• The Amazing Dr Black – communication, communication, communication.
• ACL Picks 2014
• Markov chains explained
• Links to useful datasets – love the fact there is a cat image dataset hidden in there. Some other useful stuff as well!

Just been too busy for too long but this amused me:

• Developer Abuse

It is amazing how your view of something depends on where you are viewing it from (an insight of breathtaking brilliance I know… ). Take Google. I quite like Google. It usually gives me what I want when I ask it. I have generally used Google from the UK and tend to get redirected to google.co.uk as opposed to google.com – a bit of a pain but not a killer as I am going to interact with the site in English. Recently however I have been working in Romania. I don’t speak Romanian (apart from being able to mangle the phrase “thankyou” pretty atrouciously). Nothing on my computer would indicate that I can speak Romanian. When I try to use Google.com or (as is most frequent now days) use the embedded Google search tool in Firefox I get redirected to google.ro – and the search results are in Romanian. I am sure they are brilliant results – just unusable for me.

It makes no difference if I am signed into Google (gmail id) or not. I always get redirected and get the results in Romanian. That is a REAL nightmare. I shouldn’t have to muck around with setting preferences or any of that other stuff – it should just work. Google: dont get clever, just give me what I want.

This could be interesting: Google conference on Scalability.

Having SOA problems? Then you are going to love this. The world is truly, truly, truly mad!

Via jevdemon

Went to the first Open Source Code Jam held by Google London yesterday. There was a good attendance, a real variety of languages, projects and people which is great. Several people stood up and gave lightning round talks (some were super lightning – 30 secs was the fastest I think!) – of upto 3 mins – just talking about what they were upto and seeing if people can help out etc. Lots of pizza, chatting and coding followed.

All in all a GREAT idea! Congrats to Joe and Zaheda for setting it up and I, for one, certainly want to go to the next one!. I am even going to dig out some old SEDA code I have (its called Raindrop) from a couple of years ago and finally make an effort to push it out into the real world. What more incentive do I need?