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Alexei › Comments
Sage: Open Source Mathematics Software - http://sagemath.org/
"Creating a viable free open source alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica and Matlab." Python based too.
- Alexei
Spooky, I just downloaded that today. Not bad, but a few more problems with freezing the computer than Maple or Mathematica.
- Matt Leifer
Fabric Made from Spider Silk - http://www.neatorama.com/2009...
Hah, this could be an Australian export
- Alexei
Most annoying floor ever made of robot tiles - http://blog.makezine.com/archive...
Robotic floor tiles that rearange as you walk ...
- Alexei
Sydney Dust Storm - http://www.neatorama.com/2009...
Sydney Dust Storm ... It was a tad weird this morning ...
- Alexei
How Google Wave Could Improve Education: Group Work - http://otherfancystuff.blogspot.com/2009...
Potential use of google wave for group work, using the play back feature to track contributions
- Alexei
Open Atrium - http://openatrium.com/
Potentially a nice collaboration platform built on drupal and free.
- Alexei
Times Higher Education - A threat to scientific communication - http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story...
paul baker liked this
Do academic journals pose a threat to the advancement of science?
- Alexei
The thing I miss most about working at Oxford University? Staff are exempt from library fines. Not so at UCL... (No, I really do miss that more than the high table dinners - honest)
SA pigeon 'faster than broadband' - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2...
Michael Nielsen liked this
Seems like an awfully slow broadband connection, but still, if you're sending data less than some 4000 km it would be faster by pigeon
- Alexei
Can someone enlighten me if the Iphone downloads the database store. I am hoping that we get to choose whether to leave the database or not. If we have a database that is more than 8 GB or whatever then we are in big trouble if it downloads on those 8GB iphones.
The database remains on EverNote's servers. You download a smaller database of note metadata (titles, times, tags, etc) which resides on your phone, but the actual contents remains "in the cloud".
- Randall Hand
It my understanding from the Evernote blogcast that future iPhone versions will add that functionality. I hope they make it an option not requirement.
- Andrew Northern
from iPhone
Yeah agreed with Andrew. I am now entering in large photos and can see my database ballooning in size. Thanks randall for the explaination. I am happy.
- Wei-Yen Tan
I think you can 'favorite' an item and that will download that note?
- Wei-Yen Tan
Thats a neat idea Alexei! Especially when Evernote seems to be pushing this tag mentality.
- Wei-Yen Tan
Is anyone else having problems with uploading notes from an iPhone to Evernote? Can't seem to do it with a 3GS and wifi, just get an error. Also crashes deleting a photo note.
Interesting. I was having a problem recently... seemed to be related to one particular note. Was giving me an unknown synch error. I deleted the note and think all is well now.
- Herb Hernandez
Facebook Acquires FriendFeed - http://www.techcrunch.com/2009...
Philip Lei, Joe, Lisa Green and 7 other people liked this
I'm delighted for the FriendFeed founders, but am not sure what this will mean for the continuation of FriendFeed as a platform, and the continuation of rooms like the Science 2.0 room. There's a lot of overlap with Facebook.
- Michael Nielsen
It means the end of the way we (the science 2.0 community) use FriendFeed. I can't imagine that we will move our activities in their current form over to Facebook.
- Neil Saunders
The reason for using Friendfeed instead of Facebook for groups like this one is that the features are so much better. If those capabilities are brought to Facebook, what reason would their be against migrating to that platform?
- Mike Chelen
Mike - privacy concerns, terms of service concerns, endless requests to use stupid applications and the slow, buggy interface all come to mind :-)
- Neil Saunders
Don't be shy, Neil.
- Michael Nielsen
Neil: user interface is indeed one of FF's biggest advantages over FB and other sites. if the FF team is able to bring this standout feature to FB then it will represent a huge improvement in usability. that is a big "if" though
- Mike Chelen
from IM
I am taking a "let's see what happens" approach, but definitely integrated into FB as is would not be something I'd like
- Deepak Singh
I don't want to be one of those conservative "I don't embrace change" types -- but I am also very worried. Facebook has a different vibe/purpose then Friendfeed (not to mention privacy concerns/stupid applications/advertising), and I would prefer to keep my two account-worlds separate (I have been keeping my Facebook profile private); Mike Chelen, I do hope that you're right, that all...
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- Benjamin Tseng
I second the motion to move rooms such as this one over to a wave-based thingamajig....
- Wladimir Labeikovsky
might we test that on shareflow? prob is of course that only 5 Flows are supported by the free version... but perhaps it would be good if some "beta-testers" would look around on that platform. We might formulate ideas how to organize all later on wave.
- Phil
What I like about both Friendfeed and Twitter, is that you can follow people because you find them interesting. Facebook is more about being friends.
- Jo Vermeulen
Let's wait for Google Wave.
- Enrico Guarnera
Benjamin: the characterization as a talent acquisition provides some hope in that expertise is more meaningful than a particular piece of software. if this means that the ff staff has a wider, more significant effect on users through fb
- Mike Chelen
Jo: yeah that is a problem with facebook's friend model. there is sort of a workaround with fan pages, however it is currently far less intuitive than on twitter or friendfeed. will facebook improve the flexibility of their model, with friendfeed team's help?
- Mike Chelen
ReComment from Abhishek's post: Oh noes. How long before you need a Facebook account to log in to FriendFeed? I don't intend to sign up to those intrusive spammers any time soon. Where's the 'Dislike' button?
- Andrew Clegg
First Newsgator abandons its online users to GReader, now FF team hands over to Facebook. I cannot imagine the discussions I very much enjoy on FF being as fluid and fast in FB.
- Polly Potter
I know someone who built a framework that could become a FF replacement with just a little bit of modification. I told him about the sentiment among the science folks here and he was interested. I will let you know if he agrees to do the modifications. Please keep commenting on what a FF replacement should (and should not) feel like.
- Lisa Green
I've been holed up in the lab and off friendfeed for about a month now, and so I'm probably looking at this acquisition from a different perspective than I would have a couple months ago. But when I first heard the news I wasn't worried. How was FF going to survive without a sale anyway? Maybe Facebook will decide to keep the FF platform, but actually try to make money from it. Is there...
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- Steve Koch
Bad science: Hit and myth: curse of the ghostwriters - http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment...
Christopher Granade, Bill Anderson, Dimitrios Diamantaras and Alexei liked this
Excellent article explaining mechanisms by which incorrect science can be amplified and become widely accepted.
- Michael Nielsen
It also goes to show just how devastating and horrible practices like ghostwriting really are.
- Christopher Granade
The Tragedy of the Coffee Shop - http://www.coffeeandcode.org/2009...
Meryn Stol, Roger Chen, Robert Higgins and 2 other people liked this
Nice article about the history of coffee shops as "third places", inbetween home and work.
- Michael Nielsen
The real message is TANSTAFL
- Jill O'Neill
I'll be interested to see if the coffee shop workers migrate to hospital cafeterias for an alternative office.
- Polly Potter
If you wanted to scan a thousand books, how would you do it? I'm looking into digitizing my library.
Christopher Granade, Fiacre O'Duinn, Brian Ahier and 5 other people liked this
Maybe look up how Google is doing it?
- Meryn Stol
If you bought any of those books from amazon, then some of them may be searchable through your "amazon library". Having said that, it's spotty coverage (in terms of which books are indexed). Same thing for google.
- Ilya Grigorik
I would first look on certain websites (which I would obviously never use myself and certainly don't know the URLs of) to check whether somebody has already scanned them.
- Matt Leifer
Meryn - Done that. Not much help...
- Michael Nielsen
Ilya - I probably bought a couple hundred (or more) from Amazon. SO that's a great idea.
- Michael Nielsen
Incidentally, I found http://sealedabstract.com/... very helpful on this subject. But it'd still be hundreds of hours of work, minimum.
- Michael Nielsen
I never realized I could search through my Amazon purchases. Interesting. Quite a value-add from Amazon!
- Meryn Stol
Looks like Google will give you full access if you scan the barcodes: http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2009... Not clear if this is useful for re-reading, or if it's possible to download...
- Michael Nielsen
I tried that.. no dice. It only works for books that have been "open sourced" by publisher or are not under copyright, which is to say, basically nothing. Ok, not entirely true, but of limited value..
- Ilya Grigorik
Thanks, Ilya. That's one weird Google blog post, then. ("It works for all the books except the ones it doesn't work for. That is, most of them.")
- Michael Nielsen
the way I understood the Google barcode scan was that since it appears you own a physical copy of the book, you can have access to a digital copy. Am I wrong in this, because I was going to do it for my books.
- Kimber Scott
from BuddyFeed
Kimber, yes, but the amount of digitized books on Google Books is limited. Actually, the bar code does not constitute proof of ownership. You can do fulltext search through all books on Google Books. But with "my library" you can limit your search to a group of books. (Pedro, yeah exactly)
- Meryn Stol
I just gave it a try. I scanned a couple of barcodes but its really just a faster way to create a list. I don't think the access rights changes at all.
- Pedro Beltrao
That's the thing.. The scan just gives you the ISBN, which you can find anywhere anyway - it doesn't prove that you own the book in any way, shape or form. For this reason, only books that are not copyrighted are available for search.
- Ilya Grigorik
Ilya, there are copyrighted books searchable on Google Book search. Just not all of them because not all publishers have signed up for the program, or have not committed their whole library. Full search does not mean you can read it in full though!
- Meryn Stol
Ah, well that's good news! Now we just need to get all the other publishers on the same bandwagon. ;-)
- Ilya Grigorik
Major project! I guess ideally, there'd be a way to prove that you own a legitimate copy of a book which would then grant you access to a digital version. Something like scan and upload one page.
- Neil Saunders
Neil - Yeah, that'd be very nice. Sadly, I haven't found anything like that.
- Michael Nielsen
yeah, but that's not going to happen either - publishers are more than happy to charge you twice for the same material - once for print and once for e. Related, Springer now has a $25 print on demand service available to patrons of libraries that buy the big ebook packages - we only have it for medical books right now, or i'd try it
- Christina Pikas
Maybe a pragmatic 80/20 split - re-buy the most important books (those that are not from Amazon) as e-books; then decide if you want to cut off the binding on the remaining books and have em scanned (as suggested in article), or make do with a semi good scan without damaging the book (pay a student to run them through a copy/scanning machine).
- Christof TD
Please try to save the integrity of the book. You may find that they will be quite valuable. Were some of them gifts? Do they have inscriptions you want to keep? Some things to consider.
- Melanie Reed
On 2nd thought you'd better wait a little (machines like the Google book scanner should become more readily available soon) - reading about the Google Book Scanning Machine: http://www.npr.org/blogs...
- Christof TD
Here we go - Book Drive Pro (looks quite industrial; but still doesn't solve the page-turning problem) - http://pro.atiz.com/ or http://mini.atiz.com/ (video on the pro version site shows the scanning workflow); ~several hundred hours for 1000 books... at least it gives you a high-quality outcome without damaging books
- Christof TD
Hmm - you could build this thing yourself (Atiz Book Drive Pro): make a V-shape cradle, including a plastic V-shape that comes down on the book (like in the video), several mounts for two DSLR cameras and a little black tent with lights -> then run an edge-detection algorithm on the pictures taken using the Python Imaging Library; this leaves only finding an open-source OCR library.
- Christof TD
Christof - For all but a tiny fraction of the books (which I'll probably keep), I'm not worried about destroying them as part of the scanning process. Your 80/20 suggestion is a really interesting one...
- Michael Nielsen
You could donate the destroyed books to a local school science library; maybe the library will find the resources to glue them back together again :-)
- Christof TD
More likely the library will waste valuable staff time and resources evaluating and then discarding a book the school cannot use. Please don't use libraries as a dumping ground! Thank you.
- D0r0th34
If you are a DIY person check out http://www.geocities.jp/takasci... and http://www.instructables.com/id... . My personal solution (I got of most my books some years ago - some I kept and scanned them manually) is a change of mindset. Most books are just dead trees that catch dust and are need much to rarely to excuse...
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- Konrad Förstner
Thanks for the link: http://www.instructables.com/id... ...this was exactly what I was thinking (see video at that link for workflow); 20 min. for each book is not too bad. Update: their open source software takes 3 hours to process a book into a PDF.
- Christof TD
Here's my stupid idea: 1) The most difficult part: Build a little stand that automatically flips through the pages - probably doesn't need to be as sophisticated as in the Instructables link above. 2) Take a HD video cam and make a video of the pages being flipped. 3) Write a little script that takes screencaps from the video every other second, after the pages have been flipped. 4) Send all the screencaps to Evernote to use their OCR and search.
- Victor / Mendeley Team
But then again, it would probably be easier to just sync a photo camera with the page flipping :-) Like I said, stupid idea!
- Victor / Mendeley Team
Here are the heavyweights: Treventus Book Scanner Robot (at Bavarian State Library, Munich) - http://www.treventus.com/booksca... and Google/ Microsoft supposedly use Kirtas high-performance scanners - http://content.zdnet.com/2346-95... ... ah, the page-flipper uses suction: http://www.kirtas.com/
- Christof TD
Video of Treventus ScanRobot in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch...
- Christof TD
Ah, sweet.. Now i just need one of those for my house! :-)
- Ilya Grigorik
buy a high speed scanner
- abuzarhamza
abuzarhamza - Even at 20 pages per minute, with roughly 300,000 pages that's roughly 300 hours of scanning...
- Michael Nielsen
How about this: (1) create a new organization called the Nielsen University library (2) offer your library's collection to google to become part of their scanned collection (3) make the one condition of the offer to google be that you get the scans for private use
- Jonathan Eisen
I suppose that this would not be a good time to point out to you that ownership of the physical volume doesn't entitle you to scan the content and create a digital version; that's what got Google into trouble in the first place. You, as an individual, haven't the right to create (even for personal, private use) digital versions of content where other entities hold the rights.
- Jill O'Neill
Don't forget that Michael is covered by Canadian law, which is significantly more lenient on copyright than US law. That's why I suggested finding pirate copies on the net. I believe that under Canadian law might not be liable for downloading them, but only for uploading. However, the situation is complicated so don't quote me on that. After downloading, you are in no better or worse shape than if you had scanned the books yourself.
- Matt Leifer
I note - I had my tongue planted deeply in my cheek when I said he should get google to do the scanning - just in case people cannot see where my tongue was
- Jonathan Eisen
Jonathan: Your original comment gave me, at least, quite a smile :-). Sadly, I can't imagine Google would find much in my library that they don't already have. Maybe the classic "Venus on the Half Shell"...
- Michael Nielsen
Jill - Is it true in Canada that you can't legally transfer between media in this way? I know I've been told that in some jurisdictions this definitely _is_ allowed, but I don't recall in which jurisdictions.
- Michael Nielsen
Michael: I was speaking from a US-centric view. That said, I would be surprised if -- to pick a publisher at random -- HarperCollins (whether US or Canada) would look favorably on such scanning activity. Libraries are permitted to scan for purposes of preservation under specific conditions, but I am not sure that the same permission has ever legislatively been extended to private...
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- Jill O'Neill
Have you read Victor Vinge's Rainbows End? ok it's a bit extreme but it works for gene sequencing :)
- Alexei
the fujitsu snapscan is reasonably good but v manual and destructive, I've taken to guillotining spines and feeding pages while watching tv .. ~ couple hrs / book. End result not that good, big bulky pdfs. Getting eprints would be much better.
- Alexei
Thankyou, by the way, to everyone who's been commenting on this!
- Michael Nielsen
If you want to use all free and open source tools, read this blog post: http://philikon.wordpress.com/2009...
- Nate Aune
Build a Wi-Fi radio relay using household materials - The H: Security news and Open source developments - http://www.h-online.com/feature...
cool
- Alexei
Histoire d'oh - http://histoiredoh.splinder.com/
Marco
- Alexei
WorldViz : Vizard - http://www.worldviz.com/product...
windows only :(
- Alexei
Virtual Worlds News: Red Hat Hosting JBoss Virtual Conference to Fill Gap in Physical Events - http://www.virtualworldsnews.com/2009...
Red hat virtual conference
- Alexei
Collanos | Think Out of the Inbox - http://www.collanos.com/
needs revision control
- Alexei
Dimdim: Free Web Meeting, Free Web Conferencing, Meetup, Open Source, Net Meeting, eLearning, web conference, Unified Collaboration, Online Meetings, Online Training, Free Screen Sharing, collaboration, live meeting - http://www.dimdim.com/
Mike Chelen, Pawel Szczesny and Michael Nielsen liked this
Matt and I tested this one out and it's really very good.
- Robert Spekkens
It has an opensource version too
- Alexei
Thanks for pointing this out to me, Rob. I've been playing around with it a bit over the last few weeks & it's much better than anything else I've come across (although admittedly my research hasn't been too extensive). Forget about that Elluminate site I told you about last week.
- damian pope
Does anyone know if DimDim would be good for enabling a remote presentation for a non-virtual conference? I imagine we could still use the free version for this, since just the presenter and one person in the conference would need to be in the virtual meeting (that person projecting their screen). But having not tried it, am not positive if it would be suitable.
- Shirley Wu
Shirley, I gave a talk via Yuuguu and conference phone and it worked fine, FWIW.
- D0r0th34
Dorothea - How do you say "Yuuguu"? What a remarkable word! (Shirley - no, I haven't used DimDim. I've been eying it for a while, based on Rob's recommendation, though.)
- Michael Nielsen
Hah, no clue whatever!
- D0r0th34
Shirley, I think it would work well for a remote presentation. You can either share the presentation file with the other people, or just view it on your machine and use a screencast. The sound quality could be better in my opinion. Also, there's a whiteboard, but I'm not totally happy with it -- there's no eraser as far as I can tell, and it puts distracting object boxes around what you write.
- Robert Spekkens
Thanks, Robert. I'll definitely give it a try!
- Shirley Wu
Lectures on the Google Technology Stack 1: Introduction to PageRank - http://michaelnielsen.org/blog...
Michael Bremner, Richard Akerman, Henry Haselgrove and 2 other people liked this
Petty point: you probably need to say t does not equal zero somewhere to get the uniqueness result, right? (If the web is disconnected then there are multiple fixed points with only the web component of the graph around.)
- Dave Bacon
Absolutely, t > 0 is needed. I use along the way that s < 1, which is equivalent to t > 0. It's needed in the proof that I-sG is invertible, for exactly the reason you describe (G breaking apart).
- Michael Nielsen
Ah great. Missed your "s<1."
- Dave Bacon
Noticed a minor typo...: G_{jk} should be G_{kj} in "Matrix description of the websurfer"
- Henry Haselgrove
Thanks, Henry! I've fixed it in the source file. It's quite a pain to fix on my blog, so I won't change that, but will eventually distribute the pdf generated from the LaTeX source.
- Michael Nielsen
hah, I was going to ask about personalising something like citerank via the jump distribution but I see you already have a problem on that!
- Alexei
Google now has a ton of data on users surfing habits ... presumably they can directly see if their model of the idealised websurfer is accurate. Do you think pagerank has changes much because of this?
- Alexei
Alexei - I'm not yet sure. I'll bet they find ways of incorporating that data somehow, though.
- Michael Nielsen
pyjamas - http://pyjs.org/
compile cross browser and desktop apps in javascript from python
- Alexei
Link to original pagerank paper: http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422... (Couldn't get your one to work Michael)
Robert Spekkens and Michael Nielsen liked this
Weird. I just tried the link again, and had no problems.
- Michael Nielsen
your link uses a waterloo proxy
- Alexei
Should be fixed. This was, in a very roundabout way, a caching problem.
- Michael Nielsen
A quick python question
Does anyone have experience with libraries for matrix calculations in Python? I'm thinking of doing the examples in python, and have been looking at numeric libraries. scipy and numpy looked to be fairly mature, and have great communities, but they only work with python 2.5, not yet 2.6. Anyone have any thoughts?
- Michael Nielsen
I used to use the numeric library a while back and it was quite good then and had a large user community. It has been replaced by numpy and scipy adds functionality on top (I missed the whole numarray fork). Using numpy is very similar to using matlab
- Alexei
python2.6 has only been out a couple of months .. it will take a while for anything new to propagate to 3rd party packages. Is there something in particular you want in 2.6?
- Alexei
No, I just installed 2.6 because it was the latest version, then fiddled around with libraries for a while, only to see what looked like the best library fall over on 2.6. I'll downgrade to 2.5. scipy and numpy look like good places to start. Thanks, Alexei!
- Michael Nielsen
Just installed Evernote for Windows in Ubuntu using CrossOver...so far, so good. It's downloading my notes now, I'll report back how smoothly things go.
I did this and it work O.K. it a least allows me to keep my notes synced to my Ubuntu box.
- nesman89
Can you use the draw mode for new notes?
- Alexei
Just did the same. Seems to work well. Did you guys get some minor graphical "glitches"? Nothing major, but the toolbar icons are all on black backgrounds
- Chris Kasten
yup, same fugly icon problems here. other than that, seems to be ok so far...
- Trent Olson
from IM
well, encountered a big problem with Evernote through CrossOver today...I can't drag an image into a note. tried to use the import function to bring it in, and it seems to have messed up my database and keeps crashing Evernote. I think I'll need to figure out where CrossOver puts the db, wipe it out, and resync.
- Trent Olson
I have some font issues as well (and have installed the MS TrueTypes). With the default fonts, bold doesn't show as bold. Alt-click doesn't work for checkboxes. Think I'll just stick with the web interface when using Linux for now...
- Chris Kasten
True, the web interface is the most stable way to use Evernote in Linux, but it is lacking a few core features. For example, how do i print a note from the web interface? Printing the page gives me all the Evernote "chrome," and only what's visible in the note window, i.e., not the entire note.
- Trent Olson
Sure, I can right click on the note & select "This Frame > Print this Frame", but there should be a Print option along with Edit, Email, etc.
- Trent Olson
Urgh that sounds painful. It'll be slow as a dog, surely?
- William Stewart
Nope, not slow at all actually. The CrossOver stuff is pretty smooth (imho). EN just doesn't quite love it...
- Chris Kasten
Matt Sears: Relay outbound SMTP email to Gmail - http://mattsears.com/2008...
using postfix with gmail as relay host
- Alexei
WiiLi.org Wii Linux - Python HTDP Driver - http://www.wiili.org/index...
python code to track wiimote
- Alexei
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