Author Archives: joern
Duolingo: Learn a language and translate the web
Another one of Luis von Ahn‘s ingenious projects: http://duolingo.com learn a language for free and translate the web in the background. There is a pretty recent TED talk by him, and below you can find their introductory video on youtube:
Interesting talk about “Filter Bubbles”
A few days ago I stumbled over an interesting TED talk by Eli Pariser about the ever increasing personalization of the web, its search results, your facebook news feed, … Do you think that you still see the whole picture … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged facebook, filter bubbles, google, information filtering, personalization, presentation, talk, ted talk, video
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Mac OS X Harddisk high Load Cycle Counts
Mac OS X’s default power management settings might wear your hard drive down unnecessarily. This post provides a lot of background information and how to change these settings. Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged 193, apm, clicking, hard disk, hard drive, hd, hdd, hdparm, hitachi, load cycle count, mac, mac book pro, mac os x, mbp, setup, smart, wear down
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Live mapping of tweets, facebook msgs, emails, sms…
Reading the Wikimedia blog I stumbled over this interesting post. They mention a framework called Ushahidi (Swahili word for “testimony’) with its subproject SwitfRiver which can be used to track and verify the reliability of news concerning current trending topics, … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged analyzing, disaster, facebook, framework, live, management, mapping, maps, mashup, news, trends, tweets, twitter, visualization
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LaTeX Thesis Skeleton
As it might be useful for other students (especially for computer science students at the University of Kaiserslautern), I decided to invest some time and create a skeleton for a thesis. The project can be found on github: http://github.com/joernhees/thesis-skeleton. I’ll … Continue reading
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Tagged bachelor, latex, master, skeleton, template, thesis, uni-kl
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Interesting analysis of a post’s life cycle
Corte.si did it again. This time a very interesting analysis of what happens when he posts on his blog and twitters about it. Most interesting: the number of bots that access his page just seconds after he published it, where … Continue reading
BetterRelations (beta): some updates
Well, in a hopefully last coding “flash” this night I included some frequently requested features, most important: a “can’t decide” button: Enjoy (also see the first post)
Introducing: BetterRelations – a Game with a Purpose
As many of you know I’m developing a game called BetterRelations for my MasterThesis. It is now available: BetterRelations (alpha) The game collects pairwise user preferences, which are then used to rate Linked Data triples by “Importance”. Would be cool … Continue reading
Python unicode doctest howto in a doctest
Another thing which has been on my stack for quite a while has been a unicode doctest howto, as I remember I was quite lost when I first tried to test encoding stuff in a doctest. So I thought the … Continue reading
Posted in Coding
Tagged doctest, encoding, howto, python, raw, russian strings, string, unicode
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How to restrict the length of a unicode string
Ha, not with me! It’s a pretty common tripwire: Imagine you have a unicode string and for whatever reason (which should be a good reason, so make sure you really need this) you need to make sure that its UTF-8 … Continue reading