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mark_l_watson
21,400karma·8,624submissions·August 19, 2009
about
I am an author of 20 books and a practitioner specializing in artificial intelligence, deep learning, natural language processing, and the semantic web. I have 55 US patents. I code in Common Lisp, Clojure, Swift, Python, Haskell, Java, and Scheme. My web site is https://markwatson.com
My recent books can be read for free online on my web site or optionally you can pay for them at https://leanpub.com/u/markwatson
Twitter: mark_l_watson and Mastodon: @mark_watson@mastodon.social
recent activity (8,624 total)
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Sorry, I will fix that in about 45 seconds.
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No way to run an external GraphViz process in an AppEngine hosted app. Right? GraphViz does rock, however. And, you are right: it is very handy for visualizing RDF data (self plug: I had examples for …
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I second the thanks! I thought that I had read every bit of Heroku documentation, but I managed to miss this.
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I agree: very stress reducing. My wife and I have 21 sq ft of containers on the deck right outside of our kitchen and close to where I work at home. Getting up frequently to "tend" our mini-garden is …
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Good list, I just installed Compass and BBC news apps. "Car Home" remains my favorite app because it can show the area you are in as a composite satellite image and roads, do voice navigation, voice q…
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I am dissapointed: tried running it on a utility I wrote for crunching Wikipedia text (lots of string operations, some file IO) and it is so much slower than Ruby 1.9.1. I stopped the benchmark after …
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Nice, I am curious how it will benchmark against Ruby 1.9.1 for some of my libraries. Anyone run any benchmarks yet on their code?
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Nice. Say goodbye to Slony? I am downloading the beta right now for play use. I would like an easier AWS setup with two EC2s running replicated PostgreSQL.
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Who could not have predicted this, after the Palm acquisition? I love my Droid phone and was thinking that a tablet droid (no phone service, just Wifi) would be really nice. The HP tablet with WebOS w…
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Nice writeup. I bought David's book on consciousness after having a long talk with him at a Consciousness and Quantum Mechanics meeting about 10 years ago. I think that this is interesting stuff. Real…
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The diagrams are informative and makes me appreciate the fact that I don't usually need to worry about UDP and TCP/IP low level things anymore (different in the 1980s, at least for the work I did back…
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I am going to share my experience, hopefully this will help someone: about 3 1/2 years ago, I went through a brief period of long hours at my desk (I had just previously had a hiking accident, disloca…
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It makes sense to only go looking for VC funds after you have something going, technically and showing some profit. I have a friend who has had a pretty good business idea for a long time, but all h…
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I will be the dissenting opinion here. Wait a year, and I think that Wave will be mostly complete (but not necessarily out of beta :-) and generally useful. Being able to embed Waves for discusion lis…
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I barely know Erlang, but that tutorial was still interesting: gives a glimpse off how CouchDB works. I have always just used CouchDB as a black-box.
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This is great since I use both Heroku and MongoDB. Pardon the self-plug, but I wrote an article a few months ago about using Heroku with external MongoDB servers: http://www.developer.com/lang/rubyra…
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Using Ubuntu is much like the OS X experience: things just work, little wasted time. OS X wins a bit with apps like TexShop and OmniGraffle while Linux wins a bit with easier package maintenance. I ha…
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Interesting comments from the guy who sets Java best practices for Google. I do most of my work now in Ruby but the Java platform is still very relevant to me because I can mix my libraries and other …
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I agree that the best new feature for most people is faster bootup time. I have a dual boot (Widows 7, Ubuntu) Toshiba U505 and the difference in bootup used to be huge (Widows 7 being a lot slower), …
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That may be the point. I have joked for years that cash would be made illegal, and perhaps now it is not such a joke.
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Flip back through the pages of history: during the few hundred years that the Roman Empire was collapsing, the tax collectors became so violent and generally oderous that in some cases Romans living o…
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Sweet: I got my wireless working even before updating: Realtek had a new Linux driver available on their site :-)
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I am downloading the ISO right now - I have a new hardware laptop that I have had problems getting wireless working, and I have happy expectations that 10.04 will recognize my hardware. It helps a lot…
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From a Ruby perspective, but this may still be useful: Redis is very nice for data that fits in memory (disk persistence is for recovery, not for realtime access) and support for counters, sets, etc. …
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So, stop using Facebook if that bothers you. Same comment, re: privacy, goes for GMail, Google documents, Twitter, Yahoo, etc. The sci-fi author David Brin (a cool guy, BTW, I once went to his house a…
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I sometimes use Neo4j but I don't know much about its implementation. Assuming that there was a lot of disk I/O involved in this benchmark, does anyone know how graph data is stored on disk, indexed, …
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I have tried several to-do list apps and nothing really does what I want it to. So far, the closest is TheDeadline but it is not a good fit for my work. Probably a stupid thing to do (since I'll proba…
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Nice article. I have moved on from 1.8.x and just use 1.9.1 for just about everything except when I need to use existing Java NLP and Semantic Web libs, in which case I use JRuby. I have an ongoing in…