Blog Archive: 2010

Programming the web UI

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I wanted to clarify the point I tried to make in my blog post about Bobo and LinkedIn’s use of faceted search. I ended that post with a confusing question about faceted search framework in Lucene, and was quickly reminded by Bob Carpenter and others that Solr provides that capability. My comment was poorly made.

My comment about facets was related to programming the interface rather than to retrieval algorithms. It seems to me that a good, interactive interface for faceted browsing is every bit as complicated to build as a  good engine for finding the facets in the first place. Lately I’ve been messing around with Javascript programming, and am getting frustrated by the seemingly unnecessary complexity of building web user interfaces that are both efficient and effective.

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DarwinTunes: a social experiment

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DarwinTunes bills itself as a “test tube for cultural evolution.” It’s an online experiment being run by researchers at Imperial College London. We often talk about the evolution of social media or cultural memes – but is that just a metaphor, or is it really evolution?

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Procedural vs. declarative programming

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Steven Pemberton gave a talk at FXPAL today where he talked about the virtues of declarative programming, and specifically about XForms. He cited some interesting statistics about the incidence of errors as a function of the size of the program, including the observation by Fred Brooks in The Mythical Man Month that the number of bugs increases as L1.5. So the way to increase the reliability of code is to reduce the amount of code that has to be written to achieve a particular result. Declarative programming, Steven argues, is an improvement over its predecessors (high-level programming languages, and interpreted programming languages) because declarative programming focuses the programmer’s attention on the application logic and dispenses with worrying about the “fiddly bits.”

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Ubuntu. Ugh.

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[“ubuntu”] describes humanity as “being-with-others” and prescribes what “being-with-others” should be all about. Ubuntu emphasises sharing, consensus, and togetherness.

according to ubuntu.com. Over the last two days I have experienced a palpable lack of togetherness with this beast in an attempt to explore the world beyond Windows. I have some Grails/Java code that I wanted to try running on a linux box rather than on Windows (on which I had no problem getting it to work). Grails is a dynamic language that requires run-time compiler support, so it must use the JDK rather than the JRE.

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