I’m looking forward to my talk at VLDB 2009 in Lyon, France. I will be presenting “HAMSTER: Using Search Clicklogs for Schema and Taxonomy Matching”, which is joint work I did with Phil Bernstein during my internship at Microsoft Research. The talk is scheduled for Tuesday 25, 2009 at 2pm in the Rhône 2 room at the conference venue.
Also look out for my labmate Bin Liu ‘s paper with our advisor, “Using Trees to Depict a Forest”.
Cool things at work:
Things I can talk about: Had dinner with fellow intern Nilanjan at Udupi Palace. Good food, good price. One great thing about Bellevue / Redmond is the large Indian population here; resulting in a competitive and thriving demand for Indian restaurants and grocery stores. Looking forward to check out Mayuri next time we go out for Indian food.
Now that VLDB insanities, and St. Patrick’s Day’s festivities are behind us, I begin my uphill climb towards getting rid of all the evil life-shortening substances I have put in my body over the last few months. The goal is to not embarrass myself at the Dexter-Ann Arbor 10K run, which is on the 1st of June. I have 2 months and 12 days to do this; so hopefully this isn’t an impossible task.
The plan is to detox and switch to a strictly healthy diet first. So dear friends, if you ever see me eating anything that says “McDonalds” or “Milky Way” on it, please feel free to slap me in the face and shake some sense back into me. That’s what friends are for, after all. The second plan of attack is to start running Monday, Wednesday, Fridays along with strength exercises, and go swimming Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays. Sunday is rest day. For March, let’s keep running at 3 miles a day, and 500m swimming. Thankfully I’ve been doing 60 push-ups everyday already, and have been running once in a while, so my body should not collapse by April.
To be honest, I’m not looking forward to the sugar and fried food cravings. But I’ll do anything for a T-shirt, and this should be worth the trouble. Expect weekly updates on this front!
In the light of the American Media Machine, I find this article very disturbing:
When University of Michigan social psychologist Norbert Schwarz had volunteers read the CDC flier, however, he found that within 30 minutes, older people misremembered 28 percent of the false statements as true. Three days later, they remembered 40 percent of the myths as factual.
Younger people did better at first, but three days later they made as many errors as older people did after 30 minutes. Most troubling was that people of all ages now felt that the source of their false beliefs was the respected CDC.
I’m really looking forward to the day when they’ll have a “Top Story” about how eating organic food inside hybrid vehicles causes certain chemical reactions in the food that trigger “bouts of homosexuality”.
I’m heading off to SIGMOD 06 in a few hours. Looking forward to meeting a lot of superstars and familiar faces!
I’m starting a page cluster called Drupal, Supersized to discuss, collect and experiment with scalability and high-performance issues in Drupal. I’m hoping people will come forward and contribute to this, let’s see how this turns out.
Lucene’s Bugzilla was apparently migrated over the weekend, resulting in hundreds of emails being sent to the lucene-developer mailing list, all of which were totally useless and a royal pain to delete using a web-based interface(I was using gmail). Considering there’s atleast some hundred people on that mailing list(I guess), multiply that with the close to a thousand emails, and you have a lot of useless email that could have been avoided if someone just turned off email notification before bulk updates / migration.
Also, in case you haven’t noticed, Lucene’s now become a top-level Apache project, putting it in the same league as the HTTP Server, SpamAssassin, Jakarta, and Struts. The Lucene project now comprises of Lucene Java, Nutch, and Lucene4c. I’m really looking forward to updates on Lucene4c; the webpages seem to be comatose.
The Internet has changed the way applications are built today. In the last few years, we have seen a sudden burst in Internet software – Instant Messengers, Online Gaming, etc; all based on the client-server architecture. With all this client server technology, we also have to ensure compatibility between languages, and operating systems. XML-RPC is one way to do this.
You can email me at my new snazzy email address, arnab # budweiser.com — Budweiser is giving away free email accounts. It’s got a filtering option that allows me to forward stuff to my Gmail, which makes life very simple.