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Live without excuses

2012-02-07T00:00:00-05:00

The excuse

Too often I hear people saying that they would really love to do something but they just don’t have the time. I would love to go to the gym, but I don’t have the time, I would love to develop that mobile app, if I only had the time…, My dream is to write a book, but I can’t because my job takes all my time and so on. The funny thing is that I never met in my life a person that said to me something like that and didn’t have less than 3 or 4 hours of free time every weekday that they could use to do everything they wanted (I’m not even counting weekends). Many people are convinced that what they do in life is more demanding and overwhelming that what others do. They then feel that their relax time is well deserved (which probably is) and they can’t use that time to do anything else, hence they “don’t have the time” to do more things.

The solution

Truth is, pretty much everyone have more time than they think. Just try one or more of the following:

Wake up 1 hour earlier in the morning
Go home from work at a resonable hour, spend a couple of hours with your spouse or family and work from 22:00 to 24:00
Use your lunch break to work on your stuff
Work on weekends. Yes you heard me, 2 full days of free time. I’m sure you can find a few hours there..

If you don’t want to do any of the above that’s absolutely fine, it’s up to you, but don’t tell me that you don’t have time, because you have (this is true for the majority of people anyway, I’m sure there are exceptions). Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong in enjoying your spare time hanging out with friends, sleep late in the morning or simply don’t turn your laptop on after a long day at work or on weekends. Just be honest (with yourself for starters) and say that you are not doing that project or that activity that you really want to do because you just prefer doing something else or because you are lazy. No excuses, you have plenty of time.

Speed up xml parsing in ActiveSupport

2011-04-01T00:00:00-04:00

Browsing through Rails source code today in one of my occasional Rails edge source explorations I stubled upon an interesting comment in xml_mini.rb in active support:

What this comment says is that you can require and use the faster libxml-ruby gem instead of the default REXML XML processor. What you have to do is require the gem in your Gemfile:

gem 'libxml-ruby', '=0.9.7'

and somewhere in your code (probably an initializer) put this line:

ActiveSupport::XmlMini.backend = 'LibXML'

Checkout a post I wrote some time ago for a similar hint on how to speed up JSON parsing in Rails.

Improve ActiveSupport's JSON decoding performance

2010-11-15T00:00:00-05:00

If you are writing a JSON api in Rails or using gems like Ripple to talk to a JSON-based datastore like Riak, there is a trick in ActiveSupport that allows you to improve JSON decoding by using a better decoding library.

By default ActiveSupport will decode JSON using the YAML gem which is not too bad, but there is better. In fact when in your Rails app you require the json gem like this:

  require 'json'

ActiveSupport will try to load the 'yajl' (Yet Another JSON Library) first and, if it can't find it, it will load YAML instead and use it to do the parsing. This mens that if you add the 'yajl-ruby' gem to your project, your JSON parsing will be faster. All you have to do is add this line to your Gemfile:

  gem "yajl-ruby"

and you are done. If you want to see for yourself how the loading is done you can just go to the 'activesupport' installation directory in your system and check the file 'json/decoding.rb'.

If you are unsure where to find the gem's path you can use:

  bundle show activesupport

You can learn more about the yajl-ruby gem at https://github.com/brianmario/yajl-ruby

Miwa Matreyek's glorious visions @ TED. Genius

2010-11-14T00:00:00-05:00

Facebook MySQL Tech Talk

2010-11-09T00:00:00-05:00

Facebook gave a very interesting talk about the kind of performance they get out of their MySQL cluster and a little bit of detail on how they do it.. One number to remember? They have a fix about to go to production that will bring the number of reads per second from 450M to 1BL.

Worth watching:

Watch live streaming video from facebookevents at livestream.com

'Host key verification failed' with Capistrano and Git

2009-10-19T00:00:00-04:00

The other day I started getting ‘Host Key verification’ failed error when trying to deploy an application with Capistrano hosted on a Git repository accessed via SSH. At first the problem was a bit scary, but after a bit of thinking I figured out that the solution to the problem was quite simple.

What I had to do was:

ssh to the machine where I wanted to deploy the application to
ssh to the git repo machine and accept the key

Done.

Install mysql gem on Ruby1.9

2009-06-02T00:00:00-04:00

This should sound like a very easy task, but it took me a while to sort this out, so I thought I'd share it. If you want to install the mysql gem with Ruby1.9 try this:

sudo gem1.9 install kwatch-mysql-ruby
    --source=http://gems.github.com/
    -- with-mysql-config=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config

Where in the --with-mysql-config option you have to specify the path to mysql_config in the bin directory in your mysql installation path.

The Yahoo! Hack day is gone. Good stuff guys!

2009-05-13T00:00:00-04:00

I went to the Yahoo! Open Hack day London last Saturday. I waited for quite a long time this event, and I’m pleased to say that all my expectations were fully met. A big number of Yahoo enthusiasts (and a guy with a Google T-shirt) arrived at the Congress Center early in the morning for a 24h session of hacking and fun events.

I was very happy to meet my ex Yahoo colleagues, seeing that they’re doing great even during hard times for the company.

I enjoyed mostly the talks about geo technologies and yql. I got so many ideas to implement in my iphone application:) In particular YQL is a very interesting technology that allows an application to query a number of Yahoo and external databases by means of restful requests.

Check some pictures on Flickr.

Post Summarizer Wordpress plugin

2009-01-04T00:00:00-05:00

UPDATE

The plugin is now hosted in the official Wordpress plugin directory and can be downloaded directly from its page

In my previous post I talked about the work I carried out for my MSc research project. Here is the Wordpress plugin that implements a simplified version of the summarization system described there.

This plugin creates an automatic excerpt of a post when it is saved or published. The excerpt created is a coherent piece of text containing the most important sentences of the post. After installing this plugin, every time you write a post and press the save or publish button an excpert is created for that post and stored in the database.

This plugin is useful also if you don’t use excerpts in your blog: it’s always useful to have a summary of your post available just to remind yourself what the post is about (it works very well with old and long posts!). Statistical natural language techniques are used to extract the most important sentences from a document. It’s straightforward to tweak the plugin to give more importance to certain features in your text.

The code of the plugin has been optimized for extensiblity in order to make it easy for contributor developers to implement a summarizer in their own language. At the moment only an English language summarizer is available, and an Italian one is on its way. After activating the plugin here are simple steps that you might want to follow in order to have a nice excerpt to use in your blog:

Write your post
Press the save or publish button
An excerpt will be created. Now you can review it, modify it and save it as many times as needed
If you want the summarizer to create an excerpt again delete the existing one and press save or publish

Note that the plugin creates automatically an excerpt for a post only if there isn't already an excerpt for that post.

Incremental Personalized Summarization with Novelty Detection

2008-12-30T00:00:00-05:00

I thought I’d share the work I carried out as part of my MSc dissertation in Intelligent Web Technologies.

The system has been implemented using Wordpress. A simplified version of this summarization system will be released as a Wordpress plugin in the following days. You can download the pdf version of my research work here: Incremental Personalised Summarisation with Novelty Detection

Here is the abstract:

In recent years personalised summarisation has been a hot topic in Information Retrieval. An example of a personalisation technique is query-biased summarisation, where the importance of a sentence is estimated based on the amount of information about the query that it contains. An appealing implementation of this method is the one undertaken by many web search enginesthat provide snippets generated with sentences, or part of sentences, that contain query terms. However, the query string is not enough to represent the user’s interests and information need, and a more complex representation is needed. We present in this work a method to create a richer user model by analyzing the interaction of the user with a blogging system. This model is then exploited to create personalised summaries that contain information tailored to the user’s interests. The system also allows the user to extend initial summaries with broader summaries that contain novel information, and dynamically adapt to the model of the user’s information need. A system- centric and user-centric evaluation suggest that the proposed summarisation method performs better than query-biased summarisation in extracting relevant sentences from a document, thus showing that adaptive summarisation is an effective way to support the user in understanding the relevancy of a document to a particular topic.