recent past, I have been a Sega Dreamcast owner. I bought it because my wife didn’t want me to play DOS-era strategy games alone on my laptop. (Some enjoy chess, I prefer turn-based strategy games.) This console offered very good gaming experience. It was underpowered for first-person shooters and had no strategy games. But we had lots of fun playing Resident Evil as a family. I played most of the titles all the way through.

Then, I upgraded to the PlayStation 2. It was a bit of a disappointment. The first-person shooters were ok. The action RPG games on the PS2 were pretty good. There were no strategy games. Resident Evil was still there, but it was no better than it had been on the Dreamcast. In the end, my wife never played much with the PS2, and I gave up on many of the titles.

The Wii is very different. First of all, my wife played way more than I did so far. She just love Wii Sports and she can probably beat me at most games by now. Even the lowly Wii Play got us to play together a bit. In fact, the main difference between the PS2 and the Wii is that I am now back at the “console as a family game machine.” I bought the classical Mario and Zelda for the Wii Virtual Console, and again, my wife enjoyed it quite a bit (nostalgia?).

I also bought Super Mario Paper. So far my experience with the game has been so-so, but I have never been a fan of Mario and I hear it gets more interesting later.

The Wii has good news and weather channels. I think I will actually make good use of those. One very important step I took was to enabled the Web browser on the Wii. It actually works very well. It is a great way to browse the Web as a family.

Technologically, the Wii might be underpowered though I doubt it. Yes, its processor only runs at 729 MHz and it only has 88 MiB of RAM, but the processor of the PS2 ran at 294 MHz and it only had 32 MiB of RAM. So, it has easily twice the power of a PS2 and the Wii does not need to support high definition, which is a good thing because drawing fewer pixels takes less time. My guess is that we will simply see less stunning visuals on the Wii, but I doubt it will matter to Wii owners. And since the Wii is outselling other consoles at least 2-to-1, expect the Wii to have great games soon. Isn’t it what matters?

(I should mention that I expect games to be cheaper-to-make on a Wii.)

The Wii remotes are a breakthrough. I will never be able to go back to standard controllers. In fact, now I am wonder why my mouse does not have the some sensors as the Wii remotes. While not as accurate as a mouse, it gives the impression that it is as accurate.

(Picture source)

IBM has put up the list of accepted papers for CASCON 2007.

Eucalyptus: A Web Service-Enabled E-Infrastructure
Authors: Sandy Liu, Yong Liang and Martin Brooks, National Research Council Canada.

Automated Conversion of Table-based Websites to Structured Stylesheets Using Table Recognition and Clone Detection
Authors: Andy Mao, James R.Cordy and Thomas R. Dean, Queen’s University.

A Search-Based Approach for Dynamically Re-packaging Downloadable Applications
Authors: Thierry Bodhuin, Massimiliano Di Penta and Luigi Troiano, University of Sannio.

Runtime Monitoring of Web Service Conversations
Authors: Yuan Gan, Marsha Chechik and Shiva Nejati, University of Toronto; Jon Bennett, Bill O’Farrell and Julie Waterhouse, IBM Toronto Lab.

Pattern Rewriting for Efficient Search in Partial-Order Event Data
Authors: Matthew J. Nichols and David Taylor, University of Waterloo.

MARO – MinDrift Affinity Routing for Resource Management in Heterogeneous Computing Systems
Authors: Yu-Tong He, Issam Al-Azzoni and Douglas Down, McMaster University.

Out of Sight but Not Out of Mind? Informal Networks, Communication and media use in Global Software Teams
Authors: Klarissa T. Chang, Carnegie Mellon University; Kate Ehrlich, IBM Research.

Using Paper Mockups for Evaluating Soft Keyboard Layouts
Authors: I. Scott MacKenzie, York University; Janet C. Read, University of Central Lancashire.

Improving Predictive Models of Cognitive Complexity Using an Evolutionary Computational Approach — A Case Study
Authors: Rodrigo Vivanco, University of Manitoba and National Research Council Canada; Dean Jin, University of Manitoba.

A Real-Time Adaptive Control of Autonomic Computing Environments
Authors: Bogdan Solomon and Dan Ionescu, University of Ottawa; Marin Litoiu and Mircea Mihaescu, IBM Toronto Lab.

Policy-driven Autonomic Management of Multi-component Systems
Authors: Raphael M. Bahati, Michael A. Bauer and Elvis M. Vieira, The University of Western Ontario.

A Comparative Study of Pairwise Regression Techniques for Problem Determination
Authors: Mohammad A. Munawar and Paul A. S. Ward, University of Waterloo

Client Certificate and IP Address Based Multi-factor Authentication for J2EE Web Applications
Authors: Heesun Park and Stan Redford, SAS Institute Inc.

An Audit Trail Service to Enhance Privacy Compliance in Federated Identity Management
Authors: Liam Peyton, Chintan Doshi and Pierre Seguin, University of Ottawa.

Window Query Processing for Joining Data Streams with Relations
Authors: Kristine Towne and Qiang Zhu, The University of Michigan – Dearborn; Calisto Zuzarte, IBM Toronto Laboratory; Wen-Chi Hou, Southern Illinois University.

The Scalability of AspectJ
Authors: Arjun Singh and Gregor Kiczales, University of British Columbia.

Threats on Building Models from CVS and Bugzilla repositories: the Mozilla Case Study
Authors: Kamel Ayari, Peyman Meshkinfam and Giuliano Antoniol, École Polytechnique de Montréal; Massimiliano Di Penta, University of Sannio.

Comparing Episodic and Semantic Interfaces for Task Boundary Identification
Authors: Izzet Safer and Gail C. Murphy, University of British Columbia.

Discovering the Shared Understanding Dynamics of Large Software Teams
Authors: Jorge Aranda, University of Toronto; Ramzan Khuwaja, IBM Toronto Lab; Steve Easterbrook, University of Toronto.

An IDE for Software Development Using Tabular Expressions
Authors: Dennis K. Peters, Memorial University; Mark Lawford, McMaster University; Baltasar Trancón y Widemann,University of Limerick.

A Test Framework for Integration Testing of Object-Oriented Programs
Authors: Tom Maibaum and Zhe (Jessie) Li, McMaster University.

Support for OpenMP Tasks in Nanos v4
Authors: Xavier Teruel, Xavier Martorell, Alejandro Duran, Roger Ferrer and Eduard Ayguadé, Barcelona Supercomputing Center — Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya.

MultiLoop: Efficient Software Pipelining for Modern Hardware
Author: Christopher Kumar Anand and Wolfram Kahl, McMaster University

SLA-Driven Business Process Management in SOA
Authors: Vinod Muthusamy and Hans-Arno Jacobsen, University of Toronto; Phil Coulthard, Allen Chan, Julie Waterhouse and Elena Litani, IBM Canada Ltd.

An Approach to Managing the Execution of Large SQL Queries
Authors: Meng Yabin, Pat Martin, Wendy Powley, School of Computing, Queen’s University

Removing Manually-Generated Boilerplate from Electronic Texts: Experiments with Project Gutenberg e-Books
Authors: Owen Kaser, University of New Brunswick; Daniel Lemire, Université du Québec à Montréal.

Identifying Fault-Prone Files Using Static Analysis Alerts Through Singular Value Decomposition
Authors: Mark Sherriff and Sarah Smith Heckman, IBM Corp. and NC State University; Mike Lake, IBM Corp.; Laurie Williams, NC State University.

Identifying Active Subgroups in Online Communities
Authors: Alvin Chin and Mark Chignell, University of Toronto

Using Web 2.0 to Locate Expertise
Author: Sandra Jean “Sacha” Chua, University of Toronto

A Trust Based Approach for Protecting User Data in Social Networks
Authors: Bader Ali, Wilfred Villegas and Muthucumaru Maheswaran, McGill University.

Typically, the proceedings are available freely online. I will post a link here once I have it.

Microsoft apparently once used this video to promote early versions of Windows. It is really funny.

Update: my wife does not think it is funny. Is there something wrong with me?